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Session 08 6 October 2026 10 min

Under a Description

I’m putting a new fence up between my garden and next door’s: six foot, close-board, the whole length, where the old one came up to my chest.

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Platethe posts
A line of new square fence posts set in fresh concrete collars runs away down a garden boundary at dusk, seen from low down at one end. Behind and between them the old close-board fence leans over, held by a diagonal prop. Low sun from the side throws the posts’ long parallel shadows across rough grass. The far end falls into darkness, and nothing is visible beyond the fence. Nobody is in the picture.

Story

The posts went in last week, six foot of them in fresh concrete where the old fence came up to a man’s chest. The panels come on Friday, and until twelve that day the yard will swap the order for shorter ones with a foot of trellis on top. Next door has a greenhouse.

G. E. M. Anscombe’s Intention, published in 1957 and quoted here from the second edition of 1963, picks out intentional actions by a certain sense of the question ‘Why?’: the sense in which the answer, if positive, gives a reason for acting (§5, p. 9). One answer refuses the question application, ‘I was not aware I was doing that’ (§6, p. 11), and it is not open to a man who watched the greenhouse go up.

A single action can have many different descriptions (§6, pp. 11–12): sawing a plank, sawing oak, making a squeaky noise with the saw, making a great deal of sawdust. It can be intentional under one description and unintentional under another (§20, p. 30).

Her own case is a man pumping water into the cistern that supplies a house, who has been told the source is poisoned (§23, p. 37). Ask him why, and his answers run from moving his arm to poisoning the inhabitants (p. 40). Four actions, or only one? One, she answers, with four descriptions, ‘each dependent on wider circumstances, and each related to the next as description of means to end’ (§26, p. 46), the last swallowing up the ones before. It is his answer to ‘Why?’ that brings the series out (p. 45).

For a known effect a man does not aim at, she has another category: something is voluntary though not intentional, she writes, if it is ‘the antecedently known concomitant result of one’s intentional action, so that one could have prevented it if one would have given up the action’ (§49, p. 89). Of her pumper she says that the interest of his intention is certainly not an ethical or legal interest: if what he said was true, that will not absolve him (§25, p. 45).

None of which tells a man what he owes a neighbour for a shadow he did not set out to cast.

Left open

What does wanting to be left alone cost the people nearest to us?

How much of a life is made of what we allowed, rather than what we chose?

Sources

  1. G. E. M. Anscombe, Intention, second edition (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1963), first published by Blackwell in 1957: the sense of the question ‘Why?’ that picks out intentional actions, §5, p. 9; the answer that refuses the question application, §6, p. 11; one action under many descriptions, and the plank, §6, pp. 11–12; intentional under one description and unintentional under another, §20, p. 30; the man pumping, §23, p. 37, and his answers, p. 40; the interest of the intention of the man who was only doing his usual job, §25, p. 45; four actions or one, and the answer that brings the series out, §26, p. 45; the four descriptions as means to end, and the last swallowing up the rest, §26, p. 46; voluntary though not intentional, §49, p. 89.
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The voices are synthesised. The incidents are invented. The problems are not, and the philosophy is quoted accurately or not at all.