What Happens When Someone Acts for a

Reason?

August 8, 2010

What happens when someone acts for a reason? Someone acts and she acts
for a reason. This seems like the obvious answer, but it is not at all obvious how
it could be right. If the agent were to act for a reason, there would have to be
a reason and she would act for it. Some powerful arguments suggest that such
a thing could never happen. So, our question might rest on a mistake. What
happens when someone acts for a reason? What happens when you divide the
number of horses and unicorns by the number of elves?
Some who defend Psychologism deny that motivating and normative reasons
belong to the same ontological category. It seems they deny that it is possible
that the reasons we act for are in the right sort of category to be good reasons.1
Normative reasons are the reasons that apply to us, make demands on us, and
count in favor of an action. These are facts about the situation or worldly
states of affair that an agent has in mind when deciding what to do. Motivating
reasons are states of the agent or the contents of those states. They help explain
why the agent behaves as she does. There is nothing in us or in the world that
plays both roles:
When we have such a reason, and we act for that reason, it becomes
our motivating reason. But we can have either kind of reason without
having the other. Thus, if I jump into the canal, my motivating
reason was provided by my belief; but I had no normative reason
to jump. I merely thought I did. And, if I failed to notice that the
canal was frozen, I had a reason not to jump that, because it was
unknown to me, did not motivate me.2

The problem with such a view is that it denies what seems obvious to many of
us. When someone acts for a reason, there is a reason that is at least potentially
a valid reason and the agent acts for it. If all goes well, the agent’s reason for
acting was a good reason. Dancy has argued that if this is so, we ought to think
of both normative and motivating reasons as constituted by the worldly facts or
states of affairs we have in mind when acting rather than the states of mind or
1 See Dancy 1995 and 2000
2 Parfit 1997, pp. 99. Smith 1987 is also often saddled with this sort of view.

1
the contents of those states.3 An acceptable theory of reasons, he says, should
accomodate these two constraints:
• Any normative reason is capable of contributing to the explanation of an
action done for that reason. (Explanatory Constraint)
• Any motivating reason must be capable of being among the reasons that
count in favor of acting. (Normative Constraint)
The problem with his view is that it too seems to deny what is obvious to many
of us. When the agent acts on a mistaken belief, the agent’s reason for acting
cannot be a worldly state of affair or fact because the facts do not fit the agent’s
beliefs.4 So, what happens when that happens? Dancy says that it sounds “too
harsh” to say that such an agent acts for no reason at all.5 So, it seems that
the reason for which the agent acts must be an attitude or the content of an
attitude. If this is right, there must be something wrong with the argument
against Psychologism.
Someone could respond to Dancy’s argument against Psychologism by deny-
ing that Explanatory and Normative Constraints. They could deny that the
reasons we act for and the reasons there are to act belong to the same onto-
logical category. Instead, they could argue that Dancy was wrong to say that
Psychologism violates the Explanatory and Normative Constraints.6 Turning
Dancy’s argument on its head, some now defend views on which both norma-
tive and motivating reasons are either our attitudes or the contents of these
attitudes.
Arguments from error make it hard to give up Psychologism about moti-
vating reasons. In this paper, I want to do two things. First, I want to argue
that Dancy was right to reject Psychologism. Second, I want to offer a response
to the argument from error that saves what is right with Dancy’s view. Is it
possible to act for good reasons? The argument from error does not force us to
deny that it is even if we insist that the good reasons are typically facts about
the situation or states of the world rather than states of mind.

1 Motivational and Normative Psychologism

Motivational Psychologism, as the name suggests, is a view concerning the on-
tology of motivating reasons, the reasons for which we act. Normative Psy-
3 SeeDancy 2000.
4 Gibbons 2009, Hornsby 2007, Lord 2008, Miller 2008, Turri 2009, and Wiland 2002 argue
that cases of error cause trouble for Dancy’s view.
5 Personal communication.
6 Miller 2008, Schroeder 2008, and Gibbons Forthcoming all defend views that are supposed

to accomodate both the Normative and Explanatory Constraints. They all reject the view that
motivating reasons are worldly facts or states of affairs. For Miller, motivating and normative
reasons are Fregean propositions. For Schroeder, both kinds of reasons are propositions, but
normative reason ascriptions are factive because the thing that is a reason is only a normative
reason if it corresponds to a fact. For Gibbons, both kinds of reasons are psychological states
of the agent. These states need not be non-factive mental states, mind you. He thinks that
knowledge is a state of mind.

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chologismis a view concerning the ontology of normative reasons, the reasons
there are to act that make demands on us, apply to us, or count in favor of an
action. On the assumption that the Explanatory and Normative Constraints
are correct, Motivational and Normative Psychologism go hand in hand. It will
be helpful to distinguish between two versions of Psychologism:

• Normative and motivating reasons are constituted by your mental states.

(PsychologismS )
• Normative and motivating reasons are constituted by the propositions that
are the contents of your mental states. (PsychologismP )

On the first view, reasons are attitudes.7 On the second, reasons are provided
by your attitudes because they are the contents of those attitudes.8
The case against Motivational Psychologism builds on the case against Nor-
mative Psychologism and it might be useful to remind ourselves why that view
strikes many as being so implausible. Normative reasons by their very nature
seem like relational beasts. It is hard to imagine a world in which there are
reasons that are not reasons for such and such an agent and even if we add the
agents in, I think it is extremely difficult to imagine these reasons matching up
with their agents without being reasons-for the agents to do or avoid various
things. How does something become a reason-for, a reason for an agent to do
or avoid such and such a thing in such and such circumstances? There might
be many paths to reasonhood, but the most obvious way something gets to be
a reason is by counting in favor or counting against. So, while some reasons
might not count in favor of anything at all, most of the reasons I can think of
are reasons precisely because they count in favor of doing something or count
against the doing of it. From here, it is a short step to the rejection of Normative
Psychologism. Unless we all harbor systematic and massive confusions about
what counts in favor of acting, the things that count in favor of, say, lending
a hand, are facts having to do with the external situation or worldly states of
affairs. We need not be too terribly picky about which of these options to set-
tle for because Normative Psychologism rejects both. It asserts that normative
reasons are the sorts of things that supervene upon our mental states, so they
are either states of mind or the contents of those states with their veridicality
or accuracy bleached out.
This first argument against Normative Psychologism is the implausible error
argument. Ordinary agents may well be mistaken about the facts on the ground
and so the actions they think will turn out favorable might not. That kind of
error is often unfortunate, but often understandable. It is implausible to accuse
ordinary agents of failing to know what it would take for actions to turn out
to be favorable in some respect or other on the grounds that it is facts about
7 Gibbons Forthcoming argues that normative and motivating reasons are states of mind

because states of mind make things reasonable and that is what reasons are in the business of
doing. Turri 2009 defends the view that motivating reasons are states of mind, but does not
endorse the further claim that normative reasons are also states of mind.
8 See Fantl and McGrath 2009, Lord 2008, Miller 2008, and Schroeder 2008.

3
the agent’s beliefs rather than facts the agent has beliefs about that determines
whether things turned out favorably for them. If I drink a tonic in the belief
that it will help my headache and it only makes the pain more intense, it would
be implausible to say that things turned out favorably for me. If counting in
favor is what confers reasonhood upon a reason, it is facts about the efficacy
of the tonic rather than my beliefs about its efficacy that determines whether
there was the reasons to drink I took there to be. If counting in favor cannot
confer reasonhood upon a reason, this just seems like one more implausible error
to impute to ordinary agents. If Moore had asked, “I know that such and such
counts strongly in favor of doing it, but what reason is there to do it?” we never
would have been so fascinated by the open question argument.
This is one objection to Normative Psychologism, but it is not the only one.
Myself, I think Normative Psychologism cannot do justice to our intuitions
about right action. In some recent defenses of Normative Psychologism, some
have argued for their view on the grounds that it preserves the link between
the right and the reasonable. Reasons, they say, are things that make things
reasonable and so the reasonable judgment of the morally conscientious agent
is the mark of the permissible.9 If this is right and the reasons demanded that
the agents acted against their own reasonable judgments about what to do,
the reasons would make unreasonable demands. But, reasons are, if anything,
reasonable things. And, if the reasons accede and do not demand that you do
not V when it would not be reasonable from your point of view to do something
other than V, V-ing just is permissible for you. After all, if you ought not V,
there is a reason not to V and that reason is the winning reason. Remove that
reason, and the obligation not to V goes away.
To see why this view is problematic, consider two plausible claims about
what it is reasonable to judge about what you should do:
• It is reasonable for you to judge that you should V if you are the mental
duplicate of someone who knows she should V.10
• It is reasonable for you to judge that you should V if it seems intuitive
that V-ing is the thing to do, these intuitions are robust, you have no
available reason to distrust these intuitions, you have no reason available
to think that V-ing is not the thing to do, or you reasonably judge that
V-ing is necessary for some further end, Y-ing, where you reasonably judge
that Y-ing is the thing to do and that judgment is not threatened by any
available defeaters.11
It seems unreasonable to reasonably judge that you should V and refrain from
V-ing, so these claims tell us something about what is reasonable to do. The
problem with Normative Psychologism is this. Given the second account of
what is reasonable to judge and do, we end up denying that facts that the agent
is non-culpably ignorant of can bear on whether V-ing is the thing for the agent
9 See Gibbons Forthcoming.
10 See Gibbons Forthcoming.
11 See Huemer 2006.

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to do. Whether these are non-normative facts (e.g., facts about the effects of
action, the historical features of the situation) or normative facts (e.g., facts
about which normative principles are genuine, facts about which of the relevant
reasons are stronger), since these facts are not fixed by facts that Normative
Psychologism says determines which reasons apply to you, these facts do not
determine which reasons apply to you. It should not be terribly difficult to
construct any number of counterexamples to this view. Non-culpable factual
ignorance excuses.12 It does not obviate the need to justify an action that
results in an overall bad state of affairs. Less controversially, we can make
reasonable mistakes about which normative principles are genuine or which of
the reasons we are considering is overriding.
It is more difficult to counterexample the first view about what is reasonable
to judge. It seems to be something of a contingent fact about human psychology
that no actual person has the sorts of moral intuitions that would make acting
like a vampire, cannibal, or Neo-Con reasonable, but since it is a mere contingent
fact about human psychology that this is so, this fact counts against the second
view of reasonable judgment and action. The first view escapes this because
someone who is the same on the inside as a vampire, cannibal, or Neo-Con may
well not be the same on the inside as someone who knows what to do. These
horrible creatures fail to do what they ought because they act against necessarily
true principles and while these principles might not be inviolable, the reasons
these creatures have for acting against them do not justify the violations. The
problem with this view, it seems, is that it avoids counterexamples but abuses
the notion of the reasonable. Someone can make a reasonable mistake about
whether some reason is stronger than another and in so doing might judge
that V-ing is the thing to do even though no one could knowingly judge that
that is so. If the hope is to link the reasonable to the right, I worry the first
view avoids counterexamples by means of a technical trick. We know what it
would take for it to avoid all the counterexamples, it would have to deny that a
conscientious and careful moral reasoner can reason to a reasonable judgment
about what to do if given the wrong intuitions as inputs. But, the thought
that someone can reason carefully and correctly from the firm intuitions she
has to a judgment about what to do and fail to be reasonable precisely because
she has the wrong inputs smacks of a strange kind of externalism. It is akin
to saying that someone who hallucinates cannot have reasonable beliefs about
the external world because the inputs were defective. The reasonable, it seems,
is more intimately connected to the agent’s perspective on things and the first
view avoids the counterexamples that arise for the second only by denying this.
So, here is a second argument against Normative Psychologism. It is pos-
sible for two equally reasonable subjects to judge that they should V and act
accordingly where one subject is permitted to V but the other is obliged not
to V. Such a difference in obligations requires a difference in the reasons that
apply to them because “ought” implies “reason”. In such cases, the reasons are
12 For arguments that non-culpable factual ignorance excuses rather than obviates the need

to justify, see [omit], Gardner 2007, pp. 121-41.

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typically grounded in features external to the subject (e.g., facts that the sub-
ject is non-culpably ignorant of, facts about the comparative weight of reasons
that the agent is non-culpably ignorant of, or facts about which principles are
genuine that the subject is non-culpably ignorant of). So, some reasons are
neither attitudes of the agent nor the propositions that the agent has in mind.
So, some reasons are constituted by facts external to the agent.
While defenders of Psychologism can try to accomodate intuitions about the
right by cutting the connection between the agent’s perspective and the reason-
able, they do violence to our intuitions about reasonable judgment. Instead,
they can try to accomodate intuitions about the reasonable by upholding the
link between the reasonable and the agent’s perspective, but then they do vi-
olence to our intuitions about right action. Of course, they can deny that the
reasonable judgment is the mark of the permissible, but then they undercut the
argument offered for Normative Psychologism. It seems that the last option is
the best option for Psychologism. If the defenders of Psychologism deny that
the reasonable judgment is the mark of the permissible, this undercuts one ar-
gument for Normative Psychologism but leaves Psychologism untouched. In the
next section, we shall consider another argument for Psychologism, the argu-
ment from error. I hope to show below that Psychologism cannot respect the
Explanatory and Normative Constraints if it is motivated by the argument from
error. If we treat these assumptions as axiomatic, there might be difficulties that
arise for Dancy’s view, but Psychologism is not a tenable alternative.

2 The Argument from Error

This argument from error is intended to be an argument for some version of
Psychologism. Suppose Plum and White are running down two very similar
halls in two very similar houses. There is a killer chasing Plum and she knows
it. White believes that there is a killer chasing her, but there is no one after
her. Keep Plum and White as psychologically similar as you can in keeping
with what I have just said. To introduce some jargon, Plum is in the good case,
White is in the bad. (Obviously, goodness and badness is measured in epistemic
terms rather than practical terms. Most of us would think our case is not made
better by putting a killer into it much less one that gives us good reason to
run screaming down a hall.) Given anti-Psychologism about motivating and
normative reasons, it is tempting to say Plum’s case is a case where there are
good reasons to run and Plum runs for those reasons. So, we might say:
(1) Plum’s reason for running down the hall was that the killer was
after her.
(2) Plum’s reason for running down the hall was that the killer was
after her and this was a good reason for her to run.
(3) Plum ran down the hall for the reason that the killer after her.
(4) Plum ran down the hall for the reason that the killer after her

6
 and this was indeed a good reason for her to run.13
What should we say about White? According to Dancy, “The distinction be-
tween true and false beliefs on the agent’s part cannot affect theform of the
explanation which will be appropriateto his actions.” 14 Why think this? I
would defend the idea this way. Think about the implausible error objection. If
the form the explanation took depended upon whether the agent’s beliefs were
correct, in the case of error we would need to describe the agent’s reason for act-
ing as something that the agent is right about. While the agent is wrong about
the facts on the ground, the agent is, presumably, right about the facts in her
head. So, we would have to describe the agent as acting for the sort of reason
that only a muddled agent would think counts in favor of acting. If we are not
trying to explain the behavior of muddled agents, we should not describe the
agent’s reason for acting in psychologized terms.15 So, it seems that if (1)-(4)
are correct, these should be correct as well:
(5) White’s reason for running down the hall was that the killer was
after her.
(6) White’s reason for running down the hall was that the killer was
after her and this was a good reason for her to run.
(7) White ran down the hall for the reason that the killer after her.
(8) White ran down the hall for the reason that the killer after her
and this was indeed a good reason for her to run.

Since there was no killer much less a killer chasing White, it seems that White’s
reason for running could not have been that the killer was after her. So, it seems
that (5)-(8) should be false. If (5)-(8) are false, (1)-(4) must be false as well. So,
neither Plum nor White ran for the reason that there was a killer after them.
It was, in some sense, the thought that was their reason for running.
Dancy responds by saying that there can be correct non-factive explanations
(e.g., (7)).16 While he would not describe White’s case by means of (5)-(8), that
is not because he thinks (5)-(8) are false. He would prefer to describe the case
this way:
13 If “reason” in (1)-(4) meant different things depending upon whether it was the kind of

reason that could be good or the kind of reason for which somene V’s, (2) and (4) would be
zeugmatic (e.g., “She saw a crack and the killer in the mirror”). They both seem perfectly fine.
So, there is at least a tiny bit of evidence that the Explanatory and Normative Constraints
are correct. The “this” in (2) and (4) pretty clearly refer to whatever it is that was Plum’s
reason for running and (2) and (4) are correct only if what “this” picks out is a good reason.
14 Dancy 1995, pp. 13.
15 Someone could defend the idea in this way. The explanations we are after are causal

explanations and the cause of behavior does not depend upon the correctness of the agent’s
attitudes. Some of the relevant attitudes are about the future and the present and past do
not depend causally upon future facts. The reason I did not offer this kind of justification is
that it is controversial as to whether the explanations we are interested in are purely causal.
Others might try to justify Dancy’s point in these ways, but Dancy would not. He thinks that
these reasons explanations are not causal.
16 Dancy 2000, pp. 131.

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 (5d) White’s reason for running down the hall was that, as she sup-
posed, there was a killer after her. However, there was no one
after her.
This is supposed to be a correct explanation because the explanation depicts the
light in which the agent acted. It is supposed to be non-factive, however, because
the truth of (5d) does not turn on the truth or falsity of the agent’s relevant
beliefs (i.e., (5d) is supposed to be true even if there is no killer after her). He
thinks it is “too harsh” to deny that White acted for a reason, but I think (5d)
sounds too harsh in a different way. To my ears (5d) is a contradiction. Here, I
have to side with Hornsby who remarks:
... [I]t is a very strange idea that explanations are ever non-factive.
To many ears, “He V-ed because, as he supposed, p” is true only if
it is true that p. (One plausible account of “as X supposes” used
parenthetically within a sentence s will treat it [as a sentence adverb
such as “luckily” should arguably be treated] as conveying something
about what is said in s without affecting its truth-conditions. If so,
then, given that “p because q” requires the truth of p and of q,
introducing a parenthetic “as X supposes” within it will not produce
anything non-factive.17
On this point, she and I are in perfect agreement.
There is further evidence against Dancy’s proposal. Consider:
(9) White ran down the hall because the killer was after her.
Dancy agrees that in the circumstances described, (9) is false.18 He agrees that
(9) is false because he agrees that it is obviously factive, but if (~9) is false.
This is why he denies that it is a consequence of (7). It had better not be a
consequence of (7), for Dancy’s response to the argument for error is supposed
to show how (7) could be correct. Dancy would probably agree that there
is some connection between (7) and (9). In many conversational contexts I
imagine that we would at least take it that someone who asserted (7) would
assent to (9) if asked. Someone could say that the connection between (7) and
(9) is weaker than entailment, but there are ways of testing this. For example,
if (7) merely conversationally implied that (9), then this implication should be
cancellable. I don’t think the implication is cancellable. Moreover, you cannot
properly reinforce entailment, but you can properly reinforce things that are
conversationally implied.19 So, consider:
(10) Plum knew that the killer was in the kitchen. Indeed, the killer
was in the kitchen.
(11) Mustard has put a killer behind bars. Indeed, he has put many
killers away.
17 Hornsby pp. 292
18 On this point, he and Schroeder both said in personal correspondence that they agree.
19 A point I owe to Stanley 2008 who credits it to Sadock 1978.

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 (12) Mustard has put a killer behind bars, but only one. After the
stress of that, he retired.
Compare these with this:
(13) White ran down the hall for the reason that a killer was after
her. Indeed, she ran down the hall because the killer was after
her.
To my ear, (13) is a redundant conjunction much in the way that (10) is. So,
we have further linguistic evidence for the hypothesis that (7) entails (9). This
is a problem because, as Hornsby notes, “p because q” is factive. I have never
seen this denied in print, only in conversation, but it might be worth offering
some evidence for that as well. So, consider:
(14) White ran down the hall because the killer was after her. In-
deed, the killer was after her.
(15) The killer was after White. That is why she ran down the hall.
It seems that (14) is a redundant conjunction, so there is some evidence that (9)
is true only if there is a killer coming after White. Also, note that (15) seems
to be equivalent to (9). (15) entails:
(16) The killer was after White.
If (16) is not factive, nothing is.
Hornsby accepts some of this, possibly all of it. She offers a disjunctivist
account of acting for a reason according to which you can be influenced by the
facts you know to be true. On her account, since agents in the good and bad
case know different things, the reasons for which they act (can) differ accordingly
even if these subjects are in the same non-factive mental states:
(17) Plum ran down the hall for the reason that a killer was after
her and White ran down the hall for the reason that she believed
a killer was after her.20
There are concerns, of course, whether (17) really properly describes the light in
which White acted. As she sees it, this does what we want a reasons explanation
to do because we manage to express that both Plum and White treated some
consideration as they would have if they knew it to be true. If either knew that
there was a killer after them, they would run. That is what (17) conveys and
that does a pretty good job depicting the light in which they acted. Neither
tried to be a hero, both tried to get to safety.
One of the difficulties I have in accepting this view is that it clashes with
the thought that the from the explanation takes depends upon the accuracy of
the agent’s beliefs. So, for example, if we did not know whether it was Plum or
White who correctly believed that the killer was after them but knew that one
of them had correct beliefs, we could not say whether it was (17) or (18) that
was correct:
20 Hornsby 2007, pp. 300.

9
 (18) White ran down the hall for the reason that a killer was after
her and Plum ran down the hall for the reason that she believed
a killer was after her.
What is it that we are not supposed to know if we do not know whether it is
(17) or (18) that is correct? Whatever it is, it is something we do not know if
all we know is this:
(19) White and Plum both ran down the hall because they both
believed that a killer was after them.
If that contains all we need to know to explain their action, what is wrong with
a conjunctive account that denies both (17) and (18) and simply offers (19) in
its place? Perhaps she will reply by saying that (19) does not tell us the reasons
for which White and Plum acted, but we can easily enrich (19) as follows:
(20) White and Plum both ran down the hall because they both
believed that a killer was after them and both thought that the
fact that there was a killer after them was a good reason to run.
Both knew that if they knew that there was a killer there, running
was the way to respond.
This does not tell us whether (17) or (18) is true, but it seems to tell us every-
thing we need to know about White and Plum. On the disjunctivist account,
full understanding requires knowing whether it is (17) or (18) is true, and I just
do not see what the disjunctivist thinks is gained if we gain this extra bit of
knowledge beyond what is contained in (20). We do learn that there was a killer
after one of our agents, but it is not at all clear what this has to do with reasons
or understanding the agent’s action.
There is a further strange feature of the view. The that-clauses we use to pick
out motivating reasons often employ propositions that are true only if certain
future events transpire. Indeed, these events might take place after we offer the
explanation of the agent’s action. White put all of her money into a hedge fund
that Mustard was running. It is strange to say that her reason for investing her
money with Mustard is one thing if it pans out and something else if it does
not. But, on the view that says the explanans will depend upon whether White
knows or merely believes that she will make a good return on her investment,
this is precisely how things are.
If neither of these views seem satisfactory, it is tempting to embrace Moti-
vational Psychologism. Like Dancy’s view, it denies that the form the reasons
explanation takes depends upon events that will transpire only after the action
occurs and asserts that the form that the explanation takes does not depend
upon the accuracy of the agent’s mental states. Like Hornsby’s view, it does
not respond to the argument from error by saying things that are contradictory.
Miller says this on behalf of PsychologismP :
[U]nless we are infallible about what facts there are, there will be
plenty of instances in which we invoke motivating reasons in our

10
 practical deliberation and yet at the same time are quite mistaken
about the existence of the facts to which they make putative refer-
ence.21
Think about White. She is mistaken about the facts. Is she mistaken about
the reason for which she runs? According to Miller, if you were to ask either
Plum or White why they were running down the hall so quickly, both would be
disposed to say, “I am running down the hall for the reason that the killer is after
me”. They would then politely excuse themselves and continue running. On his
view, motivating reasons are propositions, not propositional attitudes, so these
remarks are not elliptical for a longer statement that makes explicit reference
to attitudes. Suppose, then, that this is a case where White is mistaken about
the facts but not thereby mistaken about her reasons. White would thus speak
the truth if she said:
(21) I am running down the hall for the reason that the killer is after
me.
But the problem here is obvious. The proposition her utterance expresses is
false. (21) entails (5) and (7), which entail (9). But (9) is false. He is not wrong
in saying that we are fallible about the facts. Obviously, we are. He is wrong in
denying that this fallibility extends straightforwardly to judgments about our
reasons for acting or the reasons others acted for. White cannot correctly assert
(21) if there is no killer after her and we cannot correctly assert (7) if there is
no killer after her.
In the debate between Dancy and the defenders of PsychologismP , both
parties agree that our ascriptions of motivating reasons do not typically make
reference to the agent’s attitudes even in cases of error. Dancy says that in the
good case, a reason is a fact. Miller says that it is a Fregean proposition that
might correspond to some fact. The problem with using the argument from
error as an argument for PsychologismP is that the Dancy and PsychologismP
seem to agree on which sentences correctly describe Plum and White’s reasons.
If, as I have argued, sentences of the form “Her reason for V-ing was that p”
entail that p is the case, the argument from error applies to both views with
equal force. Miller rejects PsychologismS as does Dancy. It is hard to see how
PsychologismS can avoid the implausible error objection. It is also hard to see
how Hornsby’s disjunctivist proposal avoids the implausible error objection. So,
where does this leave us? It leaves us looking for a new view.

3 Acting and Achieving

The argument from error is more powerful than previously thought, for if it
constitutes a decisive refutation of Dancy’s view it seems to constitute a decisive
refutation of PsychologismP as well. It seems to me that there is one further
view worth considering. It is a compromise of sorts, but one that is designed to
21 Miller 2009, pp. 229.

11
please no one. Since this is the mark of a good compromise, this view has at
least something going for it.
It seems that the parties to this debate have worked under the assumption
that acting for a reason is not a kind of achievement. Sure, responding to
real reasons is an achievement, but acting for a reason is something you can
successfully pull off even if you do not manage to respond to real reasons. Why
think that? This seems to me to be a pretty promising argument to the contrary.
(P1) The reasons for which an agent V’s when the agent V’s for
a reason are picked out by means of that-clauses that deploy
propositions that are the contents of the beliefs that figure in the
agent’s deliberation and so are typically propositions about the
situation rather than propositions about their own propositional
attitudes.
(P2) When the agent V’s for a reason, the form the explanation
takes of the agent’s V-ing does not depend upon the accuracy or
veridicality of the agent’s propositional attitudes.
(P3) The ascriptions that report the reasons for which the agent V’d
are factive.
(C) So, if ~p, “She V’d for the reason that p” is false and if the agent
is the non-factive psychological duplicate of someone who acted
for a reason (i.e., a subject it would be true to say of, “She V’d
for the reason that p”), she herself did not succeed in acting for
a reason.
The support for (P1) comes from the implausible error argument and the ar-
guments for the Explanatory and Normative Constraints. The thought behind
(P2) is that the form an explanation takes does not depend upon whether the
agent’s attitudes are veridical or not. If we have two subjects that are non-
factive mental duplicates who both V and we want to say the reasons for which
they V, we cannot then say that hte reasons for which they V differ (i.e., it is a
fact about an agent’s mind in one case and a fact the agent has in mind in the
other). As for (P3), that seems pretty well supported by the linguistic evidence.
If you think the idea of a correct but non-factive explanation makes little sense,
you should accept (C).
How does this view differ from disjunctivism? It flips disjunctivism on its
head. According to disjunctivism:
(1) In the good case, she ran down the hall for the reason that the
killer was after her.
(2) In the bad case, she ran down the hall for the reason that she
believed the killer was after her.
The disjunctivist thinks that the propositions that specify the agent’s motivating
reasons in the good and bad case provide the explanans that correctly explain
the same explanandum proposition in the good and bad case. This contradicts

12
(P2) because it says that there are two cases (i.e., the good and the bad) with
the same explanandum where agents are in the same non-factive mental states
and the reasons that explain their behaviors differ. On the present view:
(3) In the good case, she ran down the hall for the reason that the
killer was after her.
(4) In the bad case, she ran down the hall, but she did not run for
any reason at all. At best, she took it that there was a reason to
run.
The view is consistent with (P2). I say that the explanandum proposition that
we explain by describing the agent’s motivating reasons in the good case is a
proposition that is false in the bad case. So, the question, “What was the agent’s
reason for acting?” rests on a mistake if the agent is in the bad case, but not in
the good. If acting for a reason is something that happens only in the good case
and not in the bad, we can accept the principle that states that there will not
be different correct explanations of the same phenomenon in both cases. Why
hold this view? Given (P1) and (P3), all the candidate explanans propositions
that we use in the good case are excluded if we try to explain how the agent in
the bad case managed to act for a reason. She acted in the bad case, but failed
to act for a reason.
Does that mean that the present view makes it impossible to explain the
agent’s behavior in the bad case? Not at all. The view agrees with disjunctivism
in saying the following:
(5) In the good case, she ran down the hall because the killer was
after her.
(6) In the good case, she ran down the hall because she believed that
the killer was after her.
(7) In the bad case, she ran down the hall because she believed that
the killer was after her.
Not only do the disjunctivists seem to agree that these all come out to be true,
all parties seem to agree that this comes out false:

(8) In the bad case, she ran down the hall because the killer was
after her.
Suppose Dancy’s view and Motivational Psychologism accept (5)-(7) but reject
(8). Consider:
(9) She ran down the hall because the killer was after her.
(10) She ran down the hall because she believed that the killer was
after her.
If they say that the truth of (9) or (10) depends upon whether the agent is in
the good case or bad, the only position for them to take that is consistent with

13
(P2) is the position I am advocating, which is that the thing you try to explain
by citing the reasons for which an agent V’s is a feature unique to the good
case. If to deal with this point you accept (6) and (7) but deny (5), it seems
you also have to deny:
(11) In the good case, she ran down the hall for the reason that the
killer was after her.
On its face, (11) entails (5). But, to deny (5) is simply to deny (P1). It is
to assert that the reasons for which we act really are correctly picked out by
propositions that report our attitudes instead of the propositions that are the
contents of the attitudes that figure in deliberation.
The most significant obstacle the present view faces is that in asserting (4),
it seems the view suffers from an explanatory deficit that other views do not.
In response, notice that those who defend PsychologismP or Dancy’s view have
to deny “She V’d for the reason that p” entail “She V’d because p”. They agree
that “She V’d because she believed p” is true whenever “She V’d for the reason
that p” is true. In asserting (4), I am committed to saying that in the bad case,
it is false that White ran down the hall because the killer was after her. On this
point, all the views are in agreement. I am not committed to denying that she
ran down the hall because the killer was after her. This causal explanation is
one that all parties seem to agree is correct. I say that the explanans proposition
in “She V’d because she believed p” does not ascribe the reason for which the
agent acts. All parties seem to agree on that point as well. So, I do not think
my view suffers from any explanatory deficit. My view accepts all the “because”
claims that the other views accept and offers the same causal explanation of the
agent’s behavior in terms of the agent’s attitudes that alternative views do.
The difference is that on the view defended here, there are more true “be-
cause” claims than on the rival view. In the good case where the agent correctly
believes p, you can correctly say, “She V’d because p”. So, maybe the problem
with the view is not that it suffers from an explanatory deficit. Does the view
offer too many explanations? What is the extra thing that motivating reasons
explain? It has to be something that distinguishes the good case from the bad.
Here is what it is. We know what something has to be to be a motivating
reason–it has to be something that could “turn out” to be a good (normative)
reason if the facts fit the attitudes. We know that each instance of acting for a
reason involves a motivating reason and each behavior that can be understood
in terms of motivating reasons is acting for a reason. So, acting for a reason is
an achievement. When you act for a reason, there is a reason and you act for
it. You saw something in the situation and have responded to it rather than re-
sponded in a predictable way given psychological inputs that might misrepresent
the circumstances in which you acted.
Why have two notions? Why have causal explanations of behavior that cite
the agent’s psychological states and reasons explanations that cite facts that fit
those states? One idea is this. In saying that someone acted for a reason, we
impart two pieces of information. Part of it has to do with specifying the agent’s
reasons to say what the agent’s intentions were in acting. (This is something

14
we can do in the good case and the bad by describing the agent’s psychological
states.) Part of it has to do with reporting facts that the agent confronted
because those facts are facts that we all potentially might have to deal with.
Causal explanations of behavior that cite the agent’s psychological states do not
convey this extra bit of information, which is that the agent saw something in
the circumstance that she took to be something that called for her to act in the
way that she did.
Properly understood (5) and (6) are complementary, not competing. They
do not compete because facts and beliefs explain different things. In some
contexts, we want to know what it is that the agent got out of acting in the way
that she did. We want to know what she accomplished or what she achieved.
These are the contexts in which we say what the reasons for which an agent
acted. If it turns out that the agent’s attitudes were mistaken, our question
rested on a mistake. We had thought that the agent got something out of
acting in the way that she did that she had hoped for, but she did not. In
contexts where we do not want to know what the agent got out of acting, we
are looking for a psychological explanation of the agent’s behavior. So, if we
know that the agent’s attitudes are false or do not know whether the agent’s
attitudes are false, our interest is in what would make the agent’s behavior
intelligible. Here, psychological states of the agent are useful. If the agent is in
the good case, we can ask both sorts of question and that is why both (5) and
(6) turn out true. If the agent is in the bad case, we can ask only one sort of
queston and that is why (7) turns out true rather than (8).
Acting for a reason is thus similar to knowing and different from believing
insofar as knowing and acting for a reason are both achievements. In contexts
where we can safely assume that the agent’s attitudes were correct, we can ask,
“Why did she do that?” and get in return an account of what she achieved by
acting in the way she did. This is akin to contexts where someone asks, in a
non-skeptical or non-challenging way, “How does she know that?” Just as we can
ask “How does she know that?” to learn something either about how she learned
that p or why she came to believe p, we can ask, “Why did she do that?” either
to learn what she gained or what she had hoped to gain and receive different
answers. If taken in the first way, the answer cites facts. If taken in the second,
the answer can cite attitudes. In contexts where we cannot safely assume that
the agent’s attidues were correct, we can ask, “Why did she do that?” and get
a correct answer that describes the agent’s attitudes, but that does not tell us
the reasons for which she acted. We are not interested in the reasons for which
she acted, we want a psychological story that makes sense of her behavior that
remains neutral on the question as to whether she had any reasons to act as she
did.
In this way, we can allow that psychological states of the agent do have a
role to play in explaining behavior. In asking why some event occurred, if we
want to know the causes, we can cite the psychological states as causes. These
psychological states are the reasons why someone’s body moved in such and
such a way. The reasons why an event occurred are not reasons for the event to

15
occur and they are not the reasons for which an agent acted.22 The thesis that
psychological states are reasons why events take place is extremely plausible
and I think that this is all that Psychologism can be right about. And this, is
just to say, that Motivational Psychologism is false.
Should this be upsetting to those who defend Psychologism? I do not think
it should be at all upsetting to Smith, for as I understand his view, he does not
really deny (P1). Rather, for him, “motivational reason” is a term of art that
has more to do with explaining behaviors. I do not think he ever worked under
the assumption that the things we pick out as the agent’s reasons for which
she V’d were themselves motivational reasons of the kind he was interested in
when he defended the Humean view that motivating reasons always involved
some belief-desire pair. So, in the end, nothing I have said against Motivational
Psychologism speaks against the Humean view that he defends. Whether that
view is correct depends pretty much on what he thought it depended on, not
on whether the things we describe as the reasons for which an agent acts are
facts, beliefs, the contents of beliefs rather than desires, but on whether the
correct causal story of an event that is an action involves psychological states
with differing directions of fit.

References
1. Dancy, Jonathan 1995. Why There Is Really No Such Thing as the Theory
of Motivation. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series 95: pp.
1-18
2. Dancy, Jonathan 2000. Practical Reality. New York: Oxford University
Press.
3. Gibbons, John 2009. You Gotta Do What You Gotta Do. Nous 43: 157-
77.
4. Gibbons, John. Forthcoming. Things That Make Things Reasonable.
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.
5. Fantl, Jeremy and Matt McGrath 2009. Knowledge in an Uncertain
World. New York: Oxford University Press.
6. Hornsby, Jennifer 2007. Knowledge in Action. In A. Leist (ed.), Action
in Context. (Berlin: De Gruyter), pp. 285-302.
7. Huemer, Michael. 2006. Phenomenal Conservatism and the Internalist
Intuition. American Philosophical Quarterly 43: 147-58.
22 That reasons why are not the same thing as motivating reasons is something that Dancy

2000 and some of his critics agree on. It is less clear that this is something that all defenders of
Psychologism agree to. Some might say that motivating reasons are kinds of reasons why and
they might deny that they are reasons why because they are considerations in light of which
the agent acted. Instead, they are states by virtue of which there seemed to be something
in the situation that called for a response. My sense is that this is closer to the view that
someone like Smith prefers.

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 8. Lord, Errol 2008. Dancy on Acting for the Right Reason. Journal of
Ethics and Social Philosophy.
9. Miller, Christian 2008. Motivation in Agents. Nous 42: 222-66.
10. Parfit, Derek 1997. Reasons and Motivation. Proceedings of the Aris-
totelian Society, Supp. Volume 71: 99-130.
11. Sadock, Jerrold. 1978. On Testing Conversational Implicature. Syntax
and Semantics 9: Pragmatics: 281-97.
12. Schroeder, Mark 2008. Having Reasons. Philosophical Studies 139: 57-71.

13. Smith, Michael 1987. The Humean Theory of Motivation. Mind 96, pp.
36-61.
14. Stanley, Jason 2008. Knowledge and Certainty. Philosophical Issues 18:
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15. Turri, John 2009. The Ontology of Epistemic Reasons. Nous 43: 490-512.

16. Wiland, Eric 2002. Theories of Practical Reason. Metaphilosophy 33, pp.
450-67.

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