Dretske, Fred - Explaining Behavior: Reasons in a World of Causes

A dog bites your neighbor. That is a piece of canine behavior, something the dog does. It is something that happens to your neighbor. Clyde loses his job and Bonnie gets pregnant. These are things that happen to them, not things they do. These things may happen to them, as with your neighbor, because of something they did, or failed to do, earlier, but that is a different matter.

The difference between things we do and things that happen to us feels familiar enough. As Richard Taylor (1966, pp. 59-60) observes, it underlies our distinction between the active and the passive-between power, agency, and action on the one hand and passion, patience, and patient (in the clinical sense) on the other. For that reason alone it is tempting to use this distinction in helping to characterize the nature and structure of behavior. With certain clarifications and refinements (a business that will take the rest of this chapter to complete), I think this is indeed a useful basis of classification.