Reasons, Not Causes: A Reply to Wakefield and Eagle

In “Psychoanalysis and Wittgenstein: A Reply to Richard Allen,” Wakefield and Eagle ask: “Why would anyone deny the seemingly innocuous and commonsensical claim that one's reasons for doing something cause one to act?” (p. 330). When I have a drink because I am thirsty, my thirst causes me to drink. One way of understanding this appeal to “common sense” is as an appeal to the way in which we are naturally inclined to speak about our actions. It would certainly be in defiance of common sense to claim that we do not sometimes speak of reasons as causes; after all, we use the word because to state our reason for doing something. On this point I agree with Wakefield and Eagle. My disagreement with them lies in our different understanding of the philosophical implications of this way of speaking. Wakefield and Eagle take our manner of speech to reflect the fact that reasons for actions are entities like natural causes. Following Wittgenstein, my claim is that the commonsense equation of reason and cause is philosophically misleading because it encourages philosophers (and psychoanalytic theorists) to overlook the crucial distinction between the way in which reasons explain action and the causal explanation of natural events. The conflation of reason and cause is grounded in and contributes to a profound misunderstanding