From Practical Knowledge to Forms of Life: Toward an Account of the Unity of Animal Action

Abstract

This paper explores the idea of animal intentional action. My aim is to advance a thesis about the logical form that our judgment takes when attributing intentionality to animal action, thereby allowing us to distinguish it from human action. To this end, I first criticize the so-called “standard theory of action” —which locates intentionality in mental events separate from the event itself— for its failure to adequately explain how we ascribe intentionality to animals in the first place. I then develop an alternative within theories of practical knowledge, particularly Anscombe’s account, which explains in a different way the unity and form of human action. My thesis holds that whereas human action derives its unity from practical knowledge as the agent’s self-consciousness of practical means and ends, animal action — lacking such self-consciousness— receives its unity through our judgments that refer to their very “forms of life”, a notion I explain by drawing on Michael Thompson’s theory