Abstract

Davidson's account of action explanation is at the core of his theory of action and hence of his philosophy in general. Usually, Davidson is regarded as the typical exponent of a standard causal understanding of action explanation. A closer look at his writings reveals, however, that his approach is much more sophisticated, for example, by distinguishing between causes and causal powers and counting reasons among the latter, which allows him to give satisfactory answers to a number of standard problems in action theory, for example, the validity of the logical connection argument, the problem of causal exclusion, and the problem of wayward causal chains. Moreover, it becomes clear in which way his understanding of action explanations fits with his thesis about the anomalous nature of the mental and his theory of radical interpretation in the philosophy of language.