Lumsden, D. & Ulatowski, J. (2023). Virtue, Self-Narratives, and the Causes of Action. Acta Analytica 23 October 2023. doi:10.1007/s12136-023-00569-w
[Abstract]Virtues can be considered to play a causal role in the production of behaviour and so too can our self-narratives. We identify a point of connection between the two cases and draw a parallel between them. But, those folk psychological notions, virtues and self-narratives, fail to reduce smoothly to the underlying human physiology. As a first step towards handling that failure to connect with the scientific framework that is the familiar grounding for our understanding of causation, we consider the causal theory of action, a leading theory of action, which shows how reasons, understood as an appropriate pair of beliefs and desires, can be treated as causes of action. Davidson’s picture is based on cause as a relation between events, which can have both a description in scientific terms and in folk psychological terms. The character of both virtues and self-narratives is not that of events, even extended ones, so we need to refer to examples of scientific explanation that incorporate structural properties of objects. While we retain the spirit of the causal theory, we wish to guard against any unwarranted optimism that an explicitly scientific explanation for human action lies in our future, drawing on Chomsky’s view that a causal explanation of human actions is likely to remain beyond human science forming capacities. We take a mild-realist view of virtues and self-narratives, in the style of Dennett. We argue that, in spite of that limited form of realism, underlined by Chomsky’s mysterian position in this domain, we still need to frame our explanations of behaviour based on virtues and self-narratives in causal terms.
[Citing Place (1956)]  
Citing Place (1956) in context (citations start with an asterisk *):
Section 2 Theories of Mind and the Causal Theory of Action
* One position on the mind–body relationship in which reasons can be seen as straightforwardly capable of causing actions is the position known as ‘the identity theory’ or ‘reductive materialism’ (Lewis, 1966; Place, 1956; Smart, 1959). On this view, mental state types are thought to be identical with neuroscientific or physical state types. Thus, beliefs, desires, reasons, and goals are all thought to be ultimately identified as brain states of specifiable kinds on the basis of an intertheoretic reduction on the model of a reduction of heat to molecular kinetic energy. In this view, there is no firm divide between what the manifest image tells us and what the scientific image tells us. The causation of action, thus, will be explicable in terms of the laws of nature at a scientific level. But the claim that neuroscientific categories will be found as the physical realisations of the mental categories embodies an optimism that is not shared by all materialist positions.