Bodily Motion and Human Action

In his book The Construction of Social Reality, John Searle asserts that the basic constitutive rule by which social facts are created is of the form “X counts as Y in C” where X is a brute physical fact, Y is the social fact and C is the conditions in which X counts as Y. In this post, I will describe the manner in which this rule functions in order to create various human actions (Y) out of one and the same mere bodily movement (X) within different contexts (C).

Consider the bodily movement of lifting one’s right hand in the air. As mere bodily motion, this movement means absolutely nothing; it is pure matter in motion which has no purpose or meaning to it. It is only by the application of collective intentionality (beliefs and desires) that such mere bodily movement comes to count as different human actions across different contexts.

For example, raising one’s right hand in the context of a court room with a left hand placed upon a Bible counts (partially) as swearing an oath. In the context of a heated argument with another person, raising one’s right hand counts as a rather threatening gesture. In the context of a marriage ceremony, raising one’s right hand immediately after the priest asks if anybody objects to the marriage, counts as objecting to the marriage. In some contexts, raising one’s hand counts as voting for or against something. In each of these cases, the same bodily motion (X) constitutes a very different action (Y).

While I have made the differences in the external aspects of context explicit in each of the examples, the essential difference between each action (Y) is due not to any external aspect of the context of each event, but rather to those aspects of the context which are internal to all member of the society which count raising the right-hand as each particular “Y”. It is intentionality which mere bodily movement lacks to become human action and intentionality is always internal to some agent. Without intentionality, the mere raising of the right hand would never amount to any more or less than mere matter in motion.

This is not to say, however, that the external context plays no determining role in the case of each action. While the external environment is not by itself a sufficient condition for a mere bodily movement counting as a human action, it is still a necessary condition for such. The external environment plays a significant role in not only determining whether raising the right hand will be counted by a society of intentional agents as voting, objecting, swearing, threatening, etc., but it also determines whether the raising of the hand will or will not amount to a human action or not. In some external contexts, such as shock therapy, raising the right arm simply is raising the right arm and nothing more. It is precisely due to this role which the external context plays that the interpretation of a single bodily movement in such diverse ways is such an effortless as well as reliable process in our everyday lives.

Indeed, so constrictive is the external environment in the interpretation of such bodily movement that it makes the faking of many human actions logically impossible. One cannot merely pretend to swear on the Bible in court; one either raises the hand or not. Similarly, one cannot pretend to gesture in a threatening way, object at a wedding or pretend to vote for the bodily movement in such external contexts constitutes swearing, threatening, objecting and voting, respectively. One might wonder how acting is possible, but such an objection only furthers my point for the external context (of a play, movie, etc.) determines whether the action is acting or not. It is precisely due to the context that actors are not really swearing, threatening, objecting and voting.

The implications which the contrast between mere bodily movement and human action has upon behaviorism are significant, for the behaviorist must limit their observation and explanation to mere bodily movement and external environment. Any recourse to intentional content must be either reduced to or defined instrumentally in terms of those two publicly observable components, if not eliminated altogether. Accordingly, the behaviorist denies that swearing, threatening, objecting and voting even exist. Such phenomena must be regarded either as a mere shorthand for extraordinarily complex relations which hold between bodily movement and external context, or as merely useful fictions.

While the behaviorist claim that all intentional content can in principle be defined in terms of publicly observable bodily movement and context, it is not clear that it should be done in practice. It seems prima facie obvious that when the behaviorist speaks of swearing, etc. they do not mean the same thing as what the “normal” person means by such terms. In other words, the social scientist is supposed to be studying the actual process of voting in a society, not the extraordinarily complex relation which holds between bodily motion and the external context. The latter sounds not only hopelessly complex and therefore elusive to the social scientist, but it also seems like an entirely different subject matter altogether.

Even if it can be argued that such a behaviorist approach to social science should be implemented, it can be argued that such an approach is impossible in practice altogether. By limiting herself to mere bodily movement and external context, the strict behaviorist has isolated herself from all communication, including that of colleagues and subjects. After all, speaking and writing can only be viewed as mere bodily motion (or sound-making) within a particular and highly varying external context which does not actually mean anything. The idea that the social scientist should, or even can exclude all intentional content from their subject matter is simply absurd.