Intention, Practical Knowledge and Representation

Abstract

Danto says “that we can change the world to fit our representations, as in action, or change our representations to fit the world, as in knowledge, are marvelous powers, but they require reference to representation.” I shall make some fairly obvious points about representation, some more controversial claims about intentional action, taking my cue in both cases from things Descartes says on these topics. Since Descartes is said to have given us the problem of how a movement in the material world can be mind-imbued or mind-informed enough to count as an intentional act, it seems only proper to see what hints he gives of a solution. It is noteworthy that this problem is not a perennial one, it did have to be invented. Earlier philosophers, even those who believed the soul could be separated from the body, found nothing paradoxical in our intentional physical action. It is a special sort of achievement to become puzzled about the most familiar of things, and intentional action surely should be the most familiar of realities, even to a philosopher. Can it really be that the soul spends so much of its time in error, the discrepancy between intention and act so frequent in our ‘community of spiritual animals’ that we can, without special philosophical conditioning, find it problematic that act and intent should ever coincide, that we should find it puzzling when Anscombe says “I do what happens” (Intention, p. 52) and “the failure to execute intentions is necessarily the rare exception”? (ibid. p. 86). If our puzzlement is really due to our Cartesian upbringing, then possibly our cure will lie in a fuller realization of what that involved. The way into the flybottle is the way out.