Abstract

Psychoanalytic accounts offer a mix of reasons and causes to explain action. Adolf Grünbaum argues that these fail to be proper explanations because they are neither justified by inductively established laws, nor fit the standard form of rational explanation, the belief-plus-desire-yields-action structure of the practical syllogism. Grünbaum accepts rational explanation as cogent and transparently causal because, he asserts, reasons are causes. Yet he omits to show how they can be, especially in the face of the apparent fact that reasons, being defined in terms of their propositional content, cannot be causes. Clarifying the position of psychoanalytic explanation does involve seeing it and rational explanation as similarly causal. This requires a realist analysis showing how reasons may be understood, not as defined in terms of their propositional contents or objects, but as states of persons caused by entering into relations with situations, and how reasoning is a causal process. Freud's philosophical intuitions on this were correct. His much criticized metapsychology offers a causal account of motives defined by source, not object, and sketches an account of the way these cause action in interaction with external situations. 2012 APA, all rights reserved).