Elizabeth Anscombe on Action Individuation (Or Why We Do Not Need a Theory of Action Individuation)
(2022) Thinking with Women Philosophers - Critical Essays in Practical Contemporary Philosophy — published
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- At the end of her enquiry on intention, Anscombe states that ‘[t]he term “intentional” has reference to a form of description of events’. This proposition implies one of Anscombe’s most famous theses, and perhaps also the most ill-understood by commentators, which is the thesis of the plurality of descriptions of action: according to this thesis, the same action may be considered under different descriptions or receive different descriptions. There is, following Anscombe, ‘a special kind of multiplicity of levels of description of human acts’. This multiplicity is not specific to action: for instance, objects or events may also receive multiple descriptions. But Anscombe talks about ‘a special kind of multiplicity’ in the case of action, for among these many descriptions, some of them are intentional and therefore bear a particular logical relationship to each other. There are in fact (at least) two, rather than one, problems of action-individuation. Therefore two formulations of the question need to be distinguished. On the one hand, the question of action individuation consists in asking how it is possible for the same action (or, for that matter, any event) to receive several descriptions, intentional or not. In other words, what is it that makes a number of descriptions true of the same action? We may call it action-individuation in the broad sense; it refers to the observation of the plurality of descriptions of an action set out at § 6 of Intention: an action may be intentional under one description and not under another. For instance, John may be sawing a plank without knowing this is Smith’s library shelf. Then, under the description ‘John is sawing a plank’, the action is intentional, but under the description ‘John is sawing Smith’s library shelf’, the action is not intentional. However, the two descriptions are true descriptions of what John is doing, his action. The second formulation of the issue of action individuation, which occupies Anscombe’s attention more particularly in § 23 of Intention and following ones, is that of knowing the extent to which an ordered set of intentional descriptions of the same action does indeed describe one and not several (intentional) actions. Let us call it action individuation in the narrow sense, which is concerned with the structure, scope and limits of intentional action. Now, in their attempt to capture the observation of the multiplicity of descriptions of human action and the idea that the same action can receive several descriptions, a number of Anscombe readers have indistinctively been wondering how to identify, isolate or individualise the supposedly ‘same action’ which receives all these descriptions. Anscombe’s readers have tended to focus on action individuation in the broad sense, or rather, they have ignored the distinction between action individuation in the broad sense and action individuation in the narrow sense. That is how the problem of action individuation became a sub-problem of the metaphysics of events, in the sense that its challenge was to isolate the event-action to which all these descriptions were attached. However, Anscombe’s concern is not to isolate any event-action, but to understand how far the agent reaches in sight in order to draw the contours of an intentional action, and in particular to measure the agent’s degrees and extent of intentionality. In the present chapter, I explore the meaning and ontological implications of the claim of the plurality of descriptions of action. After examining Anscombe’s exposition of this plurality of descriptions of action, I consider how it should not and though has been usually understood, as needing, though lacking, an identity theory and a theory about what sort of entities actions might be. Then I turn to Donald Davidson’s solution to the alleged problem of action-individuation, which has often been wrongly assimilated to Anscombe’s. Only to conclude that either there is no problem of action-individuation, or rather that the problem is not what readers have usually thought it was.
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Aucouturier, V. (2022). Elizabeth Anscombe on Action Individuation (Or Why We Do Not Need a Theory of Action Individuation). In Benoit, Audrey; Le Jallé Eléonore (ed.), Thinking with Women Philosophers - Critical Essays in Practical Contemporary Philosophy (Springer). Springer. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/228725