- Length
- 128 pagesHarvard University Press, 2nd ed. 1963, reissued 2000
- Reading
- HardPresupposes texts it does not explain; a guide helps
- Availability
- In printA current standard edition is available
Intention
A hundred and twenty pages that created a field. Anscombe asked what distinguishes raising your arm from your arm going up, refused every answer that posits an inner event, and produced the account of practical knowledge that analytic philosophy of action has been arguing about ever since.
- Date
- 1957
- Author
- G. E. M. Anscombe
- Region
- Oxford and Cambridge
- Language
- English
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Reply — Answers a named earlier work
- Form
- Treatise
- Method
- Analytic — Clarification of language and logical form
- Transmission
- Continuous — Copied and read without a break in its own language
- Standing
- Live — Still argued in current philosophical work
- Years back to what it answers
- 172 years
Little noticed for two decades and now the founding text of analytic action theory, cited constantly and by common consent very hard to read.
What the book says
A short book asking what makes something an action rather than a mere happening, and finding the answer in a kind of knowledge rather than in a hidden mental cause. Anscombe notices that intention shows up in three apparently unrelated ways - we speak of someone's intention in acting, of an action done intentionally, and of an intention for the future - and argues they are one concept. The test she proposes is a question: an action is intentional if the question why? applies to it in a particular sense, the sense that asks for the agent's reason. Ask a man why he is moving his arm and he may say he is pumping water; ask why he is pumping and he may say he is filling the cistern; ask why that, and he is poisoning the household. One movement, described four ways, and the descriptions form a series in which each answers the why of the one before. From this comes the book's most influential claim: an agent knows what they are doing without observing themselves, in the way one knows where one's limbs are - knowledge that is practical rather than contemplative, and is the cause of what it understands rather than a report on it.
What it argues
That intentional action is action to which a certain sense of the question why applies, and that the agent's answer is not a report on something observed. The pumping example does the work: a single bodily movement falls under a series of descriptions, each further from the body and closer to what the agent is up to, and the agent's knowledge covers the whole series without inference or evidence. Anscombe calls this knowledge without observation, and she distinguishes it from ordinary knowledge by its direction of fit - a shopping list carried by a shopper and a list made by a detective following him may contain the same items, but if the lists diverge the mistake is in the shopper's performance and in the detective's record. That asymmetry is the book's most quoted idea and is the reason practical knowledge is not a species of contemplative knowledge.
What it answered
The picture of intention as an interior act preceding and causing behaviour - which she attributes to the whole modern tradition and which requires the agent to introspect a mental item and report it. Behind that stands her real ethical target, which the following year's essay names: a moral philosophy conducted in terms of obligation and moral ought without any account of action, and without the theological framework in which those terms once had a use.
How it argues
By working through cases with extreme compression and almost no signposting. Anscombe states a position in a sentence, tests it against an example, and moves on before most readers have registered what happened; the book has no summary, few conclusions marked as such, and a habit of returning to a point fifty sections later. It is genuinely difficult and its difficulty is not decorative - the method is Wittgenstein's, which means the reader is meant to do the work rather than receive a result.
The moment
Anscombe was a convert to Catholicism, a mother of seven, a fellow at Oxford and later professor at Cambridge, and Wittgenstein's chosen translator and executor. In 1956 she opposed the Oxford honorary degree for Truman on the ground that he had ordered the deliberate killing of civilians, and published a pamphlet saying so; the degree passed and the pamphlet is still read. Intention appeared the following year and belongs to the same conviction that what a person does, under which description, is where moral thinking has to start.
How it travelled
Slowly and then completely. For twenty years it was read by few; Davidson's work on action in the 1960s and 70s, which disagrees with her on the central question of whether reasons are causes, made the subject central and made this the book everyone had to have read. Since the 1990s the specifically Anscombean position - that practical knowledge is not observational and that reasons are not causes - has had a substantial revival, and her ethics essay is one of the three or four most cited papers in twentieth-century moral philosophy.
The strongest objection
Davidson's, and it goes to the heart of the account. Anscombe holds that explaining an action by the agent's reason is not giving its cause; Davidson argued that a person may have a reason for doing something, and do it, and yet not do it for that reason - and that the only thing which distinguishes acting for a reason from merely having one is that the reason caused the action. If he is right, the causal account is not an intrusion of the wrong model but the only way to mark a distinction Anscombe needs. Her defenders answer that a causal story cannot capture the agent's own knowledge of what they are doing, which is where the argument has settled and stayed.
Why read it
Because it is short and because nothing else does what it does - but not quickly, and not without a commentary. The pumping example and the shopping-list passage are the two places to start, and they can be read on their own. Read Modern Moral Philosophy alongside it; the two together are about a hundred and fifty pages and reorganised two fields.
- First printed
- 1957
- First in English
- 1957
- Digitised
- No
The second edition of 1963 makes small revisions. Anscombe was one of Wittgenstein's literary executors and translated the Investigations; the method here is his, applied to a subject he did not treat.
Written in English. In copyright.
Where it stands
Live. Action theory, practical knowledge, the individuation of actions and the question whether reasons explain causally are all active fields, and this is the book they start from.
On quoting this book
In copyright. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
What Anscombe means by practical knowledge, and whether the notion is coherent, is the central and unresolved question. Whether her rejection of reasons as causes survives Davidson is argued in both directions and is now a live dispute again after decades in which Davidson was assumed to have won. How much of the method is Wittgenstein's and how much her own is discussed but not settleable. And the relation between this book and her ethics - whether Intention is neutral groundwork or already carries the Aristotelian commitments of the later work - divides her readers.