Filosofia Teoretica I Modulo: Azione!

Aristotele, Anscombe, Davidson

3. Aristotle and Anscombe 5

However, in this way we have reached the outer borders of Aristotle’s theorizing
about action. In this regard, two comments seem apt:

(1) What is interesting in advancing and discussing the notion of practical truth is
not if we are entitled to literal talk of practical truth. It is what are the implications (or at
least the suggestions) of this notion, as here discussed, concerning larger issues like:
the theoretical priority of agency or of action;
the primitive and irreducible nature of action;
the conceptual content and structure action;
the reality of action, what is for action to take place;
the constitutive normativity of action

(2) Even if this set of questions is inspired by Aristotle's own view of action,
Aristotle's discussion of practical truth leaves them largely underdetermined. In order to
make the relevant connections with the above sort of questions, with practical content,
practical reality, and practical normativity, we have to go beyond Aristotle's theorizing,
and to complicate somewhat the matters.

Anscombe on Practical Truth

To get a feeling of how matters might be made more complicated, we can revert
to the closing paragraphs of Anscombe's "Thought and Action".
Anscombe regards what Aristotle means for "practical truth" as the great question.
She correctly characterizes practical truth as the good working, the actualization, of
practical thought, that also has actuality as action. She also correctly observes that the
truth of the judgments of practical thought is not sufficient for practical truth, which also
requires agreement of true judgements with right desire; and that it is only of this
complex condition that we can say that it is the termination of practical intelligence (sc.
thought stricto sensu practical, as terminating in action).

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 Anscombe’s discussion of these topics more or less follows the lines I have
proposed:
(a) Agreement in content of practical thinking and right inclination (which is also
constitutive of purposive movement) is a necessary condition for there being any choice
at all, “sound or unsound” (TaA, 76). It is the minimal requirement of predicative
structure that underlies truth-aptness.
Against this background, Anscombe briefly discusses the ways in which, given
this structured nature (like that of affirmation and denial) truth and falsity of judgment
and rightness and wrongness of inclination can interact:

(b) false judgment on eupraxia, if condition (a) is satisfied so that there is choice,
entails that the inclination (the inclusion of a certain apprehend good in deliberation and
decision and its application to self-movement) is wrong too. The false judgment in
question does not correspond to the cases discussed before: it is endorsement of a
substantively false conception of doing well (the “worldling”). This is a false first or
universal premise.

(c) false judgment can be “at a lower level”, at the level of the specification of
means for or constitutive conditions of doing well (the second premise). If error in this
respect concerns a matter which is not obvious and again, if there is agreement between
inclination and judgment, the inclination may still be right. (What David Ross calls
“subjective rightness”.) Again, the error in judgment seems to involve a substantive
ethical consideration (however, it is not easy to reconcile reference to “scoundrelism”
with the idea that inclination is right, if not in terms of analogy).

It is striking that Anscombe makes in this context appeal to substantive ethical

considerations, seemingly implying that they are to some extent constitutive of agency. I
think this reading is in a way misleading, but also that Anscombe is less than completely
clear on this point. (More on this later.) However, it is only at this point that Anscombe
explicitly raises the question of practical truth, in a passage that is better to quote
extensively:

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 We now approach the great question: what does Aristotle mean by ‘practical
truth’? He calls it the good working, or the work, of practical judgment; and
practical judgment is judgment of the kind that terminates in action. (TaA, 77)
Follows the Aristotelian definition in terms of truth of judgment in agreement
with right desire. Anscombe remarks that this entails that practical truth is not truth of
judgments, although it entails it: the work of practical intellect is that “agreement”. This
is the crucial qualification of Anscombe’s reading of Aristotle:
That [truth in agreement with right desire] is brought about - i.e. made true - by
action (since the description of what he [the agent] does is made true by his doing
it), provided that a man forms and executes a good 'choice'. The man who forms
and executes an evil 'choice' will also make true some descriptions of what he
does. He will secure, say, if he is competent, that such and such a man has his
eyes put out or his hands cut off, that being his judgment of what is just to do.
But his description "justice performed" of what he has done will be a lie. He,
then, will have produced practical falsehood ("TaA", 77)
What this quite complex passage adds to the Aristotelian position is a (badly
needed) articulation of what is required for characterizing action in terms of practical
truth, and, more in general, for understanding the normative inner structure of action.

(a) The work of practical intellect is said to be

(i) practical truth;
(ii) the agreement of truth of judgment and right desire;
(iii) something “brought about”.
That is, reading in reverse order,
(iii) an action is performed which
(ii) by making judgments and right inclination to agree
(iii) brings about practical truth or actualizes rational, contentful agency.

(b) Practical truth and action, we can add in a truly Aristotelian vein, are one and
the same, given that with and in that action certain true thoughts and certain right
inclinations are made to agree.

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 (c) Practical truth is not (like theoretical truth) truth of judgments, but a way
action can be in actuality; it is truth as the property of certain facts, of the facts that
constitute the taking place of action in the correct way.

(d) the distinction of truth-makers, truth-bearers, and the normative relation

between the ones and the others, which is minimally required for talking of truth, is
preserved: the action qua action-description true of it is the truth-bearer; the action qua
what is done is the truth-maker; the former may or may not correspond to the latter. This
makes for a first understanding of the factivity and reflexivity of action (topics we will
deal with presently).

There is a deep tension in the present text between this understanding of practical
truth and the distinction between practical truth and falsity which is drawn in what appear
to be substantively ethical terms.
Practical truth might be a matter
(i) of the structure of the relation: something being made true by action; or
(ii) of the content and quality of what is so made true.
The tension might be assuaged if (i) is taken to be the determination of a concept
of truth as it befits action (entailing factivity and reflectivity) and if (ii) is taken to be a
conception of what is for action, to which a concept of truth like (i) applies, to be
determinately true or false.
The underlying idea would be that, on the basis of (i), it is necessarily and only
action, not any judgment or other attitude, that can bear the values of truth or falsity along
the lines or in the terms that (ii) specifies; and that it necessarily and only action that can
be the relevant truth-maker. But still there is a distinctive role for (ii) which is that of
making clear the substantive content which can be ascribed to truth-conditions in this
practical perspective, what is for action to determinately be a practical truth or a practical
falsehood.

I want to say conclusively something about the dual perspective Anscombe opens
on practical truth or (more generally) on the intrinsic normativity of action.

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 (1) “That [truth in agreement with right desire] is brought about - i.e. made true -
by action (since the description of what he [the agent] does is made true by his doing it)”:
this is Anscombe’s crucial thought concerning the concept of practical truth. On the face
of it, it says of the concept of practical truth that it, in contrast with theoretical truth, is
not some sort of given but something made or brought about.
This idea is closely connected with the other principle, that the bearers of practical
truth-values are actions, not judgments, because it would not be meaningful to say that
we can make judgments true.

Of course, in a sense I can make the judgment: “My right arm is raised” true
simply by raising my arm; but this is not to make it directly and unconditionally so that
the judgment takes the value True; it is not, so to say, a logical change. It is to change the
world so that then and conditionally on that change a judgment to the effect that so and so
is true. But the truth of the judgment is something given.
We could say, by contrast, that the fact, the real change which takes place, if it
counts as an action and as the action or raising my arm (with full indexes), is a practical
truth:
(a) it is the truth-maker of the action of raising my arm;
(b) it is that very action (what else could it be?) being made true, bearing the value True,
by what is the case.
But, as I have repeatedly contended, the importance of the notion of practical
truth does not lie in its literal application but in what can be reaped from it concerning the
intrinsic normative structure of action. Now, it seems to me that to specifications of
normativity descend from what we have just seen:
(a) Action is factive: I have said that what is to be practically made true is the
content of action, the description of what the agent does. But of course the action could
not take place or exist or be brought about unless the content or the description of it is
true. (This is a necessary, not a sufficient condition.) But by definition a state which
cannot exist unless the content of it is true is a factive one.
(b) Action is reflexive or self-referential: As Anscombe says, there is no other
way of making true the description of an action but by doing that very action. That is,

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there is no specification of practical truth-conditions which does not mention the practical
state, the action, these are the truth-conditions of. This is to say that there is a condition of
reflexivity or self-referentiality on the content and on the normative nature of action. (I
suspect that, taken together with factivity, reflexivity is sufficient to account for the
nature of action.)

I want to say something more about reflexivity or self referentiality. Anscombe

states that something is made true, something, involved in action, takes a truth value.
This is the "description of what [the agent] does". That of description is of course a
crucial concept for Anscombe's theory of action, one we are going to discuss in depth.
For now, we can see it as corresponding to Aristotle's predicative and conceptual
structure of a certain purposive movement, or as the content of an action.
Thus the content that individuates what the agent does is what stands for practical
truth or falsehood and is made true or false. This, however, is not sufficient for the
practical character of the truth concept that is here in question, since it might be made
true just as any descriptive content is made true by the obtaining of its truth-conditions.

The truth-maker of the description that individuates, forms the content of, an
action is that very action. The being made true of a description that individuates an
action, is to be understood in a very strict, literal sense, as a bringing about or as doing,
and, specifically and most importantly, a doing with that description, the doing of that
action.
This is a differentiating feature of the notion of truth and falsehood in action that
we are exploring with Anscombe. If there is to be anything like the truth-conditions of an
action, they have to essentially include that very action. This is because there seems to be
no other way a specification of truth-conditions could hold good of the character of the
description of action, of the description of a doing, if descriptions are "integral" (as
Anscombe puts it) to the notion of action or of doing. If what has to be made true is the
description of a doing; and it is essential to that description that it constitutes something
as a doing and as the doing it is; then there is nothing else that can make it true, but the
doing of the description itself. Action makes action true.

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 By contrast, no account of the truth-conditions of a theoretical judgment, or of its
content, need to include that very judgment. A dimension of reflexivity or self-
referentiality is essential to the specification of practical truth-conditions, to the notion of
practical truth that we are exploring. It is only in particular cases that it figures in
theoretical truth-conditions.
Self-referentiality has been affirmed (or denied, for that matter) as a feature of
intention (as the state of an agent). I want to suggest that it is a fundamental dimension of
the basic normativity of action; that it lays at the core of any specification of correctness
for practical episodes. (Whether, or not, we want to understand it in terms of practical
truth.)
(2) Once this has been said concerning the formal concept of practical truth, the
conceptual profile of the content and normativity of action, one can still ask what would
be for such a concept to be applied, what a substantive conception of practical truth, a
substantive or material conception of the normativity of action, would be.
Whether, given the formal concept of practical and within the form it confers tom
the normativity of action an action is a practical truth or falsehood will depend, according
to Anscombe, on its substantive content, on the ethical determination of the action
description. This is the contrast drawn between good and evil choice.

Given that the distinction between formal and material perspective is held firm, I
have no quarrel with this idea. What must be ethically neutral is the normative structure
and the possibility of action and agency. Here the contrast is between episodes which (by
being factive and reflexive) satisfy the necessary (perhaps sufficient) conditions for
counting as actions and episodes which do not.
In this latter case, nothing makes or is made true, in the practical sense of truth: no
action is realized and no action description is in this way made true. Notice that this is a
failure in terms of normative structure: by saying that no action is realized we are not
saying that something else or nothing at all takes place. What happens might be
extensionally the same with a possible action without being that action because it does
not instantiate the right relations of content and reality.

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 But in the former case it is open to us to ask about the soundness of the action
description and of the action along some substantive ethical standard. The action-
description may be sound or unsound. But what stands to test is what is done or the facts,
not the underlying judgments.