Gertrude Margaret Elizabeth Anscombe (1919-2001) was a leading English philosopher of her generation, intellectual disciple of Ludwig Wittgenstein, scholar of ancient and medieval philosophy, fellow at Oxford, and for many years Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge. Intention is her most important book. Some regard it as a classic. The book was first published in 1957. The new HUP edition is a reprint of the 1963 2^nd edition.

There are two main points, one negative and one positive, developed in tandem throughout the book. The negative point is that, contrary to what one might expect, intentions are not a distinct kind of mental happening that causes actions. It is a common view that when someone does something intentionally, two factors are involved: the activity, which is observable by others, and the inner intention, which is not observable, though it is readily known by that person. For example, many 18^th and 19^th century psychologists considered actions to result from acts of will, committed by spiritual substances, minds. According to some current cognitive theories, intentions, or something like them, are mental representations, deployed by brains, which function as plans to cause and guide action. Anscombe rejects this picture. In fact, she denies that there is any special distinguishing feature of intentional actions that distinguishes them from other happenings.

The positive point is that what makes some behavior a case of intentional action is the fact that it can be described in a certain way. As Anscombe puts it, "’intentional’ refers to a form of description" and not to an extra feature of actions. An event gets described in this way when we think it makes sense to ask "For what reason did that happen?" and what we expect as an explanation is not just the statement of a mere cause, but an interpretation of the reasons that a person has in acting. We are familiar with cases of mere causes — "It was a nervous tick," and "He was pushed," are not the right kind of answer to the question; and we know cases of acting for reasons — "She did it in order to help a friend," is the right kind of answer. The main purpose of the book is to develop our intuitive familiarity with this difference into a more principled sort of understanding.

It bears emphasis that Anscombe’s method is a form of conceptual, or linguistic analysis. Rather than theorizing directly about the mind, she examines how language is used to describe people and their behavior. Why the focus on language? Here, Anscombe follows in the tracks of Wittgenstein, who remarked that "the confusion and barrenness of psychology is not to be explained by calling it a "young science"; its state is not comparable with that of physics, for instance, in its beginnings. … For in psychology there are experimental methods and conceptual confusion." The remark comes in the final fragment of his posthumous Philosophical Investigations, and the one responsible for placing it there is Anscombe, his translator, and literary executor. Intention is thoroughly influenced by Wittgenstein in its assumption that philosophical puzzles arise from confusion about language. The cure is always a closer look at a wider range of ways in which we use language.

In keeping with this method, the book begins by listing three related ways of speaking. We speak of expressions of intention for the future, of acting intentionally and of a person’s intentions in acting. Anscombe immediately warns that confusion results from focusing too exclusively on any of these. Consider intentions for the future. The sentence "I am going to leave this city," can be used to make a prediction or to express an intention. This might make one think that an intention is a strange sort of prediction. But the case of intention in a present action shows that intentions are not always about the future. Sometimes Anscombe’s use of the method seems artificial. Who would really confuse an intention with a prediction just because both can be expressed by a future tense sentence? It is striking though, that even in flushing out a dubious confusion about language, Anscombe displays many an insight about her subject. We needn’t be on the hunt for confusions to appreciate that.

A large part of the book discusses how having intentions gives us special knowledge of what we are doing. By observing yourself raising a glass, you can know that you are drinking, or going to drink. But observation isn’t normally necessary for you to know what you are doing. If you act intentionally, you normally already know what you are doing without observation simply by having the intention to drink. How does having an intention give you this type of knowledge? Anscombe supposes that the difficulty of answering this question is a main factor that leads to the view that intentions are inner mental happenings. If there are two ways of knowing what one is doing, then doesn’t doing something consist of two parts, action and intention, which can be known in different ways? Anscombe considers this a confusion. Her view is that there is just one thing known, the action, but that this can be known in two ways.

Anscombe calls this special type of knowledge that we have in intention "practical knowledge," and follows St. Thomas Aquinas in declaring that "practical knowledge is the cause of what it understands." By this she means a kind of knowledge that typically leads a person to action, or "supervises" a person’s action. While Aquinas’ slogan is brief and obscure, Anscombe’s discussion of this topic is extended and obscure. It takes a good deal of mental athletics on the part of a reader to get through. Truthfully, I find little in it that explains how this kind of knowledge leads to action, and little about how whatever leads a person to action can involve knowledge of what one is doing.

One surprising twist is that Anscombe identifies practical knowledge with the ability to engage in a special kind of reasoning about what to do. Here she takes her cue from Aristotle’s account of "practical reason." Since reasoning involves considering and having reasons for action, Anscombe thinks this account of practical knowledge meshes with her earlier account of intentional action (according to which "intentional" refers to the form of description that depends on giving reasons for action.)

Why does Anscombe deny that intentions are a kind of inner happening or mental representation that causes action? She has a number of arguments. Perhaps the main one is that any action can be described in many ways, only some of which are intentional. I raise my arm. In doing so, I hail a cab. In doing so, I cause a traffic accident. In doing so, I also activate certain muscles of my body. I do only the first two things intentionally. My intentions must somehow determine that the action is intentional under two of these descriptions but not the other two. But the idea that a "mental extra factor" in addition to my action could determine this involves "inextricable confusions," according to Anscombe. Rather than the discovery of confusions, there seems to be a legitimate challenge here. My intention in the example is about raising an arm, and about hailing a cab, not about working muscles and not about causing accidents. That is, intentions are meaningful. So, the view that intentions are mental representations requires some theory of the meaning of mental representations. Modern readers are less likely to think this challenge is an impassable obstacle than those who read Intention closer to the peak of mid 20^th century behaviorism.

A problem with Anscombe’s account is this. Clearly, people sometimes act intentionally without having reasons for what they do. A person can move a coffee mug for no particular reason, or just because it suits them that way. Yet we don’t conclude that the action is unintentional for lack of a reason. Anscombe goes to lengths to show that such actions are an exception to the rule, arguing that the form of description which goes with intentional action would be useless if all or most actions were like this. She suggests that it is better to class such exceptional actions as voluntary rather than intentional. But none of this addresses the problem. Intentional actions are not just the ones people have reasons for. So, Anscombe doesn’t define intentional actions as the ones that happen for reasons. Instead she says that they can be described in a special way that depends on asking for reasons. This fails to distinguish intentional from unintentional actions. Furthermore, even if we do describe intentional actions using a certain kind of language, there remains an unanswered question: Why can some things but not others be described in this way?

Intention is very brief, free of jargon, and self-contained. Apart from some discussion of Wittgenstein and Aristotle, there is scarcely a reference to other philosophers or texts, and no particular background knowledge is required. Still, it is a difficult book, not because of technicality but because of obscurity. This is due to organization and style. It is densely written and discusses a wide range of issues and problems together. There are not adequate summaries and guideposts in the text. A reader is always in the thick of arguments, examples, distinctions, and details. It takes a special effort to tie these together and to draw general lessons. Like Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, the book consists of many separate, short sections which "criss cross" the issues making abrupt transitions between subjects. Since Wittgenstein himself expressed regret for this way of writing, I don’t think that Anscombe had a good reason to imitate him. What is more, the obscurity doesn’t simply fade away as a diligent reader reorganizes the material. Anscombe can be very clear and insightful. She can also come at problems obliquely, and explain one puzzling point with another that is just as puzzling, often after putting the reader through a workout. The amount of effort that goes into this can lead to an illusion of progress.

The dust jacket of the new edition of Intention declares it a classic, and gives the collected praise of several philosophical luminaries. Cora Diamond writes that "Intention opened for philosophical exploration a territory of thought… it is still an indispensable guide." This seems to me to be one-half right. Intention came at the beginning of over forty years of philosophical work on action and related issues (though it wasn’t alone.) It certainly gets credit for influencing subsequent work, but stimulating thinking on an impressive range of topics is not the same as providing a guide. This book is much too murky for that.

David Velleman writes that Intention is "often quoted, sometimes read, rarely understood." There is a good remedy for this situation. The recent HUP edition of another notorious work from the ’50s, Wilfrid Sellar’s Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, comes with dust jacket homage, a substantial introduction by Richard Rorty, and an extensive study guide by Robert Brandom. This is a good way for philosophical blurb writers to earn their keep, helping readers with a difficult classic. No doubt, the fact that Sellars was deceased but Anscombe still alive when the respective editions were published is part of the reason for this difference in treatment. In the absence of such help, it takes a particularly hardworking and philosophically inclined reader to wrestle this book. Clearly, many professional philosophers think it is worthwhile.

© 2001 Adam Kovach

Categories: Philosophical