Chapter Eight - Why ‘Why?’? Action, Reasons and Language

Summary

Not a Heuristic Device

What distinguishes actions that 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. (Anscombe 1963, 9)

This is the famous nub of Anscombe’s account of intentional action. By ‘the question “Why?” ‘ she means such questions as: ‘Why are you doing that?’, ‘Why did you do that?’ and so on. Anscombe proceeds to investigate and explain what sense of the question ‘Why?’ is at issue, by contrasting it with other senses of ‘Why?’, by delineating the sorts of case where the question is refused application, by distinguishing certain forms of positive answer to it, etc.

We may first note that Anscombe’s question ‘Why?’ is in the second person, being addressed to the (putative) agent. This is among other things connected with a certain primacy that, according to Anscombe, is enjoyed by a person’s own statement of his reasons for acting. Now it is no part of Anscombe’s thesis that an action is only intentional if the agent actually does give the requisite sort of answer to ‘Why?’ – after all, it might be that nobody asks him that question. We could if we liked propose a possibly counterfactual conditional statement, ‘Were the agent to be (or have been) asked “Why …?”, he would/could answer (or have answered) such-and-such’ – but only so long as we don’t take ourselves to be giving an analysis or definition of ‘intentional action’. For such an analysis or definition would be no good, for various reasons – such as that brute animals can act intentionally.

How then are we to understand the role of the question ‘Why?’ in Anscombe’s account? I shall be proposing an answer along the following lines. Our use and grasp of the concept of the intentional, and of many of the concepts with which it is connected (voluntary, plan, aim, for the sake of, responsible, desirability …), have their roots in a certain pervasive language-game, that of asking for and giving reasons – reasons for action, as we come to call them.