Anscombe and Wittgenstein on Animals and Intention

[Here's something I've been working on. I think it suffers a bit from being compressed, but I'm working to a short word limit.] 

Elizabeth Anscombe famously criticizes her teacher Ludwig Wittgenstein for talking about the “natural expression of an intention” in Philosophical Investigations. I will consider recent responses to this dispute by Mikel Burley and Martin Gustafsson, arguing that Burley’s response is correct but incomplete, and that Gustafsson’s defense of Anscombe, while also correct, does not show Wittgenstein to have been wrong. Anscombe’s criticism of Wittgenstein is partly pragmatic, and since the two philosophers have somewhat different aims, each can be right relative to those aims. Whose side we take will then depend in part on what aims we adopt, and it might not be necessary to pick either side in this debate.

In order to judge the matter we should first consider the evidence. Wittgenstein asks: "What is the natural expression [Ausdruck] of an intention? – Look at a cat when it stalks a bird; or a beast when it wants to escape" (PI, §647). Responding to this, Anscombe writes:

Intention appears to be something that we can express, but which brutes (which, e.g. do not give orders) can have, though lacking any distinct expression of intention. For a cat's movements in stalking a bird are hardly to be called an expression of intention. One might as well call a car's stalling the expression of its being about to stop. Intention is unlike emotion in this respect, that the expression of it is purely conventional; we might say ‘linguistic’, if we will allow certain bodily movements with a conventional meaning to be included in language. Wittgenstein seems to me to have gone wrong in speaking of the ‘natural expression of an intention’ (Philosophical Investigations §647). (Intention, p. 5)

Wittgenstein’s remark is reminiscent of PI §256, where he asks: “But suppose I didn’t have any natural expression [Äußerungen] of sensation, but only had sensations?” The word for expressions here suggests linguistic expression, which is what Anscombe seems to have in mind, but the qualifying adjective ‘natural’ suggests that Wittgenstein is not talking about anything merely conventional. In §257 he talks about groans and grimaces as manifestations of pain. Presumably this is the kind of thing he has in mind in §256 when he refers to natural expressions of sensation. He uses a different word for expression in §647, and indeed the movements of a stalking cat seem further from language proper than a groan of pain. But it still seems right to say that these movements show something about what the cat is up to, something that will help us to predict and understand its movements. Why not call this an expression of intention? 

Mikel Burley’s view is that the disagreement between Wittgenstein and Anscombe is because of an ambiguity in the word ‘expression’.[1] This seems right, but is perhaps not the last word to be said on the subject. Burley’s point is that a cat cannot voluntarily reveal its intention. Nor can it tell us its intention, of course. But it might nevertheless, non-voluntarily, exhibit or display its intention. Burley also mentions PI §284 in this connection, where Wittgenstein invites us to imagine a stone having sensations. He anticipates a certain kind of failure. We do not, he imagines, simply fail to imagine a stone’s being sentient. We question, or perhaps reject, the very idea: “One says to oneself: How could one so much as get the idea of ascribing a sensation to a thing? One might as well ascribe it to a number!” The task is absurd. But then Wittgenstein asks us to look at a wriggling fly, whereupon he imagines our difficulties will vanish. With the stone “everything was, so to speak, too smooth” for pain, whereas with the fly “pain seems able to get a foothold”. Our reactions to a wriggling fly are quite different from those to a stone. How the world appears in terms of the applicability of concepts, whether too smooth or rough enough for us to get a grip, depends on our reactions to it. Although, of course, our reactions are to features of the world. So language depends on both us and the world. The fly’s wriggling is like a human being’s groan of pain or squirming. It surely might be called a natural expression of pain.

Anscombe does not deny this though. Her point is that intention is different. Unlike emotion (and, I would think, a sensation such as pain), it has only conventional, not natural, expression.       

Martin Gustafsson argues that Anscombe regards intention in animals and in human beings as equally cases of intention but of different kinds of intention.[2] Human intention is connected with language in a way that animal intention is not. Unlike human intention, “the cat’s intention to catch the bird exists only qua the cat’s stalking”.[3] This is what makes it like the car that is about to stop. The car has no intention, so it is also importantly different from the cat, but the symptoms of its being about to stop are not really separable from its being about to stop. Or at least, not as separable as a human being’s intention to do something is from the expression of that intention, which might, after all, be a lie. Unlike cats, human beings are also quite capable of acting against their biological interests.

In the cat case, as conceived by Anscombe, the cat’s intention (to catch the bird) is constitutively bound up with the cat’s nonconventional behavior (its stalking the bird), and this constitutive nexus is intelligible in view of what sort of creature a cat is. The characterization of the behavior qua directed at an intended goal— “stalking the bird”—is applicable because cats are creatures for which it is good to catch birds and because they have the biological equipment (sense organs, etc.) needed to aim at particular things (like birds). If [I am] correct, the reason why Anscombe does not want to call the cat’s behavior an expression of the cat’s intention is that the constitutive interrelationship between intention and behavior is too tight to make the notion of “expression” applicable.[4]  

Behavior does not express intention, according to Anscombe, because the connection between behavior and intention is too tight, to use Gustafsson’s word. What I do to achieve my intended goal embodies my intention in a way that cannot lie.[5] I might walk down a certain street in order to make you think I am going to a museum, say, but then this walking embodies my intention to deceive you. It is not merely a deceptive act regarding my unreal intention to go the museum. It is also a real act that shows, unavoidably if unwittingly, my intention to deceive. 

The expression of sensation is not quite like this. Saying “I am in pain” can be a lie and grimacing can be deceptive—I might in fact feel no pain at all. Any close conceptual connection between pain-behavior and pain is nevertheless not as close as it is in the case of intention and the behavior that embodies it. Or so, at any rate, Anscombe sees it.

Might we not, even so, choose to say that actions embodying a certain intention express that intention? Gustafsson’s view is that Anscombe means to stipulate that we ought not to speak this way when doing philosophy, because of the danger of our doing so’s leading us astray in a Cartesian or empiricist way that treats intentions as mental states not very different from sensations such as pain.[6]    

Burley’s suggestion is that we might equally say that a cat exhibits an intention as that it expresses an intention. If Gustafsson is right, then this is either not quite right or else is itself ambiguous. In philosophically safe usage we might indeed talk about a cat’s expressing its intention, but when there is a need to be scrupulous about the words we use we ought not to speak this way. The important point is to distinguish between the expression of an emotion or a sensation, on the one hand, and the expression or exhibition of an intention, on the other. Since Wittgenstein used different words for the two cases – Äußerung for the former and Ausdruck for the latter – perhaps there is no reason to criticize him. But Anscombe is bothered also by his use of the word ‘natural’ (natürliche) here. Intentions, as she sees the matter, can be exhibited or embodied, as in the case of inarticulate animals’ intentions as well as those of human beings, or, in the human case only, they can be expressed. To speak of ‘natural expression of intention’ is both to blur the distinction between animal and human intention (which Wittgenstein might not mind doing) and to blur the distinction between actual events internal to the human body (including the brain) and the metaphorically inner events of the mind. That distinction is one that both Anscombe and Wittgenstein want to insist on.

On the other hand, Anscombe’s understanding of intention, at least as Gustafsson presents it, is significantly influenced by Aristotle and Aquinas.[7] It would be antithetical to Wittgenstein’s way of doing philosophy to make Aristotelian or Thomist metaphysics an essential part of his work. So we cannot expect him to want to say all that Anscombe would say. And in §647 his primary concern is to move the reader away from the picture of intention as something inner, like a feeling, towards something more like behaviorism. Not that he is a behaviorist, or any other kind of –ist, but that he wants to move the reader out of Cartesianism (and empiricism) and to do so in a direction that might be called that of behaviorism. If you actually get to behaviorism, though, then you have gone too far. Indeed, as Wittgenstein sees it, if you stop in any -ism then you need to move on.

In other words, if Gustafsson’s Anscombe is right, then Wittgenstein went wrong in speaking of the natural expression of an intention not in the sense of saying something absolutely false but in a pragmatic and local (to philosophy) way. But given that Wittgenstein’s goals might include that of not committing to the position that Gustfasson’s Anscombe adopts, and of not committing to any other position either, unless perhaps not being in the grip of any metaphysical picture counts as a position, then it might have been no pragmatic error on his part to speak as he did.               

  

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[1] See Mikel Burley “Wittgenstein, Wonder and Attention to Animals,” in Niklas Forsberg, Mikel Burley, and Nora Hämäläinen Language, Ethics and Animal Life: Wittgenstein and Beyond, Bloomsbury, 2012, pp. 166-178, p. 170.

[2] Martin Gustafsson, “Anscombe’s Bird, Wittgenstein’s Cat: Intention, Expression and Convention” Philosophical Topics Volume 44, Number 1, Spring 2016, pp. 207-237.

[3] Gustafsson, p. 225.

[4] Gustafsson, p. 226.

[5] See p. 231

[6] See p. 235

[7] See p. 208

Wiggling chairs

I loved reading Eli Friedlander's "Missing a Step Up the Laddeer" (which I'm sure was open access when I got it, but which doesn't seem to be any longer). I might do a series of posts on it (cue nothing at all for three weeks followed by a "what I saw on TV last night" post instead).

Having said that I like the paper, there are some bits of it that I don't get. Perhaps blogging about them will help me understand.

For instance, on pp. 58-59 Friedlander says:

I can will to move my hand, but I cannot in the same sense will the chair to move. My act of will, I would like to say, cannot connect directly to the chair. I can only move my body which is the one to move the chair. But Wittgenstein asks himself what would it be like to find out that something is essentially not in the scope of my will. For this negation to make sense, one must be able to conceive of the possibility of trying to will such-and-such and not being able to do so. Someone asked, for instance, to try to will the chair to move, might concentrate on the chair intensely, fasten his gaze on it, narrow his eyes, and express determination. But would this count as trying to will the chair to move and finding out that it is the kind of thing that does not obey the will? There is no trying and discovering that the chair is out of the range of my will. It would be as nonsensical as trying to find out whether sounds can be colored.

The first sentence sounds plausible enough. Actually, I'm not sure that I can will to move my hand in any different sense than that in which I can will to move a chair by psychic means. I can, though, move my hand or, if it is restrained or paralyzed, try to move it. I cannot move a chair in the same way. Nor can I try to move a chair in the same way or the same sense. A doctor might ask me to wiggle first one hand then the other, and perhaps also ask me to wiggle each foot in turn to test for something or other. But if she then said, "Now wiggle the chair" she would either be kidding or else using 'wiggle' in some other sense, one that involves moving over to the chair and applying physical force to it. That's what I take the first part of this quoted passage to be getting at.

But the experiment with psychic powers seems perfectly intelligible to me. The chair won't move, of course. Telekinesis is not possible. Still, denying (or affirming) its possibility makes sense in a way that denying or affirming that sounds can be colored does not. Doesn't it? A magician might, after all, seem to move physical objects through sheer mental power, while no magician could ever even seem to color sounds. Doing so is unimaginable because the idea is unintelligible--the words make no sense (and 'because' here just means '=').

It's a minor point, if I'm right, but a) it's good to be right, and b) I wonder whether I'm missing something. Is attempting to use psychic powers that I know I haven't got really intelligible? Does my thinking that it is reveal some level of superstition on my part, a refusal or failure to rule out completely the possibility that people might have psychic powers? Is it like, or related to, the following question of the rationality of buying lottery tickets? It is often said that it is irrational to buy lottery tickets because the chances of winning are so small, but if you get a dollar's worth of pleasure from buying the ticket then it is rational to pay a dollar for a ticket. But then you only get that pleasure because you imagine that you might win, which is irrational of you. If you really comprehend the smallness of the odds of winning then having a ticket would give you no pleasure at all. And if you really understood how the world works, perhaps the very idea of psychic powers would seem not just false but nonsensical to you. The words 'psychic powers' (and others of the same kind) would be completely withdrawn from circulation in your conceptual economy.

That doesn't seem right though. My not thinking about, or even slightly believing in, psychic powers doesn't mean that these words have no meaning. And 'meaning for me' is not really a thing. "Those words have no meaning for me" just means I don't use those words. Or that's how it seems to me, anyway.

Hume and reasons

Simon Blackburn was the first person to teach me philosophy when I was an undergraduate, and I'm sure he has influenced me more than I realize. He was a brilliant teacher, managing to make Hume seem all at once very clear, very controversial, and indisputably correct. He also helped me enormously when I was applying to graduate schools, going far beyond what I might reasonably have asked of him. It's good to remember what I owe him. But I can't resist quibbling with some of what he writes in his defense of  Hume in The Stone. According to Blackburn, Hume is misunderstood by his critics:

The most visible example of this is the rumpus surrounding the famous passage in which Hume declares that reason by itself is inert, and has no other office than to serve and obey the passions. The mountains of commentary this has excited include accusations that Hume is a skeptic about practical reasoning (whatever that might mean); that he is a nihilist who cannot have any values; that in his eyes nothing matters; that he is too stupid to realize that learning that a glass contains benzene instead of gin might extinguish your desire to drink from it; that he constantly forgets his own theory; and indeed, in the words of one contemporary writer — the frothing and foaming and insolence here reach a crescendo — that philosophers like Hume only avoid being “radically defective specimens of humanity” by constantly forgetting and then contradicting their own views. 

The contemporary writer in question is Allen Wood. Here Blackburn quotes Wood at greater length, writing that, as Wood sees it:

Humeans must say that there are no reasons for anything—nothing matters. They are rank nihilists! Nicely illustrating how to combine poverty of imagination with vulgarity of tone, one of the commentators included here, Allen Wood, describes them as ‘either radically defective specimens of humanity who are incapable of feeling respect for anyone or anything, or else every time they do feel it they commit themselves to contradicting their own metaethical theories’. Golly.

It seems to me that Wood is saying that the Humean theory would only be true if people were much worse than they actually are. Whether that's true or false, I don't think that saying it is so vulgar, insolent, frothing, or foaming.

Reasons are tricky things because they can be thought of as motives or as justifications. Hume's claim that reason is the slave of the passions covers both these ideas: reason does not move us to action without some accompanying emotion, and reason ought not to move us unless in the service of some (presumably good) emotion, according to him. The 'ought' that follows the 'is' (in "Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions") is a little odd, but not disastrously so. If reason cannot be anything else then why say that it ought not to be anything else? If it could be something else then how can Hume be so sure that it isn't? I assume he means that it isn't and we shouldn't pretend, or try to act, otherwise.

It depends what you mean by 'reason' though, surely. Hume seems to mean something like 'the calculative faculty,' and I suppose that is a slave of the passions. But if by 'reason' we mean something closer to sanity, then reason is not such a slave. It isn't rational in that sense of 'reason' to prefer the destruction of the world to the scratching of one's finger.

Schopenhauer says that all actions are the result of the agent's character combined with a motive, where I think the motive is taken to be something like a carrot and a relevant feature of one's character might be loving carrots. The carrot alone does not cause my movement towards it, but then neither does reference to my love of carrots unless we know (that I believe) there is a carrot there. This picture seems all right as far as it goes, but it seems to rely on the fact/value distinction perhaps a little too much. If I avoid pain do we need to add that my character happens to have aversion to pain as one of its features? Or if I do the right thing do we need to add that I happen to be the kind of person who values rightness in order to make sense of my behavior?

It's tempting to say that we only don't need to because it goes without saying. But I wonder. Can we really understand something's being painful without understanding it as to-be-avoided? Or something's being right without understanding it as desirable? If something is desirable other things being equal, we don't need to add "and other things are equal in this case." It is analytic that the painful is to be avoided (other things being equal) and the right (if there is such a thing) is to be done, isn't it? Which I suppose is just a way of saying that some concepts are normatively loaded. "Because there were carrots in it" is not an intelligible reason for running into a burning building, unless I know that the runner really loves carrots. But "Because my daughter was in it" is a perfectly intelligible reason. And not because we add an unspoken "And people love their daughters."

If, as Blackburn says, "reasons have become the Holy Grail of contemporary philosophy," then it seems that philosophers would do well to pay more attention to grammar, to the definition and use of words like 'reason'. But I suppose I would say that.

[UPDATE: when I first conceived this post I thought I had something to say. Now I'm less sure that that's the case, especially given how vast the literature on this subject is and how little I even try to say about it here. But my sense is that a lot of time has been spent arguing about what reasons really are and whether reason is really the slave of the passions, and so on. If the answer to these questions is "It depends what you mean by 'reason'," or "In this sense/these cases Yes, but in that sense/those cases No," then much of this energy might have been wasted.]

Internal and external reasons

Chapter 5 of Joyce's The Myth of Morality continues his discussion of reasons. He argues that all normative reasons are internal, following Bernard Williams' argument that, in Joyce's words:

An external reason claim is one that is applied to the subject of the ascription regardless of what are his desires; and Williams argues that although we make such claims, they are all false. (p. 108)

They are false because reasons for action must be able to explain the action in question, and to do this the alleged reason must be able to motivate the agent. Joyce accepts the Humean view (without claiming to be able to prove it correct) that actions are motivated by beliefs and desires working together.

There is clearly a difference between the reason why someone did what they did and the reason why they should have done something else. I mean, there is a difference in the sense that these do not have to be the same thing. Perhaps you did something for the money but could have made more money doing something else, in which case both reasons are "for the money." But if you kill someone for the money then the reason why you should have refused is rather different. And it might not match any of your desires at all. It is still a reason why you should not have done it.

Is it a reason that you had not to kill the person? Maybe not. But it was a reason that, so to speak, existed for you not to kill them all the same. What kind of existence do reasons that are not acted on have? How can there be a reason that is not owned by someone, that is not someone's reason? And what is the reason not to kill people for money (if, say, Qaddafi makes you a generous offer)? There isn't much of a reason, in a sense. That is, there isn't much I can think of to say to anyone who seriously asked such a question. Because they are people, is about as good as I can do. But it sounds crazy, or like a joke, to say that there is no reason for people not to slaughter innocent civilians for money if that is what they want to do.  

Crow life

These are some of my thoughts after reading chapter 6 of Robert Pippin's Hegel's Practical Philosophy, chapter 1 of Jonathan Lear's Radical Hope, and chapter 5 of Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition. Lear discusses the Crow practice of counting coups (specific kinds of acts of bravery that they valued highly) and the question of what happens when a way of life, and the concepts that go with it, dies out. 

Studio portrait of Crow delegation. Front row, left to right: King Crow; Medicine Crow; Long Elk; Chief Yshidiapas or Aleck-Shea-Ahoos, called Plenty Coups (Many Valorous Achievements in Battle with the Coup Stick) ; Pretty Eagle. Back row, left to right: A. M. Quivey (interpreter); Two Belly; Augustus R. Keller (agent); Thomas Stewart (interpreter). 1880. Attributed to Charles Milton Bell. 1880. Albumen print. National Museum of the American Indian. Catalog number: P03423.

On p. 153, Pippin writes that, "The proper act-description partly depends on the established context of deliberation and action (what having this or that practical reason for doing this or that could mean in such a context) and partly on what intention and what act-description are attributed to you by others." This sounds a little too third-person to me, although much depends on how we take the word 'proper,' I suppose (as well as 'established context'). Imagine the Crow nation being wiped out by people who understand little of their culture. One of the Crow is seen to plant his coup-stick during the battle, but the only people who live to describe this event have no understanding of what a coup-stick is, nor of what it means to plant it in the ground in a fight. Does it then follow that "planting his coup-stick" is not the proper description of what he did? I suppose it won't be a meaningful description of the act unless and until enough is discovered by those to whom such a description might be given to allow them to make sense of talk of coup-sticks. But I would want to say that if they do learn enough to make sense of the action, then we should say that now they can describe the act properly and before they could not. There is a truth to be known, that is to say, and not only warranted assertibility.

In relation to my first comment, this passage from Lear (p. 32) seems relevant: "We do not grasp the devastation that the Crow endured so long as we think that the issue is who gets to tell the story. For the problem goes deeper than competing narratives. The issue is that the Crow have lost the concepts with which they would construct a narrative. This is a real loss, not just one that is described from a certain point of view. It is the real loss of a point of view. This is the confusion of the young man who takes the horse: he has not yet recognized this loss. For an act is not constituted merely by the physical movements of the actor: it gains its identity via its location in a conceptual world." This is (or at least might well seem) close to what Pippin is saying. But it seems to me that if we are to recognize that such a loss is possible, then we have to recognize the reality of what is lost. And then no description will be proper that does not recognize this reality and/or loss. No matter the context and attributions made by others.

This is why I would question Arendt's assertion (p. 192) that, "Action reveals itself fully only to the storyteller, that is, to the backward glance of the historian, who indeed always knows better what it was all about than the participants." It's the word 'always' that bothers me. Perhaps Lear understands better than the Crow what they were up to (I don't mean this ironically, but I emphasize 'perhaps'), but must this always be the case? It's not hard to imagine all Native American culture having been wiped out and history books agreeing that nothing happened in America before 1492. There were natives there, people might say, but they did nothing of any significance: American history began in 1492. This is not the kind of thing that I would want to say, nor to acknowledge as proper in those circumstances (although I'm starting to feel unfair to Pippin at this point).

On the other hand, on p. 199 Arendt writes that: "To men the reality of the world is guaranteed by the presence of others, by its appearing to all; "for what appears to all, this we call Being," and whatever lacks this appearance comes and passes away like a dream, intimately and exclusively our own but without reality." Perhaps one might say that acts, words, people, and peoples whose intelligibility is lost have passed away like dreams. This might be overly sentimental, but I mean that (perhaps) one might say just what the racist or cultural imperialist historian says, only in a very different mood: "Before us nothing happened." Something like this might be said with thoughtless indifference, with a sense of triumph, or with a sense of incomprehensible loss. But I think there would be a risk both of sentimentality and of giving comfort to the culturally arrogant in saying it at all. So I think I prefer to say that I disagree with Pippin and Arendt here.    

This one's from the hip

It's probably not wise to post ideas that are not properly researched or thought out, but then again this is only a blog. I sort of think that half-baked (but not necessarily worthless) ideas are what it's for. So here goes.

I'm sitting in on a seminar with Tal Brewer on the philosophy of action, which is a terrific experience. Consequently I'm reading and trying to think about philosophy of action quite a bit, and am likely to blog about it or else not blog, since I only have so much time. This week I re-read Davidson's "Actions, Reasons, and Causes" (page references below are to this paper as it appears in his Essays on Actions and Events). My impression is that many people object to his claim that reasons are causes because they think of causes in a rather mechanical sense. But I wonder whether this isn't a mis-reading.

Davidson (p. 3) is interested in “the relation between a reason and an action when the reason explains the action by giving the agent’s reason for doing what he did.” On p. 12 he says that “A primary reason for an action is its cause,” where a primary reason consists of a pro-attitude and a belief. On p. 17 he considers the objection to this view that we know causes by observation but our reasons for acting as we do non-observationally. But, he says (p. 18), “the only question is whether these oddities [involving first-person knowledge] prove that reasons do not cause, in any ordinary sense at least, the actions that they rationalize.” The ordinary sense he has in mind seems to relate to the word ‘because’ (see p. 9), which is a pretty broad sense (it might cover all four of Aristotle’s ‘causes’, for instance). So one question I have is whether Davidson is really saying anything precise enough to be helpful (or criticize-able) here. On pp. 9-10 he elaborates on the issue of ‘because’ by saying that, “When we ask why someone acted as he did, we want to be provided with an interpretation.” An interpretation doesn’t sound like an efficient cause, but it might be a cause in the ordinary sense. It certainly answers the question ‘Why?’ I’m not sure how far this takes us beyond common sense and/or Anscombe though.

The last objection Davidson considers to his argument (pp. 18-19) is that there is something wrong with talking about the causes of actions at all. I’m not sure I follow what Davidson says in the final paragraph, but his initial point seems to be that it can’t be true that actions are identical with bodily movements, that these bodily movements have causes, and yet that the actions do not have causes. So far so good, but I wonder whether he has missed the point of the objection (or perhaps Melden, to whom he is responding, made it badly). I would think that an action is a bodily movement under some particular description. So the man playing a tune on a squeaky pump might perform exactly the same bodily movements as a man pumping poison into a house full of Nazis, but their actions are different. Presumably the mere movements have causes in the brain, etc., but in what sense might an action (understood as movements under a particular description) have a cause? Would the agent be caused to conceive of his movements under that description? Or is it not the conceiving or particular understanding that is caused but rather the movements-under-that-description? I think I can make sense of the question “Why do you take yourself to be playing a tune?”, so there might be a ‘because’ here, but it surely won’t be the same as the answer to the question “Why are you playing a tune?” And the answer to the question “What are the causes of the movements we observe in this man’s body?” might be different again. I suspect that the problem is that people are inclined to think of causes as efficient causes within the body. And actions do not appear to have these. But if Davidson means ‘cause’ in a much broader sense then this criticism seems to pass him by because what he is saying has so little substance. Reasons give a because, i.e. they explain why someone did something. But didn’t we know this at the very beginning of the essay (i.e. its first sentence)?