Reasons and Causes
So far we have taken for granted the relationship between what a person desires to achieve and the action they take to achieve it, and it is now time to look at it more closely. There is a debate among philosophers about whether the relationship is a causal one or not.
One of the best discussions of these issues, which have become less central over recent years, is to be found in Keat and Urry (1975). They argue that the relationship is in fact a causal one, but ‘cause’ in this context must not be understood in the positivist sense of a contingent regularity.If we hold to the positivist view then we tend to fall into an either/or conception of the relationship between the natural and social sciences. The natural sciences are concerned with contingent regularities between two phenomena out of which we construct universal laws of nature. The social sciences deal with people’s ideas about the world, with logical relationships and with relationships between concepts. This view of rationality and action will be explored more fully in the next chapter. For the moment we will concentrate on Keat and Urry’s suggestion that we can develop a non-positivist causal explanation of human action. They claim that
it is part of our concept of rational agents that their beliefs and desires cause them to act in the appropriate manner. Systematic failure to act in this manner will lead us to withdraw the application of the concept of rationality to them. But this does not mean, that where the concept is applicable, the relations between beliefs, desires and actions is non-causal.
(Keat and Urry 1975: 156)
The problem with this argument is that the simplicity of the terms employed to capture human action and the simplicity of the relationships posited between these terms. There is no doubt that human beings have beliefs and desires and that these are related to human actions. But it is possible, for example, for human beings to have and act on desires of which they are not necessarily conscious, or conscious only in distorted ways; people can have conflicting desires, or be unclear about what they want; they can be driven by desires which run counter to reasons for acting in a certain way; recognition of this can be found throughout Western literature and philosophy, although it is most systematically stated in various forms of psychoanalysis.
Modern forms of sociology such as ethnomethodology and structuration theory emphasize the taken-for-granted and implicit nature of rules on which action is based. It is questionable whether interpretive approaches are compatible with anything but the broadest sense of causality - a sense which perhaps covers up rather than illuminates significant differences and complexities. And of course beliefs and desires are processes in themselves and parts of wider interpretive processes, not discrete entities which can be isolated for study (Giddens 1976).One of these complexities is the nature of language. The linguistic turn in twentiethcentury philosophy has generated several important theories of language and the way language works, and they all point to there being a hiatus between language and language use, and causal explanations. This does not mean that human beings are not subject to causal processes which operate through their physical and biological and psychological make-up as well as through the social structures in which they are placed, but the way in which they represent their own understanding of themselves and their situations and actions, and the way that identify and talk about their lives, will be processes which cannot be understood through notions of cause. The next chapter will outline one very forceful argument along these lines.