Spontaneous expression and intentional action

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An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy

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Spontaneous expression and intentional action

Stina Bäckström

To cite this article: Stina Bäckström (2020): Spontaneous expression and intentional action, Inquiry, DOI: 10.1080/0020174X.2020.1822910

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/0020174X.2020.1822910

Published online: 07 Oct 2020.

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Spontaneous expression and intentional action

Stina Bäckström

School of Culture and Education, Södertörn University, Huddinge, Sweden

ABSTRACT

When spontaneous expressions such as smiling or crying have been at issue in Anglophone philosophy of action, the touchstone has been Donald Davidson’s belief-desire account of action. In this essay, I take a diﬀerent approach. I use Elizabeth Anscombe’s formal conception of intentional action to capture the distinction and unity between intentional action and spontaneous expression.

Anscombe’s strategy is to restrict her inquiry to the class of acts to which a certain sense of the question ‘Why?’ has application. Applying Anscombe’s strategy to an area she did not consider other than by contrast, I argue that spontaneous expressions are subject to a diﬀerent but intimately related why- question. Both questions elicit non-observational knowledge. But where the question posed to intentional actions opens up a means-end order (an order of practical reasoning) this is not true of the corresponding question for spontaneous expressions. Our explanations of our own spontaneous expressions have conceptual and normative dimensions, but they do not display an inferential order. Anscombe, taking a formulation from Aquinas, describes practical knowledge as the cause of what it understands. I conclude by arguing that this formulation also holds true of our understanding of our own smiles and episodes of crying.

ARTICLE HISTORY Received 18 September 2018; Accepted 4 February 2020

KEYWORDS Intentional action; expression; Anscombe; practical reasoning; form; understanding

Spontaneous expressions, such as smiling, laughing, crying, and frowning, are central to human life. They are central to communication – they contribute to the overall meaning of what we say and do. They are central to intimacy and closeness – quite unlike other modes of communication they make a person present, revealed in the here and now. They also have ethical relevance – when and why a person laughs or cries can be a sign of, say, cruelty or selﬁshness. All these observations stand in need

CONTACT Stina Bäckström stina.backstrom@sh.se School of Culture and Education, Södertörn University, Alfred Nobels allé 7, 141 89 Huddinge, Sweden

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDer- ivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distri- bution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.

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of clariﬁcation. But ﬁrst, can we delineate what kind of human act a spontaneous expression is?

When emotional expressions and expressive actions have been in focus within Anglophone philosophy of mind and action, the touchstone has been what has sometimes been called the standard story of action, namely Donald Davidson’s belief-desire account. It is often pointed out that certain expressive actions, in particular of emotion, resist treatment by Davidson’s account (Hursthouse 1991; Finkelstein 1999; Goldie 2000;

Döring 2003; Bar-On 2004). It is also recognised that although such happenings as smilings and episodes of crying clearly don’t conform to David- son’s account, they still seem intimately related to intentional actions somehow. One response to this has been to explore the option of thinking about intentional action in other and more inclusive terms than Davidson’s view allows for, terms that might even embrace such spontaneous expressions as smiling and frowning (Bar-On 2004, 2011).

In this essay, I take an entirely different approach to the question how to understand spontaneous expression. I do not take Davidson’s story of action, or indeed any other story related to Davidson’s in taking action to be bodily movement caused in some suitable way by an agent or an agent’s psychological states, as my given starting point in discussing action and expression. Instead, I will use Elizabeth Anscombe’s conception of intentional action, which is different in substance and method from most conceptions under the heading of philosophy of action today (Ford 2015; Lavin 2016; Vogler 2016). What I find particularly helpful in Anscombe for thinking about spontaneous expression is the fact that for Anscombe intentional action is a particular form of happening, and its psychological or mental nature is to be understood as an aspect of this form. In a similar fashion, I think the mental or psychological nature of a spontaneous expression should be understood as an aspect of its form – a form it is the project of this essay to elucidate. What these allusions to form amount to will become more clear as we go along.¹

Anscombe herself has no extended discussion of spontaneous expression. In Intention, examples of spontaneous expression come up brieﬂy as contrast cases. She claims, for instance, that if we imagine that the only occurrence of ‘intention’ would be in ‘intentional action’ (not in

1In this paper, my aim is to articulate an alternative conception of a range of cases of human behavior. My term for this range is ‘spontaneous expression’. I reserve the term ‘action’ for that which interests Anscombe in Intention. Since the aim here is to get this alternative conception so much as in view, I will not discuss the consequences this shift in perspective might have for the classiﬁcation of particular cases.

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‘intention for the future’), then ‘an action’s being intentional [would be]

rather like a facial expression’s being sad’ (2000, § 20). For Anscombe, thus, the contrast with facial expression of emotion is a fruitful way to capture something about intentional action. I want to reverse the order of comparison in this essay and use the contrast with intentional action as a way of capturing something about spontaneous expression.

Two intimately related features of Anscombe’s conception of intentional action will be of particular importance for me, namely her thought that intentional action is subject to a certain sense of the question, ‘Why?’ and her idea that such a question can (and do in exemplary instances) open up an order inherent in intentional action, an order of means to end. Exploring these Anscombean themes will lead me to formu- late three interconnected claims regarding the form of spontaneous expression:

(1) Spontaneous expressions are subject to a why-question diﬀerent from the one that pertains to intentional actions.

(2) The order in spontaneous expression is conceptual and normative but it is distinct from a means-end order.

(3) Practical knowledge and one’s understanding of one’s spontaneous expressions are two formally diﬀerent determinations of the characterisation: ‘“the cause of what it understands”’ (2000, § 48).²

One thing that emerges from bringing Anscombean action-theory to bear on spontaneous expression is, thus, a clear answer to the question,

‘Are spontaneous expressions intentional actions?’ No, they are not. But this is not because they are bodily movements caused by other sorts of mental states, or because they are bodily movements over which we lack control, or because they are bodily movements that are impersonal rather than personal. Rather, it is because spontaneous expressions participate in one distinctive form of happening, and intentional actions in another. We can also see, however, that both forms are united under the general characterisation of being ‘“the cause of what [they] understand”’ (2000, § 48). Since Anscombe herself associates the formulation closely with practical knowledge, I go beyond Anscombe in bringing spontaneous expressions under this formulation. I do so, however, by applying her method to a phenomenon she did not consider other than by contrast.

By thus extending Anscombean action-theory we get a particular

2Anscombe quotes this formulation from Aquinas’s Summa Theologica.

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interpretation of the distance in closeness that many have suspected there must be between intentional action and spontaneous expression.

Exactly what, on a more specific level of description, my characterisation elucidates I will leave largely open. Facial expressions, posture, and gestures expressive of emotion, moods, and feelings of pain or pleasure come most readily to mind. And for those regions of human psychology it also seems obvious that accounting for them involves accounting for spontaneous expression. For this reason, it might seem natural that my topic is restricted to expression of affective phenomena (if this is a good title for the regions indicated). But I want to keep it open both what can be expressed spontaneously and what role such expressions should have in an account of different psychological phenomena. We need to understand better what spontaneous expression is before we can look to those questions. And we can do so by bringing Anscombe’s approach to action to bear on those obvious examples. That is my strategy. But first, I will make some general remarks to situate Anscombe’s approach to action.³

1. An investigation into a form of description of events

One way of beginning to describe the diﬀerence between Anscombe’s philosophy of action and the current paradigm in the philosophy of action is to point out that Anscombe explicitly denies that intention is some extra feature added to a mere bodily movement: ‘We do not add anything to the action at the moment it is done by describing it as intentional’ (2000, § 19). Much eﬀort in the contemporary paradigm is spent on debating precisely this question: what sort of mental state or structure does intention need to be (e.g. all-out judgment, overall plan), and what relation does it need to stand (e.g. triggering, guiding) to a bodily movement for it all to add up to an intentional action? In Intention § 19–20, Anscombe argues that any account governed by this question will be unsatisfactory.

So, what, on Anscombe’s view, is an intentional action? The just quoted passage continues: ‘To call it intentional is to assign it to the class of intentional actions and so to indicate that we should consider the question

“Why?” relevant to it in the sense that I have described’ (§ 19). We will

3What I am asking here, in eﬀect, is for the reader to bear with me. Since I am aiming at a fresh start from diﬀerent basic assumptions, it would be premature and unproductive at this stage to try to delineate the category I am interested in by relating it to the theoretical categories established by others, such as e.g., arational actions (Hursthouse 1991) or avowals (Bar-On 2004).

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spend time on this why-question shortly. But we can note that Anscombe’s answer here describes intentional action as the sort of thing to which a certain question can be asked, to which a particular kind of explanation is, as it were, in play. Later, she says, ‘In fact the term “intentional” has reference to a form of description of events’ (§ 47).

In using the formulation ‘form of description’, Anscombe is highlighting how the concepts we use when we describe and explain action exhibit a distinctive unity. But it would be wrong to conclude that form is thereby something that merely pertains to language while leaving the question of the nature of intentional action unsettled. Anscombe argues that it would be a mistake to think that in articulating this form of description we have isolated a way of using language about certain events that ‘for some undiscovered reason [are] subject to the question “Why?”’ (§46).

At diﬀerent moments in Intention, Anscombe tries to dissuade us of the idea that there is such a question arising once we have elucidated the form of description of intentional action.⁴

For Anscombe, then, articulating the form of description of intentional action is nothing short of understanding what an intentional action is.

Events, Anscombe argues, come in diﬀerent forms. And if the event does not partake in the form of intentional action – if it is, say, an inadvertent, reﬂex, kick – we don’t turn it into an intentional action by conceiving of it as guided or triggered by ever so sophisticated mental processes.⁵

In saying that the why-question is relevant to an intentional action, Anscombe is showing us a way of understanding the difference between say, an inadvertent, reflex, kick and an intentional kick, where the difference is at the level of intelligibility, or logical organisation (Ford 2015; Lavin 2016). What counts as the parts and features of the happening, who or what sort of thing can be its author, what counts as its explanation, even how the explanation explains, everything is different.⁶

4Most notably there is such an argument in §19, but see also the above cited §46. Thank you to an anonymous reviewer for prompting me to clarify this issue.

5For Anscombe the problem of deviant causal chains that has preoccupied proponents of the standard story is not a problem to be solved – neither does she think it is insoluble. Rather, the problem is a symptom of the fact that one does not work up to a story of intentional action with materials taken from outside of its form of description of events. Properly understanding the denial that intention is an extra feature, and properly understanding the notion that intention has reference to a form of description of events are intimately connected. For if we don’t register the formal nature of Anscombe’s conception of intention and intentional action we might well think that Anscombe’s denial that intention is an extra feature must mean that she thinks that intentional action is no more than some complex sequence of mere bodily movements. That is, we might think that she is a behaviorist.

6Other philosophers have used the term ‘category’ to mark this kind of diﬀerence. See for example Ryle ([1938] 2009) who also discusses Kant and Aristotle on the notion of a category.

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An intentional action, Anscombe’s argues, is such as to give a certain sense of the question, ‘Why?’ application. The question can be, as Anscombe puts it, ‘refused’, such as when the agent says, ‘I wasn’t aware I was doing that’ (2000, § 6). To say that the question is refused is diﬀerent from saying that the person has no answer. That the person does not have an answer is also perfectly possible (though less so in some cases than others). In such a case the agent might say, ‘I don’t know, I just thought I would’, or, ‘No reason’. Here harmony in understanding between onlooker and agent is preserved. But if the question is refused, a rift is disclosed. Using the notion of form we can say that the inquirer thought that she was confronted with a happening of a certain form, and the agent, in refusing the question, corrects her. (This is not to say that the agent has some kind of unlimited authority. In special circumstances, we would reject the person’s refusal of the question as e.g.

insincere, self-deceived, or confused.)

Given that Anscombe locates the difference between intentional actions and other sorts of movements and happenings at the level of form and not feature, means that for Anscombe the task of giving an account of intentional action is to elucidate this form and articulate the concepts that belong to it. This is wholly different from what Lavin (2016) has called a decompositional approach to action, where the primary task of philosophy of action is to provide an answer to the question (originally posed by Wittgenstein): What is left over if I subtract the fact that my arm goes up from the fact that I raise my arm? From Anscombe’s perspective there is nothing wrong with saying that when I raise my arm, my arm goes up. But the latter description is not one that is less specific by having dropped reference to some feature, but by being less formally committal. Anscombe’s response to Wittgenstein’s question might then be to say: It is somewhat like asking ‘What is left over if I subtract the fact that this is an animal from the fact that it is a human being?’ or, ‘What is left over if I subtract the fact that this is a piece of music from the fact that it is an atonal symphony?’⁷

Now that we have a sense for Anscombe’s approach to action we can ask the question: if intentional action is a form of event, then what to say about spontaneous expressions? Do they exhibit this form, or another? We also get a sense for how to begin to look for the answer to this question, namely seeing what happens if we ask the why-question.

7Compare with Ford’s (2011) discussion of categorial generality.

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2. Diﬀerent senses of the why-question

Here is Anscombe’s initial characterisation of intentional action:

[Intentional actions] are the actions to which a certain sense of the question

‘Why?’ is given application; the sense is of course that in which the answer, if positive, gives a reason for acting. (2000, § 5)

In line with the formal character of her inquiry, Anscombe is not saying that whenever we do something intentionally, we have a reason for doing it. The why-question asks for a reason, and hence the applicability of the question shows a connection between reasons and intentional actions. Since the connection is formal, it remains even when the action in question is not done for a reason. In many cases the question will be obviously inapplicable: seizures, trippings, sneezes, yawns, are all not typi- cally within the scope of Anscombe’s question (although there are excep- tions, one can trip intentionally). Given uncertainty, the answer ‘I wasn’t aware I was (sighing, pulling my hair obsessively, speaking really loudly)’ can settle the issue. A wide range of answers shows the question to be applicable. There are answers of a ‘positive’ kind, that is, answers giving reasons for acting. Examples of such answers could be, ‘To polish them oﬀ’ or, ‘To revenge my father’. There are also answers of a ‘negative’

kind, such as, ‘No reason’ or, ‘I just thought I would’.⁸

Now, one might think that Anscombe’s initial criterion, the applicability of the question, ‘Why?’ in fact brings spontaneous expressions within the scope of the form of description of events she is interested in. For with such acts we might ask the person why she is doing it, and the typical answer is not ‘I wasn’t aware I was doing that’, but rather, answers in the range of ‘I’ve been sad all day’, ‘That was a hilarious comment’, or ‘I don’t know, it just came over me’. Hence the question, it would seem, has application, in which case the acts in question would fall within the scope of Anscombe’s investigation.

This is mere appearance. The initial criterion needs further elucidation, and that’s what the bulk of Intention is supposed to provide. As we read along, we see that Anscombe’s view is that the question we might pose to a spontaneous expression does not have the same sense as the why- question relevant to characterising intentional action.

We cannot diﬀerentiate the two questions in terms of one eliciting an explanation from the ﬁrst-personal point of view, the other not. They

8See Ford (2015) for an elaboration of the notion of a form of description of events in Anscombe, with a particular focus on the idea of the applicability of the why-question.

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both elicit, as Anscombe puts it, non-observational knowledge. That is, when I ask you why you are crying, I don’t expect an answer in impersonal terms, such as citing a physiological mechanism. If you say: ‘I have a bad allergy’, this is not so much an answer to the initial question as a way of showing that it wasn’t applicable in this case. The answer (assuming that it is true) shows that the crying wasn’t, in this case, an expression.

The mere presence of the word ‘reason’ doesn’t help us either: ‘The reason she was crying was that she was feeling guilty’.

What does help us differentiate the two questions and thus place spontaneous expressions outside of Anscombe’s form of description of events, is examining the answers to the question. As we saw, Anscombe is clear on the fact that her why-question tolerates a range of answers, such as ‘I felt like it’ and ‘No particular reason’. However, the question can also be answered by relating one’s present activity to something future in a specific way. (As we will see, this ‘specific way’ is a means-end order. I will turn to this order shortly.) Such an answer can take the shape of men- tioning some future state of affairs one wants to achieve. Or it may mention a description of a larger project or action to which one’s present action is contributing somehow. For example, ‘Why are you pumping water?’ can be answered by ‘I’m replenishing the water supply’, ‘I’m poisoning the inhabitants’, or, ‘To polish them off.’

It is a decisive argumentative move in Intention to show that within the range of answers to the why-question, these future-looking answers are of special importance. They are of special importance in the sense that the concept of intentional action collapses without them. Her argument for this conclusion, in paragraph 20, is a reduction to absurdity of the idea of retaining the form of description of events, while excluding the possibility of the future-looking explanation.⁹ Exactly what sort of future-looking answer Anscombe is pointing to will not become clear until we connect it to the order of means to end. We will do this in the next section. But for now, we will simply note that Anscombe’s view is that her why-question is applicable where there is an intentional action, and that her why-question has a speciﬁc sort of future-looking answer in the range of possible answers.

Now, let’s grant that Anscombe is right. The why-question we pose to an intentional action can be answered by future-looking answer (of the speciﬁ- cally means-end kind). Does the why-question we pose to a spontaneous expression, such as an episode of crying, have this sort of future-looking answer in its range? I submit no. You ﬁnd me in the kitchen crying and

9See Vogler (2016) for an exposition of the argument in its complexity.

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you ask me why I’m crying. I tell you, ‘I’m making dinner’. There is no appar- ent sense to this answer, so suppose you then ask me, ‘Does making dinner make you sad?’ I answer, ‘No, but I’m hungry’. ‘Oh,’ you say, ‘are you so hungry and exhausted you are crying because of that?’. I say, ‘No, I’m pre- paring dinner, that’s all.’ I have not yet managed to make myself intelligible to you, to show you how the diﬀerent answers I give you hang together to form some kind of intelligible whole. Now, the problem with this dialogue isn’t that ‘making dinner’ is the wrong sort of action to explain crying.

Regardless of what action you plug in as an answer to the why-question it will not match the sense of the question. In order to see this, let us consider a diﬀerent version of the dialogue, one where I do come up with an explanation, but where the original question is thereby refused.

‘Why are you crying?’

‘I’m practicing a part for our yearly theatre performance at work’

‘Oh, I see, I thought you were upset. You’re really good!’

I’m here submitting an explanation in terms of an action, and it genuinely explains why I’m crying. But your original question supposed that my crying was a genuine (not play-acted, or feigned, or performed) expression, and asked for an explanation of it as such. When I give my explanation, my answer is at once an explanation and a correction. The correction regards not so much the description of what I am doing: ‘crying’, but what kind or form of crying it is. You presupposed, naturally, that my crying was a genuine expression, an emotional response of mine. My answer corrects you and tells you that my crying is a play-acted crying, a part of practicing a role. (I am well aware that the lines between the two kinds of crying is not always very clear, but I’m proposing that there is a line.)¹⁰

This second dialogue provides us with an interesting contrast. When Anscombe’s why-question – the question that has a further action or further purpose in the range of possible answers – has application to a purported act of spontaneous expression, this purported act of expression can now be qualiﬁed as less genuine. We might still want to call it an act of expression, but it clearly has a sort of dependent or derivative status.

A third variation on the dialogue provides us with yet another contrast:

‘Why are you crying?’

10The issue of performed or theatrical expressions is much more diﬃcult than I can do justice to here.

Issues of technique and how to make use of one’s own spontaneous reactions would be a part of exploring this issue.

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‘I’m cutting onions’

‘Oh, I thought you were upset’

The response ‘I’m cutting onions’ cites an ongoing action of mine, but there is nothing essentially future-directed in my answer. I might just as well have said: ‘I was cutting onions’. The answer does not give application to Anscombe’s why-question. But, interestingly enough, this example also reveals that there is a distinction not only between intentional action and spontaneous expression, but between a mere physiological reaction and a spontaneous expression. In this dialogue, the response ‘I’m cutting onions’

contains an explanation, but not of the kind the interlocutor supposed would be available. This answer rebukes the original question. But, impor- tantly, it does so not because the original question asked for a further purpose, but because the original question was asking for the meaning in the crying, what the crying was about. It asked for a meaningful connection between the expression and the circumstances. The response denies that such a question has application. I could have responded: ‘No, no, I’m not crying, I’m just cutting onions.’ These variations on a dialogue point us in the direction of thinking that there is a distinction between intentional action and spontaneous expression. They are not subject to the same why- question. But we might also need a distinction between spontaneous expression and merely causal, physiological, response. I will come back to this latter distinction. For now, I want to stay focused on the distinction between intentional action and spontaneous expression.

The why-question that attaches to the form of crying we are interested in (a spontaneous expression) is not Anscombe’s why-question. This, in turn, places crying outside the sphere of her topic, intentional action.

Now, my suggestion is that these observations are not local to crying.

There is a range of act-concepts whose instantiations often (though not necessarily) are such spontaneous expressions, such as: laughing, frowning, smiling, sighing, recoiling, grinning, clenching one’s fists, pouting, declining or averting one’s eyes, slouching, shrinking, shuddering, trem- bling, flinching, cringing, beaming, and smirking. Someone may wish to test this claim by plugging in these different examples in the sorts of dialogue I have been imagining. What is important is that at least with the concept of expressive crying, the relevant why-question is non-observationally answerable but it is nevertheless not Anscombe’s why-question.

As I mentioned before, Anscombe takes the future-looking answer to her why-question to open up for an exploration of her topic, intentional action.

This is because this answer reveals an order that is contained in intentional

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action, a means-end order. Looking at how Anscombe describes this order gives us further material for our comparison with spontaneous expressions.

3. The order in action and the order in spontaneous expression One central idea in the previous section was that the speciﬁc kind of future looking answer to Anscombe’s why-question was central to the sense of the question. In this section I will get more precise about what this speciﬁc kind of answer is. Anscombe urges that understanding the form of intentional action requires us to examine cases where the why-question not only is applicable, but receives future looking answers. She says,

[S]ome chain must at any rate begin. As we have seen, this does not mean that an action cannot be called voluntary or intentional unless the agent has an end in view; it means that the concept of voluntary or intentional action would not exist, if the question ‘Why?’, with answers that give reasons for acting, did not.

Given that it does exist, the cases where the answer is ‘For no particular reason’, etc. can occur; but their interest is slight, and it must not be supposed that because they can occur that answer would everywhere be intelligible, or that it could be the only answer ever given. (§ 21)

The chain Anscombe is talking about here is an order of means and ends, of doing one thing in order to do something else. If some chain must begin, and we should look at such a chain to understand the form of intentional action, what would be an instance? ¹¹

Let’s consider Anscombe’s master example, a man moving his arm up and down, pumping poisoned water into a cistern, thereby replenishing the house water supply in order to poison the inhabitants. We imagine ourselves confronting this man with a series of why-questions. The answers we get form an order, dubbed by Anscombe the A-D order:

A. Moving my arm up and down B. Pumping water

C. Replenishing the water supply D. Poisoning the inhabitants

11One question that arises from Anscombe’s emphasis on means-end order is what happens to the idea of non-telic action or activity (i.e., actions or activities that have no end-point internal to them). There is currently a debate in Anscombe-inspired action theory on precisely this question. See e.g., Thompson (2008), Lavin (2013) and Hornsby (2013). What Hornsby argues for, which seems plausible to me, is that both telic action and non-telic activity are needed for a complete picture of intentional agency.

According non-telic activity a theoretical place doesn’t, however, threaten the point I make about spontaneous expression in this essay. I have emphasised that spontaneous expressions such as episodes of crying are subject to a diﬀerent why-question altogether. Thus, such expressions would not be examples of non-telic intentional activity of the sort Hornsby wants to make room for.

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This order is such that we can work forwards, by continuing to raise the why-question. The explanations are, as Anscombe puts it, ‘swallowed up’ by each other, such that D might be given as an answer to the why-question about A. The answer B (or C or D) responds to the why-question about A only if we can see how doing A might contribute to or be constitutive of B. But we can also work backwards, from D to A, through a ‘How?’ question.

The how-question about D is answered by C (or B, or A), only if we understand how C is a way to get D done. The why-question asks for the end, the how-question asks for the means, and both questions are ways of unfolding the means-end structure of the man’s action (§ 26).

Anscombe ties the order to Aristotle and the practical syllogism, and it is clear that for her the A-D order is a clue to showing what is right in thinking about action as an exercise of practical rationality. As such, the description that ends the series of why-questions, the end of the action, needs to be such that we can understand why someone would want it. This is, for Anscombe, not the same as saying that the end needs to be praiseworthy – morally or otherwise – it suﬃces that it is recognisable as in some respect desirable. That an end has some pleasure in it is one example of something recognisably desirable, that it beﬁts the sort of person one takes oneself to be is another. About the description that ends the series of how-questions, Anscombe doesn’t have much to say in Intention. What she does say, with reference to Aris- totle, is that ‘one does not deliberate about an acquired skill; the description of what one is doing, which one completely understands, is at a distance from the details of one’s movements, which one does not consider at all’ (§ 30).¹²The A-D order, thus, is an inferential order, it shows means-end reasoning at work.

I have already argued that there is a distinct why-question applicable to spontaneous expressions. This already suggests that there is no A-D order to be revealed in such episodes. And this is indeed the case.

Let’s look at what a series of why-questions opens up in a case where I am sitting in a room crying, and you enter the room and ask me why I’m crying:

(Why are you crying?)

‘I’m watching this TV-show (pointing at the television)’ (E) (Why was the TV-show upsetting?)

12This is one point at which the issue (mentioned in footnote 8) of what role, if any, non-telic action or activity might have to play in Anscombean action-theory comes up.

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‘There was a man there who reminded me of my father’ (X) (Why does being reminded of your father make you upset?)

‘I just miss him, that’s all’ (P)

I will call the series of responses the ‘EXP-order’. Like the A-D order, the EXP-order is brought out by eliciting non-observational knowledge. But the relation between the items in the EXP-order is different from how the A-D order is structured. X explains E not by E contributing to or con- stituting X: crying is not a means to watching television. Rather, X articu- lates a meaningful connection between the crying, on the one hand, and watching television on the other hand. It is in no way strange that a person cries in front of the TV, but it leaves the more specific connection undetermined. X, and then P, fill in the details a bit more.

The last item on the EXP-order resembles the last item on the A-D order in that it ‘swallows up’ the middle item. That is, I could have responded to the question, ‘Why are you crying?’ by saying, ‘I miss my father’. However, you would not work your way back from P to E by asking, ‘How are you missing your father?’ Rather, you can work your way back, so to speak, by asking me if there is any reason why I miss my father particularly acutely right now. In explaining the crying, there is a movement between the here and now, and the particularities of the speciﬁc situation, to such things as events in the person’s history, general dispositions and character traits, and values and visions of life. It is not possible, I think, to specify in the abstract what might be relevant, which is not to say that anything thereby goes.

The fact that the last item swallows up the middle indicates that the EXP-order is an order in Anscombe’s sense, and not a mere sequence of causally connected facts or events. Compare with the following: ‘I’m crying’, ‘Why?’, ‘I’m cutting onions?’, ‘Why?’, ‘I’m making dinner?’, ‘Why?’,

‘I’m hungry’, ‘Why?’ Here we have sequence where the answer ‘I’m hungry’ could not have been given to the ﬁrst in the series of why-questions. It is also unclear what the person who is repeating the question wants to understand. It seems as if the target of her question shifts with each ‘Why?’. (For those of you who spend time with small children, this sort of sequence will seem very familiar.)¹³

Now, the elements of an A-D order hold together conceptually, together they form a piece of practical reasoning. Of what sort is the

13Thank you to an anonymous reviewer for prompting me to consider this sort of sequence.

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EXP-order? How are the elements of this order joined together? How do they explain the crying? It might be tempting at this point to think that if there is no means/end order, the explanation must be of a merely causal sort.¹⁴Earlier, when discussing diﬀerent variations on answers to a question ‘Why are you crying?’ I suggested that a merely causal answer, such as ‘I’m cutting onions’, in fact shows that the crying in question is not of the form normally supposed in the question. Now we are ready to see why. ¹⁵

If we compare ‘I’m cutting onions’ to ‘I was reminded of my father’, one major diﬀerence is the sort of discussion that can arise regarding the former but not the latter answer. It might strike you as strange that being reminded of my father makes me cry, since all I usually show when my father comes up is scorn. This might prompt further questions about what it was about this TV-show that allowed me a diﬀerent perspective on my father. For an answer to be an answer and not just a further question mark, it needs to point to something intelligible as contributing to or prompting my sadness, something we can understand in terms of loss or deprivation. It might take a life-story to get to such an understanding, but often it only takes a sentence. No such discussion arises around

‘I’m cutting onions’ as an answer.

Hence, the elements of the EXP-order are under constraints of conceptual intelligibility: they explain what they do in so far as the concepts in them hang together in relevant ways. But there is also a normative dimen- sion. There is space for an evaluative discussion with respect to the EXP- order, but not with respect to a merely causal explanation. Say we are sib- lings, and your perspective on our common male progenitor is that he was abusive and cruel and doesn’t deserve anyone’s tears. Then you might say to me: ‘That man caused enough tear-shed when he was alive! Get on with it!’ This criticism, in turn, might be deemed callous and insensitive. No comparable normative discussion is to be had concerning the explanatory nexus crying/cutting onions.¹⁶

14See Frey and Frey (2017, 209) for a recent example of a blanket contrast between practical reason as a form of explanation, and mere causality.

15The following argument is inspired by David Finkelstein’s discussion of how a person’s various ways (verbal and non-verbal) of expressing her state of mind hang together. He argues that rationalisation of action is a species of a broader genus of ‘items that make sense together, in light of each other’ (Fin- kelstein 2003, 112).

16In the processes of isolating the special sense of the why-question, Anscombe discusses, to set aside, what she calls mental causes. An example of a mental cause is jumping from seeing a face in the window. Anscombe distinguishes the cause of the jumping from the object of feeling. Cause and object might co-incide, but they might not. She also distinguishes mental causes from reasons for acting by saying that notions of good and evil are involved in the latter but not the former (§ § 14– 15). I ﬁnd Anscombe’s discussion of mental causes hard to make use of for my purposes. This is

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(No doubt, there could be a normative discussion of sorts regarding how to avoid crying when cutting onions. ‘Why aren’t you using goggles?’, ‘Here, chew on a piece of bread, it helps’. But this this discussion does not pertain to what the crying is about, its sense and appropriate- ness. It is a normative discussion regarding how to best prevent the crying by intervening in the causal chain that leads up to it.)

Anscombe stresses that the form of description of events in which the concepts of intention, reason, and action participate, is laid out by the A-D order. She does not claim that every case of an intentional action opens up an A-D order. Some intentional actions are done just to do it, on a whim, or for no reason, and some intentional actions have an A-D order that seems oﬀ or broken. There’s a parallel with the order that opens up with the why- question we pose to a spontaneous expression. Sometimes there is very little to say about why we are, say, crying, smiling, or sighing. And sometimes what we say appears oﬀ or hard to understand.¹⁷But it is hard to imagine that this could always be the case, as if all our expressions simply happened, and where we could make no intelligible connection to the situation and our other thoughts and feelings.¹⁸

What emerges from this comparative exercise is that the order in spontaneous expression is related to but distinct from the order in intentional action. From the Anscombean perspective, both these forms of human act are instances of first-personal (self-conscious) happenings. In both the case of intentional action and the case of spontaneous expression it belongs to their forms that a why-question, essentially posed to the person whose action or expression it is, is applicable to them. What I mean by this is the following. An intentional action, on Anscombe’s view, is eligible for her why-question. This why-question is first-personal, and opens up (in exemplary instances) an order of description (the A-D order). A spontaneous expression, I argue, is eligible for a different but related why-

partly because, since her topic is intentional action, she isn’t particularly nuanced when it comes to describing the contrasting phenomena. As my discussion makes clear, I think it is problematic to dis- tinguish the phenomena she calls mental causes from what she calls reasons for acting by pointing to notions of good and evil. Even jumping from seeing a face in the window is a reaction we make intelligible in ways that involve, however implicitly, notions of vulnerability, threat and preparation.

17One common such case is when we behave aggressively in a situation where we do not think we ought to so behave. In such situations, we commonly deny that we are angry – and we often deny it in an aggressive way. (Such performative contradictions are the stuﬀ of comedy.) Often, but not always, we can acknowledge the anger when the dust settles. There are also the more troubling cases of self-alienation, described in the psychoanalytic literature.

18A particular case to consider here is physical pain, say a splitting head-ache. The frowns and sighs that express this pain are made intelligible through our why-question, but when I answer ‘I have a splitting head-ache’, this promptly ends the inquiry. If I ask you why you have a headache, you might well know why, but you don’t know it non-observationally. Hence not all expressions open up an order of answers reaching, as it were, further inwards and backwards. But many do.

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question. This why-question, too, is ﬁrst-personal and opens up an order of description (the EXP-order). Another way to put this point would be to say that intentional action and spontaneous expression have in common that they are formally related the person’s own understanding of them. That is, it is to the acting or expressing person we turn when we are looking for an articulation of the A-D order and the EXP-order respectively.¹⁹

Practical knowledge, Anscombe says, quoting Aquinas, is the ‘“cause of what it understands”’ (§ 48). By ‘cause’, Anscombe here means formal cause. The agent’s understanding (description) is the form of the happening it understands. This might seem obscure, but I understand it as a different way of putting the point that intentional actions are (in their very nature) such that the why-question is applicable to them. This why-question lets the agent’s understanding of what happens unfold. And this understanding at the same time reveals the form of the happening it describes. If I am right about spontaneous expressions, we can say the same about a person’s understanding of her own expressions; it is also the cause of what it understands. For in both cases the happenings are subject to a request for a first- personal explanation, and this explanation exhibits a specific form. One result of this investigation is, then, that the general formulation Anscombe takes from Aquinas has formally different specific determinations. Practical knowledge is displayed in A-D order form. This is an order of practical rationality, of doing one thing in order to do another one. Self-consciousness in expression is displayed in a different kind of order, an order, one might perhaps put it, of spontaneous sense-making.

My claim is that there is more than one way in which a person’s understanding can be the cause of that which it understands. This claim is not something that Anscombe herself appears to have on her horizon. To the contrary, she seems to associate the formulation ‘the cause of what it understands’ closely with the concept of practical knowledge. I take the extension of the formulation, rather, to be a result of applying her method to an area she did not consider other than by contrast. Once we notice how spontaneous expressions are subject to a why-question intimately related to Anscombe’s, we must, on pain of her own arguments,

19The comparison between spontaneous expressions and intentional action would be fruitful to bring to bear further on the debate over the nature of practical knowledge. Anton Ford (2016, 2017) has argued that we need to accord perception a more central role in our account of practical knowledge. In Ford’s view, practical reasoning is primarily concerned with settling questions about how one should realise one’s ends in relation to the practical possibilities the situation aﬀords, and thus crucially involves per- ceptual knowledge. One’s spontaneous expressions do not depend on settling any how-questions. It might, then, be possible to diﬀerentiate practical knowledge from one’s knowledge of one’s spontaneous expression by the role perception plays in the former.

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maintain that practical knowledge does not exhaust the ways in which a person’s understanding might be the cause of what it understands.

Someone might worry about applying the concept of understanding to the case of spontaneous expression and its explanation. The A-D order displays rationality at work, and someone might object that the series of responses in the EXP-order just don’t show the right kind of unity charac- teristic of understanding. The A-D order shows an inferential unity, this objection would continue, whereas there is no comparable order to the answers laid out in (so-called) EXP-order. This objection, however, takes it for granted that all ways of making connections that is properly called understanding needs to conform to an inferential paradigm. Assuming a false paradigm is an argumentative strategy that Anscombe opposed in many areas. Her account of practical knowledge is itself an attack on assuming theoretical knowledge as a paradigm for all knowledge (2000,

§ 32). The objection I’m considering here presupposes, I think, a non-obli- gatory inferential paradigm of understanding.

To loosen the grip of this conception of understanding, we can ﬁnd inspiration in a discussion by Anscombe’s teacher Wittgenstein. In § § 531–533 of the Philosophical Investigations he compares the understanding that is expressed or evidenced by replacing one sentence with another, with the understanding that is evidenced by leading someone else to understand a poem or a theme in a piece of music. He asks:

‘Then has “understanding” two diﬀerent meanings here? – I would rather say that these kinds of use of “understanding” make up its meaning, make up my concept of understanding’ (2001, 122). One way of putting Wittgenstein’s point here would be to say that wants us to notice how impoverished our conception of understanding would be if we didn’t allow it to span these diﬀerent ‘kinds of use’.

Neither of the cases Wittgenstein brings up in these paragraphs are necessarily examples of inferential understanding. Translating or elaborating a sentence, explaining its meaning in other words, need not involve spelling out its inferential implications. Neither is leading someone to understand a poem or theme in a piece of music – something which might involve using metaphors or asking them to listen for certain things – an example of inferential understanding. This puts the onus back on the person who wants to insist on the inferential paradigm: why should everything legiti- mately called ‘understanding’ conform to this particular paradigm?

Making sense of one’s own spontaneous expressions retains, I think, features of both cases Wittgenstein considers. For it has elements of elaboration and articulation, replacing one sentence with another to explain its

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meaning. But, since the original object of explanation (the crying or smiling) is itself a non-verbal form of expression, it also resembles leading someone to understand a poem or a theme in a piece of music.

We might see someone’s crying as, on the one hand, something translata- ble and articulable. On the other hand, we might see it as similar to a poem: singular and irreplaceable. What is important to me here is that a person in making sense of her expression gives form to it, in the sense that, as Anscombe’s puts it, ‘without it what happens does not come under the description […] whose characteristics we have been investi- gating’ (2000, § 48). This is Anscombe’s own gloss on Aquinas’s formulation, and what I claim is that this is a perfectly good summary also of the conclusion we arrived at regarding spontaneous expressions.

4. Spontaneous expression delineated

By using Anscombe’s strategy of letting a special sense of the why-question open up a form of description of events, I have shown how spontaneous expression and intentional action relate to each other, from a perspective inspired by Anscombe. They are uniﬁed in that our understanding of them is the formal cause of what it understands. This characterisation does not hold of, say, the nexus of crying and cutting onions. But the form this understanding takes is diﬀerent in each of the two cases. With spontaneous expressions, this understanding displays sense-making connections such as those between crying, being reminded of one’s father, and missing one’s father. In the case of intentional actions our understanding displays a means-end order, such as pumping in order to replenish the water supply.²⁰

Drawing on Anscombean action-theory, we are thus left with a picture where the ﬁeld of meaningful human acts (acts that are such that the person’s own understanding gives form to them) comprises not only intentional action. What might be the importance of attending to this wider ﬁeld?

Most immediately, of course, understanding human life. But Anscombe herself also indicates that an interest in ethics ought not conﬁne us to a study of intentional action. She calls the idea that a good man is by deﬁnition ‘just one who aims wisely at good ends’, ‘unconvincing’. This is

20I have been focusing on a straightforward contrast between intentional action and spontaneous expression. With this contrast in view, we can begin to explore more complicated cases, where we might need to draw on resources from our accounts of both phenomena. Such cases include actions that are expressive in the sense of being ultimately explained by an emotion, such as throwing things in anger. Other cases are actions that are expressive in the way they are being done, such as joy- ously greeting someone.

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because, she reasons, ‘[H]uman goodness suggests virtues among other things, and one does not think of choosing means to ends as obviously the whole of courage, temperance, honesty, and so on (§ 41)’.

In Intention, Anscombe leaves us hanging with this statement, not giving any positive suggestions about what may be left out. But we might guess that part of what Anscombe is alluding to here is precisely patterns of feelings, attitudes, and moods. Given the Aristotelian roots of her thinking, this is a fair inference. As such patterns characteristically take spontaneous expression it is natural to think that an ethics that looks wider than to practical knowledge would look, in part, to spontaneous expression. Hence, by circumscribing and delineating the form of intentional action, Anscombean action theory, and Anscombe-inspired philosophical psychology more broadly, urges us to consider the place of spontaneous expression in ethical life.

Acknowledgements

This paper has a long history and many people are owed thanks for comments and discussion. I won’t be able to mention them all. But I do want to thank David Finkelstein for years of discussion of this topic. I am also very grateful to Martin Gustafsson for comments on a late version of this paper and for countless occasions of philosophical exchange. I presented this paper at a workshop at Leipzig University, I thank the audi- ence for a productive discussion. I also want to thank the anonymous reviewers who helped improve this paper. Work on this paper has been generously supported by the Kone Foundation and the Academy of Finland.

Disclosure statement

No potential conﬂict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Funding

This work was supported by Kone Foundation and the Academy of Finland.

References

Anscombe, G. E. M. 2000. Intention. 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Bar-On, Dorit. 2011. “Neo-Expressivism: Avowals’ Security and Privileged Self- Knowledge.” In Self-knowledge, edited by A. Hatzimoysis, 189–201. Oxford: Oxford University Press.