When did Booth kill Lincoln?" (Hint: Booth shot Lincoln on April 14, 1865, but Lincoln lingered through the night, dying on the fifteenth.) Still not sure? Suppose we adopt a Davidsonian analysis of actions whereby:
(1)
If A does x by doing y, then A's doing x is the same as A's doingyJ Since Booth killed Lincoln by shooting him, we would conclude that the action which was a killing is identical to the action which was a shooting. But if identical events happen at the same time, then the act of killing occurred when the act of shooting did (i.e., on April" 14). So Booth killed Lincoln before Lincoln died -a result which many have found counter-intuitive. John Vollrath in 'When Actions are Causes '2 argues that this paradoxical result can be avoided, for the acceptance of (1) (labeled as 'the explanatory identity thesis') does not commit us to:
(3) If A does x by doing y, then A does x at the same time that A doesy.
for the missing premise which completes the enthymeme, viz.,
(2) If A's doing x is the same as A's doing y, then A does x at the same time that A does y.
can plausibly be denied. It is my thesis that even should we accept Vollrath's analysis of action descriptions, we have no reason to deny (2). Thus, the explanatory identity thesis will still commit us to (3), although (hopefully) it is less paradoxical than it seems at first blush.
Vollrath claims that:
... if an event could begin to exemplify different action types at different times, we could hold that there is something that is both a shooting and a killing, but it was a shooting before it was a killing ... it may not have been a case of 'causinga death' until