In their volume of essays on agency and action, John Hyman and Helen Steward explain in the editorial preface that philosophy of action has been dominated throughout its recent history by positivism and its critics. Positivists such as Carnap, Neurath, and Hempel rejected the view, accepted at the time, that there is an “impassable divide” in principle between natural sciences, on the one hand, and those thought to be “imbued with meaning” of mind, society, and culture, on the other. In the 1930s and 1940s, philosophers such as Ryle, Wittgenstein, and Wisdom turned against the positivist conception and with it the idea, propounded by Mill, that “the human sciences are comparable to the exact natural sciences in their infancy.”

The landscape changed again in the 1960s, and as a result of a more “scrupulous examination” of the logic of sentences used to report actions and the connections between the concepts of agent, action, event, and cause, today's orthodoxy in the philosophy of action involves a combination of ideas drawn from both the positivist and anti-positivist traditions. The most common expression of the synthesis, due largely to Davidson, involves the claims that reason explanation is a species of causal explanation and that reasons are causes.

This may be the result of a more scrupulous examination of the logic of sentences used to report actions and the connections between the concepts of agent, action, event, and cause, but it takes place with total disregard of (the later) Wisdom, Ryle, and Wittgenstein's criticism of analysis and the picture of the language-world relation that underpins it. The synthesis given expression in Davidson's thesis is untenable, I believe, on the grounds that it not only obscures the explanatory power of reasons and mental concepts but also creates unnecessary metaphysical and epistemological puzzles about the nature of mental states and our knowledge of them. “Cause,” however, is, as A. I. Melden said, a “snare” word in philosophy. Elizabeth Anscombe famously remarked that a philosopher would do well to give up using “good” in moral philosophy and replace it with more fine-grained notions suited to her purposes; the same could be said about “cause.”