action

Something an agent can do or perform

Also known as act · doing · do · gum:NonAffectingDoing · nonaffecting doing · non-affecting doing

Instance of: philosophical concept
Subclass of: occurrence
, non-affecting action
, planned act
Part of: activity
, human behavior

Overview

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In philosophy, an action is something an agent does. Actions contrast with events that merely happen to someone and are typically performed for a purpose and guided by an intention. The first question in the philosophy of action is to determine how actions differ from other forms of behavior, like involuntary reflexes. According to Ludwig Wittgenstein, it involves discovering "What is left over if I subtract the fact that my arm goes up from the fact that I raise my arm". A common response to this question focuses on the agent's intentions. So driving a car is an action since the agent intends to do so, but sneezing is a mere behavior since it happens independent of the agent's intention. The dominant theory of the relation between the intention and the behavior is causalism: driving the car is an action because it is caused by the agent's intention to do so. On this view, actions are distinguished from other events by their causal history. Causalist theories include Donald Davidson's account, which defines actions as bodily movements caused by intentions in the right way, and volitionalist theories, according to which volitions form a core aspect of actions. Non-causalist theories, on the other hand, often see intentions not as the action's cause but as a constituent of it.

Overview

All data

39 statements · 13% with external sources · numbers in brackets are citations

Studied by: action theory
Has effect: reaction
effect
Different from: Akt
Akti
intentional human activity
activity
Has characteristic: agent
Opposite of: reaction

Data quality

statements

13%

externally sourced

Source last edited October 9, 2026. AIDB refreshes this page daily.

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AIDB. (2026). action (Q4026292). Retrieved from https://aidb.si/e/action-Q4026292