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Intention

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 April 2010

Rosalind Hursthouse
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Extract

When I first read Intention as a student it seemed misnamed, since, I thought, it gave an account of intentional action all right, but left me still wondering what an intention was. It was only with years of rereading that I came to see that one beauty of the account was that it eliminated the need to ask.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 46 , March 2000 , pp. 83 - 105
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2000

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References

2 Some of my stalking horses: Davidson (at any rate on many people's interpretation of him) Pears, McGinn, Davis, Shaffer, O'Shaughnessy, Goldman, Audi, Danto, Honderich, Lewis, Loar, …

3 Nor even that actions thus caused may be intentional. (See the discussion in §11 of my destroying a message.) Hence, I take it, causal explanations do not as such compete with reason explanations as has often been maintained.

4 The Causation of Action in Knowledge and Mind, ed. , Ginet and , Shoemaker, pp. 179–80.Google Scholar

5 The Causation of Action, pp. 182-3.

6 Cf. Gareth Evans, The Varieties of Reference, Chapter 6.

7 Readers familiar with Davidson's paper on Intending may wish to compare his description of this example on pp. 88 and 96 of Actions and Events.

8 Nor need we take it as settled that Aristotle's four exhaust the field. McDowell has argued that the post-Wittgensteinian task for philosophy of mind is to describe how the mind (or the mental) fits into the world by giving a genuinely post-Cartesian account of the mental and of the world. The latter would involve, for a start, rejecting the ‘imperialism of the natural sciences’ — the idea that the only genuinely objective facts are those which the sciences can describe. Part of this programme could involve rejecting the dominance of the physical notion of causality. Why should an action ‘because’ have to be validated in any way by a scientific ‘because’ connecting neural events with the macroscopic movements of our matter?

9 ‘Special in virtue of being non-observational’ is my phrase, not Anscombe's, but I think uncorrupting. Her use of the phrase ‘known without observation’ has generated some puzzlement (Vesey et al. in Analysis), but (a) much of this has centred on her applying it to my knowledge of the position of my own limbs rather than my knowledge of my intentional actions (and she has responded – Collected Papers, Vol. II no. 7) and (b) at least some of it I think is spurious. Let us agree indeed that when you see me standing at the bus stop you do not observe me going to the opera though you may know that that is what I am doing. And let us agree indeed that I observe the bus-stop sign and have observed my watch and will observe the bus and could hardly be intentionally catching a bus to the opera if this were not so. So perhaps the difference between first person and third person knowledge of intentional actions is not perfectly captured by a contract between observational and non-observational knowledge. But I do not know of a better expression and this one at least now has a familiar use in this context.

10 Donellan, (alone?) sees this; see J. Phil 1963.Google Scholar

11 Pears, Cf., Questions in the Philosophy of Mind, p. 9.Google Scholar

12 Evans had begun this. See The Varieties of Reference, 7.4.