Hodgson 1Hodgson 1

Prosper Hodgson

Saturday, March 16, 2013PHIL 290 Agent, Actions, Ends

Prof. Eric Ratzel

Q: Why did the Chicken Cross the Road? A: In Order to get Pancaked by a Car...

Intention is a tricky idea. It is something that people understand intuitively, knowing the difference between when someone intentionally or unintentionally knocks a glass off of a table for instance, but when pressed almost everyone struggles to describe what the essence of intention is. The same confusion arises when people are asked to describe an action, lifting the persons arm being an example. Most would say the action was the lifting of the arm, but others would cite the contraction of certain muscle groups, and still others might reply with the impulse from the brain telling the specific muscle groups to contract which results in the lifting of the arm. Action and intention are both important aspects of everyday life, they are, in fact, what everyday life is, a series of actions performed either with or without intent. It is this fact that makes understanding exactly what action and intention are vitally important, there is far too much confusion that surounds these processes. To clear some of that confusion, and sometimes add to it, philosophers have long been trying to define exactly what intention and action are, with the written record of these pursuits going as far back as Aristotle. In the modern era, two of the most widely read and influential authors on this subject are Donald Davidson and G. E. M. Anscombe. Both philosophers have spent a great deal of time on the study of intentions and actions, and their differing views can be seen by taking apart this situation: You ask a man why he is crossing the street, and he replies that it is because he wants to get something to eat.

The questions that need to be answered are; what the person meant when they said that they want something to eat, where the action is in his crossing of the street, and how did this action come about, or what was its intent? Were Davidson to examine this question the first thing that he would say is that the action was the crossing of the street, and the intention was to get closer to food so that the man could fulfill his desire of no longer being hungry. Davidson believes that actions are intentional when the agent has a particular desire for something, in this case food, and the belief that performing an action will satisfy that desire, hence the crossing of the street, this combination of the belief/desire pair causes the agent to act, as he says in his essay Actions, Reasons, and Causes, Whenever someone does something for a reason, therefore, he can be characterized as (a) having some sort of pro attitude toward actions of a certain kind, and (b) believing... that his action is of that kind (3-4). This is Davidsons building block for his entire theory on action, that this belief/desire pairing (which he refers to as the primary reason) is the cause for an individual acting.

So Davidsons view can be seen (crudely) like so; it begins with events, which are simply datable occurrences, or things that happen that can be recorded, and one type of event is an action. Actions are performed by an individual for a reason, but Davidson continues by splitting acts into two groups, the unintentional acts that have no cause and the intention acts that have a primary reason. The man is crossing the street because he is aware that he is hungry and knows that crossing the street will bring him closer to food, so he crosses the street.

Another important idea in Davidsons theories on action and intention is that of the interpretation of the action. Davidson states that, A person can have a reason for an action, and perform the action, and yet this reason not be the reason why he did it (9). He justifies this view with the belief that one and the same action can always be described correctly in more than one way. The example Davidson uses to show how this is true is that of an individual turning on the lights in room. This act can be described as the individual using a finger to flick the light switch to the on position, or as the individual making the room brighter, or as alerting the person robbing the individual. Here is can be seen that the same event can be described in a number of different ways: the event of alerting the prowler is the same event as the individual making the room brighter which is the same event as the individual moving a part of their body in a certain way, here using their finger to flip the light switch. All of these statements are true and all of these statements are different, but they all describe the same action.

For a moment imagine if the man crossing the street because he was hungry was struck by a car and died. If someone were to ask why the man is dead, according to Davidson, it would be perfectly reasonable to reply with the fact that he was hungry. Of course, the reason the man is dead is because a multi-ton vehicle traveling at high speeds smashed into his body and pulverized it, but from a different perspective the reason he is dead is because he was in the middle of the street, and the reason that he was in the middle of the street was because he was hungry. This is an example of what, in his essay Agency, Davidson refers to as the accordion effect. In Agency he describes the accordion effect as, A way of inquiring whether an event is a case of agency to ask whether we can attribute its effects to a person (54). Agency, for Davidson, implies intentionality, which must, of course, stem from a person. So the event of the man being hit by a car, while it was not his intention to be hit by the car, was an intentional action because he was crossing the street because he was hungry.

And so, for Davidson the connection between intention and action as both rational and causal. The connection is rational because the belief/desire pair specifies the reason for performing the action, and it is causal because the primary reason causes the action to happen. This is why actions can be explained through their causes, and how Davidsons theory of action splits into two distinct parts, that of the physical movement of the body (the act) and the mental event attached to it by the individual (the primary reason). This is also why primary reason can be used as justification for the action, for as Davidson says, Central to the relation between a reason and an action it explains is the idea that the agent performed the action because he had the reason (9). Davidsons belief in a causal relation between intention and action is one of many points where his theories differ from those of Anscombe.

For Anscombe when an individual is describing an intentional action they are describing something for which reasons can be given, and in her theories on action reasons do not mean causes. Anscombes example is that when asked why an individual knocked a glass off the table, the individual gives the answer that they saw something that made them jump. This provides a causal explanation for why the individual knocked the glass off the table, but it fails to give a reason. The knocking of the glass off the table was not intentional, though it was caused by the individual being startled. This example also highlights what Anscombe believes distinguishes an intentional act from an unintentional, namely how the agent would answer the most basic question, Why?. Anscombe explains, The sense is of course that in which the answer, if positive, gives a reason for acting (Intention, 5). Looking back at the inciting example, when asked why he was crossing the road, and the man answered that it was because he wanted to get something to eat, his positive answer gives his reason for acting and so here one sees that Anscombe and Davidson agree that the man is acting intentionally.

Unlike Davidson, however, Anscombe breaks intention down into three distinct forms through its use in language. The first way intention is used is as a projection of future action, or when an individual intends to do y. The second version is used as a rationalization of a current action, when an individual is xing with the intention of ying. The last form of intention is when it is used as an expansion of current actions, as in when an individual is xing intentionally. Anscombe uses this to show that intention cannot be defined as just one thing, and that when an individual is trying to decipher what intentions are it is important to explore every facet, not just the one that is immediately appropriate, as in Davidsons writing he focused almost entirely on explaining actions that had already happened.

Another way Davidson and Anscombe differ in their theories of action is that while Davidson believes that the cause of action is a primary reason, Anscombe puts forth the view that the cause of a current action is a previous action. For Anscombe actions could be viewed as forming a chain through the question Why?, when an individual is asked why they are doing something they will respond with along the lines of, Because I want to x or In order to x. This line of questioning can continue on and on, each act building upon the last. This chain can also be followed backwards through the question of How?, as in How are you xing? and the response being, By ying. Anscombe describes this as the A-B-C-D series, with A and B being links in the chain with either Why? or How? connecting them, she refers to each link being added to the chain as swallowing up the previous link, or action. While previous actions and decisions have a bearing on Davidsons primary reason, for him each act is a stand alone event, colored by but removed from the past. Anscombe makes a point of saying that, Another implication of what I call swallowing up is that nothing definite has to hold about how many terms we put between A and D (26), showing that any number of actions may lead to any number of actions.

So when the man crosses the street to get food, there are pieces of the puzzle missing. The man is crossing the street in order to get food, because he is hungry after going on a five mile run in order to loose weight, and he is loosing weight in order to become more attractive, and he is going on vacation because he has been working hard in the office in order to get a promotion to support his family better, and so on and so forth. So because he was working hard, he is going on vacation and wants to look better, and so he is trying to loose weight by running, but while running he gets hungry and wants some food, so he crosses the street so that he can get something to eat, and then he is hit and killed by a car. All of these things are intentional actions from Anscombes view point, even the unfortunate bit with the car. Anscombe describes this fact with an example of a man sawing wood. When the man is sawing the plank of wood, his action is intentional under the description of sawing the plank of wood, but the same act is unintentional as the man is making a loud noise, creating a pile of sawdust, and dulling the edge of the saw. Sawing the plank, making noise, creating sawdust, and dulling the saw are all the same action, that of the man running the saw through a plank of wood, put under different descriptions that singular act is both intentional and unintentional. The same goes for the hungry man and the car, his crossing the street was intentional, but under a different description of the same event, he was killed by oncoming traffic.

One of the biggest differences in Anscombe and Davidsons views, however, is what really constitutes an intentional action. As stated above, Davidsons theory is that an intentional action consists of two parts, the primary reason followed by bodily movement, and so intentional actions are those bodily movements that can be ascribed a primary reason. In essence, intention to act must come before the intentional action. On the other hand, Anscombe believes the opposite, that in order to understand what it means to intend to act, one must know how to act intentionally. To this end, Anscombe states, Thus there are many descriptions of happenings which are directly dependent on our possessing the form of description of intentional actions (47), that is to say that there is so much that people talk about that requires the understanding of intentional action. In fact, Anscombes point is best exemplified by observing young children. If one child is doing something to annoy another, the victim can only question Why, why, why? over and over again. And when asked by an elder what is going on, the victim will say that their antagonizer was annoying them on purpose, or that they knew what they were doing, obvious signs that the antagonizer is acting intentionally. The victim fails to understand why the other child is annoying them, until the victim begins to act. Then they understand, then they can begin to act with intention, but not before they intentionally act. The hungry man thus intentionally acted by crossing the road to get something to eat, instead of acting with intention, as after coming up with his primary reason (that he wanted food and that crossing the street would facilitate this need) he would have been aware that crossing streets can be dangerous when there is traffic and looked both ways before moving from the sidewalk. As Anscombe points out, it is far more likely to intentionally act, when thinking and doing are simultaneous, than take the time to have a primary reason before acting.

Even though actions and intentions make up almost every moment of an individuals conscious life, and the fact that every individual inherently knows and understands what actions and intentions are, describing these concepts is a tricky business. The two philosophers who have done the most significant work in this field are Donald Davidson and G. E. M. Anscombe, and even though Davidson based his theories on actions and intentions off of Anscombes own, their views are entirely different. If a hungry man is crossing the street and is flattened by a car that he failed to see coming, Davidson and Anscombe would not describe this singular event in a similar way. Using their vastly differing frameworks, Davidson would take the mans bodily motion of crossing the street and ascribe to it the primary reason of wanting to get food, while if a bystander were to ask Anscombe why the man was crossing the road she would say that the man was hungry, because he was running, because he wanted to lose weight, because he wanted to look good, and so on and so on. And where Davidson would say that the man acted with intention, Anscombe would would imply that the man was performing an intentional action. All the thought and effort that these two philosophers put into trying to get to the heart of intention and action just shows how difficult it is truly understand something that everyone knows inherently, and no matter what the hungry man did, or how one chooses to look at it, the fact remains that he is still just as flat as a pancake.

Works CitedAnscombe, G. E. M. Intention. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2000. Print.

Davidson, Donald. Essays on Actions and Events. New York City: Oxford UP, 2011. Print.