What does an action mean?

When I asked myself what to write in this week’s blog, I suddenly realized that through the years I have given hardly any attention to my Ph.D. thesis. Actually the only thing that I discussed here from my dissertation was the difference between meaning 1 and meaning 0 (see my blog dated 16 March 2009). Although not everything in my thesis will be of interest to the readers of these blogs, I think that at least one theme is, namely: What do we mean when we say that an action has a certain meaning? The answer to this question is not only of theoretical interest for philosophers or, for instance, sociologists. It has also practical relevance. Think for instance of a court that must judge why a murderer performed his criminal act, or – hopefully more innocent – of parents who want to know why their child did this or that in a certain situation.

Traditionally, it is said that, when we want to know what an agent meant with his or her action, we want to know the reason. Let’s take an example. A man shoots down another man on the other side of the street; then he runs to him and takes his wallet. Why? Without any additional information, you may think that the man is a criminal who robs his victim of his wallet, hoping that it is filled with bank notes. However, such an act is difficult to understand, if the agent happens to be a millionaire. We can “understand” that a poor man needs money and that he thinks that he can get it by shooting down and robbing a stranger, who may have a thick wallet in his pocket. But a millionaire? Why should he do that? I’ll not answer this question, but what my example makes clear is that we need at least two questions in order to understand what the agent did; so in my case why he shot down (and robbed) his victim. The first question is: What was the intention of the agent that he shot down a stranger? Answer: He wanted to take his wallet. And the second questions is: What was his motive (ground) for doing so? Answer: he needed money (or had another motive if the perpetrator was a millionaire). In my blog dated 9 July 2019 we saw that Daniel Dennett calls the first question the “for-question” and the second question the “how-come-question”.

Can we say now that we understand the action performed by the agent? Let’s assume that we know that the agent needed money (so he had a motive) and that therefore he shot down the other man in order to take his wallet (so he had also an intention). Then most of us will say that his act is a crime. Nonetheless the latter is not as obvious as you might think. Even if we know an agent’s motive for acting and his intention in acting, it may be that we still don’t fully understand the action in question. In order to make this clear, let me assume that the town where the action just discussed took place is in the frontline of a war. Two armies are fighting against each other in the streets. Now it may be so that the shooting we just saw happen before our eyes has been done by a criminal who had put on a uniform and uses the confusing situation to rob other people. However, it’s also possible that both the agent and the victim are soldiers belonging to different armies. Both soldiers have received orders to kill opponents and to take the wallets of the victims and to give them to their commanders. Then the shooting soldier has a motive (his orders) and an intention (killing enemy soldiers). Should we then no longer call the action a crime but the execution of a – supposedly legal – order? At first sight we may say so; nevertheless it doesn’t need to be correct. For maybe the victim had seen that his opponent wanted to shoot him down and realized that his gun was empty, so that he couldn’t defend himself. Therefore he held his hands up. Nevertheless he was shot down. Then we talk no longer of the execution of an order but of a crime of war. Cases like these made me conclude that in order to understand an action we need not only to know what its motive is (Dennett’s how-come-question) and what its intention is (Dennett’s for-question), but that we need also to ask a third question, namely the question what the action as such is (in my example: a crime or an order). We can only understand an action and so know its reason if we know (1) how it comes about (its motive); (2) what it is for (its intention); and (3) what it stands for or represents (let’s call it its sense). Only when we have answered these three questions, we know what an action means.