INTENTION y G. E. M. ANSCOMBE SECOND EDITION HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, Massachusetts London, EnglandCopyright © 1957, 1963 by G. E. M. Anscombe All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Originally published in England in 1957 by Basil Blackwell Fiest Harvard University Press paperback edition, 2000 Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 0-674-00399-3,3s CONTENTS page The subject introduced under three heads: expression of intention for the future, intentional action, and intention in acting. 1 Intuitive understanding of the difference between ‘prediction’ and ‘expression of intention’ rejected as a foundation for a philosophical account of expres- sions of intention. Prediction defined so as to com- prise orders and expressions of intention as well as estimates of the future. The falsity of expressions of intention in the simple future tense (a) as lying and (6) as falsity because the intention is not carried out. 1 Usefulness of considering the verbal expression of intention for the future in order to avoid various dead ends. Uselessness of an introspective explanation of intention. Expressions of intentions distinguished from estimates of the future by the justification, if any, given for them. 5 Are there any statements of the form ‘A intends X’ which can be made with fair certainty? Descriptions of a man’s actions often descriptions truly substitutable for‘ X’ in ‘A intends X’. Reasons why we suppose a man the sole authority on his own intentions. 7 Intentional actions defined as those to which a certain sense of the question ‘Why?’ is given application. Difficulty of defining the relevant sense and danger of moving in a circle in our explanations of ‘ reason for acting’ and ‘action’, ‘I knocked the cup off the table because I was startled’ gives an answer to a question ‘Why?’ about something done. 9 The question ‘ Why ?’ is refused application by the answer ‘I did not know I was doing that’, The same action can have many descriptions, in some of which the agent knows it and in some not. 11iv uA TO, i, 12. INTENTION The question also refused application when the action was involuntary; but this notion cannot be introduced without treating as solved the very kind of problem we are discussing. Difficulties of the notion ‘ in- voluntary ’. ‘Non-observational knowledge’ introduced as e.g. the knowledge one has of some of one’s own move- ments. There is also non-observational knowledge of the causation of a movement, as when I say why I gave a start. We can define one class of involuntary move- ments without begging any questions, as the class of movements known without observation, but where there is no room for non-observational knowledge of causality: e.g. the muscular spasm one sometimes has in dropping off to sleep. In one sense of ‘ Why? ’ the answer mentions evidence; but an answer to a question ‘ Why?” about an action, which does not mention evidence, does not therefore necessarily give a reason for acting. The cases where it was difficult to distinguish a cause from a reason turn out to be ones where there is non-observational knowledge of the causation. This kind of causation labelled ‘ mental causality ’. Mental causes should be distinguished from motives of actions and objects of feelings. And also from intentions with which a person acts,even though these may be expressed in the form ‘I wanted . » .’ Mental causality is not important in itself, but it is important to make these distinctions. Motives have been sharply distinguished from inten- tions by philosophers, and described as causes. Popularly motive and intention are not so distinct; but ‘motive’ is a wider notion than ‘ intention ’. A motive is not a cause at all. Among motives that are not intentions for the future we can distinguish between backward-looking motives like revenge (I killed him because he killed my brother) page 12 qs 16 714. 15. 16. 17. 19. 20. ConrTENTS and motive-in-general (He did it out of friendship). Motive-in-general can also be called ‘ interpretative ’ motive, What distinguishes backward-looking motives from mental causes? The notions of good and harm are involved in them. In some cases the distinction between a mental cause and a reason is not sharp—E.g. ‘I put it down because he told me to’. Summary of results reached so far. The question ‘Why?’ is not refused application when the answer is e.g. ‘ For no particular reason ’ or ‘I don’t know why I did it’. Consideration of the latter answer. The fact that ‘For no particular reason ’ is a possible answer to the question ‘ Why?’ about an action does not shew that this answer always makes sense. But when we speak of it as not making sense, we mean that we cannot understand the man who says it, rather than that ‘a form of words is excluded from the language’. The question ‘ Why?’ identified as one expecting an answer in the range we have described, which range we use to define the class of intentional actions. We do not mention any extra feature attaching to an action at the time it is done by calling it intentional. Proof of this by supposing there is such a feature. Discussion whether intentional actions could still have the characteristic of being intentional although there were no such thing as expression of intention for the future, or further intention with which one acts. There would be no such thing as our question ‘ Why?’ or intentional action if the only answer were: ‘For no particular reason ’. v page 20 21 23 24 25 26 28 30vi 21, 22, 23. 24. 25. 26. INTENTION Criticism of the Aristotelian proof of a final end for a man’s actions. Still, we can now see that some chains of reasons for acting must occur if there is such a thing as intentional action at all. Discussion of intention with which, when this men- tions something future. In order for it to be possible to say that an agent does P in order that Q, 4e must treat an acknowledgement of ‘But if P, Q won’t happen ’ as incompatible with his having that intention in acting. Is there any description which is #he description of an intentional action when intentional action occurs? An example is invented in which to examine the question: a man who moves his arm in pumping water to replen- ish a house water-supply to poison the inhabitants and is also doing other things with the pump handle at the same time. Any true descriptions of what he is doing which satisfy our criteria, are descriptions of inten- tional actions. Are there as many actions and as many intentions as there are such descriptions? Difficulties. If ‘ he is poisoning the inhabitants ’ is one of these descriptions, when does he do this? How is moving his arm up and down an act of poisoning the inhabitants ? Supposing the man to know the water will poison the inhabitants, but to say ‘I didn’t care about that, I was only doing my job of pumping ’, this answer does not fall within the range of answers to ‘ Why?” by which we have defined intentional action. Can one determine one’s intentions just by what one says they are? The interest of a man’s intentions, apart from what he actually did. Answer to the questions of §23. The A—D order: i.e. the order of descriptions of an action as intentional, such that each term of the series can be said to be an intention i the action as described by the previous term, and the last term an intention of the action as described by the first or any intermediate term. page 33 34 37 41 41 4s28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. ConTENTS Is there ever any place for an interior act of intention, which really determines what is or is not going on under the title ‘ such-and-such a kind of action’? Further enquiry into non-observational knowledge. Knowledge of one’s own intentional actions—I can say what I am doing without looking to see. But must there not be two objects of knowledge—what I am ‘doing’, ie. my intention, and what is actually taking place, which can only be given by observation? Philosophical views on will and intention which have arisen from this problem. An example to prove that it is wrong to try and push the real intention, or act of will, back to something initiating the movements that then take place. Attempt at solution by comparing the facts which may falsify a statement of intentional action to the facts which may make an order fall to the ground. Inade- quacy of this solution. Example of man with a shopping list: the relation of this list to what he buys, and of what he buys to a list made by a detective following him. The character of a discrepancy between the list and what is bought in the two cases. Is there such a thing as ‘ practical knowledge’ in the sense of ancient and medieval philosophy? This notion can only be understood by first under- standing what Aristotle called ‘ practical reasoning ’. The practical syllogism is not a form of demonstration of what I ought to do. It is a different kind of reason- ing from that of the proof syllogism, but this has been misunderstood in modern times. Practical syllogisms are not confined to ones that look patallel to proof syllogisms. The starting point for a piece of practical reasoning is something wanted, and the first premise mentions something wanted, vii page 47 49 56 57 62viii INTENTION § page 35. Occurrence of evaluative terms in the first premise of practical syllogisms given by Aristotle. Not every statement of a reason for acting shews practical reasoning. ‘I want’ does not rightly occur in the premises, but the first premise must mention some- thing wanted. 63 36. In the relevant sense of ‘ wanting’ ‘X’ in ‘A wants X’ does not range over all describable objects or states of affairs. Volition and sense-knowledge cannot be described independently of one another. Problem of wanting a wife, and generally of wanting what the agent does not even suppose to exist yet. 67 37. Ifa man wants something, he can always be asked what for, or in what aspect it is desirable; until he gives a desirability-characterisation. Jo 38. The question ‘What for?’ cannot significantly be asked in a continuation of the series of such questions, once a desirability-characterisation has been reached. The point illustrated by an example: ‘ It befits a Nazi to spend his last hour exterminating Jews’. This does not mean that the practical reasoning cannot be assailed so long as it is not fallacious. 72 39. The fact that a desirability-characterisation is required does not shew that any is compulsive in relation to wanting. Bonus est multiplex. 74 40. Comparison of the problem of the relation of ‘ want- ing ’ to ‘ good ’ with that of the relation of ‘judging’ to ‘true’. 76 41. The mark of practical reasoning is that the thing wanted is at a distance from the particular action, 78 42. The ‘ absurdity ’ of setting practical reasonings out in full. The point is to describe not what (psychologic- ally) goes on, but an order; the same order as I described in discussing what ‘ the intentional action’ was. 71943. 44. 45. 46. 47- 48. 49. 50. st. $2. CONTENTS Contrast between ‘ the stove is burning ’ and ‘ the man is paying his gas bill’: enormous apparent com- plexity of ‘doing ’ in the latter case. Consideration of ‘If I do this, this will happen, if that, that ’ followed by action: cases in which this is, and in which it is not ‘ practical reasoning ’. Practical knowledge considered as the knowledge of what is done in the man who directs a project without seeing it. Problem: howis this knowledge, if his orders do not get carried out? ‘The description of something as e.g. building a house or writing on the blackboard employs the concept of human action, which we have seen to be defined by means of our question ‘ Why?” The term ‘intentional’ relates to a form of description of events. Intention in animals. Many descriptions of events effected by humans are formally descriptions of executed intentions. Elucida- tion of the notion of practical knowledge. Account of ‘ voluntary ’ action. Return to expression of intention for the future. What has been said about intention in present action also applies to future intention. A prediction is an expres- sion of intention when our question ‘ Why?’ applies to it. Consideration of ‘I just want to, that’s all’ in regard to an expression of intention for the future. ‘Tam not going to—’ as an expression of intention, and ‘I am going to—’ as an expression of belief. Cases where they might occur together. ix page 80 80 82 83 84 87 89 9° go 91INTRODUCTION The greater part of what appears here was delivered as a course of lectures at Oxford in the Hilary Term of 1957. Excerpts, with small modifications, comprising the discussion of the differ- ence between ‘ motive ’, ‘ intention ’ and ‘ mental cause ’ formed an Aristotelian Society paper delivered on June 3rd, 1957. I am indebted to the Society for permission for a substantial reprint of that matter. This book assembles the results, so far as concerns this particular topic, of research begun during my tenure of the Mary Somerville Research Fellowship at Somerville College. I wish therefore to express my gratitude to the Donors. Mote recently I have been supported by the Rockefeller Founda- tion, to which an acknowledgment is therefore also due. Note on the Second Impression I have made a few alterations; the only ones of any signifi- cance are on pp. 29, 58, 59 and 61. Note on Second Edition For this edition I have made some small alterations in §§ 2, 6, 17, 33 and 34.INTENTION 1. Very often, when a man says ‘I am going to do such- and-such ’, we should say that this was an expression of intention. We also sometimes speak of an action as intentional, and we may also ask with what intention the thing was done. In each case we employ a concept of ‘ intention ’; now if we set out to describe this concept, and took only one of these three kinds of statement as containing our whole topic, we might very likely say things about what ‘ intention’ means which it would be false to say in one of the other cases. For example, we might say ‘ Intention always concerns the future’. But an action can be intentional without being concerned with the future in any way. Realising this might lead us to say that there are various senses of ‘ inten- tion’, and pethaps that it is thoroughly misleading that the word ‘intentional’ should be connected with the word ‘ intention’, for an action can be intentional without having any intention in it, Or alternatively we may be tempted to think that only actions done with certain further intentions ought to be called inten- tional. And we may be inclined to say that ‘intention’ has a different sense when we speak of a man’s intentions simpliciter— ie. what he intends to do—and of his intention in doing or proposing something—what he aims at in it. But in fact it is implausible to say that the word is equivocal as it occurs in these different cases, Where we are tempted to speak of ‘different senses’ of a word which is clearly not equivocal, we may infer that we are in fact pretty much in the dark about the character of the concept which it represents. There is, however, nothing wrong with taking a topic piecemeal. I shall therefore begin my enquiry by considering expressions of intention. 2. The distinction between an expression of intention and a prediction is generally appealed to as something intuitively clear. ‘I am going to be sick’ is usually a prediction; ‘I am going to take a walk’ usually an expression of intention. The dis- tinction intended és intuitively clear, in the following sense: if2 INTENTION § 2 I say ‘I am going to fail in this exam. ’ and someone says ‘ Surely you aten’t as bad at the subject as that ’, I may make my meaning clear by explaining that I was expressing an intention, not giving an estimate of my chances. If, however, we ask in philosophy what the difference is between e.g. ‘I am going to be sick ’ as it would most usually be said, and ‘I am going to take a walk’, as i# would most usually be said, it is not illuminating to be told that one is a prediction and the other the expression of an intention. For we are really asking what each of these is. Suppose it is said ‘A prediction is a statement about the future’, This suggests that an expression of intention is not. It is perhaps the description—or expression—of @ present state of mind, a state which has the properties that characterise it as an intention. Presumably what these are has yet to be discovered. But then it becomes difficult to see why they should be essentially connected with the future, as the intention seems to be. No one is likely to believe that it is an accident, a mere fact of psychology, that those states of mind which are intentions always have to do with the future, in the way that it is a fact of racial psychology, as one might say, that most of the earliest historical traditions concern heroic figures. And if you try to make being concerned with the fut ure into a defining property of intentions, you can be asked what serves to distinguish this concern with the future from the predictive concern, Let us then try to give some account of prediction. The following seems promising: a man says something with one inflection of the verb in his sentence; later that same thing, only with a changed inflection of the verb, can be called true (or false) in face of what has happened later. Now by this criterion, commands and expressions of intention will also be predictions. In view of the difficulties described above, this may not constitute an objection. Adopting a hint from Wittgenstein (Philosophical Investigations §§ 629-30) we might then first define prediction in general in some such fashion, and then, among predictions, distinguish between commands, expressions of intention, estimates, pure prophecies, etc. The ‘intuitively clear’ distinction we spoke of turns out to be a distinction between expressions of intention and estimates. ButINTENTION § 2 3 a single utterance may function as more than one of these kinds of prediction. E.g. when a doctor says to a patient in the presence of a nurse ‘ Nurse will take you to the operating theatre’, this may function both as an expression of his intention (if it is in it that his decision as to what shall happen gets expressed) and as an order, as well as being information to the patient; and it is this latter in spite of being in no sense an estimate of the future founded on evidence, nor yet a guess or prophecy; nor does the patient normally infer the information from the fact that the doctor said that; he would say that the doctor fold him. This example shews that the indicative (descriptive, informatory) character is not the distinctive mark of ‘ predictions ’ as opposed to ‘ expressions of intention ’, as we might at first sight have been tempted to think. An imperative will be a description of some future action, addressed to the prospective agent, and cast in a form whose point in the language is to make the person do what is described. I say that this is its point in the language, rather than that it is the purpose of the speaker, partly because the speaker might of course give an order with some purpose quite other than that it should be executed (e.g. so that it should not be executed), without detriment to its being an order. Execution-conditions for commands correspond to truth- conditions for propositions. What are the reasons other than a dispensable usage for not calling commands true and false according as they are obeyed or disobeyed? An order will usually be given with some intention or other, but is not as such the expression of a volition; it is simply 4 description of an action cast in a special form; this form is sometimes a special inflection and sometimes a future tense which has other uses as well. Orders are usually criticised for being sound or unsound rather than for being fulfilled or not fulfilled; but this does not serve to distinguish orders from estimates of the futute, since the same may hold for estimates of the future, where these are scientific. (Unscientific estimates are of course praised for being fulfilled rather than for being well-founded, as no one knows what a good foundation is for an unscientific estimate—e.g. @ political one.) But there is a difference between the types of4 INTENTION § 2 ground on which we call an order, and an estimate of the future, sound. The reasons justifying an order are not ones suggesting what is probable, or likely to happen, but e.g. ones suggesting what it would be good to make happen with a view to an objective, or with a view to a sound objective. In this regard, commands and expressions of intention are similar. It is natural to feel an objection both to calling commands, and to calling expressions of intention, predictions. -In the case of commands, the reason lies in the superficial grammar, and just because of this is more easily disposed of. In the case of inten- tions, superficial grammar would rather incline us to accept the diagnosis, since a common form of expression of intention is a simple future tense, and indeed, this use of the future tense must play a dominant part in any child’s learning of it. But our objections are deeper rooted. If I do not do what I said I would, I am not supposed to have made a mistake, or even necessarily to have lied; so it seems that the truth of a statement of intention is not a matter of my doing what I said. But why should we not say: this only shows that there are other ways of saying what is not true, besides lying and being mistaken? A lie, however, is possible here; and if I lie, what I say is a lie because of something present, not future. I might even be lying in saying I was going to do something, though I afterwards did it. The answer to this is that a lie is an utterance contrary to one’s mind, and one’s mind may be either an opinion, or a mind to make something the case. That a lie is an utterance contrary to one’s mind does not mean that it is a false report of the contents of one’s mind, as when one lies in response to the query ‘A penny for your thoughts ’. One might not have a ‘ mind’ to do something, distinguish- able from uttering the words. And then, as Quine once put it (at a philosophical meeting), one might do the thing ‘to make an honest proposition’ of what one had said. For if I don’t do what I said, what I said was not true (though there might not be a question of my fra¢bfulness in saying it), But the reason why Quine’s remark is a joke is that this falsehood does not neces- sarily impugn what I said. In some cases the facts are, so to speak, impugned for not being in accordance with the words,INTENTION § 2-3 5 rather than vice versa, This is sometimes so when I change my mind; but another case of it occurs when e.g. I write something other than I think Iam writing: as Theophrastus says (Magna Moralia 1189b 22), the mistake here is one of performance, not of judgment. There are other cases too: for example, St. Peter did not change his mind about denying Christ; and yet it would not be correct to say he made a lying promise of faithfulness. A command is essentially a sign (or symbol), whereas an intention can exist without a symbol; hence we speak of com- ~ mands, not of the expression of commanding ; but of the expression of intention. This is another reason for the very natural idea that in order to understand the expression of intention, we ought to consider something internal, i.e. what it is an expression of. This consideration disinclines us to call it a prediction—i.e. a description of something future. Even though that is just what “Tl do such-and-such ’ actually looks like, and even though ‘I intend to go for a walk but shall not go for a walk’ does sound in some way contradictory. Intention appears to be something that we can express, but which brutes (which e.g. do not give orders) can have, though lacking any distinct expression of intention. For a cat’s movements in stalking a bird are hardly to be called an expression of intention. One might as well call a car’s stalling the expression of its being about to stop. Intention is unlike emotion in this respect, that the expression of it is purely conventional; we might say ‘ linguis- tic’, if we will allow certain bodily movements with a conven- tional meaning to be included in language. Wittgenstein seems to me to have gone wrong in speaking of the ‘ natural expression of an intention ’ (Philosophical Investigations § 647). 3. We need a mote fruitful line of enquiry than that of considering the verbal expression of intention, or of trying to consider what it is an expression of. For if we consider just the verbal expression of intention, we arrive only at its being a— queer—species of prediction; and if we try to look for what it is an expression of, we are likely to find ourselves in one or other of several dead ends, ¢.g.: psychological jargon about ‘ drives ” and 1 Assuming that we are correctly told that Theophrastus was the author.6 INTENTION § 3 ‘sets’; reduction of intention to a species of desire, i.e. a kind of emotion; or irreducible intuition of the meaning of ‘I intend’. Looking at the verbal expression of intention is indeed of use for avoiding these particular dead-ends. They are all reached in consequence of leaving the distinction between estimation of the future and expression of intention as something that just is intuitively obvious. A man says ‘I am going for a walk ’ and we say ‘that is an expression of intention, not a prediction’. But how do we know? If we asked him, no doubt he would tell us; but what does he know, and how? Wittgenstein has shown the impossibility of answering this question by saying ‘ He recognizes himself as having, or as having had, an intention of going for a walk, or as having meant the words as an expression of intention ’. If this were correct, there would have to be room for the possi- bility that he misrecognizes. Further, when we remember having meant to do something, what memory reveals as having gone on in our consciousness is a few scanty items at most, which by no means add up to such an intention; or it simply prompts us to use the words ‘I meant to. . .’, without even a mental picture of which we judge the words to be an appropriate description. The distinction, then, cannot be left to be intuitively obvious, except where it is used to answer the question in what sense a man meant the form of words ‘Iam going to...’ ona particular occasion, We might attempt to make the distinction out by saying: an expression of intention is a description of something future in which the speaker is some sort of agent, which description he justifies (if he does justify it) by reasons for acting, sc. reasons why it would be useful or attractive if the description came true, not by evidence that it is true. But having got so far, I can see nowhere else to go along this line, and the topic remains rather mystifying. I once saw some notes on a lecture of Wittgenstein in which he imagined some leaves blown about by the wind and saying ‘ Now J’ll go this way . . . now I’ll go that way’ as the wind blew them. The analogy is unsatisfactory in apparently assigning no role to these predictions other than that of an unnecessary accompaniment to the movements of the leaves. But it might be replied: what do you mean by an ‘ unnecessary ” accompaniment? If you mean one in the absence of which theINTENTION § 3~4 7 movements of the leaves would have been just the same, the analogy is certainly bad. But how do you know what the move- ments of the leaves would have been if they had not been accom- panied by those thoughts? If you mean that you could calculate their movements just by knowing the speed and direction of the winds and the weight and other properties of the leaves, are you insisting that such calculations could not include calculations of their thoughts?—Wittgenstein was discussing free will when he produced this analogy; now the objection to it is not that it assigns a false role to our intentions, but only that it does not describe their role at all; this, however, was not its purpose. That purpose was clearly some denial of free will, whether we take the wind as a symbol for the physical forces that affect us, or for God or fate. Now it may be that a correct description of the role of intention in our actions will not be relevant to the question of free will; in any case I suspect that this was Wittgen- stein’s view; therefore in giving this anti-freewill picture he was at liberty simply to leave the role of intention quite obscure. Now our account of expressions of intention, whereby they ate distinguished from estimates of the future, leaves one in very much the same position as does the picture of the wind blowing the leaves. People do in fact give accounts of future events in which they are some sort of agents; they do not justify these accounts by producing reasons why they should be believed but, if at all, by a different sort of reason; and these accounts are very often correct. This sort of account is called an expression of intention. It just does occur in human language. If the concept of ‘intention’ is one’s quarry, this enquiry has produced results which are indeed not false but rather mystifying. What is meant by ‘reason’ here is obviously a fruitful line of enquiry; but I prefer to consider this first in connexion with the notion of intentional action. 4. I therefore turn to a new line of enquiry: how do we tell someone’s intentions? or: what kind of true statements about people’s intentions can we certainly make, and how do we know that they are true? That is to say, is it possible to find types of statement of the form ‘A intends X ’ which we can say have a8 INTENTION § 4 great deal of certainty? Well, if you want to say at least some true things about a man’s intentions, you will have a strong chance of success if you mention what he actually did or is doing. For whatever else he may intend, or whatever may be his intentions in doing what he does, the greater number of the things which you would say straight off a man did or was doing, will be things he intends. I am referring to the sort of things you would say in a law court is you were a witness and were asked what a man was doing when you saw him. That is to say, in a very large number of cases, your selection from the immense variety of true statements about him which you might make would coincide with what he could say he was doing, perhaps even without reflection, certainly without adverting to observation. I am sitting in a chair writing, and anyone grown to the age of reason in the same world would know this as soon as he saw me, and in general it would be his first account of what I was doing; if this were something he arrived at with difficulty, and what he knew straight off were precisely how I was affecting the acoustic properties of the room {to mea very recondite piece of information), then communication between us would be rather severely impaired. In this way, with a view to shewing roughly the range of things to be discovered here, I can take a short cut here, and discuss neither how I am to select from the large number of true statements I could make about a person, nor what is involved in the existence of such a straight-off description as ‘ She is sitting in a chair and writing ’. (Not that this does not raise very inter- esting questions. See Philosophical Investigations, p. 59, (b): ‘1 see a picture: it shows a man leaning on a stick and going up a steep path. How come? Couldn’t it look like that if he were sliding downhill in that position? Perhaps a Martian would give that description.’ Et passin.) All I am here concerned to do is note the fact: we can simply say ‘Look at a man and say what he is doing’—i.e. say what would immediately come to your mind as a report to give someone who could not see him and who wanted to know what was to be seen in that place. In most cases what you will say is that the man himself knows; and again in most, though indeed in fewer, cases you will be reporting not merely what he is doing, but av intention of his—namely, to do thatINTENTION § 4-5 9 thing. What is more, if it is not an intention of his, this will for the most part be clear without asking him. Now it can easily seem that in general the question what a man’s intentions are is only authoritatively settled by him. One reason for this is that in general we are interested, not just in a man’s intention of doing what he does, but in his intention in doing it, and this can very often not be seen from seeing what he does. Another is that in general the question whether he intends to do what he does just does not arise (because the answer is obvious); while if it does arise, it is rather often settled by asking him. And, finally, a man can form an intention which he then does nothing to carry out, either because he is prevented or because he changes his mind: but the intention itself can be complete, although it remains a purely interior thing. All this conspires to make us think that if we want to know a man’s intentions it is into the contents of his mind, and only into these, that we must enquire; and hence, that if we wish to understand what intention is, we must be investigating something whose existence is purely in the sphere of the mind; and that although intention issues in actions, and the way this happens also presents interesting questions, still what physically takes place, i.e. what a man actually does, is the very last thing we need consider in our enquiry. Whereas I wish to say that it is the first. With this pteamble to go on to the second head of the division that I made in § x : intentional action, 5. What distinguishes actions which are intentional from those which are not? The answer that I shall suggest is that they are the actions to which a certain sense of the question ‘Why?’ is given application; the sense is of course that in which the answer, if positive, gives a reason for acting. But this is not a sufficient statement, because the question “ What is the relevant sense of the question ‘ Why?’ ” and “ What is meant by * reason for acting ’ ?” are one and the same. To see the difficulties here, consider the question, ‘ Why did you knock the cup off the table?’ answered by ‘I thought I saw a face at the window and it made me jump’. Now, so far 1 have only characterised reason for acting by opposing it to evidence for supposing the thing will take place—but the‘ reason’10 INTENTION § 5 here was not evidence that I was going to knock the cup off the table. Nor can we say that since it mentions something previous to the action, this will be a cause rather than a reason; for if you ask ‘ Why did you kill him?’ the answer ‘ He killed my father’ is surely a reason rather than a cause, but what it mentions is previous to the action. It is true that we don’t ordinarily think of a case like giving a sudden start when we speak of a reason for acting. ‘‘ Giving a sudden start ”, someone might say, “‘ is not acting in the sense suggested by the expression ‘reason for acting’. Hence, though indeed we readily say e.g. “What was the reason for your starting so violently?’ this is totally unlike ‘ What is your reason for excluding so-and-so from your will?’ or ‘ What is your reason for sending for a taxi?’” But what és the difference? In neither case is the answer a piece of evidence. Why is giving a start or gasp not an ‘action’, while sending for a taxi, or crossing the road, is one? The answer cannot be “ Because the answer to the question ‘why?’ may give a reason in the latter cases”, for the answer may ‘ give a reason ’ in the former cases too; and we cannot say “Ah, but not a reason for acting”’; we should be going round in circles. We need to find the difference between the two kinds of ‘ reason ’ without talking about ‘acting’; and if we do, perhaps we shall discover what is meant by ‘acting’ when it is said with this special emphasis. It will hardly be enlightening to say : in the case of the sudden start the ‘ reason’ is a cause; the topic of causality is in a state of too great confusion; all we know is that this is one of the places where we do use the word ‘ cause’, But we also know that this is a rather strange case of causality; the subject is able to give the cause of a thought or feeling or bodily movement in the same kind of way as he is able to state the place of his pain or the position of his limbs. Nor can we say: “—Well, the ‘ reason’ for a movement is a cause, and not a reason in the sense of ‘reason for acting’, when the movement is involuntary; it is a reason, as opposed to a cause, when the movement is voluntary and intentional.’ This is partly because in any case the object of the whole enquiry is really to delineate such concepts as the voluntary and the inten- tional, and partly because one can also give a ‘ reason’ which is only a ‘ cause ’ for what is voluntary and intentional. E.g. “ WhyINTENTION § 5-6 u are you walking up and down like that?” —“It’s that military band; it excites me”. Or “ What made you sign the document at last? ’—‘ The thought: ‘It is my duty’ kept hammering away in my mind until I said to myself ‘I can do no other’, and so signed.” It is very usual to hear that such-and-such are what we call “teasons for acting’ and that it is ‘rational’ or ‘what we call rational’ to act for reasons; but these remarks are usually more than half moralistic in meaning (and moralism, as Bradley remarked, is bad for thinking); and for the rest they leave our conceptual problems untouched, while pretending to give a quick account. In any case, this pretence is not even plausible, since such remarks contain no hint of what it is to act for reasons. 6. To clarify the proposed account, “ Intentional actions ate ones to which a certain sense of the question ‘ why?’ has application ”, I will both explain this sense and describe cases shewing the question not to have application. I will do the second job in two stages because what I say in the first stage of it will be of use in helping to explain the relevant sense of the question “why ?’. This question is refused application by the answer: ‘I was not aware I was doing that’. Such an answer is, not indeed a proof (since it may be a lie), but a claim, that the question ‘ Why did you do it (are you doing it)? ’, in the required sense, has no application. It cannot be plausibly given in every case; for example, if you saw a man sawing a plank and asked ‘ Why are you sawing that plank?’, and he replied ‘I didn’t know I was sawing a plank ’, you would have to cast about for what he might mean. Possibly he did not know the word ‘ plank’ before, and chooses this way of expressing that, But this question as to what he might mean need not arise at all—e.g. if you ask someone why he is standing on a hose-pipe and he says ‘I didn’t know I was’. Since a single action can have many different descriptions, e.g. ‘sawing a plank’, ‘sawing oak’, ‘sawing one of Smith’s planks ’, ‘ making a squeaky noise with the saw’, ‘making a great deal of sawdust’ and so on and so on, it is important to notice that a man may know that he is doing a thing under one description, and not under another. Not every case of this is a12 INTENTION § 7 case of his knowing that he is doing one part of what he is doing and not another (e.g. he knows he is sawing but not that he is making a squeaky noise with the saw). He may know that he is sawing a plank, but not that he is sawing an oak plank or Smith’s plank; but sawing an oak plank or Smith’s plank is not something else that he is doing besides just sawing the plank that he is sawing. For this reason, the statement that a man knows he is doing X does not imply the statement that, concerning anything which is also his doing X, he knows that he is doing that thing. So to say that a man knows he is doing X is to give a description of what he is doing wnder which he knows it. Thus, when a man says ‘ 1 was not aware that I was doing X ’, and so claims that the question ‘ Why?’ has no application, he cannot always be con- futed by the fact that he was attentive to those of his own pro- ceedings in which doing X consisted. 7. It is also clear that one is refusing application to the question ‘ Why?’ (in the relevant sense) if one says: ‘It was involuntary ’, even though the action was something of which one was aware. But I cannot use this as it stands, since the notion of the involuntary pretty obviously covers notions of exactly the type that a philosophical enquiry into intention ought to be elucidating. Here, digressing for a moment, I should like to reject a fashionable view of the terms ‘ voluntary’ and ‘ involuntary ’, which says they are appropriately used only when a person has done something untoward. If anyone is tempted by this view, he should consider that physiologists are interested in voluntary action, and that they are not giving a special technical sense to the word. If you ask them what their criterion is, they say that if they are dealing with a grown human they ask him, and if with an animal, they take movements in which the animal is e.g. ttying to get at something, say food. That is, the movement by which a dog cocked its ear at a sudden sound would not be used as an example. This does not mean that every description of action in which its voluntariness can be consideted is of interest to physio- logists. Of course they are only interested in bodily movements. We can also easily get confused by the fact that ‘ involuntary ’INTENTION § 7-8 13 neither means simply non-voluntary, nor has an unproblematic sense of its own. In fact this pair of concepts is altogether very confusing. Consider the four following examples of the involun- tary: (a) The peristaltic movement of the gut. (b).The odd sort of jerk or jump that one’s whole body sometimes gives when one is falling asleep. (¢) ‘He withdrew his hand in a movement of involuntary recoil.’ (@) ‘ The involuntary benefit I did him by a stroke 1 meant to harm him.’ Faced with examples like (c) and (d), how can I introduce ‘It was involuntary ’ as a form for rejecting the question ‘ Why?’ in the special sense which I want to elucidate—when the whole purpose of the elucidation is to give an account of the concept ‘intentional’? Obviously I cannot. There is however a class of the things that fall under the concept ‘ involuntary’, which it is possible to introduce without begging any questions or assuming that we understand notions of the very type I am professing to investigate. Example (+) belongs to this class, which is a class of bodily movements in a purely physical descrip- tion. Other examples are tics, reflex kicks from the knee, the lift of the arm from one’s side after one has leaned heavily with it up against a wall. 8. What is required is to describe this class without using any notions like ‘intended’ or ‘ willed’ or ‘voluntary’ and ‘involuntary ’. This can be done as follows: we first point out a particular class of things which are true of a man: namely the class of things which he knows without observation. E.g. a man usually knows the position of his limbs without observation. It is without observation, because nothing shews him the position of his limbs; it is not as if he were going by a tingle in his knee, which is the sign that it is bent and not straight. Where we can speak of separately describable sensations, having which is in some sense out ctiterion for saying something, then we can speak of observing that thing; but that is not generally so when we know the position of our limbs. Yet, without prompting, we can say it. I say however that we know it and not merely can say14 INTENTION § 8 it, because there is a possibility of being right or wrong: there is point in speaking of knowledge only where a contrast exists between ‘he Anows’ and ‘he (merely) *hinks he knows’. Thus, although there is a similarity between giving the position of one’s limbs and giving the place of one’s pain, I should wish to say that one ordinarily knows the position of one’s limbs, without observation, but not that being able to say where one feels pain is a case of something known. This is not because the place of pain (the feeling, not the damage) has to be accepted by someone I tell it to; for we can imagine circumstances in which it is not accepted. As e.g. if you say that your foot, not your hand, is very sore, but it is your hand you nurse, and you have no fear of or objection to an inconsiderate handling of your foot, and yet you point to your foot as the sore part: and so on, But here we should say that it was difficult to guess what you could mean, Whereas if someone says that his leg is bent when it is straight, this may be surprising but is not particularly obscure. He is wrong in what he says, but not unintelligible. So I call this sort of being able to say ‘ knowledge’ and not merely ‘ being able to say’. Now the class of things known without observation is of general interest to our enquiry because the class of intentional actions is a sub-class of it. I have already said that ‘I was not aware I was doing that’ is a rejection of the question ‘ Why?” whose sense we are trying to get at; here I can further say ‘1 knew I was doing that, but only because I observed it’ would also be a rejection of it. E.g. if one noticed that one operated the traffic lights in crossing a road. But the class of things known without observation is also of special interest in this part of our enquiry, because it makes it possible to describe the particular class of ‘ involuntary actions’ which I have so fat indicated just by giving a few examples: these are actions like the example (b) above, and our task is to mark off this class without begging the questions we are trying to answer. Bodily movements like the peristaltic movement of the gut are involuntary; but these do not interest us, for a man does not know his body is making them except by observation, inference, etc. The involuntary that interests us is restricted to the class of things known without observation; as you wouldINTENTION § 8-9 15 know even with your eyes shut that you had kicked when the doctor tapped your knee, but cannot identify a sensation by which you know it. If you speak of ‘ that sensation which one has in reflex kicking, when one’s knee is tapped’, this is not like e.g. ‘the sensation of going down in a lift’. For though one might say ‘I thought I had given a reflex kick, when I hadn’t moved’ one would never say e.g. ‘ Being told startling news gives one that sensation’: the sensation is not separable, as the sensation ‘ like going down in a lift’ is. Now among things known without observation must be included the causes of some movements. E.g. ‘Why did you jump back suddenly like that?’ ‘ The leap and loud bark of that crocodile made me jump’. (I am not saying I did not observe the crocodile barking; but I did not observe that making me jump.) But in examples like (b) the cause of motion is known only through observation. This class of involuntary actions, then, is the class of move- ments of the body, in a purely physical description, which are known without observation, and where there is no such thing as a cause known without observation. (Thus my jump back- wards at the leap and bark of the crocodile does not belong to this subclass of involuntary actions.) This subclass can be described without our first having clarified the concept ‘ involun- tary’. To assign a movement to it will be to reject the question “ Why?’ 9. I first, in considering expressions of intention, said that they wete predictions justified, if at all, by a reason for acting, as opposed to a reason for thinking them true. So I here already distinguished a sense of ‘ Why? ’, in which the answer mentions evidence. ‘There will be an eclipse tomorrow ’—‘ Why?’ ‘ Because. . . ’—and an answer is the reason for thinking so. Or “There was an ancient British camp here’. ‘ Why?’—and an answer is the reason for thinking so. But as we have already noted, an answer to the question ‘ Why ?’ which does not give reason for thinking the thing true does not therefore give a reason for acting. It may mention a cause, and this is far from what we want. However we noticed that there are contexts in which there is some difficulty in describing the distinction between a16 INTENTION § 9-10 cause and a reason. As e.g. when we give a ready answer to the question ‘ Why did you knock the cup off the table? ’—‘I saw such-and-such and it made me jump.’ Now we can see that the cases where this difficulty arises are just those where the cause itself gua cause (or perhaps one should rather say: the causation itself) is in the class of things known without observation. ro. I will call the type of cause in question a ‘mental cause’. Mental causes are possible, not only for actions (‘The martial music excites me, that is why I walk up and down’) but also for feelings and even thoughts. In considering actions, it is important to distinguish between mental causes and motives; in considering feelings, such as fear or anger, it is important to distinguish between mental causes and objects of feeling. To see this, con- sider the following cases: A child saw a bit of red stuff on a turn in a stairway and asked what it was. He thought his nurse told him it was a bit of Satan and felt dreadful fear of it. (No doubt she said it was a bit of satin.) What he was frightened of was the bit of stuff; the cause of his fright was his nurse’s remark. The object of fear may be the cause of fear, but, as Wittgenstein’ remarks, is not as such the cause of fear. (A hideous face appearing at the window would of course be both cause and object, and hence the two are easily confused), Or again, you may be angry af someone’s action, when what makes you angry is some reminder of it, or someone’s telling you of it. This sort of cause of a feeling or reaction may be reported by the person himself, as well as recognised by someone else, even when it is not the same as the object. Note that this sort of causality or sense of ‘ causality’ is so far from accommodating itself to Hume’s explanations that people who believe that Hume pretty well dealt with the topic of causality would entirely leave it out of their calculations; if their attention were drawn to it they might insist that the word ‘ cause’ was inappropriate or was quite equivocal. Or conceivably they might try to give a Humian account of the matter as far as concerned the outside observer’s recognition of the cause; but hardly for the patient’s. 1 Philosophical Investigations § 476.INTENTION § 11 17 11. Now one might think that when the question ‘ Why?’ is answered by giving the intention with which a person acts —for example by mentioning something future—this is also a case of a mental cause. For couldn’t it be recast in the form: ‘ Because I wanted . . .” or ‘Out of a desire that. ..’? If a feeling of desire to eat apples affects me and I get up and go to a cupboard where I think there are some, I might answer the question what led to this action by mentioning the desire as having made me . . etc, But it is not in all cases that ‘I did so and so in order to...’ can be backed up by ‘I fe/ta desire that... ’. I may e.g. simply hear a knock on the door and go downstairs to open it without experiencing any such desire. Or suppose I feel an upsurge of spite against someone and destroy a message he has received so that he shall miss an appointment. If I describe this by saying ‘I wanted to make him miss that appointment ’, this does not necessarily mean that I had the thought ‘If I do this, he will ...’ and that affected me with a desire of bringing it about, which led up to my doing so, This may have happened, but need not. It could be that all that happened was this: I read the message, had the thought ‘That unspeakable man!’ with feelings of hatred, tore the message up, and laughed. Then if the question ‘Why did you do that?’ is put by someone who makes it clear that he wants me to mention the mental causes— ¢.g. what went on in my mind and issued in the action—I should perhaps give this account; but normally the reply would be no such thing. That particular enquiry is not very often made. Nor do I wish to say that it always has an answer in cases where it can be made. One might shrug or say ‘I don’t know that there was any definite history of the kind you mean’, or ‘It merely occurred tome... .’ A ‘ mental cause ’, of course, need not be a mental event, i.e. a thought or feeling or image; it might be a knock on the door. But if it is not a mental event, it must be something perceived by the person affected—e.g. the knock on the door must be heard —so if in this sense anyone wishes to say it is always a mental event, I have no objection. A mental cause is what someone would describe if he were asked the specific question: what produced this action or thought or feeling on your part: what did you see or hear or feel, or what ideas or images cropped up in18 INTENTION § 11-12 your mind, and led up to it? I have isolated this notion of a mental cause because there is such a thing as this question with this sort of answer, and because I want to distinguish it from the ordinary senses of ‘ motive ’ and ‘ intention’, rather than because it is in itself of very great importance; for I believe that it is of very little. But it is important to have a clear idea of it, partly because @ very natural conception of ‘ motive’ is that it is what moves (the very word suggests that)—glossed as ‘.what causes’ a man’s actions etc. And ‘what causes’ them is perhaps then thought of as an event that brings the effect about—though how it does—i.e. whether it should be thought of as a kind of pushing in another medium, or in some other way—is of course completely obscure, 12. In philosophy a distinction has sometimes been drawn between our motives and our intentions in acting as if they were quite different things. A man’s intention is what he aims at or chooses; his motive is what determines the aim or choice; and I suppose that ‘determines’ must here be another word for * causes’, Popularly motive and intention are not treated as so distinct in meaning. E.g. we hear of ‘ the motive of gain’; some philo- sophers have wanted to say that such an expression must be elliptical; gain must be the intention, and desire of gain the motive. Asked for a motive, a man might say ‘1 wanted to. . .’, which would please such philosophers; or ‘I did it in order to...’, which would not; and yet the meaning of the two phrases is here identical. When a man’s motives are called good, this may be in no way distinct from calling his intentions good—e.g. he only wanted to make peace among his relations. Nevertheless there is even popularly a distincticn between the meaning of ‘ motive’ and the meaning of ‘intention’. E.g. if a man kills someone, he may be said to have done it out of love and pity, or to have done it out of hatred; these might indeed be cast in the forms ‘ to release him from this awful suffering ’, or ‘ to get tid of the swine’; but though these are forms of expression suggesting objectives, they are perhaps expressive of the spirit in which the man killed rather than descriptive of the end to which the killing was a means—a future state of affairs to beINTENTION § 12 19 produced by the killing. And this shows us part of the dis- tinction that there is between the popular senses of motive and intention. We should say: popularly, ‘ motive for an action ’ has a rather wider and more diverse application than ‘ intention with which the action was done ’. When a man says what his motive was, speaking popularly, and in a sense in which ‘ motive’ is not interchangeable with ‘intention ’, he is not giving a ‘ mental cause ’ in the sense that Thave given to that phrase.—-The fact that the mental causes were such-and-such may indeed help to make his claim intelligible. And further, though he may say that his motive was this or that one straight off and without lying—i.e. without saying what he knows or even half knows to be untrue—yet a consideration of various things, which may include the mental causes, might possibly lead both him and other people to judge that his declara- tion of his own motive was false. But it appears to me that the mental causes are seldom more than a very trivial item among the things that it would be reasonable to consider. As for the importance of considering the motives of an action, as opposed to considering the intention, I am very glad not to be writing either ethics or literary criticism, to which this question belongs. Motives may explain actions to us; but that is not to say that they ‘determine ’, in the sense of causing, actions. We do say: * His love of truth caused him to...’ and similar things, and no doubt such expressions help us to think that a motive must be what produces or brings about a choice. But this means rather ‘He did this in that he loved the truth’; it interprets his action, Someone who sees the confusions involved in radically distinguishing between motives and intentions and in defining motives, so distinct, as the determinants of choice, may easily be inclined to deny both that there is any such thing as mental causality, and that ‘ motive ’ means anything but intention. But both of these inclinations are mistaken. We shall create confusion if we do not notice (a) that phenomena deserving the name of mental causality exist, for we can make the question ‘ Why?’ into a request for the sort of answer that I considered under that head; ()) that mental causality is not restricted to choices or voluntary or intentional actions, but is of wider application; it is restricted to the wider field of things the agent knows about not20 INTENTION § 12-13 as an observer, so that it includes some involuntary actions; (©) that motives are not mental causes; and (¢) that there is an application for ‘ motive’ other than the applications of ‘ the intention with which a man acts’. 13. Revenge and gratitude are motives; if I kill a man as an act of revenge I may say I do it in order to be revenged, or that revenge is my object; but revenge is not some further thing obtained by killing him, it is rather that killing him is revenge. Asked why I kill him, I reply ‘ Because he killed my brother ’. We might compare this answer, which describes a concrete past event, to the answer describing a concrete future state of affairs which we sometimes get in statements of objectives. It is the same with gratitude, and remorse, and pity for something specific. ‘These motives differ from, say, love or curiosity or despair in just this way: something that Aas happened (or is at present happen- ing) is given as the ground of an action or abstention that is good or bad for the person (it may be oneself, as with remorse) at whom it is aimed. And if we wanted to explain e.g. revenge, we should say it was harming someone because he had done one some harm; we should not need to add to this a description of the feelings prompting the action or of the thought that had gone with it. Whereas saying that someone does something out of, say, friendship cannot be explained in any such way. I will call revenge and gratitude and remorse and pity backward-looking motives, and contrast them with motive-in-general. Motive-in-general is a very difficult topic which I do not want to discuss at any length. Consider the statement that one motive for my signing a petition was admiration for its promoter, X. Asked ‘ Why did you sign it?’ I might well say ‘ Well, for one thing, X, who is promoting it, did...’ and describe what he did in an admiring way. I might add ‘ Of course, I know that is not a ground for signing it, but I am sure it was one of the things that most influenced me’—which need nof mean: ‘I thought explicitly of this before signing ’. I say ‘ Consider this’ really with a view to saying ‘let us not consider it here’. It is too complicated. The account of motive popularised by Professor Ryle does not appear satisfactory. He recommends construing ‘he boastedINTENTION § 13-14 21 from vanity ’ as saying ‘ he boasted . . . and his doing so satisfies the law-like proposition that whenever he finds a chance of securing the admiration and envy of others, he does whatever he thinks will produce this admiration and envy ’1, This passage is rather curious and roundabout in expression; it seems to say, and I can’t understand it unless it implies, that a man could not be said to have boasted from vanity unless he always behaved vainly, or at least very very often did so. But this does not seem to be true. To give a motive (of the sort I have labelled ‘ motive-in- general ’, as opposed to backward-looking motives and intentions) is to say something like ‘ See the action in this light’. To explain one’s own actions by an account indicating a motive is to put them in a certain light. This sort of explanation is often elicited by the question ‘ Why?’ The question whether the light in which ‘one so puts one’s action is a true light is a notoriously difficult one. The motives admiration, curiosity, spite, friendship, fear, love of truth, despair and a host of others are either of this extremely complicated kind or are forward-looking or mixed. I call a motive forward-looking if it is an intention. For example, to say that someone did something for fear of . . . often comes to the same as saying he did so lest .. . or in order that .. . should not happen. 14. Leaving then, the topic of motive-in-general or ‘ inter- pretative’ motive, let us return to backward-looking motives. Why is it that in revenge and gratitude, pity and remorse, the past event (or present situation) is a reason for acting, not just a mental cause? Now the most striking thing about these four is the way in which good and evil ate involved in them. E.g. if Iam grateful to someone, it is because he has done me some good, or at least I think he has, and I cannot show gratitude by something that I intend to harm him, In remorse, I hate some good things for myself; I could not express remorse by getting myself plenty of enjoyments, or for something that I did not find bad. If I do something out of revenge which is in fact advantageous rather 1 The Concept of Mind, p. 89.22 INTENTION § 14 than harmful to my enemy, my action, in its description of being advantageous to him, is involuntary. These facts are the clue to our present problem. If an action has to be thought of by the agent as doing good or harm of some sort, and the thing in the past as good or bad, in order for the thing in the past to be the reason for the action, then this reason shews not a mental cause but a motive. This will come out in the agent’s elaborations on his answer to the question ‘ Why?’ It might seem that this is not the most important point, but that the important point is that a proposed action can be questioned, and the answer be a mention of something past. ‘I am going to kill him ’—‘ Why? ’—‘ He killed my father’. But if we say this, we show that we are forgetting the course of our enquiry; we do not yet know what a proposed action is; we can so far describe it only as an action predicted by the agent, either without his justifying his prediction at all, or with his mentioning in justifica- tion a reason for acting; and the meaning of the expression ‘reason for acting’ is precisely what we are at present trying to elucidate. Might one not predict mental causes and their effects? Or even their effects after the causes have occurred? E.g. ‘ This is going to make me angry’. Here it may be worth while to remark that it is a mistake to think one cannot choose whether to act from a motive. Plato saying to a slave ‘I should beat you if I were not angry ’ would be a case. Or a man might have a policy of never making remarks about a certain person because he could not speak about that man unenviously, or unadmiringly. We have now distinguished between a backward-looking motive and a mental cause, and found that, here at any rate, what the agent reports in answer to the question ‘Why?’ is a reason for acting if in treating it as a reason he conceives it as something good or bad, and his own action as doing good or harm. If you could e.g. show that either the action for which he has revenged himself, or that in which he has revenged himself, was quite harmless or was beneficial, he ceases to offer a reason, except prefaced by ‘I thought’. If it is a proposed revenge he either gives it up or changes his reason. No such discovery would affect an assertion of mental causality. Whether in general good and harm play an essential part in the concept of intention it still remains to find out, So far they have only been introducedINTENTION § 14-15 23 as making a clear difference between a backward-looking motive and a mental cause. When the question ‘ Why?’ about a present action is answered by a description of a future state of affairs, this is already distinguished from a mental cause just by being future. Hence there does not so far seem to be any need to say that intention as such is intention of good or of harm. 15. Now, however, let us consider this case: Why did you do it? Because he told me to. Is this a cause or a reason? It appears to depend very much on what the action was or what the circumstances were. And we should often refuse to make any distinction at all between some- thing’s being a reason, and its being a cause of the kind in ques- tion; for that was explained as what one is after if one asks the agent what led up to and issued in an action. But his being given a reason to act and accepting it might be such a thing. And how would one distinguish between cause and reason in such a case as having hung one’s hat on a peg because one’s host said ‘ Hang up your hat on that peg’? Nor, I think, would it be correct to say that this is a reason and not a mental cause because of the understanding of the words that went into accepting the sug- gestion. Here one would be attempting a contrast between this case and, say, turning round at hearing someone say Boo! But this case would not in fact be decisively on one side or the other; forced to choose between taking the noise as a reason and as a cause, one would probably decide by how sudden one’s reaction was. Further, there is no question of understanding a sentence in the following case: ‘ Why did you waggle your two fore-fingers by your temples? ’—‘ Because 4e was doing it’; but this is not particularly different from hanging one’s hat up because one’s host said ‘ Hang your hat up’. Roughly speaking—if one were forced to go on with the distinction—the more the action is described as a mere response, the more inclined one would be to the word ‘ cause’ ; while the more it is described as a response to something as saving a significance that is dwelt on by the agent in his account, or as a response surrounded with thoughts and questions, the more inclined one would be to use the word24 INTENTION § 15-16 “reason ’. But in very many cases the distinction would have no oint. P This, however, does not mean that it never has a point. The cases on which we first grounded the distinction might be called ‘ full-blown ’: that is to say, the case of e.g. revenge on the one hand, and of the thing that made one jump and knock a cup off a table on the other. Roughly speaking, it establishes something as a reason if one argues against it; not as when one says ‘ Noises should not make you jump like that: hadn’t you better see a doctor? ’ but in such a way as to link it up with motives and intentions: ‘ You did it because he told you to? But why do what he says?’ Answers like ‘ he has done a lot for me’, ‘he is my father’, ‘it would have been the worse for me if I hadn’t’ give the original answer a place among reasons; ‘reasons’ here of course conforms to our general explanation. ‘Thus the full-blown cases are the right ones to consider in order to see the distinction between reason and cause. But it is worth noticing that what is so commonly said, that reason and cause are everywhere sharply distinct notions, is not true. 16, It will be useful at this stage to summarize conclusions reached so far. Intentional actions are a sub-class of the events in a man’s history which are known to him sof just because he observes them. In this wider class is included one type of involuntary actions, which is marked off by the fact that mental causality is excluded from it; and mental causality is itself characterized by being known without observation. But inten- tional actions are not marked off just by being subject to mental causality, since there are involuntary actions from which mental causality is not excluded. Intentional actions, then, are the ones to which the question ‘ Why ?’ is given application, in a special sense which is so far explained as follows: the question has not that sense if the answer is evidence or states a cause, including a mental cause; positively, the answer may (2) simply mention past history, (4) give an interpretation of the action, or (¢) mention something future. In cases (b) and (c) the answer is already characterised as a reason for acting, i.e. as an answer to the question ‘ Why?’ in the requisite sense; and in case (a) it is an answer to that question if the ideas of good or harm areINTENTION § 16-17 25 involved in its meaning as an answer; or again if further enquiry elicits that it is connected with ‘interpretative’ motive, or intention with which. 17. I can now complete my account of when our question ‘Why?’ is shewnnottoapply. Wesaw that it was refused applica- tion if the agent’s answer was ‘ I was not aware I was doing that’ and also if the answer implied ‘I observed that I was doing that’. There was a third circumstance as well, in which the question would have no application: namely that in which the action is somehow characterised as one in which there is no room for what I called mental causality. This would come out if for example the only way in which a question as to cause was dealt with was to speculate about it, or to give reasons why such and such should be regarded as the cause. E.g. if one said ‘ What made you jump like that?’ when someone had just jerked with the spasm which one sometimes gets as one is dropping off to sleep, he would brush aside the question or say ‘It was involuntary— you know, the way one does sometimes jump like that’; now a mark of the rejection of that particular question ‘ What made you? ’ is that one says things like ‘I don’t know if anyone knows the cause ’ or ‘ Isn’t it something to do with electrical discharges ?” and that this is the only sense that one gives to ‘ cause’ here. Now of course a possible answer to the question ‘ Why?’ is one like ‘ I just thought I would ’ or ‘ It was an impulse’ or ‘ For no particular reason’ or ‘It was an idle action—I was just doodling ’. I do not call an answer of this sort a rejection of the question. The question is not refused application because the answet to it says that there is #0 reason, any more than the question how much money I have in my pocket is refused application by the answer ‘None’. An answer of rather peculiar interest is: ‘ I don’t know why I did it’. This can have a sense in which it does not mean that perhaps there is a causal explanation that one does not know. It goes with ‘I found myself doing it’, ‘I heard myself say...’, but is appropriate to actions in which some special reason seems to be demanded, and one has none. It suggests surprise at one’s own actions; but that is not a sufficient condition for saying it, since one can be a bit surprised without wanting to use such an26 INTENTION § 17-18 expression—if one has uttered a witticism of a sort that is not one’s usual style, for example. ‘I don’t know why I did it’ perhaps is rather often said by people caught in trivial crimes, where however it tends to go with ‘it was an impulse’. I disregard this use of it, as it has become too much of a set form; and it does not in fact seem strange to be attracted to commit trivial crimes without any need (if there is anything strange, it is only in not being deterred by obvious considerations, not in thinking of doing such a thing). Sometimes one may say: ‘ Now why did I do that? —when one has discovered that, e.g. one has just put something in a rather odd place. But ‘I don’t know why I did it’ may be said by someone who does not discover that he did it; he is quite aware as he does it; but he comes out with this expression as if to say ‘ It is the sort of action in which a reason seems requisite’. As if there were a reason, if only he knew it; but of course that is not the case in the relevant sense; even if psychoanalysis persuades him to accept something as his reason, or he finds a reason in a divine or diabolical plan or inspiration, or a causal explanation in his having been previously hypnotised. I myself have never wished to use these words in this way, but that does not make me suppose them to be senseless. They are a curious intermediary case: the question ‘ Why? ’ has and yet has not application; it has application in the sense that it is admitted as an appropriate question; it lacks it in the sense that the answer is that there is 20 answer. I shall later be discussing the difference between the intentional and the voluntary; and once that distinction is made we shall be able to say: an action of this sort is voluntary, rather than intentional. And we shall see (§25) that there are other more ordinary cases where the question ‘Why?’ is not made out to be inapplicable, and yet is not granted application. 18. Answers like ‘No particular reason’; ‘I just thought I would’, and so on are often quite intelligible; sometimes strange; and sometimes unintelligible. That is to say, if someone hunted out all the green books in his house and spread them out carefully on the roof, and gave one of these answers to the question ‘Why?’ his words would be unintelligible unless asINTENTION § 18 27 joking and mystification, They would be unintelligible, not because one did not known what shey meant, but because one could not make out what the man meant by saying them here. These different sorts of unintelligibility are worth dwelling on briefly. Wittgenstein said that when we call something senseless it is not as it were its sense that is senseless, but a form of words is being excluded from the language. E.g. ‘ Perhaps congenitally blind people have visual images ’. But the argument for ‘ exclud- ing this form of words from the language’ is apparently an argument that ‘ its sense is senseless’. The argument goes some- thing like this: What does it mean ?—That they have what I have when I have a visual image. And what have 1?—Something like this.—Here Wittgenstein would go on to argue against private ostensive definition. The next move is to see what is the language- game played with ‘ having a visual image’ or ‘ seeing in one’s mind’s eye’. It isn’t just saying these things—nor can it be explained as saying them with the right reference (this has been shewn by the argument against private ostensive definition), The conclusion is that the language-game with ‘ seeing ’ is a necessary part of the language-game with ‘seeing in the mind’s eye’; or rather, that a language-game can only be identified as that latter one if the former language-game too is played with the words used. The result of the argument, if it is successful, is that we no longer want to say ‘ Pethaps blind men . . . etc.’ Hence Wittgenstein’s talk of ‘therapies’. The ‘exclusion from the language’ is done not by legislation but by persuasion. The “sense that is senseless ’ is the ¢ype of sense that our expressions suggest; the suggestion arises from a ‘false assimilation of games’, But our present case is entirely different. If we say ‘ it does not make sense for this man to say he did this for no particular reason’ we are not ‘excluding a form of words fromthe language’ ; we are saying ‘ we cannot understand such a man’. (Wittgen- stein seems to have moved from an interest in the first sort of ‘not making sense’ to the second as Philosophical Investigations developed.) Similarly, ‘I was not aware that I was doing so’ is sometimes intelligible, sometimes strange, and in some cases would be unintelligible.28 INTENTION § 18-19 It would take considerable skill to use language with frequent unintelligibility of this sort; it would be as difficult as to train oneself in the smooth production of long unrehearsed word- salads, The answers to the question ‘ Why?’ which give it an appli- cation are, then, more extensive in range than the answers which give reasons for acting. This question ‘Why?’ can now be defined as the question expecting an answer in this range. And with this we have roughly outlined the area of intentional actions. 19. We do not add anything attaching to the action at the time it is done by describing it as intentional. To call it inten- tional is to assign it to the class of intentional actions and so to indicate that we should consider the question ‘ Why?’ relevant to it in the sense that I have described. For the moment, I will not ask by this question ‘ Why?’ should be applicable to some events and not to others. That an action is not called ‘intentional’ in virtue of any extra feature which exists when it is performed, is clear from the following: Let us suppose that there is such a feature, and let us call it ‘I’. Now the intentional character of the action cannot be asserted without giving the description under which it is inten- tional, since the same action can be intentional under one descrip- tion and unintentional under another. It is however something actually done that is intentional, if there is an intentional action at all. A man no doubt contracts certain muscles in picking up a hammer; but it would generally be false to call his contraction of muscles the intentional act that he performed. This does not mean that his contraction of muscles was unintentional. Let us call it ‘ preintentional’. Are we to say that I, which is supposed to be the feature in virtue of which what he does is an intentional action, is something which accompanies a preintentional action, or movement of his body? If so, then the preintentional move- ment + I guarantees that an intentional action is performed: but which one? Clearly our symbol ‘1’ must be interpreted as a description, or as having an internal relation to a description, of an action, But nothing about the man considered by himself in the moment of contracting his muscles, and nothing in the contraction of the muscles, can possibly determine the contentINTENTION § 19 29 of that description; which therefore may be agy one, if we are merely considering what can be determined about the man by himself in the moment. Then it is a mere happy accident that an I relevant to the wider context and further consequences ever accompanies the preintentional movements in which a man performs a given intentional action, What makes it ¢rwe that the man’s movement is one by which he performs such and such an action will have absolutely no bearing on the I that occurs, unless we suppose a mechanism by which an I appropriate to the situation is able to occur because of the man’s knowledge of the situation—he guesses e.g. that his muscular contractions will result in his grasping the hammer and so the right J occurs, But that cannot very well be, since a maf may very likely not be so much as aware of his preintentional acts. Besides, we surely want I to have some effect on what happens. Does he then notice that I is followed often enough by its description’s coming true, and so summon up J? But that turns the summoning up of I into an intentional action itself, for which we shall have to look for a second I. Thus the assumption that some feature of the moment of acting constitutes actions as intentional leads us into inextricable confusions, and we must give it up. And in describing intentional actions as such, it will be a mistake to look for ¢be fundamental description of what occurs— such as the movements of muscles or molecules—and then think of intention as something, perhaps very complicated, which qualifies this. The only events to consider are intentional actions themselves, and to call an action intentional is to say it is inten- tional under some description that we give (or could give) of it. The question does not normally arise whether a man’s proceedings are intentional; hence it is often ‘ odd’ to call them so. E.g. if I saw a man, who was walking along the pavement, turn towards the roadway, look up and down, and then walk across the road when it was safe for him to do so, it would not be usual for me to say that he crossed the road intentionally. But it would be wrong to infer from this that we ought not to give such an action as a typical example of intentional action. It would however be equally a mistake to say: since this man’s crossing the road is an example of an intentional action, let us consider this action by itself, and let us try to find in the action, or in the30 Inrention § 19-20 man himself at the moment of acting, the characteristic which makes the action intentional, 20. Would intentional actions still have the characteristic ‘intentional’, if there were no such thing as expression of intention for the future, or as further intention in acting? Le. is ‘intentional ’ a characteristic of the actions that have it, which is formally independent of those other occurrences of the concept of intention? To test this, I will make two rather curious suppositions: (2) Suppose that ‘intention’ only occurted as it occurs in ‘intentional action’, and (b) suppose that the only answer to the question ‘ Why are you X-ing?’, granted that the question is not refused application, were ‘ I just am, that’s all ’. (a) This supposition, we might say, carries a suggestion that ‘intentional action’ means as it were ‘intentious action’. That is to say, that an action’s being intentional is rather like a facial expression’s being sad. It would not, of course, be without consequences; the applicability of the question ‘Why?’ would remain. But of course the diagnosis of a melancholy expression has consequences too, and in a similar fashion: ‘ What are you sad about?’ may be asked, and may receive either a positive answer or the answer ‘ Nothing’; which in turn may mean that one is sad, but not about anything, or that one is not sad. Intention, on this interpretation of our supposition (a), has become a style- characteristic of observable human Proceedings, with which is associated the question ‘Why?’ This however is quite contrary to the concept of intention, because the very same human proceedings may be questioned under the desctiption *X’ ( Why are you X-ing?’) and under the description ‘ Y” (‘Why are you Y-ing ?’), and the first question be admitted appli- cation while the second is refused it, so that the very same pro- ceedings are intentional under one description and unintentional under another. It is clear that a concept for which this does not hold is not a concept of intention. If we try to make it retain this characteristic by suggesting that the proceedings-in-a-given- description are what bears the stamp of intention, we shall have to suppose that a man who, having been seen clearly, is asked ‘Why are you X-ing?’ can never profess unawareness that he was X-ing, except on pain of being a liar if in fact he was X-ing.INTENTION § 20 3 And this supposition would involve such radical changes that it becomes impossible to say whether we could still see a place for the concept of intention at all, or diagnose the question ‘ Why?’ as having in part the same sense as our question ‘Why?’ We should merely have 4 question to which possible answers were ‘I just was, that’s all’, “I wasn’t’, mention of something in the past like ‘ He killed my father ’, or a sentimental characterisation of the action. For of course answers giving further intentions are excluded ex Aypothesi, since if they were included the possible substitutions for ‘X’ in ‘A intends X ’ would include more than the supposition allows. We can however try to give a different interpretation to supposition (a). Intention still only occurs in present action. That is, there is still no such thing as the further intention with which a man does what he does; and no such thing as intention for the future. Intention however is not a style that marks an action, or an action-in-a-desctiption; for it is possible for a man to think he is doing one thing when he is not doing that thing but another. Thus he can say that he did not know he was doing something, when asked why he did it. We must not however be too sweeping in excluding intention with which a man does what he does; for we must presumably allow the further intention with which he is doing X, say Y, so long as it is reasonable to say that he is doing Y in, and at the same timeas, doing X: e.g. a man can be said to hold a glass to his lips with (at least) the intention of drinking, if he és drinking when he holds it to his lips. What is excluded from the supposition is a further intention Y such that we could object that he is not yet doing Y but only doing X with a view to doing Y, as when a man takes his gun down with a view to shooting rabbits. In this case intentional actions will be marked out as those of which a man has non-observational knowledge, and for which there is a question whose answers fall in the range (a) ‘ I just did’ (4) backward looking motive, and (¢) sentimental characterisation. (a) is of no interest; so our question must be: is motive enough to constitute intentional actions as a special kind? One can argue against motives—i.e. criticise a man for having acted on such a motive—but a great deal of the point of doing so will be gone if we imagine the expression of intention for the future to be32 INTENTION § 20 absent, as it is on our hypothesis. That is why on this hypothesis giving an interpretative motive tutns into sentimental character- isation. It seems reasonable to say that if the only occurence of intention were as the intention of doing whatever one is doing, the notion of intentional action itself would be a very thin one; it is not clear why it should be marked off as a special class among all those of a man’s actions and movements which are known to him without observation, any more than we mark off movements that are expressions of emotion as a distinct and important class of happenings. (0) By the second supposition, though intention is supposed to occur both in present intentional action and in expressions of intention for the future, the only answer to the question ‘Why?’ is ‘I just am’. (Naturally ‘further intention with which’ a man acts is excluded by this hypothesis, for it is expressed in a type of answer to the question ‘ Why?’ which is excluded.) If this were so, then there would be no special sense of the question ‘Why?’ and no distinct concept of intentional action at all. That is to say, it would no longer be possible to differ- entiate within the class of acts known without observation. For a question whose only answer is a statement that one is doing the thing cannot be identified with our question ‘ Why?’, even if the word for it is one used in requests for evidence and enquiries into causality. Thus on the present hypothesis there would be no distinction between such things as starts and gasps and, quite generally, voluntary actions. It is natural to think that the difference is one that we can see in the things themselves. To be sure, all these things will be alike as regards the way we know that they are taking place— but isn’t there an introspectively discernible difference between an involuntary gasp and a voluntary intake of breath?—Well, one may be more sudden than the other. Still, I can voluntarily do it quite quickly, so that is not the difference—Should we say the voluntary kind can be foreseen, predicted ?—But the involun- tary kind might be predicted—But the basis of the prediction won’t be the samel—To be sure; but the difference between bases of prediction is just the difference between evidence and a reason for acting. Though ‘I just did, that’s all’ is an answer to the question ‘ Why did you do it?’, it does not give a reason,INTENTION § 20-21 33 and the parallel answer for the future ‘I’m just going to, that’s all’ does not give a basis for the prediction, it merely repeats it. Let us try another method of differentiation. A voluntary action can be commanded. If someone says ‘ Tremble’ and I tremble I am not obeying him—even if I tremble because he said it ina terrible voice, To play it as obedience would be a kind of sophisticated joke (characteristic of the Marx Brothers) which might be called ‘ playing language-games wrong ’. Now we can suppose that human actions, which are not distinguished by the way their agent knows them, are or are not subject to command. If they are subject to command they can be distinguished as a separate class; but the distinction seems to be an idle one, just made for its own sake. Don’t say ‘ But the distinction relates to an obviously sseful feature of certain actions, namely that one can get a person to perform them by commanding him’; for “ usefulness ’ is not a concept we can suppose retained if we have done away with ‘ purpose’. Still, some actions are subject to command, so has not the question ‘ Why?’ a place? ‘ Why did you do it?’ ‘ Because you told me to’. That is an answer, and if some actions were subject to command, the people concerned might have the question whether something was done in obedience to a command or not. But the question ‘Why?’ may here simply be rendered by “Commanded or not commanded?’ This will be a form of the televant question ‘Why?’ if it is open to the speaker to say “You commanded it, and I did it, but not commanded’. ‘1 didn’t do it because you told me to’.) But what would be the point of this, taken by itself—i.e. in isolation from a person’s reasons and aims? For these are excluded; the question ‘ Why?’ is not supposed to have any such application in the case we are imagining. The expression might be only a form of rudeness. Thus the occurrence of other answers to the question ‘ Why?’ besides ones like ‘1 just did ’, is essential to the existence of the concept of an intention or voluntary action. 21, Ancient and medieval philosophers—or some of them at any rate—regarded it as evident, demonstrable, that human beings must always act with some end in view, and even with some one end in view. The argument for this strikes us as rather34 INTENTION § 21-22 strange. Can’t a man just do what he does, a great deal of the time? He may or may not have a reason or a purpose; and if he has a reason or purpose, it in turn may just be what he happens to want; why demand a reason or purpose for i#? and why must we at last arrive at some one purpose that has an intrinsic finality about it? The old arguments were designed to show that the chain could not go on for ever; they pass us by, because we are not inclined to think it must even begin; and it can surely stop where it stops, no need for it to stop at a purpose that looks intrinsically final, one and the same for all actions. In fact there appears to be an illicit transition in Aristotle, from ‘all chains must stop somewhere’ to ‘ there is somewhere where all chains must stop.’ But now we can see why some chain must at any rate begin. As we have seen, this does not mean that an action cannot be called voluntary or intentional unless the agent has an end in view; it means that the concept of voluntary or intentional action would not exist, if the question ‘ Why?’, with answers that give reasons for acting, did not. Given that it does exist, the cases where the answer is ‘For no patticular reason’, etc. can occur; but their interest is slight, and it must not be supposed that because they can occur that answer would everywhere be intelligible, or that it could be the only answer ever given. 22. In all this discussion, when I have spoken of the answer to the question ‘ Why?’ as mentioning an n/ention, the intention in question has been of course the intention with which a man does what he does. We must now turn to the closer examination of this. So far I have merely said ‘If the answer to the question ‘Why?’ is a simple mention of something future, then it expresses the intention ’, and the question of cause versus reason, which has plagued us in relation to answers mentioning the past, simply does not arise here. I do not of course mean to say that every answer which tells you with what intention a man is doing whatever it is he is doing is a description of some future state of affairs; but if a description of some future state of affairs makes sense just by itself as an answer to the question, then it is an expression of intention. But there are other expressions of the intention with which a man is doing something: for example, aINTENTION § 22 35 wider description of what he is doing. For example, someone comes into a room, sees me lying on a bed and asks ‘ What are you doing?’ The answer ‘lying on a bed’ would be received with just irritation; an answer like ‘Resting’ or ‘Doing Yoga’, which would be a description of what I am doing in lying on my bed, would be an expression of intention. For the moment, however, let me concentrate on the simple future answet. I have said an answer describing something future ‘just by itself’ is an expression of the intention with which a person acts. That qualification is necessary can be seen in the following instance ‘ Why are you setting up a camera on this pavement?’ ‘ Because Marilyn Monroe is going to pass by’. That is just a statement of something future, but by no means expresses that I am setting up a camera with the intention that Marilyn Monroe shall pass by. On the other hand, if you say ‘Why are you crossing the road’ and I reply ‘I am going to look in that shop window ’, this expresses the intention with which I cross the road. Now what is the difference? Consider this case: ‘Why ate you crossing the road?’?— ‘ Because there will be an eclipse in July ’. This answer, as things are, needs filling in. And no kind of filling in that we shall accept without objection would give that answer the role of a statement of intention. (I mean e.g. something like ‘For six months before the eclipse that shop window is having a lot of explanatory diagrams and models on display ’), But some savage might well do something in order to procure an eclipse; and I suppose the answer ‘Eclipse in July’ could perhaps have been understood as an expression of intention by the Dublin crowd who once assembled to watch an eclipse, and dispersed when Dean Swift sent down his butler with a message to say that by the Dean’s orders the eclipse was off. That is to say: the future state of affairs mentioned must be such that we can understand the agent’s thinking it will or may be brought about by the action about which he is being questioned. But does this mean that people must have notions of cause and effect in order to have intentions in acting? Consider the question ‘ Why are you going upstairs?’ answered by ‘ To get my camera’. My going upstairs is not a cause ftom which anyone could deduce the effect that I get my camera. And yet isn’t it a36 INTENTION § 22 fature state of affairs which is going to be brought about by my going upstairs? But who can say that it is going to be brought about? Only I myself, in this case. It is not that going upstairs usually produces the fetching of cameras, even if there is a camera upstairs—unless indeed the context includes an order given me, ‘Fetch your camera ’, or my own statement ‘I am going to get my camera’. On the other hand, if someone says ‘ But your camera is in the cellar ’, and I say ‘I know, but I am still going upstairs to get it? my saying so becomes mysterious; at least, there is a gap to fill up. Perhaps we think of a lift which I can work from the top of the house to bring the camera up from the bottom. But if I say: ‘No, I quite agree, there is no way for a person at the top of the house to get the camera; but still I am going upstairs to get it’ I begin to be unintelligible. In order to make sense of *I do P with a view to Q’, we must see how the future state of affairs Q is supposed to be a possible later stage in proceedings of which the action P is an earlier stage. It is true that, on the one hand, cases of scientific knowledge, and on the other hand cases of magical rites, or of a vague idea of great power and authority like Dean Swift’s, all come under this very vague and general formula. .A// that I have said, in effect, is ‘It is not the case that a description of any future state of affairs can be an answer to this question about a present action’, A man’s intention in acting is not so private and interior a thing that he has absolute authority in saying what it is—as he has absolute authority in saying what he dreamt. (If what a man says he dreamed does not make sense, that doesn’t mean that his saying he dreamed it does not make sense.) I shall not try to elaborate my vague and general formula, that we must have an idea how a state of affairs Q is a stage in proceedings in which the action P is an earlier stage, if we are to be able to say that we do P so that Q. For of course it is not necessary to exercise these general notions in order to say ‘I do P so that Q’. All that it is necessary to understand is that to say, in one form or another: ‘ But Q won’t happen, even if you do P’, or ‘but it will happen whether you do P or not’ is, in some way, to contradict the intention.INTENTION § 23 37 23. Let us ask: is there any description which is she descrip- tion of an intentional action, given that an intentional action occurs? And let us consider a concrete situation. A man is pumping water into the cistern which supplies the drinking water of a house. Someone has found a way of systematically contaminating the source with a deadly cumulative poison whose effects are unnoticeable until they can no longer be cured. The house is regularly inhabited by a small group of party chiefs, with their immediate families, who are in control of a great state; they are engaged in exterminating the Jews and perhaps plan a world war——The man who contaminated the source has calculated that if these people are destroyed some good men will get into power who will govern well, or even institute the Kingdom of Heaven on earth and secure a good life for all the people; and he has revealed the calculation, together with the fact about the poison, to the man who is pumping. The death of the inhabitants of the house will, of course, have all sorts of other effects; e.g., that a number of people unknown to these men will receive legacies, about which they know nothing. This man’s arm is going up and down, up and down. Certain muscles, with Latin names which doctors know, are contracting and relaxing. Certain substances are getting generated in some nerve fibres—substances whose generation in the course of voluntary movement interests physiologists. The moving arm is casting a shadow on a rockery where at one place and from one position it produces a curious effect as if a face were looking out of the rockery. Further, the pump makes a series of clicking noises, which are in fact beating out a noticeable rhythm. Now we ask: What is this man doing? What is the description of his action? First, of course, aay description of what is going on, with him as subject, which is in fact true, E.g. he is earning wages, he is supporting a family, he is wearing away his shoe-soles, he is making a disturbance of the air. He is sweating, he is generating those substances in his nerve fibres. If in fact good government, or the Kingdom of Heaven on earth and a good life for everyone, comes about by the labours of the good men who get into power because the party chiefs die, then he will have been helping to produce this state of affairs. However, our enquiries into the38 INTENTION § 23 question ‘ Why?’ enable us to narrow down our consideration of descriptions of what he is doing to a range covering all and only his intentional actions. ‘He is X-ing’ is a description of an intentional action if (2) it is true and (b) there is such a thing as an answer in the range I have defined to the question ‘ Why are you X-ing?’ That is to say, the description in ‘ Why are you contracting those muscles?’ is ruled out if the on/y sort of answer to the question ‘ Why?’ displays that the man’s knowledge, if any, that he was contracting those muscles is an inference from his knowledge of anatomy, And the description in the question ‘ Why are you generating those substances in your nerve fibres?’ will in fact always be ruled out on these lines unless we suppose that the man has a plan of producing these substances (if it were possible, we might suppose he wanted to collect some) and so moves his arm vigorously to generate them. But the descriptions in the questions ‘ Why are you making that face come and go in the rockery ? ’, ‘ Why are you beating out that curious rhythm?’ will be revealed as descriptions of intentional actions or not by different styles of answer, of which one would contain something signifying that the man zofices that he does that, while the other would be in the range we have defined. But there are a large number of X’s, in the imagined case, for which we can readily suppose that the answer to the question ‘ Why ate you X-ing?’ falls within the range. E.g. ‘ Why are you moving your arm up and down? ’—‘I’m pumping’. ‘ Why are you pumping ?’—‘I’m pumping the water-supply for the house’, ‘ Why ate you beating out that curious rhythm? ’,—‘ Oh, I found out how to do it, as the pump does click anyway, and I do it just for fun’. ‘Why are you pumping the water? ’—‘ Because it’s needed up at the house’ and (sotto voce) ‘To polish that lot off’. ‘Why are you poisoning these people ?’—*‘ If we can get rid of them, the other lot will get in and...’ Now there is a break in the series of answers that one may get to such a question. Let the answer contain a further description Y, then sometimes it is correct to say not merely: the man is X-ing, but also: ‘ the man is Y-ing ’"—if that is, nothing falsifying the statement ‘He is Y-ing’ can be observed. E.g. ‘ Why are you pumping ?’—‘ To replenish the water supply ’. If this was the answer, then we can say ‘He és replenishing the water-INTENTION § 23 39 supply ’; unless indeed, he is not. This will appear a tautologous pronouncement; but there és more to it. For if after his saying ‘To replenish the water-supply ’ we can say ‘ He is replenishing the water-supply ’, then this would, in ordinary circumstances, of itself be enough to characterise that as an intentional action. (The qualification is necessary because an intended effect just occasion- ally comes about by accident). Now that is to say, as we have already determined, that the same question ‘ Why?’ will have application to this action in its turn, This is not an empty conclusion: it means that someone who, having so answered ‘ To replenish the water-supply ’, is asked ‘ Why are you replenishing the water-supply ? ’, must not say e.g. ‘ Oh, I didn’t know I was doing that’, or refuse any but a causal sense of the question. Or rather, that if he does, this makes nonsense of his answers. A man can be doing something which he nevertheless does not do, if it is some process or enterprise which it takes time to complete and of which therefore, if it is cut short at any time, we may say that he was doing it, but did not do it. This point however, is in no way peculiar to intentional action; for we can say that something was falling over but did not fall (since some- thing stopped it). Therefore we do not appeal to the presence of intention to justify the description ‘ He is Y-ing ’; though in some cases his own statement that he is Y-ing may, at a certain stage of the proceedings, be needed for anybody else to be able to say he is Y-ing, since not enough has gone on for that to be evident; as when we see a man doing things with an array of wires and plugs and so on. Sometimes, jokingly, we are pleased to say of a man ‘ He is doing such-and-such’ when he manifestly is not. E.g. ‘He is replenishing the water-supply’, when this is not happening because, as we can see but he cannot, the water is pouring out of a hole in a pipe on the way to the cistern. And in the same way we may speak of some rather doubtful or remote objective, e.g. ‘ He is proving Fermat’s last theorem’; or again one might say of a madman ‘He is leading his victorious armies ’. It is easy, however, to exclude these cases from consideration and point out the break between cases where we can say ‘He is Y-ing’, when he has mentioned Y in answer to the question ‘Why are you X-ing?’, and ones where we say rather ‘ He is40 INTENTION § 23 going to Y’. I do not think it is a quite sharp break. E.g. is there much to choose between ‘ She is making tea’ and ‘ She is putting on the kettle in order to make tea ’—i.e. ‘ She is going to make tea’? Obviously not. And hence the common use of the present to describe a future action which is by no means just a later stage in activity which has a name as a single whole. E.g. ‘ 1am seeing my dentist ’, ‘ He is demonstrating in Trafalgar Square’ (either might be said when someone is at the moment e.g. travelling in a train). But the less normal it would be to take the achievement of the objective as a matter of course, the more the objective gets expressed on/y by ‘in order to’. E.g. ‘I am going to London in order to make my uncle change his will ’; not ‘1am making my uncle change is will’. To a certain extent the three divisions of the subject made in §1, are simply equivalent. That is to say, where the answers *I am going to fetch my camera’, ‘Iam fetching my camera’ and ‘ in order to fetch my camera’ ate interchangeable as answers to the question ‘ Why?’ asked when I go upstairs. Now if all this holds, what are we to say about all these many descriptions of an intentional action? Are we to say that there are as many distinct actions as we can generate distinct descriptions, with X as our starting point? I mean: We say “Why are you X-ing?’ and get the answer ‘To Y’, or ‘I’m Y-ing ’, Y being such that we can say ‘ he’s Y-ing ’; and then we can ask ‘Why are you Y-ing?’ and perhaps get the answer *To Z’, and can still say ‘He’s Z-ing’. E.g. ‘ Why are you moving your arm up and down?’ ‘To operate the pump’, and he is operating the pump. ‘Why are you pumping?’ ‘To replenish the water-supply’ and he is replenishing the water- supply; ‘Why are you replenishing the water-supply?’ ‘To poison the inhabitants’ and he is poisoning the inhabitants, for they are getting poisoned. And here comes the break; for though in the case we have described there is probably a further answer, other than ‘just for fun’, all the same this further description (e.g, to save the Jews, to put in the good men, to get the Kingdom of Heaven on earth) is not such that we can now say: he is saving the Jews, he is getting the Kingdom of Heaven, he is putting in the good ones. So let us stop here and say: are there four actions here, because we have found four distinct descriptions satisfyingINTENTION § 23-25 4r our conditions, namely moving his arm up and down, operating the pump, replenishing the water supply, and poisoning the inhabitants ? 24. Before trying to answer this, however, we must raise some difficulties. For someone might raise the objection that pumping can hardly be an act of poisoning. It is of course, as the lawyers would say, an act of laying poison, and one might try to reply by saying the man poisons the inhabitants if he lays poison and they get poisoned. But after all we said it was a cumulative poison; this means that no single act of laying the poison is by itself an act of poisoning; besides, didn’t the other man ‘lay’ the poison? Suppose we ask ‘When did our man poison them?’ One might answer: all the time they got poisoned. But in that case one might say ‘ His poisoning them was not an action; for he was perhaps doing nothing relevant at any of the times they were drinking the poison.’ Is the question ‘ When exactly did he poison them?’, to be answered by specifying all the numerous times when he laid the poison? But none of them by itself could be called poisoning them; so how can we call the man’s present pumping an intentional act of poisoning? Or must we draw the conclusion that he at no time poisoned them, since he was not engaged in poisoning at the times at which they were being poisoned? We cannot say that since at some time he poisoned them, there must be actions which we can label ‘ poisoning them’, and in which we can find what it was to poison them. For in the acts of pumping poisoned water nothing in particular is necessarily going on that might not equally well have been going on if the acts had been acts of pumping non- poisonous water. Even if you imagine that pictures of the inhabitants lying dead occur in the man’s head, and please hin— such pictures could also occur in the head of a man who was not poisoning them, and need not occur inthis man. The difference appears to be one of circumstances, not of anything that is going on then, 25. A further difficulty however arises from the fact that the man’s intention might not be to poison them but only to earn his pay. That is to say, if he is being improbably confidential42 INTENTION § 25 and is asked ‘ Why did you replenish the house water-supply with poisoned water?’, his reply is, not ‘To polish them off’, but ‘I didn’t care about that, I wanted my pay and just did my usual job’. In that case, although he knows concerning an intentional act of his—for it, namely replenishing the house water- supply, is intentional by our criteria—that it is a/so an act of replenishing the house water-supply with poisoned water, it would be incorrect, by our criteria, to say that his act of replenish- ing the house supply with poisoned water was intentional. And I do not doubt the correctness of the conclusion; it seems to shew that our criteria are rather good. On the other hand, we teally do seem to be in a bit of a difficulty to find the intentional act of poisoning those people, supposing that this is what his intentional act is. It is really not at all to be wondered at that so very many people have thought of intention as a special interior movement; then the thing that marked this man’s proceedings as intentional poisoning of those people would just be that this interior movement occurred in him. But (quite apart from the objections to this idea which we have already considered) the notion of the interior movement tends to have the most unfor- tunately absurd consequences. For after all we can form inten- tions; now if intention is an interior movement, it would appear that we can choose to have a certain intention and not another, just by e.g. saying within ourselves: ‘ What I mean to be doing is earning my living, and no¢ poisoning the household’; or ‘ What I mean to be doing is helping those good men into power; I withdraw my intention from the act of poisoning the household, which I prefer to think goes on without my intention being in it ’. The idea that one can determine one’s intentions by making such a little speech to oneself is obvious bosh. Nevertheless the genuine case of ‘I didn’t care tuppence one way or the other for the fact that someone had poisoned the water, I just wanted to earn my pay without trouble by doing my usual job—I go with the house, see? and it doesn’t matter to me who’s in it’ does appear to make it very difficult to find anything except a man’s thoughts—and these are surely interior—to distinguish the inten- tional poisoning from poisoning knowingly when this was nevertheless not the man’s intention. Well, one may say, isn’t my proposed criterion in a way aINTENTION § 25 43 criterion by thoughts? If the answer to the question ‘ Why did you replenish the house supply with poisoned water?’ is ‘To polish them off’, or any answer within the range, like ‘I just thought I would’, then by my criterion the action under that description is characterised as intentional; otherwise not. But does this not suppose that the answer is or would be given? And a man can surely make up the answer that he prefers! So it may appear that I have supplied something just like the interior movement, which a man can make what he likes; but (perhaps out of an attachment to ‘ verificationism ’) preferred an external answer (actual or hypothetical) which a man can equally make what he likes—at least within the range of moderately plausible answers. Of course I must mean that the srushful answer is, or would be, one or the other; but what sort of control of truthful- ness can be established here? The answer to this has to be: there can be a certain amount of control of the truthfulness of the answer. For example, in the case of the man who didn’t care tuppence, part of the account we imagined him as giving was that he just went on doing his usual job. It is therefore necessary that it should be his usual job if his answer is to be acceptable; and he must not do anything, out of the usual course of his job, that assists the poisoning and of which he cannot give an acceptable account. E.g. suppose he distracts the attention of one of the inhabitants from some- thing about the water source that might suggest the truth; the question ‘ Why did you call him from over there?’ must have a credible answer other than ‘ to prevent him from seeing’; and a multiplication of such points needing explanation would cast doubt on his claim not to have done anything with a view to facilitating the poisoning.—And yet here we might encounter the following explanation: he did not want the enormous trouble that would result from a certain person’s noticing; hoped that since the poison was laid it would all go off safely. All along the line he calculated what looked like landing him personally in least trouble, and he reckoned that preventing anything from being suspected would do that. That is quite possible. Up to a point, then, there is a check on his truthfulness in the account we are thinking he would perhaps give; but still, there is an area in which there is none. The difference between the44 INTENTION § 25 cases in which he doesn’t cate whether the people are actually poisoned or not, and in which he is very glad on realising that they will be poisoned if he co-operates by going on doing his ordinary job, is not one that necessarily carries with it any difference in what he overtly does or how he looks. The difference in his thought on the subject ight only be the difference between the meanings of the grunt that he gives when he grasps that the water is poisoned. That is to say, when asked “ Why did you replenish the house supply with poisoned water?’ he might either reply ‘I couldn’t care tuppence’ or say ‘I was glad to help to polish them off’, and if capable of saying what had actually occurred in him at the time as the vehicle of either of these thoughts, he might have to say only that he grunted. This is the kind of truth there is in the statement ‘ Only you can know if you had such-and-such an intention or not’, There is a point at which only what the man himself says is a sign; and here there is room for much dispute and fine diagnosis of his genuineness. On the other hand, if, say, this was not his normal job, but he was hired by the poisoner to pump the water, knowing it was poisoned, the case is different. He can say he doesn’t care tup- pence, and that he only wants the money; but the commission by the acceptance and performance of which he gets the money is—however implicit this is allowed to be—to pump poisoned water. Therefore unless he takes steps to cheat his hirer (he might e.g. put what he mistakenly thought was an antidote into the water), it is not an acceptable account if he says ‘I wasn’t intending to pump poisoned water, only to pump water and get my hire’, so that the forms he adopts for refusing to answer the question ‘ Why did you pump poisoned water?’ with an answer in our defined range—e.g. with the answer ‘to get the pay ’— are unacceptable. So that while we can find cases where ‘ only the man himself can say whether he had a certain intention or not; they ate further limited by this: he cannot profess not to have had the intention of doing the thing that was a means to an end of his. All this, I think, serves to explain what Wittgenstein says at §644 of Philosophical Investigations: «Tam not ashamed of what I did then, but of the intention which I had”. And didn’t the intention resideINTENTION § 25-26 45 also in what I did? What justifies the shame? The whole history of the incident.’ And against the background of the qualifications we have introduced, we can epitomize the point by saying ‘ Roughly speaking, a man intends to do what he does’. But of course that is very roughly speaking. It is right to formulate it, however, as an antidote against the absurd thesis which is sometimes main- tained; that a man’s intended action is only described by describ- ing his objective. The question arises: what can be the interest of the intention of the man we have described, who was only doing his usual job, etc.? It is certainly not an ethical or legal interest; if what he said was true, shat will not absolve him from guilt of murder! We just are interested in what is true about a man in this kind of way. Here again Wittgenstein says something relevant, in his discussion of ‘I was going to’: ‘Why do I want to tell him about an intention too, as well as telling him what I did? . . . because I want to tell him something about myself, which goes beyond what happened at that time. I reveal to him something of myself when I tell him what I was going to do.—Not, however, on grounds of self-observation, but by way of a response (it might also be called an intuition).’ (Philosophical Investigations, §659). Wittgenstein is presumably thinking of a response, or reaction, to the memory of ‘ that time ’; in the context of ovr interests, we can think of it as a response to our special question ‘ Why? ’. 26. Let us now return to the question with which we ended §23: Are we to say that the man who (intentionally) moves his arm, operates the pump, replenishes the water supply, poisons the inhabitants, is performing four actions? Or only one? The answer that we imagined to the question ‘ Why?’ brings it out that the four desctiptions form a seties,; A—B—C—D, in which each description is introduced as dependent on the previous one, though independent of the following one. Then is B a description of A, C of B, and so on? Not if that means that we can see that ‘he is operating the pump’ is another46 INTENTION § 26 description of what is here also described by ‘ he is moving his arm up and down ’—in such a way that is, that what verifies the latter, in this case, also verifies the former. On the other hand, if we say there are four actions, we shall find that the only action that B consists in here is A; and so on. Only, more circumstances are required for A to be B than for A just to be A. And far more circumstances for A to be D, than for A to be B. But these circumstances need not include any particularly recent action of the man who is said to do A, B, C and D (although we made it a cumulative poison, for present purposes we can suppose that a single pumping is enough to do the trick). In short, the only distinct action of his that is in question is this one, A. For moving his arm up and down with his fingers round the pump handle js, in these circumstances, operating the pump; and, in these circumstances, it is replenishing the house water- supply; and, in these circumstances, it is poisoning the household. So there is one action with four descriptions, each dependent on wider circumstances, and each related to the next as description of means to end; which means that we can speak equally well of four corresponding intentions, or of one intention—the last term that we have brought in in the series, By making it the last term so far brought in, we have given it the character of being the intention (so far discovered) with which the act in its other descriptions was done. Thus when we speak of four intentions, we are speaking of the character of being intentional that belongs to the act in each of the four descriptions; but when we speak of one intention, we are speaking of intention with which; the last term we give in such a series gives the intention with which the act in each of its other descriptions was done, and this intention so to speak swallows up all the preceding intentions with which earlier members of the series were done. The mark of this ‘ swallowing up’ is that it is not wrong to give D as the answer to the question ‘Why?’ about A; A’s being done with B as intention does not mean that D is only indirectly the inten- tion of A, as, if I press on something which is pressing on some- thing . . . which is pressing against a wall, I am only indirectly pressing against the wall. If D is given as the answer to the question ‘ Why?’ about A, B and C can make an appearance in answer to a question ‘How?’, When terms are related in thisINTENTION § 26-27 47 fashion, they constitute a series of means, the last term of which is, just by being given as the last, so far treated as end. A term falling outside the series A—D may be a term in another series with some of the members A, B, C in it: for example, if the man is beating out the rhythm of God Save the King in the clicking of the pump. The intention of doing so with which he moves his arm up and down is not ‘ swallowed up ” by the intention of D (beating out that rhythm is not sow he pumps the water); and the mark of this is that if the question ‘Why are you moving your arm up and down?’ receives as answer ‘To click out the rhythm of God Save the King’, the answer to ‘ Why?’ asked about sis action does not lead to D. Another implication of what I call ‘swallowing up’ is that nothing definite has to hold about how many terms we put between A and D; for example, in the imagined case we did not put in a term ‘ making the water flow along the pipes’, which yet would take its place in the series if anyone thought of asking the question ‘ Why?’ about it. 27. Is there ever a place for an interior act of intention? I suppose that the man I imagined, who said ‘I was only doing my usual job’, might find this formula and administer it to himself in the present tense at some stage of his activities. However, if he does this, we notice that the question immediately arises: with what intention does he do it? This question would always arise about anything which was deliberately performed as an ‘act of intending’. The answer in this case might be ‘So that I don’t have to consider whose side I am on’. Thus the interior performance has not secured what you might have thought, namely that the man’s action in pumping the water fs just doing his usual job; it is itself a new action, like clicking out the rhythm of God Save the King on the pump. It is in fact only if the thought ‘I’m only doing my usual job’ is spontaneous rather than deliberate that its occurrence has some face-value relevance to the question what the man’s intentions really are. And when spontaneous, it is subject to those tests for truthfulness, which, as we saw, applied to the same form of words given as an explanation after the event; and given that it survives all the same external tests, it comes under the same last deter-48 INTENTION § 27 mination: ‘In the end only you can know whether that is your intention or not’; that means only: there comes a point where a man can say ‘ This is my intention’, and no one else can con- tribute anything to settle the matter. (It does not mean that when he says ‘This is my intention’, he is evincing a knowledge available only to him. Le. here ‘ knows ’ only means ‘can say’. Unless indeed we imagine a case where it could be said: he thought this was his intention, but it became clear that he was deceived.) The only new possibility would be one of eliciting some obviously genuine reaction by saying such things as (to give crude examples): ‘ Well, then you won’t be much interested to hear that the poison is old and won’t work’; or ‘Then you won’t be claiming a share in a great sum with which someone wishes to reward the conspirators’. This sort of thing is of course a stock way of bringing out pretences, often met with in literature—e.g. the deaf man who hears clearly what he ought not to—and in life pretences are no doubt discerned by skilled psychological detectives. But there comes a point at which the skill of psychological detectives has no criteria for its own success. For, after all, probing questions may lead a man to pretend something new, instead of revealing what was there already. So perhaps no concrete inferences as to matters of fact which are quite simply testable can be drawn from the detectives’ verdicts. One may fee/ that the verdict is right; that the man whe gives it has ‘insight’, But, as Wittgenstein put it (Philosophical Investigations, p. 128) the consequences here are of a diffuse kind. “The difference of attitude that one has’ would be a diffuse consequence; or if you want ‘ consequence ’ to mean ‘ inference ’, the nuances in relationships with others in the plot that you will expect the man to have later; the atmosphere between him and them, and similar things. We can imagine an intention which is a purely interior matter nevertheless changing the whole character of certain things. A contemptuous thought might enter a man’s mind so that he meant his polite and affectionate behaviour to someone on a particular occasion only ironically, without there being any outward sign of this (for perhaps he did not venture to give any outward sign). There need not be any specific history, or any consequences, in the light of which an outside observer could see the forms ofINTENTION § 27-28 49 affection as ironically meant; for as far as concerns history, it is always possible to find things to despise in people without any very special story issuing in contempt on this occasion; and afterwards he might change his mind, think of the episode as an odd aberration, and never tutn future occasions into a development of it. Let us suppose that the thought in his mind is ‘ you silly little twit!’ Now here too, it is not enough that these words should occur to him. He has to mean them. This shews once more, that you cannot take any performance (even an interior performance) as itself an act of intention; for if you describe a performance, the fact that it has taken place is not a proof of intention; words for example may occur in somebody’s mind without his meaning them. So intention is never a performance in the mind, though in some matters a performance in the mind which is seriously meant may make a difference to the correct account of the man’s action—e.g. in embracing someone. But the matters in question are necessarily ones in which outward acts are ‘ significant ’ in some way. 28. We must now look mote closely into the formula which has so constantly occurred in this investigation: ‘ known without observation’. This had its first application to the position of one’s limbs and certain movements, such as the muscular spasm in falling asleep. It is not ordinarily possible to find anything that shows one that one’s leg is bent. It may indeed be that it is because one has sensations that one knows this; but that does not mean that one knows it by identifying the sensations one has. With the exterior senses it is usually possible to do this. I mean that if a man says he saw a man standing in a certain place, or heard someone moving about, or felt an insect crawling over him, it is possible at least to ask whether he misjudged an appearance, a sound, or a feeling; that is, we can say: Look, isn’t shis perhaps what you saw? and reproduce a visual effect of which he may say: * Yes, that is, or could be, what I saw, and I admit I can’t be sure of more than that ’; and the same with the sound or the feeling! 11 think that these facts ought to make people less contemptuous of phenomen- alism than it has now been fashionable to be for a good many years; 1 have heard people jeer at the expression ‘seeing an appearance’ on the grounds that it is incorrect speech. It does not seem to me to matter whether it is incorrect speech or not; the fact remains that one can distinguish between actually seeing a man, andso INTENTION § 28 But with e.g. the position of one’s limbs it is otherwise than with the external senses. If a man says that his leg is bent when it is lying straight out, it would be incorrect to say that he had mis- judged an inner kinaesthetic appearance as an appearance of his leg bent, when in fact what was appearing to him was his leg stretched out. (This topic is certainly a difficult one, deserving a fuller discussion; here, however, such a discussion would be out of place). This consideration, assuming its correctness, is enough to justify saying that normally one does not know the position or movement of one’s limbs ‘ by observation ’. In enquiring into intentional action, however, I have used this formula quite generally, and the following objection will very likely have occurred to a reader: ‘ Known without observa- tion’ may very well be a justifiable formula for knowledge of the position and movements of one’s limbs, but you have spoken of all intentional action as falling under this concept. Now it may be e.g. that one paints a wall yellow, meaning to do so. But is it reasonable to say that one ‘knows without observation” that one is painting a wall yellow? And similarly for all sorts of actions: any actions that is, that are described under any aspect beyond that of bodily movements. My reply is that the topic of an intention may be matter on which there is knowledge or opinion based on observation, inference, hearsay, superstition or anything that knowledge or opinion ever are based on; or again matter on which an opinion is held without any foundation at all. When knowledge or opinion are present concerning what is the case, and what can happen—say Z—if one does certain things, say ABC, then it is possible to have the intention of doing Z in doing ABC; and if the case is one of knowledge or if the opinion is correct, then doing or causing Z is an intentional action, and it is not by observation that one knows one is doing Z; or in so far as one is observing, inferring etc. that Z is actually taking place, one’s knowledge is not the knowledge that a man has of his intentional actions, By the knowledge that a man has of his intentional the appearances’ being such that one says one is seeing, or saw, a man; and that one can describe or identify ‘ what one saw ’ on such an occasion without knowing e.g. that one really saw a reflection of oneself or a coat hanging on a hook; now when cone does so describe or identify ‘ what one saw’, it is perfectly reasonable to call this: describing or identifying an appearance.INTENTION § 28-29 st actions I mean the knowledge that one denies having if when asked e.g. ‘ Why are you ringing that bell?’ one replies ‘ Good heavens! I didn’t know I was ringing it!’ This is difficult. Say I go over to the window and open it. Someone who hears me moving calls out: What are you doing making that noise? I reply ‘Opening the window’, I have called such a statement knowledge all along; and precisely because in such a case what I say is true—I do open the window; and that means that the window is getting opened by the move- ments of the body out of whose mouth those words come. But I don’t say the words like this: ‘Let me see, what is this body bringing about? Ah yes! the opening of the window ’. Or even like this ‘ Let me see, what are my movements bringing about? The opening of the window’. To see this, if it is not already plain, contrast this case with the following one: I open the window and it focuses a spot of light on the wall. Someone who cannot see me but can see the wall, says ‘ What are you doing making that light come on the wall?’ and I say ‘Ah yes, it’s opening the window that does it’, or ‘That always happens when one opens that window at midday if the sun is shining.’ 29. The difficulty however is this: What can opening the window be except making such-and-such movements with such-and-such a result? And in that case what can knowing one is opening the window be except knowing that that is taking place? Now if there are two ways of knowing here, one of which T call knowledge of one’s intentional action and the other of which I call knowledge by observation of what takes place, then must there not be two objects of knowledge? How can one speak of two different knowledges of exactly the same thing? It is not that there are two descriptions of the same thing, both of which are krown, as when one knows that something is red and that it is coloured; no, here the description, opening the window, is identical, whether it is known by observation or by its being one’s intentional action. I think that it is the difficulty of this question that has led some people to say that what one knows as intentional action is only the intention, or possibly also the bodily movement; and that the rest is known by observation to be the resu/f, which wasg2 INTENTION § 29 also willed in the intention. But that is a mad account; for the only sense I can give to ‘ willing ’ is that in which I might stare at something and will it to move. People sometimes say that one can get one’s arm to move by an act of will but not a matchbox; but if they mean ‘ Will a matchbox to move and it won’t’, the answer is ‘ If I will my arm to move in that way, it won’t ’, and if they mean ‘I can move my arm but not the matchbox ’ the answer is that I can move the matchbox—nothing easier. Another false avenue of escape is to say that I really ‘do’ in the intentional sense whatever I think I am doing. E.g. if I think I am moving my toe, but it is not actually moving, then I am ‘ moving my toe’ in a certain sense, and as for what bappens, of course I haven’t any control over that except in an accidental sense. The essential thing is just what has gone on in me, and if what happens coincides with what I ‘ do’ in the sphere of inten- tions, that is just a grace of fate. This I think was Wittgenstein’s thought in the Tractatus when he wrote: ‘The world is inde- pendent of my will’ and “Even if what we wish were always to happen, this would only be a grace of fate, for it is not any logical con- nexion between will and the world that would guarantee this, and as for the presumed physical connexion, we cannot will that.’ (6.373, 6.374). That is tosay: assuming it not to exist, willing it will be ineffectual. And I think that this reasoning applies to the effectiveness of any act of will, Hence Wittgenstein wrote in his notebooks at this time: ‘I am completely powerless ’. But this is nonsense too. For if nothing guarantees that the window gets opened when I ‘ opened the window ’, equally noth- ing guarantees that my toe moves when I ‘ move my toe’; so the only thing that does happen is my intention; but where is that to be found? I mean: what is its vehicle? Is it formulated in words? And if so, what guarantees that I do form the words that I intend? for the formulation of the words is itself an intentional act. And if the intention has no vehicle that is guaran- teed, then what is there left for it to be but a bombination in a vacuum? I myself formerly, in considering these problems, came out with the formula: I do what appens. ‘That is to say, when theINTENTION § 29-30 53 description of what happens is the very thing which I should say I was doing, then there is no distinction between my doing and the thing’s happening. But everyone who heard this formula found it extremely paradoxical and obscure. And I think the reason is this: what happens must be given by observation; but Ihave argued that my knowledge of what I do is not by observ- ation. A very clear and interesting case of this is that in which I shut my eyes and write something. I can say what I am writing. And what I say Iam writing will almost always in fact appeat on the paper. Now here it is clear that my capacity to say what is written is not derived from any observation. In practice of course what I write will very likely not go on being very legible if I don’t use my eyes; but isn’t the role of all our observation- knowledge in knowing what we are doing like the role of the eyes in producing successful writing? That is to say, once given that we have knowledge or opinion about the matter in which we perform intentional actions, our observation is merely an aid, as the eyes are an aid in writing. Someone without eyes may go on writing with a pen that has no more ink in it; or may not realise he is going over the edge of the paper on to the table or overwriting lines already written; here is where the eyes are useful; but the essential thing he does, namely to write such-and- such, is done without the eyes. So without the eyes he knows what he writes; but the eyes help to assure him that what he writes actually gets legibly written. In face of this how can I say: I do what happens? If there are two ways of knowing there must be two different things known. 30. Before I make an end of raising difficulties, I will produce an example which shews that it is an error to try to push what is known by being the content of intention back and back; first to the bodily movement, then perhaps to the contraction of the muscles, then to the attempt to do the thing, which comes tight at the beginning. The only description that I clearly know of what I am doing may be of something that is at a distance from me, It is not the case that I clearly know the movements [ make, and the intention is just a result which I calculate and hope will follow on these movements. Someone might express the view I reject by saying: Consider54 INTENTION § 30-31 the sentence ‘I am pushing the boat out’. Here, the only part of the sentence which really expresses the known action in this intentional action is ‘I am pushing’. The words ‘ the boat’ express an opinion on an object which I take to be just in front of me; and that is verified by the senses, i.e. it is a matter of observation. The word ‘ out’ expresses intention with which I am pushing because it expresses an opinion as to an effect of my pushing in these circumstances, which opinion is accompanied by a desire on my part. And this must be the model for analysing every description of an intentional action. My example to refute such a view is this. Imagine raising the following rather curious question: Is there any difference between letting one’s arm drop and lowering one’s arm at the speed at which it would fall? Can I deliberately lower my atm at the speed at which it would fall? I should find it difficult to make that the title under which I acted. But suppose someone simply wanted to produce the effect that in fact I lowered my arm at the speed at which it would fall—he is a physiologist, and wants to see if I generate anything different in the nerve fibres if I do this. So he fixes up a mechanism in which something in motion can be kept level if I hold a handle and execute a pumping movement with my arm and on the downward stroke lower it at the rate at which it would fall. Now my instruction is: Keep it level, and with a bit of practice I learn to do so. My account of what Iam doing is that I am keeping the thing level; I don’t consider the movement of my arm at all. I am able to give a much more exact account of what I am doing at a distance than of what my arm is doing. So my keeping the thing level is not at all something which I calculate as the effect of what I really and immediately am doing, and therefore directly know in my ‘knowledge of my own action’. In general, as Aristotle says, one does not deliberate about an acquired skill; the description of what one is doing, which one completely understands, is at a distance from the details of one’s movements, which one does not consider at all. 31. Having raised enough difficulties, let us try to sketch a solution, and let us first ask: What is the contradictory of aINTENTION § 31 55 description of one’s own intentional action? Is it ‘ You aren’t, in fact ’?—E.g. ‘ You aren’t replenishing the house water supply, because the water is running out of a hole in the pipe ’? I suggest that it is not. To see this, consider the following story, which appeared for the pleasure of readers of the New Statesman's ‘This England’ column. A certain soldier was court-martialled (or something of the sort) for insubordinate behaviour. He had, it seems, been ‘abusive’ at his medical examination. The examining doctor had told him to clench his teeth; whereupon he took them out, handed them to the doctor and said ‘ You clench them’. Now the statement: ‘The water is running out of a pipe round the corner’ stands in the same relation to the statement ‘T’m replenishing the house water-supply’ as does ‘ My teeth are false ’ to the order ‘ Clench your teeth ’; and so the statement (on grounds of observation) ‘ You are not replenishing the house water-supply ’ stands in the same relation to the description of intentional action ‘I am replenishing the house water-supply ’, as does the well-founded prediction ‘This man isn’t going to clench his teeth, since they are false’ to the order ‘ Clench your teeth’, And just as the contradiction of the order: ‘ Clench your teeth ’ is zof ‘ The man, as is clear from the following evidence, is not going to do any clenching of teeth, at least of the sort you mean ’, but ‘Do not clench your teeth ’, so the contradiction of ‘I’m replenishing the house water-supply ’ is not ‘ You aren’t, since there is a hole in the pipe’, but ‘Oh, no, you aren’t’ said by someone who thereupon sets out ¢.g. to make a hole in the pipe with a pick-axe. And similarly, if a person says ‘I am going to bed at midnight’ the contradiction of this is not: ‘ You won't, for you never keep such resolutions’ but ‘ You won’t, for 1am going to stop you’. But, returning to the order and the desctiption by the agent of his present intentional action, is there not a point at which the parallelism ceases: namely, just where we begin to speak of knowledge? For we say that the agent’s description is a piece of knowledge, but an order is not a piece of knowledge. So though the parallelism is interesting and illuminates the periphery of the problem, it fails at the centre and leaves that in the darkness that we have found ourselves in.56 INTENTION § 32 32. Let us consider a man going round a town with a shop- ping list in his hand. Now it is clear that the relation of this list to the things he actually buys is one and the same whether his wife gave him the list or it is his own list; and that there is a different relation when a list is made by a detective following him about. If he made the list itself, it was an expression of intention; if his wife gave it him, it has the role of an order. What then is the identical relation to what happens, in the, order and the intention, which is not shared by the record? It is precisely this: if the list and the things that the man actually buys do not agree, and if this and this alone constitutes a mistake, then the mistake is not in the list but in the man’s performance (if his wife were to say: ‘ Look, it says butter and you have bought margarine ’, he would hardly reply: ‘ What a mistake! we must put that right’ and alter the word on the list to ‘ margarine’); whereas if the detective’s record and what the man actually buys do not agree, then the mistake is in the record. In the case of a discrepancy between the shopping list and what the man buys, I have to introduce the qualification: If this and this alone constitutes a mistake. For the discrepancy might arise because some of the things were not to be had and if one might have known they were not to be had, we might speak of a mistake (an error of judgment) in constructing the list. If I go out in Oxford with a shopping list including ‘ tackle for catching sharks ’, no one will think of it as a mistake in perform- ance that I fail to come back with it. And then again there may be a discrepancy between the list and what the man bought because he changed his mind and decided to buy something else instead. This last discrepancy of course only arises when the descrip- tion is of a future action. The case that we now want to consider is that of an agent who says what he is at present doing. Now suppose what he says is not true. It may be untrue because, unknown to the agent, something is not the case which would have to be the case in order for his statement to be true; as when, unknown to the man pumping, there was a hole in the pipe round the corner. But as I said, this relates to his statement that he is replenishing the water-supply as does the fact that the man has no teeth of his own to the order ‘ Clench your teeth’ ;INTENTION § 32-33 57 that is, we may say that in face of it his statement falls to the ground, as in that case the order falls to the ground, but it is not a direct contradiction. But is there not possible another case in which a man is simply not doing what he says? As when I say to myself ‘ Now I press Button A’—pressing Button B—a thing which can certainly happen. This I will call the direct falsification of what I say. And here, to use Theophrastus’ expression again, the mistake is not one of judgment but of performance. That is, we do not say: What you said was a mis- take, because it was supposed to describe what you did and did not describe it, but: What you did was a mistake, because it was not in accordance with what you said. It is precisely analogous to obeying an order wrong—and we ought to be struck by the fact that there is such a thing, and that it is not the same as ignoring, disregarding, or disobeying an order. If the order is given ‘ Left turn!’ and the man turns right, there can be clear signs that this was not an act of disobedi- ence, But there is a discrepancy between the language and that of which the language is a description. But the discrepancy does not impute a fault to the language—but to the event. Can it be that there is something that modern philosophy has blankly misunderstood: namely what ancient and medieval philosophers meant by practical knowledge? Certainly in modern philosophy we have an incorrigibly contemplative conception of knowledge. Knowledge must be something that is judged as such by being in accordance with the facts. The facts, reality, are prior, and dictate what is to be said, if it is knowledge. And this is the explanation of the utter darkness in which we found ourselves. For if there are two knowledges—one by observation, the other in intention—then it looks as if there must be two objects of knowledge; but if one says the objects are the same, one looks hopelessly for the different mode of contemplative knowledge in acting, as if there were a very queer and special sort of seeing eye in the middle of the acting. 33. The notion of ‘practical knowledge’ can only be understood if we first understand ‘ practical reasoning ’. ‘ Prac- tical reasoning ’, or ‘ practical syllogism’, which means the same58 INTENTION § 33 thing, was one of Aristotle’s best discoveries. But its true character has been obscured. It is commonly supposed to be ordinary reasoning leading to such a conclusion as: ‘I ought to do such-and-such.’ By ‘ ordinary reasoning ’ I mean the only reasoning ordinarily considered in philosophy: reasoning towards the truth of a proposition, which is supposedly shewn to be true by the premises. Thus: ‘ Everyone with money ought to give to a beggar who asks him; this man asking me for money is a beggar; I have money; so I ought to give this man some’, Here the conclusion is entailed by the premises. So it is proved by them, unless they are doubtful. Perhaps such premises never can be certain. Contemplating the accounts given by modern commentators, one might easily wonder why no one has ever pointed out the mince pie syllogism: the peculiatity of this would be that it was about mince pies, and an example would be ‘All mince pies have suet in them—this is a mince pie—therefore etc.’ Certainly ethics is of importance to human beings in a way that mince pies are not; but such importance cannot justify us in speaking of a special sort of reasoning. Everyone takes the practical syllogism to be a proof—granted the premises and saving their inevitable uncertainty or doubtfulness in application—of a conclusion. This is so whether Aristotle’s own example has been taken: Dry food suits any human Such-and-such food is dry lam human This is a bit of such-and-such food yielding the conclusion This food suits me or whether, adopting a style of treatment suggested by some modern authors, the first premise is given in an imperative form, We may note that authors always use the term ‘ major’ and ‘ minor ’ of the premises of practical syllogism: having regard to the definition of these terms, we can see that they have no application to Aristotle’s practical syllogism, though they could be adapted to the imperative form if we assimilate ‘ Do |’ to the predicate of a proposition. Consider the following: Do everything conducive to not having a car crash. Such-and-such will be conducive to not having a car crash. Ergo: Do such-and-such.INTENTION § 33 59 Both this and the Aristotelian example given before would necessitate the conclusion. Someone professing to accept the opening order and the factual premise in the imperative example must accept its conclusion, just as someone believing the pre- mises in the categorical example must accept its conclusion. The first example has the advantage of actually being Aristotle’s, apart from the conclusion, but the disadvantage, so far as its being practical is concerned, that though the conclusion is necessitated, nothing seems to follow about doing anything. Many authors have pointed this out, but have usually put it rather vaguely, saying, e.g. that the reasoning does not compel any action; but Aristotle appears to envisage an action as following. The vague accounts that I have mentioned can be given a quite sharp sense. It is obvious that I can decide, on general grounds about colouring and so on, that a certain dress in a shop window would suit me very well, without its following that I can be accused of some kind of inconsistency with what I have decided if I do not thereupon go in and buy it; even if there are no impediments, such as shortage of cash, at all. The syllogism in the imperative form avoids this disadvantage; someone professing to accept the premises will be inconsistent if, when nothing intervenes to prevent him, he fails to act on the particular order with which the argument ends. But this syllog- ism suffers from the disadvantage that the first, universal, premise is an insane one, which no one could accept for a moment if he thought out what it meant. For there are usually a hundred different and incompatible things conducive to not having a car crash; such as, perhaps, driving into the private gateway immedi- ately on your left and abandoning your car there, and driving into the private gateway immediately on your right and abandon- ing the car there, The cause of this mischief, though it is not entirely his fault, is Aristotle himself. For he himself distinguished reasoning by subject matter as scientific and practical. ‘ Demonstrative’ reasoning was scientific and concerned what is invariable. As if one could not reason about some particular non-necessary thing that was going to happen except with a view to action! ‘ John 1 No author, of course, has proposed this syllogism. I am indebted for the idea of it, however, to a passage in Mr. R, M. Hare’s book, The Language of Morals, p. 35.60 INTENTION § 33 will drive from Chartres to Paris at an average of sixty m.p.h., he starts around five, Paris is sixty miles from Chartres, therefore he will arrive at about six ’—this will not be what Aristotle calls a ‘demonstration’ because, if we ask the question what John will do, that is certainly capable of turning out one way or another. But for all that the reasoning is an argument that something is true. It is not practical reasoning: it has not the form of a calculation what to do, though like any other piece of * theoretical ’ argument it could play a part in such a calculation. Thus we may accept from Aristotle that practical reasoning is essentially concerned with ‘what is capable of turning out variously ’, without thinking that this subject matter is enough to make reasoning about it practical. There is a difference of form between reasoning leading to action and reasoning for the truth of a conclusion. Aristotle however liked to stress the similarity between the kinds of reasoning, saying! that what ‘ happens ’ is the same in both. There are indeed three types of case. There is the theoretical syllogism and also the idle practical syllogism? which is just a classtoom example. In both of these the conclusion is ‘said’ by the mind which infers it. And there is the practical syllogism proper. Here the conclusion is an action whose point is shewn by the premises, which are now, so to speak, on active service. When Aristotle says that what happens is the same, he seems to mean that it is always the same psychical mechanism by which a conclusion is elicited. He also displays practical syllog- isms so as to make them look as parallel as possible to proof syllogisms. Let us imitate one of his classroom examples, giving it a plausible modern content: Vitamin X is good for all men over 60 Pigs’ tripes are full of vitamin X T’m a man over 60 Here’s some pigs’ tripes. Aristotle seldom states the conclusion of a practical syllogism, and sometimes speaks of it as an action; so we may suppose the man who has been thinking on these lines to take some of the dish that he sees. But there is of course no objection to inventing a De Motu Animalium VIL, *Ethica Nicomachea 1147a, 27-8.INTENTION § 33 61 form of words by which he accompanies this action, which we may call the conclusion in a verbalised form. We may render it as: (2) So ’ll have some ot (4) So I’d better have some. or (¢) So it’d be a good thing for me to have some. Now cettainly no one could be tempted to think of (a) as a proposition entailed by the premises. But neither are (6) and (c), though at first sight they look roughly similar to the kind of conclusion which commentators usually give: What’s here is good for me. But of course in the sense in which this is entailed by the premises as they intend it to be, this only means: ‘ What’s here is a type of food that is good for me’, which is far from meaning that I’d better have some. Now the reason why we cannot extract ‘I’d better have some’ from the premises is not at all that we could not in any case construct premises which, if assented to, yield this conclusion. For we could, easily. We only need to alter the universal premise slightly, to: It is necessary for all men over 60 to eat any food con- taining Vitamin X that they ever come across which, with the other premises, would entail the conclusion in the form ‘ I’d better have some’ quite satisfactorily. The only objection is that the premise is insane, as would have been the corresponding variant on Aristotle’s universal premise: Every human being needs to eat all the dry food he ever sees, In short the ‘ universality’ of Aristotle’s universal premise is in the wrong place to yield the conclusion by way of entailment at all. Only negative general premises can hope to avoid insanity of this sort. Now these, even if accepted as practical premises, don’t lead to any particular actions (at least, not by themselves or by any formal process) but only to not doing certain things. But what Aristotle meant by practical reasoning certainly in-62 INTENTION § 33-34 cluded reasoning that led to action, not to omissions. Now a man who goes through such considerations as those about Vitamin X and ends up by taking some of the dish that he sees, saying e.g. ‘So I suppose I’d better have some ’, can certainly be said to be reasoning; on the other hand, it is clear that this is another type of reasoning than reasoning from premises to a conclusion which they prove. And I think it is even safe to say that (except in, say, doing arithmetic or dancing, i.e. in skills or arts—what Aristotle would call 7¢éxvat) there is no general positive rule of the form ‘Always do X’ or ‘Doing X is always good—required—con- venient—, a useful—suitable—etc.—thing’ (where the ‘X’ describes some specific action) which a sane person will accept as a starting-point for reasoning out what to do in a particular case. (Unless, indeed, it is hemmed about by saving clauses like * if the circumstances don’t include something that would make it foolish ’.) Thus though general considerations, like ‘ Vitamin C is good for people’ (which of course is a matter of medical fact) may easily occur to someone who is considering what he is going to eat, considerations of the form ‘ Doing such-and-such quite specific things in such-and-such circumstances is always suitable’ are never, if taken strictly, possible at all for a sane person, outside special arts. 34. But, we may ask, even if we want to follow Aristotle, need we confine the term ‘ practical reasoning’ to pieces of practical reasoning which look very parallel to proof-reason- ings? For ‘I want a Jersey cow; there ate good ones in the Hereford market, so I’ll go there’ would seem to be practical reasoning too. Or ‘If I invite both X and Y, there'll be a strained atmosphere in view of what X has recently said about Y and how Y feels about it—so I'll just ask KX’. Or again ‘ So-and-so was very pleasant last time we met, so I'll pay him a visit’. Now Aristotle would have remarked that it is mere ‘ desire ’ in a special sense (é7Oujia) that prompts the action in the last case; the mark of this is that the premise refers to something merely as pleasant. The point that he is making here is, however, rather alien to us, since we do not make much distinction between one sort of desire and another, and we should say: isn’t it desire in some sense—i.e. wanting—that prompts the action in all the cases?INTENTION § 34-35 63 And ‘all cases’, of course, includes ones that have as large an apparatus as one pleases of generalisations about morals, or medicine, or cookery, or methods of study, or methods of getting votes or securing law and order, together with the identification of cases. This is so, of course, and is a point insisted on by Aristotle himself: the dp x7 (starting point) is rd dpexrdy (the thing wanted). For example, the fact that current school geometry text books all give a faulty proof of the theorem about the base angles of an isosceles triangle will not lead a teacher to discard them or to make a point of disabusing his class, if he does not want to impart on/y correct geometrical proofs. He will say that it doesn’t matter; the Euclidean proof, Pons Asinorum, is too difficult; in any case Euclid starts (he may say) with the unjustified assumption that a certain pair of circles will cut; and are you going to suggest wotties about the axiom of parallels to school children and try to teach them non-Euclidean geometry? and much else of the sort. All this obscures the essential point, which is that, rightly or wrongly, he does not want to impart on/y correct geometrical reasoning. It then becomes relevant to ask what he does want to do. Let us suppose that he is reasonably frank and says he wants to keep his job, occupy his time in ‘ teaching’, and earn his salary. This question ‘ What do you want?’ was not a question out of the blue, like ‘ What are the things you want in life? ’ asked in a general way at the fireside. In context, it is the question ‘With a view to what are you doing X, Y and Z?’, which are what he is doing. That is to say, it is a form of our question ‘ Why?’ but with a slightly altered appearance. If a man is asked this question about what he is doing, that ‘ with a view to which’ he does it is always beyond the break at which we stopped in §23. For even if a man ‘is doing’ what he ‘ wants’, like our imaginary teacher, he has never completely attained it, unless by the termination of the time for which he wants it (which might be the term of his life). 35. In four practical syllogisms that Aristotle gives us, there occur the expressions ‘it suits’, ‘should’, and ‘ pleasant’. The four universal premises in question are:64 INTENTION § 35 (a) Dry food suits any man (2) [I] should taste everything sweet (c) Anything sweet is pleasant (d) Such a one should do such a thing The first three come from the Nicomachean Ethics, the fourth from the De Anima; in the De Anima Aristotle is discussing what sets a human being in physical motion, and this universal (d) is just a schema of a universal premise. The occurrence of ‘should’ in it has no doubt helped the view that the practical syllogism is essentially ethical, but the view has no plausibility; this is not an ethical passage, and Aristotle nowhere suggests that the starting point is anything but something wanted. In thinking of the word for ‘should’ ‘ ought’ etc, (Se?) as it occurs in Aristotle, we should think of it as it occurs in ordinary language (e.g. as it has just occurred in this sentence) and not just as it occurs in the examples of ‘ moral discourse’ given by moral philosophers. That athletes should keep in training, pregnant women watch their weight, film stars their publicity, that one should brush one’s teeth, that one should (not) be fastidious about one’s pleasures, that one should (not) tell ‘ necessary ’ lies, that chairmen in discussions should tactfully suppress irrelevancies, that someone learning arithmetic should practise a certain neatness, that machinery needs lubrication, that meals ought to be punctual, that we should (not) see the methods of ‘ Linguistic Analysis’ in Aristotle’s philosophy; any fair selection of examples, if we care to summon them up, should convince us that ‘ should” is a rather light word with unlimited contexts of application, and it can be presumed that it is because of this feature that Aristotle chose a roughly corresponding Greek word as the word to put into the universal premise of his schematic practical syllogism. Case (4) appears to presuppose a situation where one is given this premise—it is, say, an instruction to an undercook in a kitchen in a special eventuality. Aristotle is here! giving us a futile mechanistic theory of how premises work to produce a conclusion: e.g. given this curious premise and the information ‘ this is sweet’ together, the action of tasting it is mechanically produced if there is nothing to stop it. We notice that this 1 Evhica Nicomachea 11478 28.INTENTION § 35 65 premise has the universality required to necessitate the conclusion for someone who accepts it; just for that reason it is absurd unless restricted to a particular situation—or unless we are to imagine someone having a sweet tooth to the point of mania. Thus there is nothing necessarily ethical about the word ‘should’ occurring in the universal premise of a practical syllogism, at least so far as concerns the remarks made by Aris- totle who invented the notion. But we find ‘ should ’ ‘ suits ’ or * pleasant’ (or some other evaluative term) in all the examples that he gives, and it is reasonable to ask why. If the starting point for a practical syllogism is something wanted, then why should the first premise not be ‘I want... ’ as in the example ‘I want a Jetsey cow’? The case as I imagined it is surely one of practical reasoning. But it is misleading to put ‘I want’ into a premise if we are giving a formal account of practical reasoning. To understand this, we need to realise that not everything that I have described as coming in the range of ‘ reasons for acting’ can have a place as a premise in a practical syllogism. E.g. ‘ He killed my father, so I shall kill him’ is not a form of reasoning at all; nor is ‘I admire him so much, I shall sign the petition he is sponsoring ’. The difference is that there is no calculation in these. The con- junction ‘so’ is not necessarily a mark of calculation. It may be said: ‘ if “ he was very pleasant . . . so I shall pay him a visit ” can be called reasoning, why not “I admire . . . so I shall sign”? ’, The answer is that the former is not a piece of reasoning or calculation either, if what it suggests is e.g. that I am making a return for his pleasantness, have this reason for the kind act of paying a visit; but if the suggestion is: ‘So it will probably be pleasant to see him again, so J shall pay hima visit ’, then it is; and of course it is only under this aspect that ‘ desire ’ in the restricted sense (¢mOvjia) is said to prompt the action. And similarly: ‘I admire . . . and the best way to express this will be to sign, so I shall sign. . .’ is a case of calculating, and if that is the thought we can once again speak of practical reasoning. Of course ‘he was pleasant . . . How can I make a return? . . . 1 will visit him’ can occur and so this case assume the form of a calculation. Here a return, under that description, becomes the66 INTENTION § 35 object of wish; but what is the meaning of ‘a return’? The primitive, spontaneous, form lies behind the formation of the concept ‘return’, which once formed can be made the object of wish; but in the primitive, spontaneous, case the form is ‘ he was nice to me—I will visit him’; and similarly with revenge, though once the concept ‘ revenge’ exists it can be made the object, as with Hamlet. We must always remember that an object is not what what is aimed at és; the description ander which it is aimed at is that under which it is ca/led the object. Then ‘I want this, so I’ll do it’ is not a form of practical reasoning either. The role of ‘ wanting’ in the practical syllo- gism is quite different from that of a premise. It is that whatever is described in the proposition that is the starting-point of the argument must be wanted in order for the reasoning to lead to any action. Then the form ‘I want a Jersey cow, they have good ones in the Hereford market, so I’ll go there’ was formally misconceived: the practical reasoning should just be given in the form ‘ They have Jersey cows in the Hereford market, so I’ll go there’. Similarly ‘Dry food’ (whatever Aristotle meant by that; it sounds an odd dietary theory) ‘ suits anyone etc., so I'll have some of this ’ is a piece of reasoning which will go on only in someone who wants to eat suitable food. That is to say, it \ will at any rate terminate in the conclusion only for someone who wants to eat suitable food. Someone free of any such wish might indeed calculate or reason up to the conclusion, but leave that out, or change it to—' So eating this would be a good idea (if I wanted to eat suitable food).’ Roughly speaking we can say that the reasoning leading up to an action would enable us to infer what the man so reasoning wanted—e.g, that he probably wanted to see, buy, or steal a Jersey cow. There is a contrast between the two propositions ‘ They have some good Jerseys in the Hereford market ’ and ‘ Dry food suits any man’, supposing that they both occur as practical premises, i.e, that the man who uses the one sets off for Hereford, and the man who uses the other takes a bit of the dish that he sees, believing it to be a bit of some kind of dry food. In the first case, there can atise the question ‘What do you want a Jersey cow for? ’; but the question ‘ What do you want suitable food for?’ means, if anything ‘ Do give up thinking about food as suitableINTENTION § 35-36 67 or otherwise ’—as said e.g. by someone who prefers people merely to enjoy their food or considers the man hypochondriac. 36. It is a familiar doctrine that people can want anything; that is, that in ‘A wants X’ ‘X’ ranges over all describable objects or states of affairs. This is untenable; for example the range is restricted to present or future objects and future states of affairs; for we are not here concerned with idle wishing. A chief mark of an idle wish is that a man does nothing—whether he could or no—towards the fulfilment of the wish. Perhaps the familiar doctrine I have mentioned can be made correct by being restricted to wishing. The most primitive expression of wishing is e.g. ‘Ah, if only . . .! ’—if only ,/2 were commensurable, or Helen were still alive, or the sun would blow up, or I could hold the moon in the palm of my hand, or Troy had not fallen, or I were a millionaire. It is a special form of expression, to which a characteristic tone of voice is appropriate; and it might be instructive to ask how such a form is identified (e.g. in a language learnt in use); but it does not concern us here. ‘Wanting ’ may of course be applied to the prick of desire at the thought or sight of an object, even though a man then does nothing towards getting the object. Now where an object which arouses some feeling of longing is some future state of affairs of which there is at least some prospect, wanting, as the longing may be called if it is sustained, may be barely distinguished from idle wishing; the more the thing is envisaged as a likelihood, the more wishing turns into wanting—if it does not evaporate at the possibility. Such wanting is hope. But wanting, in the sense of the prick of desire, is compatible with one’s doing nothing at all towatds getting what one wants, even though one could do something; while to hope that something will happen that it is in one’s power to try to bring about, and yet do nothing to bring it about, is hope of a rather degenerate kind; or ‘ hope that it will happen’, though I do none of the things I know I might do towards it, is rather ‘ hope that it will happen without my doing anything towards it’: a different object from that of the first hope. Phe wanting that interests us, however, is neither wishing nor hoping nor the feeling of desire, and cannot be said to68 INTENTION § 36 exist in a man who does nothing towards getting what he wants. The primitive sign of wanting is frying 4o get; which of course can only be ascribed to creatures endowed with sensation. Thus it is not mere movement of stretching out towards something, but this on the part of a creature that can be said to know the thing. On the other hand knowledge itself cannot be described independently of volition; the ascription of sensible knowledge and of volition go together. One idea implicit in phenomenalism has always been that e.g. the knowledge of the meaning of colour-words is only a matter of picking out and naming certain perceived differences and similarities between objects. And this kind of idea is not dead even though phenomenalism is not fashionable. A modern Psammetichus, influenced by epistemo- logists, might have a child cared for by people whose instructions were to make no sign to the child in dea/ing with it, but frequently to utter the names of the objects and properties which they judged to be within its perceptual fields, with a view to finding out which were the very first things or properties that humans learned to name. But e.g. the identification served by colour-names is in fact not primarily that of colours, but of objects by means of colours; and thus, too, the prime mark of colour-discrimination is doing things with objects—fetching them, carrying them, placing them—according to their colours. Thus the possession of sensible discrimination and that of volition are inseparable; one cannot describe a creature as having the power of sensation without also describing it as doing things in accordance with perceived sensible differences. (Naturally this does not mean that every perception must be accompanied by some action; it is because that is not so that it is possible to form an epistemology according to which the names of the objects of petception are just given in some kind of ostensive definition.) The primitive sign of wanting is ¢rying to get: in saying this, we describe the movement of an animal in terms that reach beyond what the animal is now doing. When a dog smells a piece of meat that lies the other side of the door, his trying to get it will be his scratching violently round the edges of the door and snuffling along the bottom of it and so on. Thus there are two features present in wanting; movement towards a thing and knowledge (or at least opinion) that the thing is there.INTENTION § 36 69 When we consider human action, though it is a great deal more complicated, the same features are present when what is wanted is something that already exists: such as a particular Jersey cow, which is presumed to be on sale in the Hereford market, or a particular woman desired in marriage. But a man can want a cow, not any particular cow, or a wife. This raises a difficulty best expressed from the point of view of the theory of descriptions. For we cannot render ‘A wants a cow” as ‘It is not always false of x that x is a cow and A wants x’. Nor can we get out of this difficulty by introducing belief into our analysis and then using what Russell says about belief: namely that ‘A believes that a cow is in the garden’ can mean, not, ‘It is not always false of x that x is a cow and A believes that x is in the garden ’ but ‘A believes that it is not always false of x...” For, Plainly, wanting a cow need not involve a belief ‘ some cow is—’; and still less does wanting a wife involve a belief ‘some wife of mine is—’. A similar difficulty can indeed arise for animals too: we say the cat is waiting for a mouse at a mouschole, but suppose there is 20 mouse? Here, however, it is reasonable enough to introduce belief and say that the cat shinks there is a mouse: I intend such an expression just as it would quite naturally be said. And though it seems rather comical to apply Russell’s analysis to the ‘ thoughts’ of a cat, there is not really any objection; for our difficulty was a logical one, about the status of the denoting phrase ‘a mouse’ in ‘ the cat is waiting for a mouse’, and not one about what may go on in the souls of cats; hence Russell’s analysis can be used to dispel the difficulty, And when we say ‘The dog wants a bone’ there is not much difficulty either; for we can say that the dog knows that there are bones in a bag and is excited and so on, or that he always gets a bone at this time and so is in a state of excitement and dissatisfaction until he gets one, But when a man wants a wife, there seems to be greater difficulty. We must say: he wants ‘It is not always false of x...’ to become true. (Here I depart from Russell in holding that propositions can be variable in truth- value; I should do that in any case, on other grounds. But in consequence the word ‘ always ’ becomes slightly misleading, and so I would substitute the commoner form: It is not for all x not the case that . . .)jo INTENTION § 36-37 Thus the special problems connected with indefinite desctip- tions do not turn out to create peculiar difficulties for an account of wanting; the difficulty here is the general one that arises when the object of wanting is not anything that exists or that the agent supposes to exist. For we spoke of two features present in ‘ wanting’: movement towards something, and knowledge, or at least opinion, that the thing is there. But where the thing wanted is not even supposed to exist, as when it is a future state of affairs, we have to speak of an idea, rather than of knowledge or opinion. And our two features become: some kind of action or movement which (the agent at least supposes) is of use towards something, and the idea of that thing. The other senses of ‘ wanting ’ which we have noticed are not of any interest in a study of action and intention. 37. Are there any further restrictions, besides the ones we have mentioned, on possible objects of wanting, when the idea of the thing that is (in fact) wanted is expressed in the first premise of a practical syllogism? There are, we may say, no further absolute restrictions, but there are some relative ones. For, as I have remarked, if ‘ There ate good Jerseys in the Here- ford market’ is used as a premise, then it can be asked ‘ What do you want a Jersey for? ’. Let the answer be: ‘A Jersey would suit my needs well ’.—And it is in fact this or a form of this, that Aristotle would accept as first premise: the reasoning in his chosen form would run: ‘(1) Any farmer with a farm like mine could do with a cow of such-and-such qualities (2) e.g. a Jersey.’ Now there is no room for a further question “ What do you want “what you could do with’ for?” That is to say, the premise now given has characterised the thing wanted as desirable. But is not anything wantable, or at least any perhaps attain- able thing? It will be instructive to anyone who thinks this to approach someone and say: ‘I want a saucer of mud’ or ‘I want a twig of mountain ash’, He is likely to be asked what for; to which let him reply that he does not want it for anything, he just wants it. It is likely that the other will theri perceive that a philosophical example is all that is in question, and will pursue the matter no further; but supposing that he did not realise this, and yet did not dismiss our man as a dull babbling loon, wouldINTENTION § 37 7 he not try to find out in what aspect the object desired is desirable? Does it serve as a symbol? Is there something delightful about it? Does the man want to have something to call his own, and no more? Now if the reply is: ‘Philosophers have taught that anything can be an object of desire; so there can be no need for me to characterise these objects as somehow desirable; it merely so happens that I want them’, then this is fair nonsense. But cannot a man /ry 0 get anything gettable? He can certainly go after objects that he sees, fetch them, and keep them near him; pethaps he then vigorously protects them from removal. But then, this is already beginning to make sense: these are his possessions, he wanted to own them; he may be idiotic, but his “ wanting ’ is recognisable as such. So 4e can say perhaps ‘ I want a saucer of mud’, Now saying ‘I want’ is often a way to be given something; so when out of the blue someone says ‘ I want a pin’ and denies wanting it for anything, let us suppose we give it him and see what he does with it. He takes it, let us say, he smiles and says ‘Thank you. My want is gratified ’—but what does he do with the pin? If he puts it down and forgets about it, in what sense was it true to say that he wanted a pin? He used these words, the effect of which was that he was given one; but what reason have we to say he wanted a pin rather than: to see if we would take the trouble to give him one? It is not a mere matter of what is usual in the way of wants and what is not. It is not at all clear what it meant to say: this man simply wanted a pin. Of course, if he is careful always to carry the pin in his hand thereafter, or at least for a time, we may perhaps say: it seems he really wanted that pin. Then perhaps, the answer to ‘What do you want it for?’ may be ‘to carry it about with me’, as a man may want a stick. But here again there is further characterisation: ‘I don’t feel comfortable without it; it is pleasant to have one’ and so on. To say ‘I merely want this ’ without any characterisation is to deprive the word of sense; if he insists on ‘ having ’ the thing, we want to know what “having ’ amounts to. Then Aristotle’s terms: ‘should’, ‘suits’, ‘ pleasant’ are characterisations of what they apply to as desirable. Such a characterisation has the consequence that no further questions ‘what for?’, relating to thecharacteristic so occurring in a premise,72 INTENTION § 37-38 require any answer. We have seen that at least sometimes a description of an object wanted is subject to such a question, i.e. such a question about the description does require an answer. This, then will be why Aristotle’s forms of the practical syllogism give us such first premises. Aristotle gives us a further practical syllogism when he remarks ‘a man may know that light meats are digestible and wholesome but not know which meats are light’! Here the description ‘ digestible and wholesome’ might seem not to be a pure desirability-characterisation. But since wholesome means good for the health, and health is by definition the good general state of the physical organism, the characterisation is adequate for a proper first premise and does not need to be eked out by, say, ‘health is a human good ’ (a tautology). 38. Let us now consider an actual case where a desirability characterisation gives a final answer to the series of ‘ What for?’ questions that arise about an action. In the present state of philosophy, it seems necessary to choose an example which is not obscured by the fact that moral approbation on the part of the writer or reader is called into play; for such approbation is in fact irrelevant to the logical features of practical reasoning; but if it is evoked, it may seem to play a significant part. The Nazis, being pretty well universally execrated, seem to provide us with suitable material, Let us suppose some Nazis caught in a trap in which they are sure to be killed. They have a compound full of Jewish children near them. One of them selects a site and starts setting up a mortar. Why this site?—Any site with such- and-such characteristics will do, and this has them. Why set up the mortar ?—It is the best way of killing off the Jewish children. Why kill off the Jewish children?—It befits a Nazi, if he must die, to spend his last hour exterminating Jews. (1 am a Nazi, this is my last hour, here are some Jews.) Here we have arrived at a desirability characterisation which makes an end of the questions ‘ What for ?” Aristotle would seem to have held that every action done by a rational agent was capable of having its grounds set forth up to a premise containing a desirability characterisation; and as we 1 Etbica Nicomachea, 1141 b 18,INTENTION § 38 wea have seen, there is a reasonable ground for this view, wherever there is a calculation of means to ends, or of ways of doing what one wants to do. Of course ‘ fun ’ is a desirability characterisation too, or ‘ pleasant’: ‘ Such-and-such a kind of thing is pleasant ” is one of the possible first premises. But cannot pleasure be taken in anything? It all seems to depend on how the agent feels about it!? But can it be taken in anything? Imagine saying ‘I want a pin’ and when asked why, saying ‘ For fun’; or ‘ Because of the pleasure of it’. One would be asked to give an account making it at least dimly plausible that there was a pleasure here. Hobbest believed, perhaps wrongly, that there could be no such thing as pleasure in mere cruelty, simply in another’s suffering; but he was not so wrong as we are likely to think. He was wrong in suggesting that cruelty had to have an end, but it does have to have a point. To depict this pleasure, people evoke notions of power, or perhaps of getting one’s own back on the world, or perhaps of sexual excitement. No one needs to surround the pleasures of food and drink with such explanations. Aristotle’s specifications for the action of a rational agent do not cover the case of ‘I just did, for no particular reason’, But where this answer is genuine, there is no calculation, and there- fore no intermediate premises (like ‘Any site with such-and-such characteristics will be a suitable one for setting up my mortar’, and ‘ This is the best way to kill off the children’) about which to press the question ‘ What for?’ So we may note, as we have done, that this sort of action ‘for no particular reason’ exists, and that here of course there is no desirability characterisation, but that does not shew that the demand for a desirability charac- terisation, wherever there is a purpose at all, is wrong. With ‘It befits a Nazi, if he must die, to spend his last hour exterminating Jews’ we have then reached aterminus in enquiring into that particular order of reasons to which Aristotle gave the name ‘ practical’. Or again: we have reached the prime starting point and can look no further. (The question ‘ Why be a Nazi?’ is not a continuation of this series; it addresses itself to one of the particular premises.) Any premise, if it really works as a first premise in a bit of ‘ practical reasoning ’, contains a descrip- tion of something wanted; but with the intermediary premises, * Leviathan Part I, Chap. VI.74 INTENTION § 38-39 the question ‘ What do you want that for?’ arises—until at last we reach the desirability characterisation, about which ‘ What do you want that for?’ does not arise, or if it is asked has not the same point, as we saw in the ‘ suitable food ’ example. But in saying this, I do not at all mean to suggest that there is no such thing as taking exception to, or arguing against, the first premise, or its being made the first premise. Nor am I thinking of moral dissent from it; I prefer to leave that out of account. But there are other ways of taking exception to, or dissenting from, it. The first is to hold the premise false; as a dietician might hold false Aristotle’s views on dry food. It does indeed befit a Nazi to exterminate Jews, the objector may say, but there is a Nazi sacrament of dying which is what really befits a Nazi if he is going to die, and has time for it. Or again the objector may deny that it befits a Nazi as such to exterminate Jews at all. However, both these denials would be incorrect, $0 we may pass quickly on to other forms of demurrer. All of these admit the truth of the proposition, and all but one oppose the desire of what it mentions, namely to do what befits a Nazi in the hour of death. The one that does not oppose it says: ‘ Yes, that befits a Nazi, but so equally does such-and-such: why not do something falling under this description instead, namely. . .’ Another says: ‘ To be sure, but at this moment I lose all interest in doing what befits a Nazi’. And yet another says ‘ While that does indeed befit a Nazi, it is not quite necessary for him to do it. Nazism does not always require a man to strain to the utmost, it is not as inhuman as that: no, it is quite compatible with being a good Nazi to give yourself over to soft and tender thoughts of your home, your family, and your friends, to sing our songs and to drink the healths of those we love’. If any of these con- siderations work on him, the particular practical syllogism of our original Nazi fails, though not on account of any falsehood in the premise, even according to him, nor on account of any fault in his practical calculation. 39. A (formal) ethical argument against the Nazi might perhaps oppose the notion of ‘What a man ought to do’! to 1 But is it not perfectly possible to say: ‘At this moment I lose all interest in doing what befts a man"? If Aristotle thought otherwise, he was surely wrong. T suspect that he thought a man could not Jack this interest except under the infiu- ence of inordinate passion or through ‘ boorishness ’ (dypotxta), ie. insensibility,