Dove e quando

Are Actions Themselves Experiential Artifacts?

Conference by Luca Bellini (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München)

ABSTRACT

There is a wide range of expressive actions we do. We kick cars that refuse to start, we kiss and talk to pictures, we wreck damage to the belongings of someone who cheated on us, and many others along the same lines. The problem of expressive action is the problem of explaining why we do such bizarre things. According to the received view, these are just actions out of emotion. Instead, I argue they are much more like make-believe games. Having to firstly clarify what makes expressive actions expressive – i.e. what, if anything, they express – I draw on both children’s games (e.g. holding a stick like a sword) and rituals (e.g. burning in effigy) to claim that expressive actions, too, prescribe what is fictionally the case. While furthering our understanding of the role that imagination plays in justifying our conduct, this talk aims at shedding light on the nature of rational agency and the problem of action – the problem of explaining what makes
something an action in the first place. I thus discuss the tentative proposal that actions themselves are artifacts whose function consists in enabling certain experiences.