Such are the insubstantial pin-point subtleties which philosophy occasionally lingers over

Much lack of understanding in a reading group discovered to me the existence of this paper (I mean of course the one mentioned there), or perhaps I should say rediscovered it to me, since it turns out that it had been emailed to me in October, only I never read it. But now I have. Although it says at the top "not for quotation", I will quote it just a wee bit; we all understand, after all, that this is notto be passed off as the final formulation, and anyway nothing I'm going to quote (or indeed, contained in the paper) is so embarrassingly awful that merely to have it known that it was once thought or written by the authors would do them lasting damage. But perhaps excessive preliminaries are excessive. So!

1. We join the authors toward the end of part IV of the paper, where they are on the way to making a point similar to that which Thompson makes towards the end of §1 of "Naive Explanation of Action", and say in doing so that

the possibility of such reversal is implicit in the chainlike structure of what Anscombe calls "the ABCD form" (p. 45), whereby a positive answer to the question "Why?" is itself the description of an intentional action, and, as such, subject to that question. Starting, then, with an intentional action, we can move forward along the chain by interrogating the action—"Why?" For just when this question has the relevant sense, positive answers to it are themselves expressions of the agent's intention.

To the last sentence is attached an endnote: "the relevant sense of the question 'why,' and the fact that positive answers to it are themselves expressions of intention, are mutually defining notions for Anscombe."

This doesn't seem quite right, though it would be convenient if it were; it is often possible to rephrase questions starting "why" more specifically using other interrogatives, and it would be interesting if some more specific question, or group of questions, could be rooted out which answers to Anscombe's "special sense" so that we could get more of an independent handle on what it is. Actually Anscombe does give another reading to it: "the sense is of course that in which the answer, if positive, gives a reason for acting" (§5), the question (obviously) then being "for what reason did you …?". She immediately observes that "what is the meaning of 'reason for acting' here?" is no clearer than "what is the meaning of 'why?' here?", of course. But the impression one might get from Moran & Stone's discussion, and indeed from sections where the man with the pump first pops up, is that the question "why?" can be recast in a much more specific form than "for what reason …?", namely, "with what intention did you …?", in which case the footnote would be right on. (In fact, as I just noticed, they do provide just this gloss: we can ask why? (for what purpose, with what intention) someone intends to φ….)

One explanation for this impression could be that §§23ff, though they appear to begin by introducing a new topic ("Let us ask:"), are actually governed by the restriction from §22, in which Anscombe decides to "concentrate on the simple future answer" to the question "why?", in the course of investigating "the intention with which a man does what he does" (her emphasis). This is what I thought at first, but the sorts of answers she has her pumping man give don't all actually mention future things. They do, though, seem to divide pretty evenly between mentioning future things (one way to express the intention with which) and giving a wider context (the other way): thus the man is moving his arm because he is pumping, and he is pumping the water to poison the house's inhabitants. Intentions with which being the general topic of this stretch, we get a lot of intentions with which in response to the question in the examples. And the particular topic of §§23 & 26 (whence the quotation in the quotation) is the selection of the "right" description from among the multiple available, so of course we're going to get a number of right descriptions. These are indeed elucidated by the positive answers to the question "why?" (though there are also some chains that end early: Why are you beating out that curious rhythm?,—Oh, I found out how to do it, as the pump does click anyway, and I do it just for fun.), but that doesn't mean that we've discovered a general feature of the question "why?" or its answers, just that, of its answers, this kind of answer can elucidate this structure. (I'm not actually sure if the gloss provided in the paper indicates that the authors understand the why-question in its full generality as boiling down to the "with what intention"-question, or whether they're just focusing on that because they are interested in the expression of intention. Presumably the latter, but the "for Anscombe" in the quoted endnote raises doubt, given that Anscombe doesn't hive off a special "with what intention"-sense of "why?".)

For it is just as much a positive answer to "why are you poisoning them?" to say "because they killed my brother", as we know from §16, or to say "out of love and pity". I take it that §16's "give an interpretation of the action" can mean the citation of a non-backwards-looking motive as well as the citation of the broader context, given §12: motives may explain actions to us … it interprets his action. And these are not expressions of intention, and the relevant "why?", whatever it is, is not really applicable to them. "Why did they do that?" and "why do you think this is a loving thing to do?" are obviously after different prey. Even one of the examples Moran & Stone use can be developed along these lines. I am lying on my bed; someone asks me why; I say "I'm resting" (or: "to get some rest"). If you ask me why again, I might say something like "I'm giving an important presentation tomorrow morning", but I might also just say "because I'm tired", which seems neither to be a mental cause, nor a motive, nor an expression of intention, though it could be construed, tendentiously, as really meaning "to rid myself of my tiredness". But I'm not sure what sort of answer might satisfy someone who really thought it necessary to ask why I might want to do that. (Just as I wouldn't be sure what to make of someone who said "I just thought I would" when asked why he was laying all the green books in his house on his roof.) I am willing to suppose that any chain of iterated "why?"-askings will eventually result in an answer, further application of the question to which requires either being treated in a different sense as its predecessors, or being met with puzzlement.

A digression: writing the above made me remember Thompson's argument that Hume's famous argument that a sequence of instrumental wantings can't go on forever is defective, though now that I've looked at it again I don't think I should be concerned about it here. It is a funny argument, though. It involves a stone being pushed from α to ω, and thereby also intermediary points β, γ, δ, and so on, each successive point being halfway between ω and the one that came before. Of this chain of pushings he observes that an interlocutor and I might together forge a potentially infinite sequence of perfectly legitimate questions and answers, Why?. However, if we assume, optimistically, that each question and answer take a combined three seconds and that a new round is started immediately the old is finished, and that both Thompson and his interlocutor do nothing else for all their born days, and that their born days measure ninety-five years apiece, they will still not have asked and answered even one billion times before dropping dead (specifically, they will have engaged in 999,324,000 exchanges, counting leap years). (Moreover, assuming an initial distance of one meter, it will only take 116 iterations of the process (that is, less than six minutes, on the assumptions above) before you find yourself wanting to move the object through a distance less than the Planck length. Far be it from me to say that this is an impossible desire to have! But it is certainly unusual, and if you find yourself disposed to evince it, you may want to ask yourself whether what you really want to do is demonstrate some philosophical thesis or other.) Of course Thompson doesn't really mean that he could actually engage in a potentially infinite series of oral performances, not really really, but I think I still have a right to be worried about time and space regarding whatever it is that he does mean. (Which surely has to be more than just that any distance through which I want to move something can be partitioned into an infinity of other distances.)