Abstract

Colloquial explanations of actions suggest that when an agent acts for a normative reason, the action can be explained by reference to that reason. Sandra is calling the doctor, for instance, because John us loosing quite a lot of blood. However, such explanations pose a problem. Normative reasons for actions are usually facts about the world, not facts about the agent's mind, and it is highly contested how best to analyze such colloquial explanations. In the first part of the talk I will briefly argue that the main accounts of world explanations, especially the reductive and the causal account, fail to fully accommodate the special explanatory role which normative reasons play when people act for them. Subsequently, I will provide a new dispositional account of normative reasons' special explanatory role. The main idea is that tracking dispositions have interesting features that account for world explanations even in cases that defy a causal analysis. Furthermore, the dispositional analysis of world explanations reveals the true nature of the connection between a normative reason and the action that is performed for it.

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