If consciousness is good for something, conscious things must differ in some causally relevant way from unconscious things. If they do not, then, as Davies and Humphreys conclude, too bad for consciousness: ‘psychological theory need not be concerned with this topic.’

Davies and Humphreys are applying a respectable metaphysical idea — the idea, namely, that if an object's having a property does not make a difference to what that object does, if the object's causal powers are in no way enhanced (or diminished) by its possession of this property, then nothing the object does can be explained by its having that property. A science dedicated to explaining the behavior of such objects would not have to concern itself with that property. That is why being an uncle is of no concern to the psychology (let alone the physics) of uncles. I am an uncle, yes, but my being so does not (causally speaking ) enable (or prevent) me to do anything I would not otherwise be able to do.

There is an idea, going back to Aristotle, that reasons for action can be understood on a parallel with reasons for belief. Not surprisingly, the idea has almost always led to some form of inferentialism about reasons for action. In this paper I argue that reasons for action can be understood on a parallel with reasons for belief, but that this requires abandoning inferentialism about reasons for action. This result will be thought paradoxical. It is generally assumed that if there is to be a useful parallel, there must be some such thing as a practical inference. As we shall see, that assumption tends to block the fruitful exploration of the real parallel. On the view I shall defend, the practical analogue of an ordinary inference is not an inference, but something I shall call a practical step. Nevertheless, the practical step will do, for a theory of reasons for action, what ordinary inference does for an inferentialist theory of reasons for belief. The result is a general characterization of reasons, practical and theoretical, in terms of the correctness conditions of the relevant sorts of step.

Introduction

It is at least a bit embarrassing, perhaps even scandalous, that debate should still rage over the sheer existence of qualia, but they continue to find able defenders after decades of being attacked as relics of ghostly substances, epiphenomenal non-entities, nomological danglers and the like; the intensity of the current confrontation is captured vividly by Daniel Dennett: