Two notions of intentional action? Solving a puzzle in Anscombe’s Intention

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’.     

The role of all things considered judgements in practical deliberation

Suppose an agent has made a judgement of the form, ‘all things considered, it would be better for me to do a rather than b (or any range of alternatives to doing a)’ where a and b stand for particular actions. If she does not act upon her judgement in these circumstances would that be a failure of rationality on her part? In this paper I consider two different interpretations of all things considered judgements which give different answers to this question, one suggested by Donald Davidson, the other by Paul Grice and Judith Baker. I argue that neither interpretation is adequate. However, a third interpretation that combines features of the Grice/Baker view with the Davidsonian view is possible. In the final section of the paper I defend this interpretation against two objections.     

Psychiatric diagnoses, ‘thought styles’, and ex post facto fact fallacies

Living in two-way, dialogical relations with our surroundings, rather than in monological, one-way causal relations with them, means that we can no longer treat ourselves as inquiring simply into a world of objective ‘things’ already existing in the world around us. We need to see ourselves instead as always acting ‘from within’ a still-in-process world of flowing streams of intermingling activities affecting us as much, if not more, than we can affect them. In such a world as this, instead of discovering pre-existing things in our inquiries, we continually bring such ‘things’ into existence. So, although we may talk of having discovering certain nameable ‘things’ in our inquiries, the fact is, we can only see such ‘things’ as having been at work in people’s activities after they have performed them. This, I want to argue, is also the case with all our diagnostic categories of mental distress – thus to see the ‘things’ they name as the causes of a person’s distress is to commit an ex post facto fact fallacy. Something else altogether ‘moves’ people in the performance of their actions than the nameable ‘things’ we currently claim to have discovered in our inquiries.     

A Deranged Argument Against Public Languages

Are there really such things as public languages? Are things like English and Urdu mere myths? I urge that, despite an intriguing line of thought which may be extracted from Davidson’s ‘A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs’, philosophers are right to countenance such things in their final ontology. The argument rebutted, which I concede may not have been one which Davidson himself ultimately embraced, is that knowledge of a public language is neither necessary nor sufficient for successful conversational interaction, so that such shared languages are explanatorily otiose. In particular, the ability of interlocutors to communicate in the face of linguistic novelty and error seems to support this conclusion. I respond with two main points. First, initial impressions aside, knowledge of things like English and Urdu is explanatorily necessary. Second, even if successful conversation could be explained without positing such knowledge, we have other reasons to take public languages ontologically seriously. The ultimate result is that what I label a ‘deranged argument against public languages’ is unsound.     

Actions That We Ought,But Can't

It is commonly assumed that ‘ought’ implies ‘can’, that is, that if we ought to do something, then it must be the case that we can do it. It is a frequent quip about this thesis that any account must specify three things: what is meant by the ‘ought’, what is meant by the ‘implies’, and what is meant by the ‘can’. ¹ Something is missed, though, when we state the thesis in its shortened, three‐word form. We overlook what it means to do something. It is, I think, not mere coincidence that nobody has discussed this issue: It is very difficult to specify what it means to do something in the relevant sense. This paper is devoted to fleshing out one way of doing something that is a problem for the thesis.     

PERSUASIVE REASONING AND DEFECTIVE ACTION1

The idea that the operations of the mind are carried out discursively, even linguistically, has won wide acceptance among contemporary Thomists. What has not been explored, however, is the role of persuasion in motivating the actions of the intellect and will. This paper explores the possibility that some form of persuasive discourse is employed by the mind to move the intellect and will to precipitate action. Drawing on essentialism as a foundational ontology, I offer a prefatory theory of persuasive reasoning –‘natural rhetoric’– to explain how it is that we persuade ourselves (and others) to do things, including things that are defective.     

Knowing failably and Moorean assertions

Knowledge-fallibilism is a species of a genus that I call knowledge-failabilism. Each is a theory of knowledge's nature. One apparent challenge to knowledge-failabilism's truth is the prima facie absurdity of Moorean assertions like ‘It's raining but I do not believe that it is.’ Does each such assertion convey an implicit and unfortunate contrast, even a contradiction? I argue that this Untenable Contrast analysis fails: no such contrast is present within the speaker's perspective at the pertinent time.     

What is nature? – ziran in early Daoist thinking

The question of the relation between humans and nature lies at the foundation of any philosophy. With the daily worsening environmental crisis, we are forced to face this ancient question again. Yet when we put it into the form of ‘humans and nature’, a metaphysics is already implied and the problem of nature has not yet been questioned. At this moment, the very question that needs to be put forward is, ‘What is nature’? The question of nature will be interrogated through a comparative view in this essay. First, I argue the modern understanding of nature lies at the root of today’s environmental problems. Then, I go back to early Daoism to explore Daoist thinking on ziran (usually translated as ‘nature’). The meaning of ‘dao emulates ziran’ is brought to light through a detailed interpretation of the ziran of dao and things. Ziran penetrates the dao, the heavenly, the earthly and the human. It is with the understanding of ziran that the nature of humans and all things are illuminated. Heidegger’s thinking on nature in connection with Daoism is briefly examined together with some other significant environmental philosophies.     

Faith and the practising analyst

Abstract: In this brief essay, I reflect on three questions: What is ‘faith’ in a modern and post‐modern cultural context? Do I, a Jungian analyst, have ‘faith’ or do I not? Does having ‘faith’ or not make a difference in the practice of analysis? I make reference to Jung's understanding of ‘faith’ and his frequent disclaimers about making metaphysical claims. I conclude that a post‐credal ‘faith’ is possible for contemporary Jungian analysts, that I do have such a faith personally, and that in my experience this makes a significant difference in analytic practice at least with some patients. Traditional faith statements must be translated into depth psychological terms, however, in order for them to be applicable in post‐modern, multicultural contexts.     

Toward a Commonsense Answer to the Special Composition Question

The special composition question is the question, ‘When do some things compose something?’ The answers to this question in the literature have largely been at odds with common sense, either by allowing that any two things (no matter how apparently unrelated) compose something, or by denying the existence of most ordinary composite objects. I propose a new ‘series-style’ answer to the special composition question that accords much more closely with common sense, and I defend this answer from van Inwagen's objections. Specifically, I will argue (among other things) that the proposed answer entails the transitivity of parthood, that it is non-circular, and that it casts some light on the ancient puzzle about the Ship of Theseus.     

Kant on the Inapplicability of the Categories to Things in Themselves

This paper addresses the question of what we can legitimately say about things in themselves in Kant's critical doctrine. Many Kant scholars believe that Kant allows that things in themselves can be characterized through the unschematized or ‘pure’ concepts of our understanding such as ‘substance’ or ‘causality’. However, I show that on Kant's view things in themselves do not conform to the unschematized categories (given their standard discursive meaning): the pure categories, like space and time, are merely subjective forms of finite, discursive cognition. I then examine what this interpretation might entail for central aspects of Kant's system such as his doctrine of noumenal freedom.     

How Emotions do not Provide Reasons to Act

If emotions provide reasons for action through their intentional content, as is often argued, where does this leave the role of the affective element of an emotion? Can it be more than a motivator and have significant bearing of its own on our emotional actions, as actions done for reasons? One way it can is through reinforcing other reasons that we might have, as Greenspan (2011) argues. Central to Greenspan’s account is the claim that the affective discomfort of an emotion, as a fact about the agent’s state of being, provides an additional normative reason to act to alleviate the state. This, I argue, is not correct, nor is it the best way to understand emotions as reason-reinforcers. In this paper, I thus do two things: I provide an examination of how and why the affect of emotion could provide reasons to act to alleviate it and I propose that the real way emotions reinforce reasons is through the way they orient our attention onto things that matter, registering them as salient.     

Two cheers for Tanhā

The central character in Sartre's 1938 novel La Nausée, Antoine Roquentin, has lost his sense of things, and now the world appears to him as utterly unstable. Roquentin suffers from what he calls ‘nausea,’ a condition caused by an ontological intuition that the self, as well as the world through which that ‘self’ moves, lacks a substantial nature. The novel portrays Sartre's own philosophical account of the self in La transcendence de l'égo. Here Sartre argues that Husserl's account of consciousness is not radical enough; the ‘I’ or ego is a pseudo-source of activity (and Sartre thus draws very close to a particularly Buddhist account of personal identity). My essay questions Roquentin's response to his ontological insight: why is this the occasion for ‘nausea’? Why doesn't Roquentin (as King Milinda famously does) celebrate and embrace his ‘non-self’? I argue that Sartre's depiction of Roquentin's ailment, and the unsatisfactory solution he provides, misunderstands both the aggregate nature of things as well as authentically rendered consciousness-only (vijñaptimātra).     

PERSPECTIVE‐NEUTRAL INTRINSIC VALUE

Is it possible to do a good thing, or to make the world a better place? Some argue that it is not possible, because perspective‐neutral value does not exist. Some argue that ‘good’ does not play the right grammatical role; or that all good things are good ‘in a way’; or that goodness is inherently perspective‐dependent. I argue that the logical and semantic properties of ‘good’ are what we should expect of an evaluative predicate; that the many ways of being good don't threaten the thesis that some ways are perspective‐independent; and that there are clear examples of perspective‐independent goodness.     

Reasons for Action and Psychological Capacities

Most moral philosophers agree that if a moral agent is incapable of performing some act ф because of a physical incapacity, then they do not have a reason to ф. Most also claim that if an agent is incapable of ф-ing due to a psychological incapacity, brought about by, for example, an obsession or phobia, then this does not preclude them from having a reason to ф. This is because the ‘ought implies can’ principle is usually interpreted as a claim about physical, rather than psychological, capacities. In this paper I argue for an opposing view: if we don’t have reasons to do things that we are physically incapable of doing, then neither do we have reasons to do things we are psychologically incapable of doing. I also argue that extending the ‘ought implies can’ principle to psychological capacities makes the principle more attractive.     

Arithmetic as Grammar

What is a number? Using material from Wittgenstein’s 1930s lectures, I argue that this question expresses a disorientation best overcome by recollecting rules that govern the number words. Why do we have the rules we do? We may be persuaded to adopt one rule rather than another by experience, when experiment shows it to be the more convenient way; we may also be persuaded by the “experience” of a new aspect. Mathematics is a “motley of techniques” for doing certain things; religion is a certain spirit meant to pervade everything we do. An important likeness is that in both instruction is essentially grammatical.     

Leibniz and the Square: A Deontic Logic for the Vir Bonus

Seventeenth century philosopher Gottfried Leibniz's contributions to metaphysics, mathematics, and logic are well known. Lesser known is his ‘invention’ of deontic logic, and that his invention derives from the alethic logic of the Aristotelian square of opposition. In this paper, I show how Leibniz developed this ‘logic of duties’, which designates actions as ‘possible, necessary, impossible, and omissible’ for a ‘vir bonus’ (good person). I show that for Leibniz, deontic logic can determine whether a given action, e.g. as permitted, is therefore obligatory or prohibited (impossible). Secondly, since the deontic modes are derived from what is possible, necessary, etc., for a good person to do, and that ‘right and obligation’ are the ‘moral qualities’ of a good person, we can see how Leibniz derives deontic logic from these moral qualities. Finally, I show how Leibniz grounds a central deontic concept, namely obligation, in the human capacity for freedom.     

Is ‘human action’ A category?

It seems to have been taken for granted that we all know what a human action is. However in attempting to draw from what philosophers have said about actions the necessary clues as to their distinguishing features, one finds little to discourage the idea that there is no way of distinguishing one category of occurrences, human actions, from the complex of different sorts of things which happen. From this I am tempted to conclude that there is no category of human action. But before drawing such a conclusion an ancient but terrible question must be faced: What sorts of things happen in the world ? This ancient question is faced but not answered. It is brought up because the failure to find a satisfactory answer to the question, Is human action a category? is a failure even to find a satisfactory assumption about what kind of reference the term ‘human action’ is supposed to have.     

Becoming a philosopher: What Heidegger learned from Dilthey, 1919–25

Wilhelm Dilthey is, famously, an epistemological pioneer for a second, ‘human’ kind of science that ‘understands’ life as we live it, instead of ‘explaining’ things as we observe them. Even today, he is usually cited for his role in the Erklären–Verstehen debate. My article, however, follows Heidegger's suggestion that we make the existence of the debate itself the problem. Whether there are different sorts of entity, different reasons for studying them and different means for doing so – such issues raise questions about science itself, not just about how to do it better. Moreover, what sort of philosopher is competent to address such questions? Heidegger argues that Dilthey's later writings intimate that it must be one who thinks from the ‘standpoint of (historical) life itself.’ This issue, says Heidegger, is ‘alive’ in Dilthey but is continually short-circuited by his very traditional plan for a ‘Critique of Historical Reason.’ Dilthey's unsuccessful struggles to produce this Critique are his gift to us, however. They encourage us to explicitly reconsider, as Heidegger does not only in Being and Time but throughout his life, what Dilthey cannot: If philosophy, like all human practices, is historical to the core, what is it to ‘be’ philosophical, about science or anything else?