‘Wittgenstein’ by Severin Schroeder, in: O’Connor & Sandis (eds), A Companion to the Philosophy of Action (2010)
Wittgenstein
SEVERIN SCHROEDER
The contributions of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) to the philosophy of action
consist mainly in his discussions of the concepts of a voluntary action and of a reason. In
both cases he rejects the prevalent causal accounts.
1. VOLUNTARY ACTION
In asking: ‘what is left over if I subtract the fact that my arm goes up from the fact that I
raise my arm?’ (PI §621) Wittgenstein is bringing out how tempting it is to think of
voluntariness as a psychological occurrence that needs to be present on top of the
physical movements involved in an action. For, after all, the same physical movements
could be voluntary or involuntary.
Hence, the traditional philosophical account of
voluntary action (versions of which were held by Descartes, the British Empiricists,
William James, and Bertrand Russell) is this: For a bodily movement to be voluntary it
must be caused by an act of will; without such a cause the same movement would be
involuntary.
Wittgenstein was to criticize this view as an instance of the common
philosophical tendency to construe all words as names of objects, events or occurrences
(cf. PI §1; Schroeder 2006, 128-34, 181-5). In this case words used to characterize an
action as voluntary (like ‘will’ and its cognates) are uncritically taken to denote some
mental occurrence. Wittgenstein offers three objections to the traditional causal account
of voluntariness:
(i) The acts of will postulated by the theory do not exist. If we take an impartial
look at what goes on in our minds whenever we move our body voluntarily, no suitable
mental events causing the movements come to light. However, the elusiveness of acts of
will tends to be obscured by philosophers’ selective attention, when they focus on only a
few especially favourable examples, such as this one: ‘I deliberate whether to lift a
certain heavyish weight, decide to do it, I then apply my force to it and lift it’ (BB 150).
Here we have some occurrences that could, without absurdity, be thought to constitute
willing: some anticipatory thinking of the action, an act of resolve, a sensation of bodily
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‘Wittgenstein’ by Severin Schroeder, in: O’Connor & Sandis (eds), A Companion to the Philosophy of Action (2010)
effort. And now we take our ideas about voluntary action from this kind of example and
assume lightly that those ideas must apply to all cases of willing (BB 150). But of course
not all cases are like that. We frequently do things without any such preliminaries.
Ordinary speech, for instance, is often entirely unpremeditated and effortless, yet not for
that matter involuntary.
(ii) Willing is thought to be a mental occurrence, but a mental occurrence must be
either voluntary or involuntary. That leads to a fatal dilemma: If the mental act of willing
is itself subject to the will, in order to be proper willing it would have to be willed. But
then we are launched on an infinite regress: For the event of willing to be voluntary it has
to be caused by an earlier event of willing; but that earlier event, too, in order to be
voluntary would have to be caused by yet an earlier event of willing, and so on ad
infinitum — which is absurd (cf. Ryle 1949, 67). So it seems more promising to deny
that willing itself could be subject to the will: ‘I can’t will willing’ (PI §613). But that
sounds odd as well. For now it would appear that ‘willing too is merely an experience …
It comes when it comes, and I cannot bring it about’ (PI §611). But now the whole idea
of voluntariness, of being in control of one’s actions, seems to be lost. That must be
wrong too (PI §612). The dilemma shows that the whole question (whether or not
willing can be willed) is misbegotten. Willing is not the sort of thing of which it makes
sense to ask whether it is voluntary or involuntary. ‘Willing’ is neither the name of an
action, nor of a passive experience. It is not the name of a mental occurrence of any kind.
(iii) According to the traditional account, a voluntary bodily action is a bodily
movement caused by a mental act. Thus, on this theory I bring it about that, say, my arm
rises. But in fact, Wittgenstein objects, I don’t (PI §614). I don’t do anything else as a
means to effect the rising of my arm. In particular, it cannot be said that I contract certain
muscles in order for my arm to go up, for I don’t even know which muscles need to be
contracted for the arm to go up. (It is rather the other way round: I could raise my arm in
order to bring about the contraction of whatever muscles are involved in the process.)
Nor do I bring about bodily movements by acts of wishing or deciding. Wishing that
something may happen is actually incompatible with doing it voluntarily (PI §616). The
word ‘wish’, like ‘hope’, implies that one is not fully in control of what will happen. If I
wish my arm to rise and, lo! it does — it wouldn’t be my own action and I’d be very
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‘Wittgenstein’ by Severin Schroeder, in: O’Connor & Sandis (eds), A Companion to the Philosophy of Action (2010)
surprised (Z §586b). A decision to raise my arm, on the other hand, is of course likely to
lead to my raising my arm; but it does not just cause my arm to go up. Again, I’d be
rather surprised if it did. It would not be my own doing (PI §627). A decision to do
something occurs before the action and cannot be regarded as part of it. Hence it cannot
figure in the analysis of the concept of a voluntary action.—
The traditional causal account of voluntary action must be rejected. Words like
‘voluntary’ or ‘willing’ do not stand for some distinctive mental occurrence that must
precede and cause a movement for it to be voluntary. How, then, is the word ‘voluntary’
used? According to Wittgenstein, we should not expect the answer to be an exciting
revelation. The concept is a familiar one, so its philosophical elucidation can only be a
reminder of what in practice we are all familiar with. ‘Voluntary movement is marked by
the absence of surprise’ (PI §628).
I am not a third-person observer to my own
behaviour: I cannot look on with interest to see what will happen next, and then perhaps
be surprised by it. Voluntary movements are characterised by a special surrounding of
intention, learning, trying (Z §577); one can be ordered to do them (Z §588), and one can
carry them out in different ways, instantiating familiar patterns of expressive behaviour:
readily, reluctantly, hesitatingly, cheerfully, carefully or carelessly (Z §594).
2. REASONS & CAUSES
Wittgenstein’s principal claim about reasons (and motives) is that they must be
distinguished from causes, for one can give the reasons for one’s actions with authority,
whereas one’s statement of the causes of one’s actions can only ever be a fallible
hypothesis (BB 15). In the early 1930s, he considers the following example:
Let us suppose a train driver sees a red signal flashing and brings the train to a stop.
In response to the question: ‘Why did you stop?’, he answers perhaps: ‘Because there
is the signal “Stop!”’. One wrongly regards this statement as the statement of a
cause whereas it is the statement of a reason. The cause may have been that he was
long accustomed to reacting to the red signal in such-and-such a way or that in his
nervous system permanent connections of pathways developed such that the action
follows the stimulus in the manner of a reflex, or yet something else. The cause need
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‘Wittgenstein’ by Severin Schroeder, in: O’Connor & Sandis (eds), A Companion to the Philosophy of Action (2010)
not be known to him. By contrast, the reason is what he states it is. [VW 110-12;
transl. changed; cf. PLP 121]
In the discussion of this example Wittgenstein makes three points to set reasons apart
from causes:
(i) A reason, in this case, is a rule that justifies the action. It is not a hypothesis as to
what happened, which might be falsified through further observations. The driver, in this
example, ‘could have also given this rule if he had not gone by it’, and it would have
been equally correct (VW 110-12). — The rule in this case is: ‘When a red signal is
flashing trains must stop.’ However, what the driver gave as his reason was not exactly
this rule, although he referred to it by speaking of ‘the signal “Stop!”’. Rather, he made
the empirical claim that that signal was flashing at that moment. By itself the semantic
rule doesn’t provide a reason to do anything; it needs to be combined with the
observation that its antecedent is fulfilled at the time. Of course it may not be necessary
to point that out when one’s interlocutor is already aware of it. In such a case, the reason
explicitly stated may indeed be nothing more than a rule.
However, this point cannot be generalised, since, obviously, not all reasons involve
semantic conventions or rules.
Often, giving one’s reason involves citing a causal
regularity instead (e.g., ‘Whisky gives me a headache’).
(ii) A reason or motive given in answer to the question ‘Why did you do that?’ is
comparable to an answer to the question ‘How did you get here?’. It is ‘the specification
of the route one has taken, hence the description of a singular process, not the
specification of a cause which always involves a whole host of observations. For this
reason we say too that we know the reason for our action with certainty … but not the
cause of an act’ (VW 424; cf. BB 15). — Indeed, there is nothing hypothetical about
describing the route one has taken, say: ‘It occurred to me that p, and then I did X’. But
for one thing, not all causal judgments are hypothetical and in need of confirmation by
repeated observations (PI §169; CE 408). For another thing, mere succession of a
thought and an action that could be justified by that thought is not sufficient to make the
content of that thought the person’s reason for acting. For example, looking at half a
bottle of wine it may occur to me that since it’s been opened it won’t keep, and then I
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‘Wittgenstein’ by Severin Schroeder, in: O’Connor & Sandis (eds), A Companion to the Philosophy of Action (2010)
proceed to drink it all up. Yet it’s easy to imagine a context in which that thought would
not in fact have contained my reason for drinking the wine (perhaps I’m well aware that I
would have drunk two glasses regardless of whether it meant finishing up a bottle or not).
So far then it would appear that a causal construal of the relation between reason and
action cannot be ruled out. However, pace Donald Davidson, a causal link cannot be the
criterion for something’s being the reason that’s operative, for (as Davidson himself was
forced to admit) the thought of a reason may (not just precede, but) trigger an action
without being or containing the agent’s reason for it. The thought may, for example, just
serve as a reminder which leads the agent to act, but for a different reason. Moreover,
although the occurrence of the thought that the wine in an open bottle won’t keep may
cause me to act, what could be invoked as a reason, as a justification of my action, is not
the occurrence of the thought, but the content of the thought: that the wine in an open
bottle won’t keep. As Wittgenstein explained to Waismann:
The attending to the rule can indeed be the cause for the rule being followed. …
[But] the cause of an action can never be referred to, to justify the action. I may
justify a calculation by appealing to the laws of arithmetic, but not by appealing to
my attending to these laws. The one is a justification, the other a causal explanation.
[PLP 123]
In any case, as Wittgenstein was to realize later, it is not always true that giving
one’s reason is like describing the route one has taken. Not all reasons are brought to
mind before the action. In general, knowledge, beliefs, interests and preferences can
inform our actions without having to be brought to consciousness prior to their
behavioural manifestations. There are countless things I believe without ever wasting a
thought on them (e.g., that the chair I’m sitting down on is sufficiently stable to support
me (PI §575)), which, however, I may bring up when asked to give reasons for some of
my past behaviour. ‘The reason may be nothing more than just the one he gives when
asked’ (AL 5; cf. PI §479). And that, in fact, is the point to stress in order to account for
the grammatical difference between reasons and causes:
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‘Wittgenstein’ by Severin Schroeder, in: O’Connor & Sandis (eds), A Companion to the Philosophy of Action (2010)
(iii) Agents have first-person authority about their reasons for their actions: What
they sincerely claim to be their reason is what we call their reason (VW 30f., 110f.).
With certain qualifications such first-person authority applies even to reasons given for
one’s past actions. Elsewhere Wittgenstein considers the remarkable confidence with
which we are able retrospectively to state our intentions (i.e. one kind of reason for our
behaviour), especially what we meant to express by our words or what we were going to
say (PI §§633-63). The following points emerge:
(a) One knows what one was going to say or wanted to say, and yet one does not
read it off from some mental process which took place then and which one remembers
(PI §637).
(b) My words do not report what happened on that occasion, they are a conditional
statement about the past. ‘They say, for example, that I should have given a particular
answer then, if I had been asked’ (PI §684).
(c) My utterance is a reaction to what I remember of the situation (PI §§648, 657,
659). That is to say, remembering the context, the situation and a certain amount of
details, I will now say: ‘I wanted to φ’; or, ‘I did it because p’.
(d) This is the language-game: We ask people for their reasons, and under certain
conditions the explanations they give, even if retrospective, enjoy a privileged status.
The conditions are: First, the agent’s claim as to his reason must be sincere and not
conflict with what he expressed (by words or deeds, including the action in question) at
other times. Secondly, the reason cannot have been a fact of which the agent was not
aware, nor a supposed fact which the agent did not believe to (or knew not to) obtain. If
these conditions are taken to be fulfilled, an agent’s avowed reasons will be accepted.
More than that, they will, as a matter of fact, be the agent’s reasons, for the concept of an
agent’s reason is the precipitate of this language-game together with the considerations
given by those conditions.
The point of such a concept is easy to see. An agent’s proffered reason will give us
an insight into his character. It tells us what considerations he regards as justifying the
action in question (at least in a weak sense of ‘justify’: as making the action
understandable from the agent’s point of view), or would so regard given the information
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‘Wittgenstein’ by Severin Schroeder, in: O’Connor & Sandis (eds), A Companion to the Philosophy of Action (2010)
and interests he had at the time. Assuming that people’s general views and dispositions
remain fairly stable over short periods of time, we can generally trust people to be
reliable in expressing subsequently what they would have been able to say at the time of
action.
Anyway, the justificatory aspect of explanations in terms of reasons is of
paramount importance to us. Asking people to give reasons for their behaviour we
challenge them to justify it; to tell us (if they can) why it wasn’t a bad (or silly) thing. The
question when this justification was (or would have been) thought of for the first time
may be quite irrelevant.
Wittgenstein’s principal claim that we can always be wrong about the causes of our
actions, but not about our reasons, is most persuasive where reasons and causes are
logically independent. Thus, the train driver’s stated reason for stopping (that the stop
signal was flashing) is independent of any causal account to explain:
(a) What made the agent become the kind of person who responds to such reasons.
(b) Physiological processes involved in the action, rather than causing the action.
However, there are some causal explanations of a different kind whose falsity would
seem difficult to reconcile with the truth of an agent’s sincere statement of his reasons.
Where the reason given is that a certain event occurred (e.g., the flashing of a signal) it
seems plausible to hold that it also implies a causal explanation:
(c) What perceptible event occasioned the agent to act.
Thus, from the driver’s professed reason it is natural to draw the causal explanation that
the flashing of a red signal caused him to stop the train. Wittgenstein, at any rate,
believed that although we are more interested to explain human behaviour in terms of
reasons, it may also be susceptible of corresponding causal explanations. Hence although
signals and linguistic utterances are primarily taken to give people reasons to respond to
them, we can also regard language as a mechanism:
It is clear that language is used for occasioning [veranlassen] people to take actions.
It is used for purposes like a mechanism and it is a mechanism. [VW 100f.; cf. PLP
122f., PI §495]
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In the present example, Wittgenstein suggests, as a parallel causal account, that perhaps
the driver’s ‘action [of braking] follows the stimulus [of the flashing light] in the manner
of a reflex’ (VW 112f.).
Now the following problem arises: How can our fallibility about causal explanations
be reconciled with our first-person authority about our reasons in cases where our reason
seems to imply a certain causal explanation? In other words, if I may be wrong in
thinking that a certain perceived event caused me to act, how can I be safe from error in
declaring the occurrence of the event to be my reason for acting? Let us consider
separately the two ways in which the causal statement may be false:
(i) The event in question did not in fact occur.
(ii) The event occurred, but did not in fact cause the action.
Ad (i): Suppose the driver was mistaken in his impression that there was a red signal.
Would it still be correct to say that the reason why he stopped was that a red light was
flashing? Jonathan Dancy thinks so. He argues that explanations such as ‘His reason for
doing it was that p’ are not factive: they report the considerations the agent regarded as
justifying the action, without committing the speaker to the truth of those considerations.
For ‘a thing believed that is not the case can still explain an action’ (Dancy 2000, 134).
Dancy concedes, however, that there may be something like a conversational implicature
to the effect that if the speaker simply reports the agent’s reason he is naturally taken to
endorse it. Hence, if we regard an agent’s professed reason as false we will normally
distance ourselves from it by inserting an expression like ‘he believed that’. So in the
error case we may prefer to say:
(1) The driver stopped because he believed that a red signal had flashed.
Yet it would be wrong to understand this to mean that the driver’s reason was the fact
that he had a certain belief. Rather, the reason — what the agent thought to justify his
action — was the content of the belief (cf. PLP 123; quoted above). Hence, (1) is
plausibly construed ‘appositionally’ (Dancy 2000, 128f.) :
(2) The driver stopped because, as he believed, a red signal had flashed.
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‘Wittgenstein’ by Severin Schroeder, in: O’Connor & Sandis (eds), A Companion to the Philosophy of Action (2010)
His reason was indeed: that a red signal had flashed, even though this was something he
wrongly believed.
Ad (ii):
Post-hypnotic suggestion provides some clear examples of this kind.
Wittgenstein considers the following case. (It should be noted that in this passage he uses
the word ‘Motiv’, translated as ‘motive’, for ‘what somebody specifies as a reason for his
action’ (VW 424f.).)
The experimental subject, who has under hypnosis been given a particular task to
execute, e.g. to put up his umbrella, does precisely this — but has no inkling why he
does what he does; asked to account for it, he may well invent a motive … and
believe in it perfectly sincerely; all the same he is deluded. [VW 424f.]
Suppose when asked for his reason the person says that the sky looked so grey, he
thought it might start to rain any moment.
In that case, the corresponding causal
explanation — that the grey sky caused him to open his umbrella — is false. For what
caused his behaviour was obviously not the sky, but the preceding hypnosis. And yet,
Wittgenstein suggests, the reason may be accepted as correct.
What the experimental subject is deluded about is the cause of his action, not its
motive. [VW 424f.]
For the reason (what here Wittgenstein calls a ‘motive’) is what a person could sincerely
have offered as a justification of his action at the time. What is peculiar about this case is
that because the person did not act of his own free will, we are not much interested in his
reason. What he gave us was indeed his reason — but what he did was not really his
action; it was, in fact, the hypnotist’s doing, and so we might be more interested in the
hypnotist’s reason for it.
Related to this, but somewhat less pathological, are certain cases of self-deception. I
may, for example, sincerely give as a reason for my telling someone off his lack of
politeness. Yet a careful observer who knows me sufficiently well realises that the
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occasion was fairly trivial and that I would never have lost my temper so much had it not
been for the fact that I felt jealous of the person I told off, perhaps without being clear
about it myself. Here, again, a reason sincerely offered by the agent is not contradicted,
but to some extent devalued by a causal explanation. The reason for my action was
indeed the one I gave. But since my behaviour was less under my control than I believed,
my behaviour could not be fully accounted for by my reason. Part of it (the inappropriate
vehemence of my outburst) could only be explained causally: by my being carried away
by an emotion I hadn’t yet fully taken stock of.
Bibliography
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Schroeder, Severin (2006). Wittgenstein: The Way Out of the Fly-Bottle. Cambridge:
Polity.
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BB The Blue and Brown Books, Oxford: Blackwell, 1958.
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Z
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