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Intentional Action Definition

Decent Essays

(1) Intentional Action Anscombe’s theory of intentional action is one of different depths and levels. On the surface of the meaning, there are intentional actions with no reasons behind them and ones with reasons. There are also unintentional actions involving unaware actions or involuntary reflexes. I will start with the explanation for intentional acts: Intentional actions are those that give a positive or negative response when the question ‘Why?’ is asked and the question ‘Why?’ has application. It is rational to ask why someone is doing an action, because they are doing it for an intentional reason. Even if an act is being done absent mindedly, like tapping your fingers on a chair while you wait at the doctor’s office, you do it for no reason, but you do not have to be doing it, it is …show more content…

She claims that intentional acts and involuntary acts are known without observation and acts that we are unaware of can only be detected by observation (like digestion or a sleep spasm). Anscombe declares that to observe something there must be a specific kind of sensation that is separately describable. For example, when you have a dream where you fall down one step, you jolt out of your sleep and you can say, “it felt like an elevator was falling and I was falling with it.” He sensation of missing a step and falling is similar to falling in an elevator so Anscombe says, in this way you can know from observation what happened. Intentional and unintentional involuntary actions are known without observation because they cannot be separately described. For example, when you intentionally raise your hand in class you do not know that you raised your hand because you saw it happen, you know because of the specific “raising hand” sensation. The person knows they did something not on the basis of a “separately describable” sensation (Anscombe, p.

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