Action, Belief, and Community

1Action

Human property

Action as a human property

Action is one of those human properties which make man an active subject co-creating the world. It is not solely reserved to people, but when attributed to them, it shows the consequences of being an animate being. We can notice as early as in Aristotle’s Categories (Aristotle 2000) that among the statements concerning specific substances, the one concerning action is exceptional since it not only assumes change and its experience, but also agency. Therefore, regardless of whether substance has the form of a beaver or an elephant, the animate being is each time differentiated from other ones owing to this particular property. At the same time, from among actions, we can differentiate some which are not automatic; in such a situation the being in question is not considered an adaptive system and is analysed in terms of their creativity. Regardless of the possibility of acknowledging the thus-understood creativity as a property of other species of animals (which I am far from either negating or disregarding, although at the moment I consider it in terms of a guess), I intend to focus on man as a being which is very special owing to this particular property, since it empowers people to model the world, including themselves. Simultaneously, the modelling does not take place via individual and separate actions – it should be understood in terms of relations. In this sense, actions create a bundle, which is perceived as a two-fold phenomenon.

Firstly, being a part of the world, man acts in a potentially ordered manner, which means that individuals recognise their actions, relating them to each other. On the one hand, people domesticate the particular sections of the world, when, say, they keep living day by day, which includes coping with the problem of suffering. On the other hand, human beings bring together different aspects of reality, as when, say, they combine the common-sense execution of their daily agenda based on sunrises and sunsets with the scientific falsification of the geocentric hypothesis. In this way, individual actions interlock, mutually supporting each other. Rather than being malleable, the world in relation to which the actions are undertaken poses a considerable challenge, ceaselessly affecting the effectiveness of human activities. The complex, bundle-like nature of actions testifies to man’s learning to systematically address challenges. Not every bundle of actions is coherent and effective; the gradation principle is at play here. We ←13 | 14→ must not forget that the acting man remains in an ineffaceable feedback with the incessantly and unpredictably changing world, which faces them with many mistakes and failures. However, the ability to cope with the mistakes and failures, which, strikingly, result in the transformation of the individual, testifies to the significance of the creative (in contrast to the imitative) nature of human actions.

Action and vocabulary

Writing about action in terms of a bundle, i.e. relationally, I am making a specific pre-judgement, and it is the vocabulary which I use which is responsible for this. It has a crucial role in the construction of a model or an image of the scenario as a part of which the object of research is analysed. Believing that such an analysis extends beyond the use of common language, I assume that it is my first task to opt for a definition of language with reference to which the necessary vocabulary can be built. According to Donald Davidson, “a language may be viewed as a complex abstract object, defined by giving a finite list of expressions (words), rules for constructing meaningful concatenations of expressions (sentences), and a semantic interpretation of the meaningful expressions based on the semantic features of individual words” (Davidson 2001d: 107). As results ←14 | 15→ from this definition, there are languages no one has ever spoken, speaks, or is ever going to speak; it also assumes that the language referred to as common constitutes a system of many overlapping languages as abstract objects. One of my research goals includes such a differentiation between these objects, which permits statements to be as clear as possible. Let us take the word “London” as an example. On the one hand, it refers to the surname of the American writer Jack London, and on the other, to the capital of the United Kingdom; it can also be used as a name of a boat or a dog, and can be located elsewhere. However, when uttered by my interlocutor, it is potentially placed at an intersection of the two (or many) languages it is an element of.

I do not intend to make a simple differentiation between language and vocabulary; I shall be satisfied to say that the latter is a derivative of the former, testifying to the semantic interpretation of sentences as meaningful sequences of words. For example, despite the identical rules of creation of meaningful links (sentences) in two different languages including the word “London”, their reference is different in each case¹. However, the word in question is not the basic element of the vocabulary: it is the combination of one word with another as its sufficient or necessary condition in a relatively permanent or conventional way. For example, the combination of the words “London” and “capital” is relatively permanent, whereas the combination of the words “London” and “sick” does not have a conventional character. Therefore, vocabulary is a derivative of language constituting a set of standard word patterns enabling the determination of their semantic attributes. On the other hand, relative permanence or conventionality indicates yet another element: use. The language defined by Davidson is not discussed in pragmatic categories, while the vocabulary under discussion may be understood in this way. The combination “London” and “capital” can be considered conventional when a specific group of people uses it regularly. However, it did not have to be like this in the past, at least until the late Middle Ages, and it does not have to be like this in the future. Despite this, the current association based on the relevant vocabulary makes it an orientation point according to which only the uttering (or writing) of a contingent sentence “London is sick” becomes understandable.

The word “action” is an element of many vocabularies, some of which are more and some of which are less formal. One can say “Time for action”, which refers to the possibly common-sense vocabulary. On the other hand, the use of the term “reflex action” is clearer. However, the above does not mean that it does ←15 | 16→ not have any colloquial connotations in the genetic sense. It is similar in the case of the word “current”, as encountered in the expression “current flows” developed by analogy to a flowing river. We do not need to determine the hierarchy of what is colloquial and what is exact. In the case of current and reflex action, we are talking about such a narrowing of the meaning, reference and use, which will serve the possibly narrow or strictly defined purpose in possibly exceptional situations, while in the case of the common-sense urge to undertake action, we are talking of a possibly broadly understood need in possibly common situations. In both cases we are dealing with different goals. It is also worth pointing out that the objects which are a part of a certain vocabulary are captured as a part of another vocabulary. For example, reflex action may be analysed in terms of end (not an anthropomorphic one) or cause. In the former case, we are dealing with the role played by the particular reflex in the continued life of an organism, while in the latter, with the cause of an action. Simultaneously, if we used yet another vocabulary – the one referring to conditions – we would arrive at a conclusion that the researcher determines either the necessary condition (here: the end), or the sufficient condition (here: the cause). Therefore, a reference to the instance of vocabulary is not aimed at a more or less precise testimony to the state of affairs.

Action as a type of event

As a part of the relevant vocabulary, action becomes a type of event. I am referring here to a complex, and yet basic constituent of the world. Until the 18th century, it was a thing which was considered such a constituent, but Immanuel Kant’s Copernican revolution (Kant 2007) and his contrasting of the noumenon with the phenomenon undermined the obviousness of things as an object of cognition; it was no longer the thing (including the thing-in-itself), but the representation of the thing, which became the object. The simple thing was replaced with the complex thing. On the other hand, as a part of epistemological and semantic investigations, including the ones following the linguistic turn, the problem of the understanding of the classical definition of truth (Latin: Veritas est adaequatio rei et intellectus) appeared in the 19th and 20th centuries. Since it is to be a thought (or proposition or sentence), i.e. a complex construct, which is to be the final argument of the relationship of correspondence, then a simple construct, i.e. a thing, should not be its first argument. In this way the state of affairs or the fact² has been referred to as a manner in which a thing is provided. For example, according to Ludwig Wittgenstein “the world is the totality of facts, ←16 | 17→ not of things” (Wittgenstein 2001: 5). In consequence, we have obtained a simplified isomorphic model, in which the domain of language as a set of observational sentences (expressing the relevant propositions) corresponds to a set of facts (states of affairs).