a simple model of psychotherapy for psychosis

Here is a very simple model for the pragmatic therapy of schizophrenic psychosis. (I say 'simple', and it is, but the theories in terms of which it is cast are not at all simple. I shan't be spelling out these theories here, and will instead assume a ridiculously happy congruence between i) the reader's prior reading and philosophical prejudices and ii) my own.) It is built on a) an understanding of the nature of the core psychotic disturbance drawn from phenomenology and psychoanalysis, b) an understanding on the nature of the self drawn from existential phenomenology, and c) an understanding of the nature of effective therapeutic treatment drawn from the behavioural therapy known as ACT or acceptance and commitment therapy. I'm posting it because it seems fairly obvious, but I've not seen it articulated in just this way in the literature - probably because a) or b) and c) are not often drawn into close proximity, but also because there is much in the RFT background to ACT which is inimical to the philosophical spirit of existential phenomenological theorising about 'the self'.

a) A person 'with schizophrenia' suffers from a schizotaxic deficit. This constitutes a fragility in their capacity to hold themselves together - or, more accurately, a fragility in the capacity of their lived body to remain held together - in the context of (in particular) emotionally significant interpersonal encounters. The fundamental disturbance is accordingly a 'self disturbance'. The boundary between self and world or self and other - a boundary generated by the body schema in action - is always somewhat fragile, and then when stressed too greatly, becomes altered. The boundary between self and world, or self and other, starts to fall apart. From this basic self disturbance arises all the secondary symptoms such as delusions, hallucinations, passivity phenomena, etc.

b) Additional strain is placed on the smooth functioning of the body schema by powerful affects such as anger/anxiety. Psychotic terror at the dissolution of the self itself promotes further self-dissolution. There is however nothing that any of us can do, directly with the resources of the conscious mind, to reduce self-disturbance. Any thinking will occur 'on top of', grounded in, the self-disturbance. The kinds of hyper-reflexive retreats documented by Laing and Sass do not promote genuinely different ways of grounding the self. (Instead they are simply that: retreats from being, however much they are narcissistically dressed up as alternative realities.) The grounds of the self always remain inarticulate, background, non-reflective, aspects of bodily going-on-being which we can only promote obliquely.

c) Part of that oblique treatment will involve any exercises of whichever sort which can aid in the recalibration and stabilisation of the body schema. The kinds of bodywork promoted by Rohricht and Schoop may help here. However ACT surely has something else - and something important - to offer. Which is the idea of dropping control agendas with regards the occurrence of distressing mental events, and also the idea of promoting an acceptance of whatever comes into the mind (acceptance tempered by a distancing acknowledgement of that whatever's mental as opposed to real state). That much has already been said in the ACT on psychosis literature. But I'd like to propose a third piece of groundless trust which it would behove the therapist to promote - namely, a trust that the body schema will look after itself if one allow it to. If one can allow oneself to 'go with' (without 'buying') the psychotic experience. Take courage, re-engage with the lived environment, and do not hyper-reflexively try to create a psychic retreat or a rigidified way of being to 'manage' the psychotic experience.

The self in psychosis has weak foundations, but these foundations are, as for everyone, constantly enacted (the path that is layed down in walking) in the course of a meaningful life lived. Can the schizotaxic patient allow that path to lay itself down, to not try to lay it down and thereby inadvertently build castles in the air which constantly threaten to crash down to earth, to instead take themselves on walks through familiar and comfortable terrains and tolerate the rough ground?

why psychology is a bit rubbish really

Er... a shamelessly hyperbolic and attention-seeking title I know. Anyway, I thought I (a psychologist) would spend a few moments clearly specifying why it seems to me that psychology is a rather limited discipline when it comes to understanding psychopathology. Of course I'm playing rather fast and loose with what is to count as the extension of 'psychology' but I hope my caricature will at least be recognisable.

Psychology today tells us about - to use a shorthand - what happens 'in minds'. That's just what psychology is. It tells us about what people think and feel and intend and will and 'represent'. And as well as telling us about what representations are in the mind, it tells us about how people think and feel and... We have 'mental states' and then we have the 'mental processes' that link these states together.

The natural deployment of this framework in psychopathological contexts suggests that in psychopathology people's representations of others or themselves or their worlds are faulty in content (a faulty 'what'), or there are faulty links between these representations (a faulty 'how'). Perhaps someone's feelings are out of proportion to a situation; perhaps their beliefs are inaccurate; perhaps they are jumping to conclusions, etc. It is either mental states that are disturbed, or mental processes that are breaking down. And that is the sum of it, of what it means to 'do the psychology' of psychopathological conditions or states, on the story I'm telling.

The problem is, however, that most of what we recognise as proper psychopathology is not at all aptly characterised as due to a faulty contents or broken processes. What most frank psychopathology involves is not a failure in the mind's mirroring capacities, a failure of what is in the mind (states or processes), but rather in the structuration of the mind itself.

By structuration I do not mean 'stage of development' or 'degree of complexity'. That, it seems to me, is (in this context alone) another psychologist's red herring. I have in mind rather the way in which the faculties dialectically unfold into their mutually constituting yet opposing domains. To understand this we need the conceptual resources not of psychology, which can only tell us about what's happening within minds, but rather of existential phenomenology, which tells us about the essential character of mindedness itself.

Here's a rather daft pictorial way of demonstrating what I'm getting at. First we have a picture of a normal mind doing its normal job. (It's not supposed to instantiate a valid faculty psychology, just to help me make a theoretical point!)

Here we've got someone looking at a dog, recognising what to call it, laying down a memory, shutting their eyes and drawing on their memory to call up an imaginary dog, etc. We have a mental process of perception leading to a mental representation etc. etc.

Now we imagine someone suffering from some deficits in their mental states and mental processes. Here's one possible result:

What we have here are a whole host of different difficulties: a faulty perceptual processes leading to the internal representation of the dog being somewhat truncated; dodgy memory processes such that we have a lack of laying down of new memories, and a knackered verbal recognition ability such that the term 'hog' comes to mind instead of 'dog'.

Such a way of depicting matters comes fairly naturally when we are thinking of specific brain injuries or fairly localised dementing processes. What I want to claim is that, despite the ambitions of cognitive clinical psychology or cognitive neuropsychiatry, it just won't do at all when we try to grasp the essential character of psychopathological conditions such as OCD or psychosis.

The essential character of such conditions, I want to suggest, lies in the fact that, under certain pressures and in certain contexts, we have a failure in the structuration of the faculties and of the very mind itself. This is difficult to represent pictorially because another claim on the table has is that to the extent that we have deviation from that structuration which separates what is inside the mind from what is outside, or which separates the imagination from memory or from perception, we have a loss of mindedness itself. I've tried to represent this in the following picture by showing how, when we have a movement of the boundary of the faculty, we simultaneously and necessarily also get a loss of that very boundary:

Our ability to really talk about distinct faculties, to place a representation within one rather than the other, starts to blur. It may become hard to say where the self ends and the world begins (witness the intruding dog). Yet this is simultaneously to say that it starts to become hard to talk about distinct selfhood at all, since self and world-as-experienced-and-understood just are mutually yet opositionally defined. Whether we have to deal with a memory or an imagination or a perception becomes unclear. Verbal recognition starts to intrude into perception. Again, it's not just that, say, something within the mind gets mislocated, or mental processes mediating representations between faculties become impaired. (That's the standard cognitive psychological model of mental disturbance.) Rather, the very possibilities of making coherent distinctions between imagining and seeing starts, especially in particular affectively significant contexts, to fall apart.

Cognitive models of obsessive compulsive disorder tell us that 'everyone gets intrusive thoughts. It's just that the person with OCD wrongly perceives the significance of these, taking themselves to be responsible etc.' To my mind this radically misunderstands the nature of both intrusive thoughts and of obsessional responsibility-taking. The obsessive person 'takes responsibility for' things that it doesn't even make sense to take responsibility for. I mean that quite literally: pushed to an extreme we start to lose track of what it even means to say that they are 'taking responsibility' in these situations. We can have some kind of a psychodynamic understanding of this: faced by an intolerable self-shattering anxiety they enact self-constructions which distort the relation between self and world so that a damaged self can take itself to have more agency and therefore control over the unpredictable beyond than it makes sense to have.

Now normalising is often very laudable, and clinically this seems to be a useful strategy, but phenomenologically speaking it's mighty suspect, and I can't help entertain the thought that, like several cognitive interventions, what is helpful in aiding the patient to return to some kind of relative stability may get in the way of deeper restructurations of the self. One could even say that normalising is the precondition of the whole psychological project, since psychology, restricted to talking about what is happening within minds and faculties, simply lacks the resources of existential phenomenology for theorising the character of deep disturbances of mindedness and faculty divisions themselves.

when the puzzle falls apart and can't be recovered

There's a curious state, phenomenologically speaking, to be had when philosophising. I believe it to be best characterised by Wittgenstein's idea of being 'held captive by a picture' and then being set free from this captivity. And the curious thing is that one can then hardly understand what it was one didn't understand before. Hard to understand what the problem was, how one was confused; even to remember the whole problem. It has just dissolved.

I don't believe this state is unique to the resolution of philosophical puzzlement. It also seems to be shared by the resolution of psychotic delusion, the bursting of the bubble of transference, being relinquished from the grips of an unconscious phantasy, and moving from dream to waking consciousness. We know we've just been dreaming, but often struggle to say what about; perhaps sometimes, through the day, we have a vague sense of still living in its penumbra.

Right now I'm caught in a puzzle about the nature of historical explanation. I've not been reading up on it, so this isn't a scholarly post. I thought I'd rather try to note my puzzlement now, since I have an inkling that it may be on the verge of dissolution and I want to use this as an exercise in trying to 'hold onto the madness'.

I'm thinking about the nature of historical explanation (I know nothing about history itself). I want to know, or so it seems to me, what the causes of an event are - e.g. the causes of the first world war.

And then I wonder to what extent I will be satisfied instead by a purely hermeneutic answer. One which specifies the intentions of the agents. One which sheds light on the meaning of the actions. Which recharacterises the actions so as to make them humanly intelligible. Which deploys 'interpretation' as its methodology.

And so I'm tempted to contrast interpretative or meaningful explication with 'efficient' causal explanation. But I wonder now what about the actual causes of the war. The thought goes: ok, so we have what inspired the military leaders, what understandings were reached by whom and when. But is this all? Can't we ask about the causes as well as the meanings? What it was that 'brought it all about'?

Well, it occurs to me now that here I may be in the heart of the kind of puzzlement that wants for dissolution rather than solution. (But can I avoid losing a sense of my puzzlement? That is my goal.) And when I first wrote this post I went on quickly, at this point, to just urge a distinction between reasons and causes, and to suggest that the felt need to articulate a causal as well as a rational story was otiose, since what was really requested by the question as to the causes of the first world war would be best and completely aptly met by a justificatory explication. (I've also had another strange experience: I thought I should go and read up on the issue, and pulled von Wright's book on Explanation and Understanding off the shelf - and found he uses the same example of the beginning of the first world war. Perhaps it is a common philosophical example that I'd forgotten I'd previously encountered?) And I think I then just lost a sense of my own puzzlement.

Donald Davidson and Bill Child both insist, regarding psychological explanation, for example, that it's fine to be told what sense we can make of someone's actions, but we also want to know specifically what made the actions happen when they did. And let me admit (now following von Wright) that we can of course talk of the circumstances, geological and political and economic circumstances which obtained at a particular time and only given which would certain motivations for action gain traction. But to go and tidy it all up in this way now seems to me to risk losing a sense of my original puzzlement. (Like providing a sensible answer (which would in fact be an answer to a sensible but banal question) to a silly (but nevertheless deep) question - I risk just being shut up, rather than being understood, by myself.)

Somewhere around here is where we must 'condense a cloud of philosophy into a drop of grammar'. And here's the thought: It sounds strange if we say 'nothing brought about an action' but this is because it looks too much like a spooky empirical, rather than a grammatical or conceptual, proposition. It looks spooky because it looks now like we're admitting uncaused events into our ontology. But conceiving of actions as events is part of what is at stake here too. We (well, we secularists) don't find it weird to talk about unintended events happening. Let's try not to get similarly freaked out by talk of uncaused actions.

Understanding just what it means to say that ''actions are uncaused' is a grammatical rather than an empirical statement' helps resolve some of the tension here. If I'm right, it's like saying 'colours are weightless', 'emotions are without length or breadth', 'integers are priceless', etc. It doesn't mean that there are these mysterious goings on (they aren't 'goings on'!); it means that no meaning has been given within the English language to talk of 'causing actions'. Perhaps we could provide such a use, and extend our language game in new and interesting and useful (but not 'truer'!) ways. That's another issue though. For now the trick is to know when we've just been un/reflectively assuming that it works in ways which are as yet simply foreign to it.

Last gasp. I find my internal interlocutor now proclaiming: Yes, but Richard, we do need some way of understanding how the world of intentions and actions relates to the world of events and causes. I acknowledge the temptation to ask this, but I suspect that the question once again comes from a mind in thrall to the very conflations which generated the sense of puzzlement which has now left me when I was finding myself wanting to ask about not just the motives but also the causes of actions. Unpicking this is however the task for another day.

making a difference

It is sometimes suggested that there is a perfectly innocuous sense in which an agent's reasons for action can be understood as the causes of her action. A sense which it ought to embarass the anti-causalist about action to not acknowledge and which - if this is all that may be meant by 'cause' in causal accounts - might also give them pause for thought about just what they had been so busy making a fuss about all this time...

That sense is the sense in which a cause is something which 'makes a difference' to what happens or what is done. To whether the action is or is not done.

In what follows I want to risk embarassment by trying to turn the tables on the causalist. What I'll suggest is that, apart from in senses of 'makes a difference to whether something is done' which are not at all intuitively understood as cases of causation, the explanatory function of the proferring of reasons for Jane's actions is not discharged through their citation aiding us in grasping that, were it not for the reason being proffered, Jane would not have done what she did.

Let me acknowledge from the start that people do not tend to act for no reasons. That however is surely part of the conceptual analysis of 'person' and 'agent' and 'action'. So in this most general sense having reasons 'makes a difference to' what we do since, if we are a being who has reasons, then we are also in the runnings for being a being who acts.

Now I don't think that this kind of 'making a difference' is what the causalist who appeals to difference-making can have in mind. In fact it would be better to phrase the difference made in terms of a difference to that - rather than what - we do. (i.e. a difference to the fact that we are do-ers or 'agents'.) Here the general having of reasons plays a purely constitutive rather than causal role in the being of actions. It doesn't touch on the issue of the likelihood of any action being undertaken, but rather on the question of whether anything that was undertaken would deserve the epithet of 'action'.

The question remains: should we understand the role of specific reasons as making a difference to the performing of specific actions? I want to deny that this is the case.

Let's start by pitching the causal account against a hermeneutic account of action explanation. The hermeneut says that reason-explanations work by situating an action in a broader context. The explanatory work is done simply by this situating, which situating allows us to re-describe what was previously not immediately intelligible for what it is in itself as something which is intelligible for what it is in itself.

The situating, as the hermeneut has it, is not a matter of the rendering intelligible of the occurrence of an event in terms of its typical causes. It is not a matter of its origination but of its identity. (Er, and yes of course you can describe something in terms of its causes or effects, but that's not the point here!) The kind of elucidation that a reason-explanation provides is a kind which is to come simply from this identification of the action as what it is.

One of the main ways in which this identity elucidation seems to occur is through the provision of teloi for the actions. John is going across the room to the fridge. "He's getting a can of coke". Ah - that let's me know what this going across the room is: it's a case of going-to-get-a-coke. I can now place John's actions within the 'space of reasons', in Sellars' helpful phrase. The hermeneut's claim is that this placing is all there is to reason-explanation.

(Of course, you have to place it correctly in the space of reasons! One of Davidson's arguments was that you supposedly couldn't distinguish between correct and incorrect such placements in the absence of appeals to causation. Ironic, then, that Davidson himself was unable to provide a straightforward criterion to help us distinguish between cases of supposed wayward causal chains in which reasons which allegedly cause actions do and do not also explain the said actions.)

The causalist however wants to say that there is something more in action explanation by reasons, and that this is a matter of actions not being performed were it not for the reasons in play. John would not have gone to the fridge were it not for the fact that he wanted to get a can of coke. This, it is suggested, is implicit in the very idea of his action being explained by the reason in question.

But is this true? What if, were there not any coke in the fridge, he would instead have gone and got a lemonade from the fridge? It is hard to see why the burden of ruling out this possibility should be placed on the elucidation which cited the coke-getting. (As I write I seem to remember that Bede Rundle has a similar argument in his book Mind in Action.) And this surely generalises to many situations.

Again, it is surely inconceivable that John would have acted thus in the absence of some such reason. But this, I want to say, is not a function of a fact of reasons being causes, but of the fact that John is an agent: a being who acts for reasons. Without reasons we would not here have a case of action or of agency or of a person called John.

Sometimes, of course, people do also act for no reason. These are surely the exceptions rather than the rules of action undertaking. Their existence is not a prima facie challenge for either the causalist or the hermeneut, since their accounts are of how we are to understand the ways in which actions are explained by reasons when they are so explained. However it is part of the causalist's account of action that a particular action would not have occurred were it not for the actual reason for it's being performed being unavailable. What they must therefore explain is how it is possible for people to act, on occasion, for no reason.

The hermeneut claims that when people do act for reasons, as they normally do, and as is constitutive of the basic idea of action itself, their action is not guided or caused by their reasons. These reasons rather provide us with extra information about the intrinsic character of the action. It is an action aimed at a certain end, or expressive of a certain desire, for example. James is playing the piano. Why? He's practicing for his forthcoming concert. Neither the practicing nor the forthcoming concert cause the playing. Nor, according to the hermeneut, do we need to think of James' intentions or desires as causing the playing. They, too, simply further characterise it.

James may very well not have been playing the piano if he had not had to practice for the forthcoming conference. (Let's imagine he just is a lazy fellow. Then on the other hand, perhaps he is not, and would have been playing it anyway.) Again, this is because James is an intentional agent. It is part of his nature to be an agent, which is to say, act for reasons. To gloss this in terms of 'something which makes a difference to what he does is' to mistake a constituting for a propitiating contribution.

I hope these considerations will make clear why it is not ok for the causalist to simply say 'But are you seriously saying that having such and such a reason made no difference to whether or not such and such an action was undertaken?' Once again, the argument is that people are beings the essential nature of which is to 'act for reasons'; that action itself is generally, as a rule, undertaken for reasons. So of course it is unlikely that, in the absence of the reason, we would have the action in question. It is possible, of course, as an exception to the rule, but unlikely. But the point is here that we do have to do with a rule, and not to do with a cause.

I hope they also show that it wouldn't be ok for the causalist at this stage to appeal to analogies of redescriptions which reference causes. Of course such redescriptions occur (think of explanations of the character of car parts in terms of their functional roles).
But that is part of an appeal to explicate what it might be for a reason to be a cause, rather than part of an argument which shows why we should think of them as causes. The hermeneut is not claiming that we have no causal analogies which, if the causal claim was required in the first place, could not then be appealed to. They were arguing instead that the context-placing, intelligibility-enhancing-through-character-revelation, nature of reasons is all there is to their explanatory power, and that this does not need to be augmented by considerations of causation.

To return to James, at the general level his having reasons makes a difference to that, and not what, he does (ie that he is a do-er). At the specific level of an individual action it makes a difference to what and not that he does (acts).

Consider what I want to suggest is a comparable non-reason-providing explanation which also works by context situation (Julia Tanney has comparable examples in her nice piece Reasons as non-causal context-placing explanations.) I see a fragment of text on a piece of paper on the pavement; 'toes' and 'cumber' it says. How can I understand it? Well, it's a fragment of a shopping list. The shopper was reminding himself to buy tomatoes and a cucumber.

The full words do not cause in the sense of makes a difference to the occurrence of the part words, or in any other sense of cause. To be sure, it is unlikely that someone would have written the part words if they had not been writing these full words, but not impossible. (Perhaps they were writing a holiday memo about being encumbered by mosquitoes.) But this is not because the full words 'bring about' the part words. Neither does mention of teloi, reasons, desires, intentions, or beliefs discharge its explanatory duty through the identification of something which brings about something else. In recharacterising the action, the talk of intentions etc. does not serve to reference anything at all other than the action itself in all its glory.

.........................

postscript on the logical connection argument

The Wittgensteinian claims that one way to distinguish reasons from causes is through the fact that the relata in a reason explanation of an action are not 'distinct existences' whereas the relata of a causal explanation of a happening are necessarily 'distinct existences'.

It is sometimes objected to this that a) we can explain what something is in terms of its causes or effects, and b) we can say that 'the cause of A caused A', that this is a causal explanation, and therefore non-distinct existences can be invoked in causal explanations.

Against these: a) yes we can. But we cannot then merely invoke this concept in a causal explanation. If a carburettor is (I have no idea what it is but let's say:) just that which mixes the air and fuel in a car, and you say to me: what causes the air and fuel to mix? and I say 'the carburettor', I think it pretty clear that I have not just provided a causal explanation. This is even clearer in b): to say that the cause of A caused A is not to explain how A came about. It is just to reiterate that it did come about without magic!

Further, we may (perhaps) be able to think of descriptions under which non-distinct existences can be considered distinct, or in which distinct existences can be considered non-distinct (as above with A). But the relevant concern is the 'descriptions' which must feature in the explanations of the action or event. If explanation of action is causal explanation, then it must be that the action and the explanans are distinct existences. This is what the hermeneut denies. An intention is related to doing X through its being an intention to do X; the connection is constititutive and ergo not causal.

why reasons aren't causes

Donald Davidson gave us a reason for thinking that reasons had to be causes. Julia Tanney killed off his argument - but reports of its death have been greatly played down. I want to start to put this right, and also to challenge a successor argument by Bill Child.

Davidson starts by acknowledging that the rationalising force of reason-giving - coming to understand something by developing a grasp of how it makes sense - is not to be simply conflated with causal explanation. However what he tells us is that by reflecting on certain examples we can see how the rationalising force of reasons is not enough to explain their explanatory potency. This leads him to the prima facie implausible idea that a reason explanation (I turned on the tap so I could water the geraniums) is, despite its univocary appearance, actually an amalgam of both rationalising and causal powers.

What are these examples? They are cases in which someone might have two (or more) reasons for doing an action, but nevertheless act for only one of them. What is it that makes it the case that the one reason eventuates in an action but the other does not? Causation, Davidson says, is the glue that binds the reason (or the reason's representation in the actor's mind - or the 'primary [set of beliefs and desires] reason' of the agent) to the action.

Davidson, however, has made a mistake that we need more than rationalisation here. Let us start by acknowledging (as Davidson himself would) that we may act for more than one reason. Given this, if someone does indeed have two reasons for performing an action, the best question to ask (Tanney suggests - if I remember rightly a paper I read about 8 years ago!) is not 'What binds the 'operative' reason to the action?' but 'What renders the other reason inoperative?' When we ask this latter question, what we find is that the latter (inoperative) reason must have been rationally trumped by another goal of the agent. Far from needing an extra ingredient - causality - to hitch operative reasons to actions, what we really need is just a deeper understanding of the justificatory play of reasons.

George wants to go for a walk. Two reasons can be offered, both of which index genuine desires of his. First, he hopes to bump into Georgina who he fancies. Second, he could do with getting a bit fitter. George goes for a walk, and we discern that the only reason for which he acts is his hope that he may have an encounter with Georgina. How do we understand this? By positing causal glue between the fancying and the walking? Not at all. What we need to understand is why George's action is not in fact justified by all his reasons. Then we find out: George also has an essay to write. This trumps getting fit for him - but it doesn't trump meeting Georgina. And the 'trumping' here occurs in the space of reasons rather than the space of causes. It is the rationality of his action given his actual preferences, now revealed to us, that the reason explanation makes manifest.

Bill Child tried another tack for making the case that reasons be considered causes:

For any putatively non-causal explanation of an event, we can always make the Davidsonian point: knowing this story allows us to fit the event into a pattern which potentially makes sense of it; but we are still left wanting to know why the event actually occurred, what made it happen when it did.

Later on he suggests:

it is wrong to think that the Davidsonian argument depends on the idea that there are cases in which an agent acts for just one of two equally strong reasons. The point of the argument is that we need to understand the 'because' in 'She phi-d because she believed that p'. Suppose there is never a case in which S has two equally good reasons for an action she performs for only one of them. It is still true that the mere fact that S's attitudes made it rational to phi does not by itself explain her actually phi-ing. ... we must appeal to causation in order to understand the metaphysics of the relation between reason and action.

...the understanding we get from seeing that reason explanation is a form of causal explanation is a reflective understanding of the metaphysics of this form of explanation; we understand what sort of explanation it is, and how reasons explain actions.

...perhaps we can add strength to the intuition by showing how naturally we exploit the idea of causality in thinking of the relation between an agent's attitudes and her actions. For example, one way of producing a result is to produce in someone else a motive for bringing it about; by inducing attitudes in you, I can affect your actions and, through them, the world beyond you. It is hard not to think causally of the whole transaction, and equally hard not to think causally of each of its stages. The first stage is clearly causal; when I induce some motive in you, I am evidently affecting you causally. And it is equally natural to think causally of the relation between your attitudes and your actions. And that, perhaps, may go some way to vindicate the causalist's conception of the explanandum in action explanation.

Well, perhaps. But the old-fashioned Wittgensteinian anti-causalist is hardly going to be moved by an approach which simply assimilates actions to events (rather than holds out for an analysis both of them, and of their relevant accountings-for, as sui generis in character), which supposes from the start that explanations of actions are interested in accounting for just why they occurred when they did (perhaps reason explanations are not that specific!), which also denies from the start what the Wittgensteinian suggests: that putting an action (which might not best be thought of as an 'event' or happening) in the context of a sense-making pattern precisely provides us with knowledge of why it was undertaken (if not of why it 'occurred'; similarly we wouldn't expect to explain why events are undertaken since it's only actions which are undertaken), and which in the process construes the art of rational persuasion as a matter of the 'production' or 'induction' of attitudes in someone else. (Although the point of the Wittgensteinian's analysis, it ought to be said, was not to issue a fatwa on the use of causal rhetoric in action-intentional context (although for the causalist to use it to vindicate an argument is a bit rich!). It was rather to suggest that a.) assimilating reasons and causes obscures more than it illuminates, and b.) that some of the reasons why we may feel compelled to bother offering causal analyses in the first place have (historically at least had) more to do with the unwarranted assumption of an estranged conception of the relation of (a disembodied) mind and (a deanimated) body in the first place, a relation which then will seem to be in need of causal glue to link together what the analyst has unwittingly sundered.) Further, no-one (so far as I know) has suggested that the mere fact that it would be rational to act for a certain reason makes it the case that someone acts for the reason in question (the reason needs to be theirs).

What then makes it the case that what could be a reason for someone to act is in fact one of the reasons - one of their reasons - for their action? In answer to this question the anti-causalist is typically happy to cite the kinds of factors which the causalist themselves would, if they were not beguiled by estranged and decontextualised conceptions of mindedness and embodiment, presumably also want to cite - such as the agent's ownership of the reason (do they cite it when asked? for example), or the meaningful contextual character of the situation of their action (the arm raising occurred in the context of a bicycle turning manouvre - John raised his arm in order to signal his exit from the main road). All they hold on to is the (alleged) fact that adding causation to the analytic mix is de trop.

This, the anti-causalist will claim, is just what it is to 'understand the 'because' in 'she phi-d because she believed that p''. We receive the kind of illumination we get when we see what the action in question really is: what the smaller fragment which eluded our prior comprehension is a fragment of. (If someone asks: "Well, and why is that illuminating?", then I think I'd just have to say the same about causal explanations: "Why are they illuminating?" The truth is: these just are what amount to two modes of understanding here: we need to understand what it is to 'understand something' in terms of such particular explanatory endeavours, rather than take it that we possess some prior notion of what 'understanding' consists in which can then be wheeled out in questions such as "And why [what do you mean "why"?] does this count as 'understanding'? ) Causal explanations and reason-giving explanations simply are - on the Wittgensteinian position I am recommending - to be considered two separate sui generis forms of explanation, and there's little sense in analysing either in terms of the other. If however what it is to understand a 'because' in either context is to apprehend something more than the differences between these conceptual contexts - for example, to be able to provide a reductive analysis of the concepts bound up in one form of explanation in terms of quite different concepts - then the anti-causalist of a Wittgensteinian bent will simply reject the project ab initio. Why should we even think such an analysis was necessary or desirable?