Anscombe, Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret (1919–2001)

1. Intention

Anscombe’s most important work, Intention (1957a), is the founding document of contemporary philosophy of action. Much of her later thought may be said to move out from this essay in three main directions: towards ethics; general problems of explanation or ‘causality’; and associated problems in the philosophy of mind.

The concept of intention is employed, she says, in three main connections: we speak of ‘events in a man’s history’ as intentional actions, of the intention with which an action is performed, and of the expression of intention, or of the corresponding ‘pure’ intention for the future, which may exist though no action has yet been done with that intention. Taking the notion of intentional action as prior, she argues that an action is intentional when it is subject to a certain form of explanation: that is, when, as she puts it, ‘a certain sense of the question “Why?” has application’ to it. Her task is then to isolate this particular form of explanation. It is without application, she argues, if the agent is unaware of doing the thing; or if the agent knows that he or she is, but only by having noticed it - that is, ‘by observation’, or where, though the agent knows that the thing is going on without observation, he or she can give no account of it, or none without observation, conjecture and so forth. If a piece of behaviour passes these tests, it is an intentional action, unless perhaps it is a case of ‘mental causality’, like a gasp that is given at the hissing of a snake. These latter cases she excludes by a series of more complex tests (see Action §1; Intention §5).

Like Oedipus, I may strike a person intentionally, and strike my father unintentionally, though these are not two distinct events or two distinct actions of mine. Actions are thus intentional only ‘under a description’. What is given in answer to the question ‘Why?’ is in fact often a further description of the same action. A series of such questions will thus reveal an order among many of the descriptions true of an action: ‘Why are you moving your arm up and down?’ -‘Because I’m pumping water’ - ‘But why pump water?’ - ‘Because I’m replenishing the house water supply’. This chain of questions ‘Why?’ may often be pressed into the future, and thus beyond any description of what is now happening; the responses will then merely express the intention with which the action mentioned earlier is performed. In general, if the question ‘Why?’ has application to a first-person future-tense description of action, then the description is an expression of intention and not a mere prediction.

The idea that ‘practical knowledge’ (the knowledge one has of one’s intentional action) does not spring from observation leads to some of the more striking claims of the work. She famously compares the relation that practical thought bears to action with the relation a shopping list bears to the contents of the shopper’s basket. The corresponding model of non-practical or ‘speculative’ thought is given by the relationship between the same basket and the list of its contents constructed by the detective who follows its owner. The difference is in ‘direction of fit’, as it is now called: the detective amends a mismatch between list and basket by altering his list, the shopper by altering the contents of the basket. These matters are elucidated by an extended discussion of Aristotle’s notion of a ‘practical syllogism’. It is argued, among other things, that the order of descriptions of an action which we elicit with the question ‘Why?’ is the reverse of the order of descriptions articulated by the agent in reasoning from end to means (see Practical reason and ethics §3).