Premeditation and happenstance: The social construction of intention, action and knowledge

Conclusion

I have attempted to show that the philosophical problem of action individuation finds its resolution in the analysis of members'in-situ practices of action description and action attribution, and that the differentkinds of description that may be given of any one presumed action make available different features of that action, and thus are loci for the production of different sorts of narrative trajectories. They can thus provide for the accomplishment of systematically different kinds of interactional tasks. For the present purposes I have distinguished two kinds of constructions that can be provided of ‘actions’: those that are ‘outcome’ descriptions (and involve the use of outcome verbs) and are indeterminate as to prior trajectory or intention; and ‘outcome-indeterminate’ performance descriptions that nevertheless can point to a prospective trajectory of possible outcomes but do not deliver them. These two kinds of description have a different logic-in-use, a different socio-logic, and it is this socio-logic that I have attempted to begin exploring.

Further, it has become clear how ‘intention,’ ‘knowledge’ and ‘action’ are finely inter-meshed in practical communicative contexts — indeed, they are ‘laminated’ together in ascriptive and accounting practices whereby the ascription, invocation or inference of ‘intention’ will presuppose or implicate a particular ‘action description.’ Put another way, particular ‘action’ attributions or descriptions logically provide for, or presuppose (are logically tied to), specific kinds of attribution of ‘intention’ and ‘knowledge.’ Indeed, the grammar of ‘action’ accounts is a logical grammar of ‘intention,’ ‘knowledge’ and ‘outcome’. What ‘action’ attribution or description is given or used in any particular context then, depends on and projects a particular ‘composite’ or ‘conjuncture’ of these three action paramaters. It is in this sense that one can talk of asocio-logic of action or, looked at in another way, a socio-logic of knowledge-in-context, one that is simultaneously conceptual, normative and practical.