Intention

G. E. M. Anscombe

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2000
• ISBN:
  9780674736535
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Modern Philosophy

Intention is one of the masterworks of twentieth-century philosophy in English. First published in 1957, it has acquired the status of a modern philosophical classic. The book attempts to show in detail that the natural and widely accepted picture of what we mean by an intention gives rise to insoluble problems and must be abandoned. This is a welcome reprint of a book that continues to grow in importance.

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 ‘intention’, and perhaps 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 intentional. And we may be inclined to say that ‘intention’ has a different sense when we speak of a man’s intentions simpliciter—i. e. 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 distinction intended is intuitively clear, in the following sense: if I say ‘I am going to fail in this exam.’ and someone says ‘Surely you aren’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 it 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 a 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 future 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 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 told 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 a 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 future, 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. a political one.) But there is a difference between the types of 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 intentions, 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, distinguishable 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 truthfulness in saying it). But the reason why Quine’s remark is a joke is that this falsehood does not necessarily impugn what I said. In some cases the facts are, so to speak, impugned for not being in accordance with the words, 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 I am writing: as Theophrastus says (Magna Moralia,¹ 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 commands, 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 ‘I’ll 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 ‘linguistic’, if we will allow certain bodily movements with a conventional 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 more 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, e.g.: psychological jargon about ‘drives’ and ‘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 possibility 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 ‘I am going to . . .’ on a 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 I’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 movements of the leaves would have been just the same, the analogy is certainly bad. But how do you know what the movements of the leaves would have been if they had not been accompanied 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 Wittgenstein’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 are 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 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 me a very recondite piece of information), then communication between us would be rath...