http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8778-524X
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ABSTRACT
The account of intentional action Anscombe provides in her (1957) Intention has had a huge influence on the development of contemporary action theory. But what is intentional action, according to Anscombe? She seems to give two different answers, saying first that they are actions to which a special sense of the question ‘Why?’ is applicable, and second that they form a sub-class of the things a person knows without observation. Anscombe gives no explicit account of how these two characterizations converge on a single phenomenon, leaving us with a puzzle. I solve the puzzle by elucidating Anscombe's two characterizations in concert with several other key concepts in ‘Intention’, including, ‘practical reasons’, the sui generis kind of explanation these provide, the distinction between ‘practical’ and ‘speculative’ knowledge, the formal features which mark this distinction, and Anscombe's characterization of practical knowledge as knowledge ‘in intention’.
Acknowledgements
This paper has benefited greatly from discussion with Harry Alanen, Maria Alvarez, Alexander Greenberg, Jane Heal, Jen Hornsby, Johannes Roessler, Glenda Satne, Hans Bernard Schmid and Silvan Wittwer. Alexander in particular has commented on several drafts and without his help I doubt I could have got my thoughts well enough in order to get this adequately clearly written. Three anonymous reviewers – one for this journal and two for another – have made invaluable suggestions and constructive criticisms which have enabled me to significantly improve the paper, as has the Editor of BJHP.
ORCID
Lucy Campbell http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8778-524X
Notes
1 Unless otherwise indicated, page numbers throughout refer to Intention (Harvard University Press, 2nd ed., 2000).
2 Three examples: (1) Anscombe’s ‘A-D series’ (§§23, 26) becomes in Davidson’s hands the more metaphysically loaded ‘accordion effect’ (Davidson, ‘Agency’, 53–61). (2) Her distinction between two mistakes – in judgment and in performance – is transformed by Searle (‘A Classification of Illocutionary Acts’) into the metaphor of ‘direction of fit’ (which is then often wrongly attributed to Anscombe herself). The metaphor gives us a misleading view not only of Anscombe’s thinking but also of the attitudes it is supposed to apply to – especially of desires and intentions (see Alvarez, Kinds of Reasons, 70; Teichmann, The Philosophy of Elizabeth Anscombe, 23). (3) Anscombe’s observation that an action is intentional only under a description (e.g. §6) is also accepted by Davidson. But he uses it to infer the extremely un-Anscombean thesis that ‘we never do more than move our bodies ‘and that’ the rest is up to nature’ (Davidson, ‘Agency’, 59).
3 On Wittgenstein’s influence on Anscombe’s methodology, see Teichmann, The Philosophy of Elizabeth Anscombe, ‘Why “Why?”? Action, Reasons and Language’; Wiseman, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Anscombe’s Intention; on his influence on her substantive philosophy of action, see Alvarez, ‘Wittgenstein on Action and the Will’.
4 The move from interest in voluntary action to interest in intentional action was itself prompted by Intention (Alvarez, ‘Wittgenstein on Action and the Will’, 498; Alvarez and Hyman, ‘Philosophy of Action 1945-2015’).
5 These various guises up until Russell’s The Analysis of Mind (1921) are helpfully catalogued in Hyman (Action, Knowledge, and the Will; appendix 1). In the 1960s, the causalist approach expressed itself in the application of the positivistic ‘covering law’ model of explanation to the explanation of action (Hempel, ‘Rational Action’; for discussion, see Stoutland, ‘Perception and Practical Knowledge’, 7–8).
6 For discussion, see Alvarez (‘Wittgenstein on Action and the Will’).
7 Later key proponents of these arguments include Hampshire, Thought and Action; Kenny, Action, Emotion, and Will; Melden, Free Action.
8 Prior to c. 2000, attention to non-observational knowledge of action was largely restricted to arguments manifesting scepticism about its coherence (e.g. Chisholm, ‘Intention by G. E. M. Anscombe’; Jones, ‘Things Known Without Observation’), or about its essential involvement in intentional action (Donnellan, ‘Knowing What I Am Doing’; Davidson, ‘Agency’, 50, ‘Intending’, 92); notable exceptions are Hampshire, Thought and Action; Strawson, Individuals; Velleman, Practical Reflection.
9 That this is a genuine counterexample is not beyond question. For dissent, see Thompson, ‘Anscombe’s Intention and Practical Knowledge’, 209–10; Haddock, ‘The Knowledge That a Man Has of His Intentional Actions’, 165–9.
10 These authors tend to reject, ignore or misconstrue one or both of the two formal features Anscombe takes to characterize practical knowledge, what I will later term Theophrastus’ and Aquinas’ Features (see below, esp. §§3 and 5).
11 See Hursthouse (‘Intention’), Moran (‘Anscombe on Practical Knowledge’), Rödl (Self-Consciousness), Teichmann (The Philosophy of Elizabeth Anscombe, ‘Why “Why?”? Action, Reasons and Language’), Thompson (‘Naive Action Theory’), Boyle and Lavin (‘Goodness and Desire’), van Miltenburg (‘Practical Knowledge’), Roessler (‘The Epistemic Role of Intentions’), Ford (‘The Arithmetic of Intention’), Lavin (‘Action as a Form of Temporal Unity’), Wiseman (Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Anscombe’s Intention) and apart from the piece by Kieran Setiya, the papers collected in Ford, Hornsby, and Stoutland (Essays on Anscombe’s Intention). Plausibly, this more direct engagement with Intention was prompted by the publication of the 2nd Edition in 2000.
12 For example, it is relatively common to pick up on and try to explain Anscombe’s claim that ‘the notion of “practical knowledge” can only be understood if we first understand “practical reasoning”’ (57) (Wiseman, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Anscombe’s Intention, ch. 6; Haddock, ‘The Knowledge That a Man Has of His Intentional Actions’, 162–5). But this does not fully explain why WQC and AKC converge, because Anscombe thinks that some actions are intentional (and so according to AKC, objects of practical knowledge) but not done on the basis of practical reasoning (25, 65).
13 I am using ‘behaviour’ as a semi-technical term to cover anything someone might be said to ‘do’. ‘Behaviours’ thus include both non-agential doings like blinking, and non-movement-involving actions like lying still or imagining heaven. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for this journal for prompting me to clarify this.
14 The present/future distinction here is not sharp (39–40), which links to the fact that ‘I am going to … ’ is, like ‘I am doing … ’, in the present progressive. This observation is key to Anscombe’s treatment of the metaphysics of actions done with further intentions (esp. §§22–26); for discussion, see Rödl, Self-Consciousness; Thompson, ‘Naive Action Theory’.
15 Anscombe’s actual question here is ‘What are you doing?’ (35; my emphasis). For the (limited) interchangeability of ‘what?’ and ‘why?’, see esp. Intention §23.
16 This language, of intentional actions ‘having a point’, does not come from Intention. But there is nothing in Intention which renders it antithetical to Anscombe’s discussion. On the contrary, it helps us tie together several of that discussion’s strands.
17 The claim is not that my action itself is ‘atomic’, lacking internal complexity: doing my Bob Dylan impression may require me to e.g. sing ‘her name is Lucifer’. The idea is rather that under the description ‘doing a Bob Dylan impression’, there is nothing more to say in explanation of its point.
18 This does not entail that we could understand the notion of having a point without also understanding the notion of being intentional (thanks to an anonymous reviewer for another journal for prompting me to clarify this point). It is integral to the holistic reading of Intention to which I committed myself in § 1, that we mutually elucidate its key concepts, with none being treated as fundamental relative to the others. That we can elucidate A in terms of (inter alia) B does not entail that A can be grasped without also grasping B. This is the main difference between conceptual elucidation and conceptual analysis.
19 Practical knowledge can also be future-directed; I stick to the present-directed case for simplicity.
20 Anscombe discusses a parallel difference – between practical and theoretical reasoning – in Intention §§33–44. A discussion of these passages would add depth to the current interpretation, but space does not allow for doing that here. For discussion, see e.g. Wiseman, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Anscombe’s Intention, ch. 6.
21 The authorship of Magna Moralia is disputed. Anscombe appears unusual in attributing it to Theophrastus (thanks to Ellisif Wasmuth, p.c., for discussion), but it is useful to have a label.
22 Two clarifications: (1) recognition-dependence in my sense means dependent on the agent’s own recognition; (2) the dependence in question is a formal rather than an efficient causal dependence. Velleman (Practical Reflection, Ch. 1) develops an account of the latter kind, but it is not Anscombe’s view. We will better understand this dependency by the end of § 5.
23 Of course, blinking might have a recognition-dependent point (imagine Hugh Grant acting in a film), but such blinkings would be intentional.
24 Note that these reasons need not be, as is sometimes suggested, teleological: we saw in § 2.2 that not all reasons for action cite an aim. See Müller (Backwards-Looking Rationality and the Unity of Practical Reason) and Hursthouse (‘Intention’, 96); cf. Newstead, ‘Interpreting Anscombe’s Intention’.
25 I further develop and defend the idea that the differences between practical and speculative knowledge can be explained in terms of their involving, respectively, intention and belief in Campbell, ‘An Epistemology for Practical Knowledge’.
26 This objection is due to an anonymous reviewer for another journal.
27 In Davidson’s original presentation, it is the climber’s reason (understood as a belief–desire pair) which unnerves him.
28 This and the next objection are due to an anonymous reviewer for another journal. The latter has also been suggested to me independently by Harry Alanen and Jane Heal.