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John McDowell, 'INTENTION IN ACTION' Introduction to it by Ted Honderich John McDowell came from the
University College of Rhodesia and Nyasaland to New College in Oxford as a
Rhodes Scholar. In due course he became a Fellow of University College Oxford,
and then moved to the philosophy department at the University of Pittsburgh. He
has written widely -- in all of the philosophies of mind and language, ancient
philosophy, metaphysics, epistemology, and metaethics. He is an independent
thinker in the tradition of the later Wittgenstein among others and in
connection with the Oxford philosopher Gareth Evans, whose posthumous book he
edited. His own fruitful books and papers have been much discussed. When waiting for the traffic light
to change we intend to cross the street when that happens, and when it does, we
then intend differently what we do -- cross. So we or most of us have the habit
of distinguishing what we may call intentions
for the future, as McDowell calls them, or forward-looking or inactive
intentions, from intentions in action
as he calls them -- which latter things presumably are what have also been
called active intentions, volitions, initiations, and traditionally willings --
all of which do not require something called the will, a separate faculty of mind, which has been discarded
along with other such faculties. John Searle is one philosopher among us who
gives and develops such a distinction between intentions. In place of these two things
McDowell puts one, or in a sense puts one. An intention for the future itself becomes or turns into an intention in
action. The two make up one continuant. Also, he explains, that the latter
phase is said to change its shape as
the action goes forward does not make for other than the whole intention that
is one thing. Much that is at least new and
arresting is said of the intention in action. It is said, to take an example
that may be unfamiliar, that the intention does not relate de re but rather de dicto
to the action it is in. The difference between de re and de dicto, which
is to say between being about a thing
and being about a representation --
all has to do with representations or propositional attitudes, including
beliefs, desires, statements, sentences -- and intentions. It is a matter, surely, of several
different differences. But just take the philosopher Quine's example of a
desire. I want a boat can mean either
that I want a particular one, maybe that particular thing that I tried
unsuccessfully to buy yesterday, or that I want some boat, one of the things
that are boats, any of the items that is of that kind or falls under that term
as I use it. So, to get back to intentions, I take it we are to understand that
the intention in action is not about just that particular action. Leaving aside much more that is said
of the new view of intention, including the matters of keeping track of time
and the succession of shapes, it is
presented as having a number of recommendations over the old view. It is more
natural, familiar, not a theory but rather a spelling out of ways we learn to
think and talk about intentionality, and simpler. It is also an extension of the
admired account of intention of the late London philosopher Brian O'Shaugnessy.
In particular this is an account of intention that is in accord with his
general dual aspect view of the mind,
an account in the tradition of many predecessors, including Spinoza. In
intentionally engaging in bodily
action, the action's intentional character is an aspect or manifestation of or a perspective on an underlying state
or reality, and in O'Shaugnessy's case and McDowell's apparently something that
is also bodily through and through. I myself wonder about the question
of whether in the lecture there is an explicit principle of counting depended
on that can be made explicit -- of when two things are two parts of one thing
or instead two things. No doubt that is worked on in the challenging part of
philosophy that is mereology. I wonder too about what is implicit in the
lecture, that what it says of intending does what Wittgenstein recommended,
which is that good philosophy 'leaves everything as it is'. Has philosophy not
changed our conceptions of ourselves? In what fundamental way did Plato,
Descartes, Hume, Kant, and the rest leave everything as it is? I cannot say I myself have been
wholly converted from my own form of the ordinary view of intentions. But the
reasonable intention of even a fine lecture cannot conceivably be conversion of
all parties. The aim, first, is to make you really think. This one does. |