Proceeding from ideas about action and intentionality in the work of Elizabeth Anscombe, the aim of the project was to investigate under what conditions it is appropriate to describe actions by using a conceptual apparatus unknown to the agent. Three sorts of example were studied: (1) Retroactive redescriptions, where recently invented concepts are used to describe actions performed at a time when those concepts were not in use; (2) Trans-cultural descriptions, where concepts that are not in use within the culture to which the agent belongs are employed to describe her actions; (3) Descriptions of the behavior of small children and animals. Central to the project was a critical engagement with the "simple" view that an action can be described in such foreign terms only if there is no aspiration to capture the intentions of the agent. In this connection, a deeper investigation into Anscombe's theoretical framework proved necessary, not least with regard to questions about the logic of action descriptions in the progressive (imperfect aspect), questions that have gained much attention in recent action-theoretic literature. The Aristotelian features of Anscombe's viewpoint also turned out to be more important than the original project description suggested, in particular with regard to the difference between descriptions of human and animal conduct.

II. THE THREE MOST IMPORTANT RESULTS AND THE TWO MOST IMPORTANT PUBLICATIONS

(1) With regard to the three sorts of case listed above, Anscombe's work gives reason to believe that descriptions of the conduct of small children and animals are essentially different from retroactive and trans-cultural descriptions. According to Anscombe, identifying those descriptions under which the conduct of animals and small children are intentional is a matter of taking into consideration their biological nature - their belongingness to a biological species. Very roughly: the bird qua bird strives to peck at bird-seed, but not to get stuck in bird-lime; the baby qua human baby strives to suck milk from her mother's breast, but not to fall down from a chair; and so on. With the development of language, there is liberation from these bounds of nature - a freedom that manifests itself in the fact that the agent's own answers to question of the form "Why are you doing such-and-such?" are given an authority strong enough to override such bounds. This reading of Anscombe shows how she unites and develops an Aristotelian and a more modern, Wittgenstein-influenced philosophy of action. It also points toward the kinship between Anscombe's conception and ideas that have more recently been defended by Philippa Foot and Michael Thompson.

(2) However, Anscombe does not seem defend the "simple" view of action descriptions even with regard to adult, language-using agents. According to the simple view, it is generally the case that an action can be intentional under the description "X" only if that description (or some synonymous equivalent) is known to the agent. One looks in vain for such a general thesis in Anscombe's work. Rather, what can be found are many concrete examples of how the agent's own account of what she is doing matters in a specific context. Certainly, the agent's own account is often of decisive importance, but the first-person authority is not absolute. In particular, it is not based on the agent's privileged access to an inner, mental state. Rather, the agent's authority is matter of freedom: as an adult, human, language-using creature I am free to define the aims of my actions. This freedom is not unlimited, however. If the agent's descriptions of her intentions appear absurd, given the wider circumstances of her conduct, they can be rejected, perhaps to the advantage of other, alternative descriptions. There is no clear evidence that Anscombe would exclude a priori the possibility that there are cases in which such alternative descriptions may contain concepts unknown by the agent.

(3) At this point, however, it is crucial to consider how very unclear the question of whether a concept is "known by" the agent in fact is. Proponents of the "simple" view are notoriously obscure at this point: they ask whether the concept is "available" (Hacking) or "in principle available" (Skinner) to the agent, but give no precise explanation of what this is supposed to involve. What proponents of the "simple" view seem to envisage is a criterion of availability that can provide a generally valid ground for judgments about the intentionality of actions. However, there are reasons to believe - and there are reasons to think Anscombe believes - that the "simple" view seems necessary and generally valid only because the notion of "availability" is left flexible enough to accommodate controversial cases by invoking notions such as "available in principle" and the like. This would imply that the issue of availability is neither conceptually nor methodologically prior to (but at best a stipulated aspect of) the question under which description an action is intentional. Of course, one could define a concept of availability which is indeed prior in the required sense, and which is thereby able to do the envisaged conceptual and methodological work. But if so, it is difficult to see how the claim about general validity can be defended against counterexamples. The conclusion, then, is skepticism toward the very idea that the notion of whether a concept is "known" or "available" to an agent can provide the foundation for a potent criterion for deciding whether a certain action description is appropriate in a specific controversial case. Not that the linguistic repertoire of the agent is unimportant. Rather, the point is that in order to get clear about its importance, what is needed are detailed descriptions of those enormously complicated patterns of human life wherein the agent is acting and where the relevant linguistic resources have their function. General criteria for when a description can be said to capture an agent's intentions threaten to hide the fact that the kind of understanding we are talking about here involves a series of unregularizable yet indispensable elements, like sensitivity, sound judgment and human life experience.

The two most important publications within the project are "Seeing the Facts and Saying What You Like: Retroactive Redescription and Indeterminacy in the Past", Journal of the Philosophy of History 4 (2010): 296-327, and "Anscombe's Bird, Wittgenstein's Cat: Intention, Expression and Convention", forthcoming in Philosophical Topics (2014) (ca 21.000 words). The first paper is mainly focused on retroactive redescriptions, but also investigates trans-cultural action descriptions. It engages critically with the idea that there are general criteria for when such descriptions are legitimate. The second paper proceeds from Anscombe's claim that animals can have but not express intentions, and explores in detail the question in what sense the conduct of (sufficiently advanced) animals is intentional and what it means to capture the relevant intentions in language. This paper also contains an extensive discussion of Anscombe's theoretical framework, connecting it with the intense recent interest in the logic of action descriptions in the progressive.

III. NEW RESEARCH QUESTIONS

Among the new questions that have arisen during the work with the project, the following three issues would be particularly interesting to consider in future research:

(1) Anscombe's conception of biological species and life processes: a critical and comparative study of her views in relation to those of Thompson and Foot, and also in relation to recent criticisms of the allegedly "essentialist" tendency in all three writers.

(2) Anscombe's conception of first person authority with regard to intentions, in relation to her defense of the principle of double effect in moral philosophy and her criticism of abuses of that principle.

(3) A deeper investigation into Anscombe's conception of freedom, and of how it is related to contemporary discussion of freedom in both the analytic and the continental traditions.

IV. INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

The results of the project have been presented at conferences and workshops at the following universities: University of Bergen, Universität Bonn, Université Bordeaux III, University of Chicago, Sapienza Università di Roma, Université Picardie Jules Verne, Stockholm University, Södertörn University College, University of Tampere, Tufts University, Uppsala University, Åbo Akademi University, University of Turku, and University of Aarhus.

The project work has involved cooperation with two inter-nordic research groups: the RJ-sponsored project "Understanding Agency" ((Uppsala universitet; cf. http://www.agency.filosofi.uu.se/), and the NordForsk-sponsored "Nordic Network for Philosophical Anthropology", NNPA (Bergen, Aarhus, Uppsala and Åbo Akademi University; se http://www.philosophicalanthropology.org/). The first cooperative effort resulted in a conference held in Uppsala in November 2012, "Action and Reason: A Symposium in Honor of Fred Stoutland" (http://www.agency.filosofi.uu.se/node91). The contributions to that conference are forthcoming in a special issue of the peer-reviewed American journal Philosophical Topics, for which Gustafsson is guest editor (2014). The cooperation with NNPA has resulted in three conferences and the forthcoming publication of a collection of papers on the subject "Questioning the Human Being: Philosophical Anthropology in the 21st Century" (eds. Gustafsson and Thomas Schwarz Wentzer; still at editorial stage, and probably forthcoming at De Gruyter 2014 or 2015).

All main publications within the project occur (or are forthcoming in) international journals and collections.

Publications

Artiklar

Gustafsson, M., ”Seeing the Fact and Saying What You Like: Retroactive Redescriptions and Indeterminacy in the Past”, Journal of the Philosophy of History 4 (2010): 296-327.

Gustafsson, M., “Familiar Words in Unfamiliar Surroundings”, International Journal of Philosophical Studies 19 (2011): 643-668.

Gustafsson, M., “Totalitarismens språk”, Ikaros 4/2011: 32-36.

Gustafsson, M., “Berkeley at Vesuvius: Philosophy, Dichtung and Common Sense”, Wittgenstein Studien 4 (2013): 27-44.

Gustafsson, M., “What is an Anachronism?”, under utgivning i M. Hartinen och J. Hakarainen (red.),  Muisti, (Tampere: Tampere University Press, 2013). (3.500 ord)

Gustafsson, M., “Wittgenstein, Language and Chess”, under utgivning i Revue Internationale de Philosophie (2013), samt i C. Travis (ed.), Logically Alien Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). (8.000 ord)

Gustafsson, M., “Anscombe’s Bird, Wittgenstein’s Cat: Intention, Expression and Convention”, under utgivning i Philosophical Topics (2014). (21.000 ord)

Gustafsson, M., “Anscombe on Life and Human Nature”, utkommer i Gustafsson & Schwarz Wentzer (red.), Questioning the Human Being. (6.000 ord)


Tidskriftsnummer och antologi

Gustafsson, M.; Minar, E. (red.), Action and Reason. Special Issue of Philosophical Topics. Utkommer under 2014.

Gustafsson, M.; Schwarz-Wentzer, T. (red.), Questioning the Human Being: Philosophical Anthropology in the 21st Century, en samling uppsatser baserade på bidrag till konferenserna “Questioning the Human Being: Philosophical Anthropology in the 21st Century” (Århus 2011) och “Health, Life and the Human Body: Philosophical and Anthropological Perspectives”. Ännu på redigeringsstadiet, kommer antagligen ut på De Gruyter under 2014 eller 2015.