Introduction

I argued in the previous chapter that a disposition to behave in a certain way is a real state of an organism or person which entitles one to make inferences about its behaviour. These inferences are characterised by conditional statements or laws. The disposition amounts to the embodiment by that organism or person of a mechanism whose working is described by that law. The law need not be universally true, but describes what results in certain specified circumstances when the disposition is operational and not interfered with.

I also argued that mental states should be identified with these dispositional states rather than with inputs to them. The task now is to say something about the laws that characterise the behavioural dispositions that constitute mental states.

On the view that I am defending a genuine agent is ipso facto a subject with mental states. So by understanding agency and in particular how an agent's behaviour is causally explained, we will understand behavioural dispositions and hence the nature of the agent's mental states.

The central claim of this chapter is that practical rationality is essential to agency. I start with the claim that action is essentially goal-directed and develop the claim that action is essentially norm-governed. By employing the distinction between framework causes and input causes established in the previous chapter, I can show that it is the framework cause of behaviour that must be characterised in terms of goals and in terms of norms.