McDowell's Conception of Intention in Action

Christian Heilbronn and Hannes Ole Matthiessen

In this paper we want to summarize what we take to be the essential theses of John

McDowell's set of lectures Intention and Bodily Action. These are: 1) That intentions are not

distinct from the bodily movements they are intentions of. 2) That the concept of intention in

action is more basic than the concept of an intention for the future, the later being an intention

in action ‘before its time has come’. 3) Actions are either identical to bodily movements or

not, depending on whether they have a teleological structure. 4) What an agent has done is a

publicly observable fact, whereas she has a special authority whenever it comes to the

question what she did intentionally. 5) Intentions in action can be expressed by statements in

the present progressive tense and express a kind of non-observational practical knowledge.

In his Lectures, McDowell wants to exploit a parallel he mentions only briefly in Mind and

World. There he claims that human perceptual experiences are conceptual through and

through and thus can serve as a rational foundation of empirical beliefs. Analogously, he

wants to convince us in these Lectures that we should understand bodily activity as informed

by conceptual capacities. This conception of action might help to avoid “a familiar picture

according to which mindedness itself occupies a more or less mysterious inner realm” and

thereby offer an alternative to “a similarly problematic tendency to distance one's body from

one's true self” (1.7). How, then, can we understand the idea that “rationality can be in bodily

activity” (1.7) or that “conceptual capacities inform our active bodily movements themselves”

(2.1)? The answer lies, according to McDowell, in a suitable conception of intention in action

for which the following two features are essential:

1.) First, we should understand intentions in terms of the actions they are in, rather

than as something distinct from those actions. To explain this point, McDowell refers to Brian

O'Shaughnessy's dual-aspect-theory of bodily action. According to O'Shaughnessy, every

bodily action is an exercise of motor capacities which can be described psychologically as a

willing , or in ordinary language more typically as “trying”, “striving” or “attempting”

(O’Shaughnessy 2003, p. 345). Thus actions have two aspects: the psychological aspect of

willing, and the physical aspect of bodily movement.1

O'Shaughnessy does not consider intentions to be aspects of bodily actions in the same way

willings are. He understands willing as a phenomenon of animal life as such. Obviously,

though, intending can be attributed only to certain animals that show some kind of future-

directed behaviour, paradigmatically rational animals. These two thoughts lead him to the

view that intending causes willing and is distinct from it. McDowell, by contrast, suggests

that intending is a species of willing, a form willing takes “in animals that are at least, as one

might put it, proto-rational” (3.2). Thus, when we perform an action, rationality can be in our

limb's movements because the intention just is the action under a psychological description.

As we understand him, McDowell is saying that in rational animals any active bodily

movement is an intention and thus informed by our rationality through and through.1 This

might be seen as parallel to his account of experience in Mind in World where perceptual

experiences are understood as conceptual all the way down.

2.) The second central feature of McDowell’s account of intention in action follows

immediately from what has been said: intentions under a psychological description are

contemporaneous with the bodily actions they are in. This raises a significant problem for

McDowell (indeed, a significant part of his Lectures is concerned with addressing it). The

problem concerns intentions for the future. We very often have intentions to do something at

a future point of time. In such cases, there is an intention, but there is no action (yet). How

then can an intention exist both prior to a bodily movement and be part of it? McDowell

claims that prior intentions and intentions in action are simply different aspects one and the

same thing. He admits that this is difficult to explain when we start with the idea of prior

intention and then try to understand how the intention in action can be the same thing “biding

its time”. Therefore he suggests that we should “start with intention in action and conceive

intention purely for the future as just what that is apart from the time difference” (3.2). Then,

he suggests, it is easier to get a grip on the idea that future intentions form something like a

larval stage of these rationally informed bodily activities. Another way of putting the point is

to compare intentions in action and intentions for the future with actions in progress and

actions in waiting (3.3).

3.) The following two important features of McDowell's account concern the relations

1 In discussion, McDowell remarked that whether or not any bodily activity in human beings is intentional or not depends on the underlying conception of activity. It is well conceivable that there might be instinctive or reflex behaviour that should count as activity, but not as intentional.

2

between bodily movements, actions, and their results. Let us turn to the relation of bodily

movements and actions first. In general, McDowell suggests we have to distinguish between

two types of cases: In several situations, bodily movements cannot be separated from the

action they are in. So if a person simply crosses the street the movements of her body cannot

be separated from the action (her crossing of the street) itself but rather express the action

they are in. That allows us to say: The Davidsonian structure of separated and causally linked

events cannot be applied to street-crossings. Furthermore, we can say that, in these cases, the

bodily movements express the intention in action. However, there are other cases in which the

agent’s bodily movements are at least notionally separable from the actions they are in. For

example, in the case where an agent crosses a street in order to be recorded by a surveillance

camera to provide herself with an alibi. The decisive feature that distinguishes this case from

simple street-crossings is its teleological structure; bodily movements figure as means to an

end. Whereas in cases like the first the “causal organisation is internal to the agent’s doing”

(3.5), the bodily movements in the second case are somewhat autonomous in being

describable as means to an end.

4.) Now let’s turn to the relation between an action and its results. McDowell suggests

that an agent has no special authority over publicly observable behaviour (at least in cases

where causal results of her bodily actions can be counted as her doings). But she still does

have a special authority over what she has done intentionally.

Consider again the example of someone crossing the street. Should we say that the result of

her action (that she actually crossed the street) is separate from her action? Common sense

suggests we should not. And the same holds for many cases in which the results of the agent’s

action encompass more than just her bodily movements. Again, McDowell argues, we should

acknowledge a limit to the application of the Davidsonian idea that “we never do more than

move our bodies: the rest is up to nature.” (Davidson 2001, p. 59)

But the motivation to keep the results of an action separate from the action itself arises from

the consideration of cases in which an intentional action produces results that were not

intended. Here McDowell acknowledges that every result of an intentional action produces

true sentences about the agent’s doing, even if the results of the action were not intended by

the agent. Consider a case in which an agent intentionally hits a baseball and thereby

accidentally kills another person. Even though the killing is not an intentional killing it is not

only true that the agent performed an action that resulted in the death of the other person but

3

that the agent actually killed that person. So the result of the action can very well be included

in the description of the action. But it is not true that the agent intentionally killed that person.

So although we can include the result in the description of the action, we cannot describe it as

an intentional action.

5.) Now let us turn to the issue of practical knowledge which McDowell discusses in

Lecture V. On the basis of Anscombe’s saying “I do what happens” McDowell develops a

notion of practical knowledge which can be summarized as follows: If a verbal utterance is to

be an expression of an intention, it has to likewise be an expression of practical knowledge.

Practical knowledge is expressed by sentences of the form “I am doing such and such” and

should be conceived as having two different directions of fit: On the one hand, an expression

of intention in action “puts a demand on the facts” (5.6); on the other hand, such expressions

are responsible to the way things are. “There is knowledge in intention only if things are,

observably by others, the way one says they are when one says what one is doing in a way

that expresses knowledge in intention.” (5.6). There are cases in which an agent is

intentionally performing an action and fails without noticing that he fails. If one held to the

idea that expressions of practical knowledge have an exclusively world–to–words direction of

fit, it would follow that the agent has knowledge about something that is not the case. Now

such a conception of practical knowledge does not seem to be a conception of knowledge at

all. So we should conceive practical knowledge as something that is not wholly independent

of what actually happens.

Furthermore, a conception that insists on the exclusively world–to–words character of the

expressions of practical knowledge would look like what McDowell calls a highest common

factor-conception. So if we want to retain the idea that knowledge in intention can constitute

knowledge about facts, we should insist that expressions of practical knowledge have both

directions of fit, world-to-word and word-to-world. To capture this thought, McDowell

introduces a disjunctive conception of taking oneself to be doing such and such: taking

oneself to be doing such and such is either – knowingly – doing such and such or, in rare

cases, merely taking oneself to be doing it.

In discussion, McDowell stressed that he didn't merely want to put forward a new account of

practical knowledge. Additionally to that he wanted to show that Davidson's account cannot

provide a theory about practical knowledge because practical reasoning, according to it,

4

merely aims at true propositions. But unless one allows the conclusion of a practical

syllogism to be an action, one will never fully grasp the idea of genuinely practical

deliberation; as McDowell put it: “you don't make it practical by assuming a special sort of

proposition.”

References:

• Davidson, Donald 2001 (1971): “Agency” in Essays on Actions and Events, Oxford,

pp. 43-63.

• O'Shaughnessy, Brian 2003: “The Epistemology of Physical Action” in Roessler,

Eilan (Eds.) Agency and Self-Awareness, Oxford, pp. 345-357.

5