Anscombe's Intention
A man pumping water poisons a household, then a village; how many actions?
First published: G. E. M. Anscombe, *Intention* (1957).
A man pumps water that he knows is poisoned. He poisons the household; he kills the inhabitants. One action or many — and intentional under which description?
Anscombe analyses intentional action: the same bodily event (pumping water) can be described as pumping, replenishing the supply, poisoning the household, killing the inhabitants, fulfilling a plot — each description carries different intentional content. Her key insight: action is intentional under some descriptions and not others; the right unit of philosophical analysis is the action-under-a-description, not the bare physical event. The book launched the modern philosophy of action, structurally shaped Davidson's work on agency, and remains the foundational analytic treatment of intention, akin to a long discursive thought experiment.
Formulation
Bodily event: man's arm moves pump handle. Possible descriptions: "pumping water," "replenishing supply," "poisoning the household," "killing the inhabitants," "fulfilling a plot." Question: under which descriptions is the action intentional? Answer (Anscombe): depends on what the agent knows and wills. Action is action-under-a-description.
Dimensions Engaged
Observer
Observer · Agency: action and intention are constitutively linked through descriptions an agent endorses.
Responses — How Schools Engage
Affirms / takes the bait 5
Foundational for modern philosophy of action; Davidson's and Bratman's work extend Anscombe's framework, while contesting details.
Anscombe rejoins the phenomenological tradition: intentional content is constitutive of action, not an external accompaniment.
Anscombe (a Catholic philosopher) reactivated Thomistic-Aristotelian action theory: action under a description is structurally Aristotelian.
Action under a description tracks how agents and observers actually engage with intentional behaviour in social practice.
The chosen description an agent endorses is constitutive of their action; existential responsibility includes which descriptions one takes up.
Reframes the question 1
Reductive naturalism prefers to identify actions with bodily events under causal description; Anscombe shows the limits of that move.
Related Experiments
Experiments engaged by an overlapping set of schools — likely to surface the same fault lines.
Further reading
- Anscombe, *Intention* (1957)
- Davidson, *Essays on Actions and Events* (1980)
Related Historical Debates
Debates that share dimensions and/or aligned schools with this experiment.
Personas Most Aligned With This Experiment
Ranked by total declared-influence weight in the schools that respond to this experiment.
Works Most Aligned With This Experiment
Ranked by total declared-influence weight in the schools that respond to this experiment.
Related Contemporary Dilemmas
Dilemmas that engage the same dimensions as this experiment.