Attributions of Intentional Action

Author(s): Louise M. Antony

Source: Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic
Tradition, Vol. 51, No. 3 (May, 1987), pp. 311-323
Published by: Springer
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LOUISE M. ANTONY

ATTRIBUTIONS OF INTENTIONAL ACTION

(Received30 May, 1986)

If we didn't learn it in English, we learned it in Philosophy: Oedipus

married Jocasta intentionally, but he only married his mother
inadvertently,even though Jocasta is his mother. The dramaticconsequences are only slightly more grim than the logical ones.
The problem for philosophers appears when we try to extract the
logical form of sentences like:
(1)

Oedipus marriedJocastaintentionally

and do it in a way which will block the inferenceto:

(2)

Oedipus marriedhis mother intentionally

given the identity:

(3)

Jocastais Oedipus'smother.

(I'll call sentences like (1) and (2) 'attributionsof intentional action',
or 'A.I.A.'s for short.)
Well, we've seen this sort of thing before. We know that from:
(4)

Oedipus believes Jocastais his wife

and (3), it does not follow that:

(5)

Oedipus believes his mother is his wife.

And so we know just what to do - we must declare (1) and (2) and
their ilk (i.e., sentences containing the adverb "intentionally")to be
intensional contexts, thereby ensuring that at least one third of all
college studentswill loathe philosophy forever.
Obviously, recognizing that "intentionally"creates an intensional
context is simply a labeling, and not a solution, of the problem.' But
it may be a step on the way to a solution, if it helps us recognize its
Philosophical Studies 51 (1987) 311-323.

? 1987 by D. Reidel PublishingCompany.

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312

LOUISE M. ANTONY

essential similarity to a class of problems with which we've had more

success, as indeed, I believe it does.
I would like to argue that we can combine two good ideas - one
due to Donald Davidson, and the other due to JerryFodor - and get a
solution to the philosophical side of Oedipus's problem. The idea I'd
like to borrow from Davidson is his proposal for the logical analysis
of sentences like:
(6)

Oedipus marriedJocasta.

On Davidson's view, (6) should be construed as asserting the existence of a particularevent, a marryingof Jocastaby Oedipus. Its logical form is something like this:
(7)

(Ex) [Married(Oedipus,Jocasta,x)]

where the object satisfying the sentence will be a particular, nonrepeatableevent, one which occurredat a definite place and time. As
a concrete particular, the event can be referredto or described in
many differentways, so that it can figurein true identity-claims,like:
(7)

Oedipus's marrying Jocasta is the same [event] as

Oedipus'smarryinghis mother.

One virtue of this analysis is that it makes transparentthe logical

relationsbetween such sentences as (6) and
(8)

Oedipus marriedJocastaquickly

the logical form of which is

(9)

(Ex) [Married(Oedipus,Jocasta,x) & Quickly (x)]

which clearly entails (6). On Davidson's analysis, virtually all

adverbial and prepositional modifications get treated this way, as
specificationsof propertiesof events. But notice that, in virtue of the
identity expressedin (7), (9) will also entail
(10)

Oedipus marriedhis mother quickly.

That doesn't seem so bad, but what happens when we apply Davidson's analysis to the adverb "intentionally" appears to be very bad
indeed. For if events are concrete particulars,subject to the law of

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ATTRIBUTIONSOF INTENTIONALACTION

313

indiscemibility of identicals, and if adverbs mark properties of individual events, then it looks like the logical analysis of (1) ought to be
(10)

(Ex) [Married(Oedipus,Jocasta,x) & Intentionally(x)]

which would license the inference to (2) - precisely what we didn't

want. It may appear that, far from contributingto a solution to the
problem of the intentionality of actions, Davidson's analysis of action
sentences makes the thing intractable.Hang on.
Davidson acknowledges the problem, but never confronts it
squarely. He says in 'The Logical Form of Action Sentences' simply
that
the adverbialform must be in some way deceptive;intentionalactions are not a class of
actions, or, to put the point a little differently,doing somethingintentionallyis not a
mannerof doing it (p. 121).

He goes on to suggestthat by using "some form of words like, 'It was

intentional of x that p' where 'x' names the agent, and 'p' is a sentence that says the agent did something" (p. 122), we can accommodate all the logical features of attributions of intentional action,
including their intensionality.
But it's hard to see how serious this proposal is, for Davidson does
not present and defend any applications of it. One qualificationmust
be made right away, in light of Davidson's interest in the logic of
action sentences. The context created by the locution 'It was intentional of x that ...' cannot be completely opaque, or else the (wanted)
inference from 'Oedipus married Jocasta intentionally' to 'Oedipus
marriedJocasta',will be blocked. That is, if the logical form of (1) is:
( 11)

Intentional {Oedipus, that [(Ex) (Marrying (Oedipus,

Jocasta,x))]}

where the 'intentionality operator'is fully intensional, then the truth

of (I 1) will not entail the truth of (7):
(7)

(Ex) [Married(Oedipus,Jocasta,x)]

Note too that existential generalization is valid in A.I.A.'s. We can

infer from the fact that Oedipus intentionally married Jocasta that
there is someone who Oedipus married.

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LOUISE M. ANTONY.

None of this is really problematic, for the complex of featureswe

would want the intentionality operatorto display is characteristicof a
class of naturally-occurringexpressions - the so-called "factives".2
Factives create what might be called "translucent"contexts: the truth
of sentences with main verbs like "know", "remember",and "understand" entails (or presupposes) the truth of the verbs' propositional
complements, so that existential generalization on referential positions within the scope of the verbs is valid. On the other hand, substitutivity of co-referringexpressions does not, in general, preserve
truth in these contexts. 'It was intentional of x that

would presum-

...'

ably display this complex of features, and would thus simply

resemble 'X knows that ...' more than 'X believes that

...'.

But at any rate, the introduction of an intentionality operator is

still more a specificationof a difficultythan a solution of it. The issue
remains: why is 'being done intentionally' not simply a property
of the action, as is 'being done quickly'?Why is the truth of an A.I.A.
sensitive to the way an action is described?Later in the abovementioned article, Davidson hints at a fuller solution:
To say someone did something intentionally is to describe the action in a way that
bearsa special relationto the beliefsand attitudesof the agent(p. 121)

the suggestionbeing that attributionsof intentional action involve an

"extra place", that they assert a relation between an agent, an event,
and something else - perhaps a belief or a desire, perhaps a description of an action.
Now this is quite promising:if 'intentionally'expressesa relational
feature of actions, ratherthan simply a property, then the difference
in logical behavior between it and adverbslike 'quickly' is explained.
But a new issue does arise - what, precisely, is the third term of the
relation? Davidson, echoing concerns of some of his critics,3 sees
resolution of this ontological issue as crucial to the defense of an
extensional account of events. Discussing yet another philosophically
portentous event in Oedipus's life, (his striking an old man - Laius,
his father, as it turns out), Davidson says that we may say in a fa(on
de parler that
the striking of the old man was intentional under one description but not under
another.This does not mean the event did and did not have a certainproperty,but that

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ATTRIBUTIONS OF INTENTIONAL ACTION

315

the event, Oedipus, and a certain description, have a relation that does not obtain
betweenthe same event, Oedipus,and a differentdescription(p. 195).

He allows that "The mention of descriptionsis obviously a gesturein

the direction of ontology", and concedes that "therecan be no serious
theory until we are told what descriptions are, and how attributions
of attitude referto them" (p. 195).
This is about as far as Davidson goes: A.I.A.'s assert a relation
between agents, events, and third things, provisionally identified as
'descriptions'.He does say in a footnote that he thinks the extra entity
is an utterance, and cites 'Actions, Reasons and Causes' and 'On
Saying That'4 for elaboration. But in neither article are the specific
difficulties attending the analysis of A.I.A.'s explicitly addressed,so
that a full account of A.I.A.'s as a relation among agents, events, and
particularacts of saying, can only be extrapolatedfrom what is said
about rationalexplanation and indirect discourse.
Presumably,the utterancein question is the making of the attribution of intentional action. Thus, (perhaps)to say that Oedipus intentionally marriedJocasta is to say that Oedipus marriedJocasta, and
that Oedipus bears some special relation to my having said that: viz.,
"Oedipus married Jocasta". But what's the special relation? Davidson's referencing 'On Saying That' suggests that it should be some
variety of the samesaying relation. But what? Oedipus needn't have
said anything about marryingJocasta in order for us to correctly say
that he marriedher intentionally. What's important here is not what
Oedipus may have said about his action, but ratherwhat he believed
about it. (Though of course, what he said may have provided crucial
data about his beliefs.)
Thus, what we want is for the content of (the action-specification
part of) our A.I.A. to match (or be relevantly like) the description
under which Oedipus representedhis action to himself. In making an
A.I.A., we are not striving to be samesayers with Oedipus, we are
straightforwardlytrying to characterize his state of mind. We are
claiming that Oedipus not only marriedJocasta,but believed he was,
in so doing, performingan action of a particularkind - the 'marrying
Jocasta'kind.
In short, the extra entity in the intentionality relation is a mental
state - a belief, or the complex mental state composed of a belief and

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LOUISE M. ANTONY

a pro attitude that Davidson terms a 'primaryreason'. I'm not saying

that it's wrong to claim that A.I.A.'s relate agents and events to
descriptions, for it will certainly be the case that, if Oedipus believes
that doing p will constitute marrying Jocasta, then Oedipus will
certainly bear a relation to the description "marriedJocasta"that he
will not bear to the description "married his mom". The point is
rather,that the fact that such relations hold or fail to hold is parasitic
upon the facts about Oedipus's mental states. It may even be that it's
impossible to specify these relations to descriptions except by reference to what Oedipus believes.
There's another reason to take beliefs (or primaryreasons- I'll just
say "beliefs" from now on) as the third relatum of the intentionality
relation, and this is a point amply acknowledged by Davidson. To
assert that an action was performedintentionally is to assert that the
action was performed for a reason, and this, according to Davidson
himself, is to assertthat the action was caused by beliefs and desiresof
the agent.5 Hence, A.I.A.'s contain a tacit reference to the agent's
beliefs anyway. Treating intentionality as a relation among agents,
events, and beliefs is economical, and moreover, affords a natural
account of the origin of the quasi-intensionalityof A.I.A.'s.
"But", someone is bound to object, "what is a belief but a disposition to utter or assent to utterancesof sentences?"This is a big objection. Lots of people have been and still are chary of unreconstructed
references to mental entities. Davidson, for all the apparent
mentalism of 'Actions, Reasons, and Causes', is one of those people.
He does not believe in the objectivity of ascriptions of propositional
attitudes and thus is hardly willing to quantify over mental objects of
those attitudes. 'On Saying That' is clearly an attempt to circumvent
reference to objects of propositional attitudes in analyses of indirect
discourse.
One question is whether some such anti-mentalistic (or antisemantic) programas Davidson's will work. I don't pretend that the
argument above shows that A.I.A.'s must be construed as making
reference to mental entities, nor that beliefs cannot somehow be
reducedto behavior and dispositions to behave. (Although I do think
this point has been demonstrated. See any functionalist critique of
behaviorism.)6But what these argumentsdo show, I think, is that an

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ATTRIBUTIONS OF INTENTIONAL ACTION

317

account in terms of beliefs is preferableto one in terms of utterances,

provided that the "gesturein the direction of ontology" can be suitably articulated. Happily for me, there is available an eminently
suitable articulation in the form of Jerry Fodor's theory of mental
representation,the second good idea I want to borrow.
Fodor's idea is that beliefs, desires, and contentful mental states in
general, are relations to mental representations.7For instance, if one
believes that Oedipus married his mother, then one stands in the
belief relation (which is functionally characterized,but that's a different good idea), to some mental representation,("m.r."),provisionally
specifiableas F (Oedipus marriedhis mother).8
The importantthing to notice here is that the proposed analysis of
belief quantifies over representations. Mental representations are
supposed to be actual sentences in a mental language - physically
realized in the nervous system - and as sentences have many of the
important propertiesof sentences in public languages.For one thing,
like public-language sentences, they are individuated by their syntactic and lexical - i.e., formal - properties. Also, like public-

languagesentences, m.r.'s have semantic properties:truth-conditions,

at the very least. Finally, like public-languagesentences, because they
are individuated formally, distinct m.r.'s can express the same truthconditions. This is the point to exploit in order to obtain an explanation of how one could believe that Oedipus married his mother
without also believing that he marriedJocasta.
Because syntactic differences among m.r.'s cash out into differences in physical realization, and hence, into differences in causal
powers, formally distinct representations may affect behavior in
systematicallydifferentways. This leaves open precisely the possibility we need - that a person may discriminate, in thought and
behavior, among differentrepresentationsof the same objective situation, indeed, to the extent of affirmingand denying the same property
of the same individual.
Thus, consider the case of Hermione, who attended neither her
English nor her philosophy classes, and just got a two-minute
summaryof the play from a friend.It might well be the case that:
(11)

Hermione believes that Oedipus marriedhis mother.

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LOUISE M. ANTONY

But also that:

(12)

Hermione doesn't believe that Oedipus marriedJocasta.

(This because the name of the other incestuous partnerdidn't come

up, so that Hermione in fact has no beliefs framedin terms of "Jocasta".)
The truth conditions of (I1) are, on Fodor'saccount:
(13)

(Ex) [x = F (Oedipus,marriedhis mother)and

Believes(Hermione,x)]

and the truth conditions of (12) are:

(14)

(Ex) [x = F(Oedipus marriedJocasta)and

Believes(Hermione,x)]

In short, (11) asserts that Hermione stands in the belief relation to

a mental representationof one sort, and (12) denies that she stands
in the belief relation to a mental representationof another sort. Fodor
proposes to handle all the propositional attitudes in the same way.
E.g., for Hermione to desire a good gradeon her lit exam is for her to
bear the "desire"relation (functionally characterizedagain, in a way
that both distinguishes it from and coordinates it properly with
beliefs, etc.) to the m.r. F(I get a good gradeon my lit exam).9
The application of Fodor's good idea to attributionsof intentional
action is fairly straightforward.As I've already argued,an attribution
like (1) - (Oedipus marriedJocasta intentionally) - is best analyzed
as asserting (a) that a particular action/event occurred, namely a
marrying of Jocasta by Oedipus, and (b) that this action occurred
because of some specific beliefs and desires of Oedipus'. The implicit
reference to Oedipus' beliefs and desires is then to be cashed out in
terms of Oedipus' functional relations to certain mental representations, in accordance with Fodor's theory. The description of the
action used in the A.I.A. constrains the specification of the relevant
mental representations.
The truth-conditionsof (1) are thus:
(15)

(Ex) {Marrying(Oedipus,Jocasta, x) & (Ey) (Ez) [y=

F(I marryJocasta)and Desires(Oedipus,y)) and z = F(doing

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ATTRIBUTIONS OF INTENTIONAL ACTION

319

this" will be sufficient for my marrying Jocasta) and

Believes(Oedipus, z)) and x's occurrence was caused by
Oedipus'sdesiringy and believing z] }l I
Such an analysis, I contend, provides all that can be wanted in an
analysis of attributions of intentional action. Most importantly, it
marks and accounts for the intensionality of such attributions,thus
explaining the failure of the inference from (1) and (3), to (2). On this
analysis, an attributionof intentional action is partly an ascription to
the agent of specific kinds of belief and desire. Since the truth of
propositional attitude ascriptions depend upon whether the agent
bears the appropriate functional relations to mental representations
with particular forms, and since the description of the action in the
original attributionof intentional action is what constrainsthe specification of the forms of the relevant mr.r.'s, it's fully to be expected
that one cannot substitute, salva veritate, any true description of an
action for any other within an attributionof intentional action.
The proposed analysis, incidentally, also addresses another
concern about intentionality registered by Davidson. Davidson is
opposed to the view that intending itself is a kind of action, distinct
from and antecedent to an intentional action. His own view is that
intentions are special kinds of pro attitudes, the onsets of which may
be events, but not actions.12 The logic of A.I.A.'s, therefore, should
not require us to interpret expressions introducing intentionality as
verbs of action.13 Hence, the proposed analysis treats these expressions in precisely the rightway.
I want to conclude by making clear what I think has been
accomplished. First, I want to enter a disclaimer about my endorsement of Davidson's "logical analyses"of action sentences. I have used
the term "logical analysis", but I don't think I mean by it quite what
Davidson does.
Davidson's interest in action sentences is different from my own.
Davidson primarily wants an account of the extensional semantic
propertiesof claims that actions (and, for that matter, events generally), have occurred. His reasons for rejecting the alternatives he surveys in 'The Logical Form of Action Sentences' fall into two categories: either the view requires quantification over intensional enti-

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LOUISE M. ANTONY

ties, or the view doesn't permit a systematic treatmentof the semantics of action ascriptions. These two sets of concerns add up to the
overarchingconcern he makes explicit in defendinghis own analysis,
which requires quantification over extensionally-treated events:
"nothing now stands in the way ... of giving a coherent and constructive account of how the meanings (truth conditions) of those sentences depend upon their structure".14It is clear, therefore, that
Davidson's study of action gets a great deal of its impetus from
Davidson's desire to get action sentences accommodated by his
programof truth-conditionalsemantics.
I am very doubtful that Davidson's approach to meaning in
natural language is the correct one. In general, I am skeptical that
model-theoretic treatments of "regimented" natural language are
going to offer answers to questions about the nature of semantic
competence, which I view as centralto the theory of meaning. Thus, I
do not offer my analysis of A.I.A.'s as an analysis of their meaning. I
view it as an account of their truth-conditions;an account of what the
world must be like insofar as they are true. Such an account will
provide, to a limited extent, a "logical" analysis, since any claim
entailed by an A.I.A. must be part of its truth-conditions.But beyond
that, I make no claims about the "logic" of A.I.A.'s - questions about
the "form"of A.I.A.'s I referto an empirical theory of syntax.
As I said, I don't view my proposal as a theory of the meaning
(except in the sense of extension) of A.I.A.'s. Thus, it's not a consequence of my view that people must believe in mental representations
in order to make A.I.A.'s. Thus it's not an objection to my view that
many people make A.I.A.'s without believing in mental representations. (The point holds generally for Fodor's theory of propositional
attitudes - the theory is not meant as a theory of the intention of
propositional attitude ascriptions, but as an empirical account of
what their truth consists in.) Still, I don't think my account is
unnatural. Reference to something representational is usually just
below the surface in an A.I.A., as Davidson himself notes. He seems
willing, as I've noted, to construe A.I.A.'s as involving quantifications
over utterances;it's the mental part that I think would bother him.'5
While we're on the subject of people's objections to mental
representations,let me say something about the issue of the contents

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ATTRIBUTIONS OF INTENTIONAL ACTION

321

of mental representations.Among those philosophers who agree that

the mind is some kind of symbol-manipulatingdevice, there is vast
disagreementabout what kind of semantic propertiesthe manipulated
tokens have, or indeed, if they have any. Specifically, there is a great
deal of controversyabout the precise relation that is supposed to hold
between sentences in public language and tokens of mentalese.16I
need only two assumptions:one, that mentalese has at least the lexical richness of any public language, to ensure that any semantic
discriminationspossible in natural language are provided for by the
resources of mentalese; and two, that mentalese sentences share at
least wide contents (that is, truth-conditions)with those sentences in
public languagesused to ascribe or expressthe propositionalattitudes
in which the mentalese sentences figure.
The second assumption allows the semantic anchoring of designated m.r.'s (so that F(Oedipus marriedhis mother) doesn't turn out
to have the content "let's have asparagus for dinner"). The first
renders innocent the use of public sentences to get at formal differences among m.r.'s. Since, ex hypothesi,it's the syntactic, and not the
semantic features of m.r.'s that control behavior, all that's necessary
to account for behavioral sensitivity to differences in the publiclanguage representationof a state of affairs is the positing of corresponding formal differences in underlying m.r.'s. We don't have to
say precisely what the m.r.'s look like.
This is the point in the article at which I ought to defend my view
from anticipated objections. But now here's the beauty of my philosophical strategy. While my analysis is subject to all the objections
one can think of to Davidson's proposal about the logic of action
sentences, plus all the objections to Fodor's theory of propositional
attitudes, I can't think of any objection that arises specifically from
the conjunction of the two views. Thus, Davidson is busily defending
one half of my view, and I can rely on Fodor for the other half. I don't
have to do a blessed thing.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

This article was written while I held a fellowship from the American Council of
LearnedSocieties:I would like to thank the ACLS for its support.I would also like to
thankJosephLevine for his helpfulcommentson an earlierversion.

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LOUISE M. ANTONY

NOTES
1
Although not everyone finds this obvious. Consider Davidson's remarks in the
appendixto 'The LogicalFormof Action Sentences'.Concernedabout the fact that one
and the same action can be said to have been performedintentionallyor unintentionally, dependingupon how it's described,he suggeststhat the "obvious solution ... is to
take 'intentionally' as creating a semantically opaque context in which one would
expect substitutivityof identityto seem to fail".(Davidson[1967], p. 147)
2 See Kiparskyand Kiparsky[1970] for a full account.
3 I have in mind especially Jaegwon Kim (Kim [1966]) and Roderick Chisholm
(Chisholm[1970] and [1971]), both of whom proposeto individuateevents intentionally, invoking data about A.I.A.'s in support of their views. Davidson discusses Kim's
theoryin Davidson [1969], and Chisholm'sview in Davidson [1971].
4 Davidson, [1968].
5 See Davidson [1963].
6 For example, HilaryPutnam[1963], and Ned Block, [1980].
7 Fodor's theory of internal representationis presented in full in Fodor [1975]. He
concentrateson philosophicalargumentsfor treatingpropositionalattitudesas relations
to mental representationsin Fodor [1978].
8 Following Fodor [1978], I assume the existence of a function that takes the publiclanguageexpressionsthat a person uses to expresshis or her propositionalattitudesto
the internalrepresentationsinvolved in those attitudes.This makes it possibleto designate particularm.r.'s by means of public-languagesentences.For more on the precise
relation between the two kinds of representations,see the discussion of m.r. content
below.
9 I see no way to avoid the use of indexicals in the specificationof the contents of
propositionalattitudes,since, as Perry(see Perry[1979]) and others have argued,how
one behaves can depend crucially upon whether some feature of one's situation is
representedindexicallyor non-indexically.(The same point will be apparentlaterwhen
I discussA.I.A.'s.)
Indexicals are notorious for complicating semantic theory. But I don't think the
problemsthey pose make any special difficultiesfor me apartfromthe generalproblem
that my view of the relation between public and mental language presupposesthe
existence of some semanticanalysisof naturallanguage.I don't see any particulardifficulty, for example, about there being tokens of mentalese that function precisely the
way public language indexical expressions function. A mentalese "I", for example,
might be nomologicallyconstrained(whereasthe public languagetoken would only be
constrainedby convention)to referto the organismin which it gets tokened,and to so
refer regardlessof what other resourcesfor self-reference(like a name or identifying
description)the organismhas availableto it.
10 For comment on the use of indexical expressionslike "this" in the specificationof
an m.r., see the previousnote.
1l When I say "desiringy" and "believingz", I mean, of course,"standingin the desire
relationto y" and "standingin the belief relationto z". I shall continue to use this sort
of shorthand.
12 Davidson,[1978].
'3 Davidson[1967], p. 122.
14 Davidson[1967], p. 119.
1 See
Antony [forthcoming]for a defenseof this diagnosis.
16 Fodor believes that m.r.'s have both "wide"and "narrow"contents (as these terms
are explained in Putnam's 'The Meaning of "Meaning"'), although it's only narrow
contentsthat have psychologicalrelevance.But his scheme has come underattackfrom
differentcorners:Burge [1979]) has attackedthe notion of narrowor "individualistic"

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ATTRIBUTIONS OF INTENTIONAL ACTION

323

content, arguing that meaning is socially determined. Schiffer [1981] contends that
psychology can make do with the syntactic properties of m.r.'s, together with the
assumption that they possess wide contents. Stich [1983], has arguedthat there's no
suitable match-upbetween the semanticsof belief ascriptionand the computationally
relevant propertiesof internal tokens, so that there are neither narrownor wide contents - psychologyis purelysyntactic.
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