On the Dualistic Assumptions Underlying G. H. von Wright’s Non-Causal Explanatory Model

I first offer a brief characterization of the argument supporting von Wright’s non-causal explanatory model for the human sciences (section I). The discussion then moves on to compare von Wright’s argument to Donald Davidson’s causal theory of action (section II). My contention here is that von Wright is committed to denying token physicalism, thus embracing some form of event-dualism. This has traditionally been understood to entail the “congruence problem ” for von Wright’s model—the problem, that is, of accounting for the very occurrence of bodily movements given an agent’s intentions. In the last section of the paper (section III), I sketch a possible solution to the congruence problem