According to the standard story given by reductive versions of the Causal Theory of Action, an action is an intrinsically mindless bodily movement that is appropriately caused by an intention. Those who embrace this story typically take this intention to have a coarse-grained content, specifying the action only down to the level of the agent’s habits and skills. Markos Valaris (2015) argues that, because of this, the standard story cannot make sense of the deep reach of our non-observational knowledge of action. He concludes that we therefore have to jettison its conception of actions as mindless bodily movements animated from the outside by intentions. Here we defend the standard story. We can make sense of the reach of non-observational knowledge of action once we reject the following two assumptions: (i) that an intended habitual or skilled action is a so-called basic action—that is, an action that doesn’t involve any finer-grained intentions—and (ii) that an agent, in acting, is merely executing one intention rather than a whole hierarchy of more or less fine-grained intentions. We argue that (i) and (ii) are false. (Less)

中文翻译：

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运动意图和非观察性行动知识：标准故事

根据行动因果理论的还原版本给出的标准故事，行动是一种本质上无意识的身体运动，由意图适当地引起。那些接受这个故事的人通常会将这种意图用于粗粒度的内容，仅将动作指定到代理的习惯和技能水平。Markos Valaris (2015) 认为，正因为如此，标准故事无法理解我们对行动的非观察性知识的深度。他的结论是，我们因此必须摒弃它的行动概念，即行动是由意图从外部激发出来的无意识的身体运动。在这里，我们为标准故事辩护。一旦我们拒绝以下两个假设，我们就可以理解行动的非观察性知识的范围：(i) 预期的习惯性或技能性动作是所谓的基本动作——即不涉及任何细粒度意图的动作——以及 (ii) 代理人在行动中只是在执行一个意图而不是一个或多或少细粒度意图的整个层次结构。我们认为（i）和（ii）是错误的。（较少的）