Beginnings of an Account

2019 ◽  
pp. 17-48
Author(s):  
John Schwenkler
Keyword(s):  
Intentional Action ◽  
Donald Davidson ◽  
Necessary Condition ◽  
Action Explanation ◽  
Mental Causality

This chapter discusses the argument of Sections 5-18 of G.E.M. Anscombe’s Intention. It begins by considering Anscombe’s reasons for defining the concept of intentional action according to “a certain sense of the question ‘Why?’”. Following this, the chapter considers Anscombe’s discussion of several ways that this question can be refused application, each of which leads her to introduce a necessary condition of intentional action. Important concepts that are discussed in this chapter include those of knowledge without observation, mental causality, motive, and the relation between causes and reasons for acting. Anscombe’s account of these matters is contrasted in several places with that of Gilbert Ryle, and it is argued, contrary to Donald Davidson, that Anscombe was not in fact an “anti-causalist” about action explanation. The chapter also considers the possibility of doing something intentionally but “for no reason”, or for reasons that one cannot easily identify or express.

scholarly journals Action explanation and its presuppositions

2019 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 123-146
Author(s):  
Lilian O’Brien
Keyword(s):  
Causal Explanation ◽  
Intentional Action ◽  
Explanatory Role ◽  
Psychological States ◽  
Action Explanation

AbstractIn debates about rationalizing action explanation causalists assume that the psychological states that explain an intentional action have both causal and rational features. I scrutinize the presuppositions of those who seek and offer rationalizing action explanations. This scrutiny shows, I argue, that where rational features play an explanatory role in these contexts, causal features play only a presuppositional role. But causal features would have to play an explanatory role if rationalizing action explanation were a species of causal explanation. Consequently, it is not a species of causal explanation.

Reasons and Action Explanation

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Wald ◽  
Sergio Tenenbaum
Keyword(s):  
Intentional Action ◽  
Theory Of Action ◽  
Action Explanation ◽  
Theories Of Action ◽  
Causal Theories

The problem of deviant causation has been a serious obstacle for causal theories of action. We suggest that attending to the problem of deviant causation reveals two related problems for causal theories. First, it threatens the reductive ambitions of causal theories of intentional action. Second, it suggests that such a theory fails to account for how the agent herself is guided by her reasons. Focusing on the second of these, we argue that the problem of guidance turns out to be related to a number of other issues in the literature on action explanation, and that it is much more general: it threatens not only causal theories but any theory of action. Finally, we suggest that a certain version of the view that acting has a constitutive or formal aim can overcome this problem.

Consciousness and Intentionality of Action

1998 ◽  
pp. 215-220
Author(s):  
Pär Sundström
Keyword(s):  
Intentional Action ◽  
Partial Answer ◽  
Necessary Condition ◽  
Contemporary Philosophy ◽  
Wide Spread ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Person Account

One much discussed issue in contemporary philosophy is the relation between consciousness and intentionality. Philosophers debate whether consciousness and intentionality are somehow ‘connected’; whether we have reason to be more optimistic about an ‘objective,’ ‘scientific’ or ‘third person’ ‘account’ of intentionality than about an analogous account of consciousness. This paper is intended as a limited contribution to that debate. I shall be concerned only with the intentionality of action. Not everything which is true of intentionality of action is true of intentionality of other phenomena, such as beliefs. I shall discuss the question, ‘What is the intentionality of action?’ More specifically, I shall discuss one partial answer to this question: that a necessary condition of an agent performing a certain intentional action is that the agent is conscious of performing that action. This answer is fairly unpopular in contemporary philosophy. In this paper, I shall try to say something about the ground for the rather wide-spread philosophical resistance to the answer, and I shall also outline the kind of considerations that I think are required to judge whether a wedge can or cannot be driven between consciousness and intentionality of action.

scholarly journals Davidson on Practical Knowledge

2015 ◽  
Vol 3 (9) ◽  
Author(s):  
David Hunter
Keyword(s):  
Early Treatment ◽  
Practical Knowledge ◽  
Intentional Action ◽  
Donald Davidson ◽  
Careful Study ◽  
Primary Reason ◽  
Standard Interpretation ◽  
General Belief

Did Donald Davidson agree with G.E.M. Anscombe that action requires a distinctive form of agential awareness? The answer is No, at least according to the standard interpretation of Davidson’s account of action. A careful study of Davidson’s early writings, however, reveals a much more subtle conception of the role of agential belief in action. While the role of the general belief in Davidson’s theory is familiar and has been much discussed, virtually no attention has been paid to the singular belief. This essay makes a start on remedying this neglect. I begin, in section 1, by examining Davidson’s claim that for a desire or belief to rationalize and cause an action it must have a suitable generality. It must, he says, be ‘logically independent’ of the action itself. While he was clear about this requirement in the case of the desire that forms part of a person’s primary reason, I show in section 2 that his early treatment of belief confuses general and singular beliefs. This confusion reflects his failure clearly to distinguish the two roles belief can play in his account of action: as rationalizing cause and as agential awareness. Somewhat surprisingly, though, after he carefully drew the distinction and announced that intentional action requires practical knowledge, he pretty much ignored it. This may explain why some have assumed that Davidson parted ways with Anscombe on this. But a careful study of their writings shows that in fact they held remarkably similar views on the nature and need for practical knowledge.  <br /><p> </p>

The Unity of Action

2019 ◽  
pp. 49-92
Author(s):  
John Schwenkler
Keyword(s):  
Intentional Action ◽  
Donald Davidson ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Difference ◽  
The Way

This chapter discusses the argument of Sections 19-27 of G.E.M. Anscombe’s Intention. It begins by considering Anscombe’s arguments that action is not intentional because of an “extra feature” of the agent, and that the concept of intentional action, as something to which a special sense of “Why?” can be given application, depends on the possibility of expressing intention for the future and describing one’s further intentions in acting. The chapter then considers Anscombe’s treatment of these last two concepts, showing how they yield a rich account of action as a teleological unity. Consideration is paid to the difference between Anscombe’s account of the unity of action and that of Donald Davidson. Finally, Anscombe’s account of the distinction between intention and foresight is discussed, with particular attention to the way that foreseen consequences stand in a different relation of dependency to an action than things that a person brings about intentionally.

scholarly journals Anscombe on the Expression of Intention

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Moran ◽  
Martin J. Stone
Keyword(s):  
Intentional Action ◽  
Donald Davidson ◽  
Philosophy Of Action ◽  
Verbal Expression

This paper asks an interpretive question about the place of “expression of intention” in Anscombe’s opening presentation of three familiar employments of a concept of intention, commonly taken as distinguishing between (1) having or forming the intention to do something, (2) doing something intentionally, and (3) doing something with a certain intention. An initial project in philosophy of action is, then, determining which of these employments is primary and can be used to explain the others. Anscombe’s own first division, however, is not the having of an intention but the expression of intention, as when someone says, “I’m going for a walk.” The paper argues that attention to the role of expression is not a mere peculiarity of Anscombe’s, and that specifically verbal expression provides a way to see how radically different in orientation Anscombe’s conception of intentional action is from the “standard story” of action since Donald Davidson.

Practical Knowledge and Luminosity

Mind ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 129 (516) ◽  
pp. 1237-1267 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juan S Piñeros Glasscock
Keyword(s):  
Practical Knowledge ◽  
Intentional Action ◽  
Donald Davidson ◽  
Perceptual Knowledge ◽  
Necessary Connections ◽  
Practical Nature

Abstract Many philosophers hold that if an agent acts intentionally, she must know what she is doing. Although the scholarly consensus for many years was to reject the thesis in light of presumed counterexamples by Donald Davidson, several scholars have recently argued that attention to aspectual distinctions and the practical nature of this knowledge shows that these counterexamples fail. In this paper I defend a new objection against the thesis, one modelled after Timothy Williamson’s anti-luminosity argument. Since this argument relies on general principles about the nature of knowledge rather than on intuitions about fringe cases, the recent responses that have been given to defuse the force of Davidson’s objection are silent against it. Moreover, the argument suggests that even weaker theses connecting practical entities (e.g. basic actions, intentions, attempts, etc.) with knowledge are also false. Recent defenders of the thesis that there is a necessary connection between knowledge and intentional action are motivated by the insight that this connection is non-accidental. I close with a positive proposal to account for the non-accidentality of this link without appeal to necessary connections by drawing an extended analogy between practical and perceptual knowledge.

TRANSCENDENTAL ARGUMENTS AND INTERPERSONAL UTILITY COMPARISONS

2011 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 273-295 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mauro Rossi
Keyword(s):  
Epistemic Justification ◽  
Donald Davidson ◽  
Necessary Condition ◽  
Transcendental Argument ◽  
Correct Interpretation ◽  
Transcendental Arguments ◽  
Know How ◽  
Interpersonal Comparability ◽  
Interpersonal Utility Comparisons ◽  
Orthodox View

According to the orthodox view, it is impossible to know how different people's preferences compare in terms of strength and whether they are interpersonally comparable at all. Against the orthodox view, Donald Davidson (1986, 2004) argues that the interpersonal comparability of preferences is a necessary condition for the correct interpretation of other people's behaviour. In this paper I claim that, as originally stated, Davidson's argument does not succeed because it is vulnerable to several objections, including Barry Stroud's (1968) objection against all transcendental arguments of a ‘strong’ kind. However, I argue that Davidson's strategy can still achieve results of anti-sceptical significance. If we reformulate Davidson's argument as a ‘modest’ transcendental argument and if we embrace an ‘internal’ account of epistemic justification, it is in fact possible to have at least justified beliefs about how different people's preferences compare in terms of strength and about their interpersonal comparability.

scholarly journals Anscombe and Davidson on Practical Knowledge. A Reply to Hunter

2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (6) ◽  
Author(s):  
Olav Gjelsvik
Keyword(s):  
Practical Knowledge ◽  
Intentional Action ◽  
Donald Davidson ◽  
Careful Consideration ◽  
Observational Knowledge

David Hunter has recently argued (in this journal) that Donald Davidson and Elizabeth Anscombe were in basic agreement about practical knowledge. In this reply, it is my contention that Hunter’s fascinating claim may not be satisfactorily warranted. To throw light on why, a more careful consideration of the role of the notion of practical knowledge in Anscombe’s approach to intentional action is undertaken. The result indicates a possible need to distinguish between what is called ‘practical knowledge’ and ‘(non-observational) knowledge of what one is doing’, and shows that Hunter’s claim concerning the closeness of Anscombe to Davidson only has plausibility for knowledge of what one is doing. Contrary to an interesting suggestion by Hunter, the paper argues that it is hard to see how Davidson’s position can benefit substantially from making use of the notion of knowledge of what one is doing.

scholarly journals THE AGENT'S ROLE IN THE CAUSATION OF ACTION: IS MICHAEL SMITH'S CAUSAL THEORY OF ACTION IN TROUBLE?

2019 ◽  
Vol 60 (142) ◽  
pp. 143-164
Author(s):  
Lucas Mateus Dalsotto
Keyword(s):  
Causal Explanation ◽  
Intentional Action ◽  
Causal Theory ◽  
Theory Of Action ◽  
Causal Theory Of Action ◽  
Action Explanation ◽  
Proper Role

ABSTRACT The goal of this paper is to find out if Michael Smith's version of the causal theory of action is able to solve David Velleman's agency par excellence challenge. Smith (2012) has claimed that his theory can deal with the challenge insofar as the exercise of the capacity to be instrumentally rational plays the intermediating role which Velleman (1992a) thinks of the agent as playing in the causation of action. However, I argue Smith misunderstands the challenge at hand, thereby failing to find the agent's proper role in action explanation. Moreover, I claim Velleman's objection puts Smith's account of the causal theory in trouble by showing it cannot reconcile the causal explanation of intentional action with our ordinary conception of agency. If Smith intends to explain what a 'full-blooded' intentional action is, I then believe he needs to incorporate into his theory a more robust account of rational guidance.

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