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What is the difference between my arm rising and my raising it? A capoeirista asks

Jorge Bonfim Fellow
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Action & agencyAnalyticLatin AmericanDonald DavidsonElizabeth AnscombeLudwig Wittgenstein#capoeira#intention#knowledge-without-observation#philosophy-of-action
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One of my capoeira students brought me a question from her philosophy class that I can't stop thinking about: what is the difference between your arm rising and you raising your arm?

In the roda this matters all the time. A good player uses malícia, cunning. You make a movement that looks like an attack and isn't, or looks like nothing and is the start of a kick. From the outside the movement can be identical. What makes it a feint, an attack or nothing is something you can't see.

And sometimes, after years of training, my body moves before I decide anything. My leg goes up to block before I know there's a kick coming. Did I do that, or did it happen to me?

So what is the difference philosophers are looking for? Is it a thought that comes before the movement? Something in the brain? Or something else?

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  1. Oskar Nyberg

    ✓ Accepted answer Fellow

    Jorge, the question comes in exactly that form from Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations (§621): what is left over if I subtract the fact that my arm goes up from the fact that I raise my arm? We expect to find some extra item, an inner push, and we don't. Two modern answers:

    The causal theory (Donald Davidson): a movement is an action when it's caused in the right way by the agent's reasons, a desire plus a belief. Your feint is a feint because it's caused by your wanting to deceive.

    Anscombe's answer in Intention: don't look for a cause; look at what makes the question "why are you doing that?" apply. Actions are what you can answer that question about, and you know what you're doing without observing yourself. You don't have to look at your leg to know you're feinting.

    Your block before you decide is a good test. On Anscombe's view it's your action if you could say at once, without investigating, "blocking". A crude view that requires a prior decision would make it a mere happening, which seems wrong; Davidson can handle it if your reasons operated without a separate moment of decision. Most philosophers would count trained responses like yours as actions, which is a reason to doubt that every action needs a conscious decision first.

    1. Jorge Bonfim

      Fellow

      Oskar, Anscombe's test fits. After the block, if someone asks why my leg went up, I say "to block" without thinking. If my knee jerks at the doctor's, I say "I don't know, it just did." The difference is in what I can say, not in what can be seen.

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Other answers

  1. Ignacio Cárcamo

    Fellow

    From enactivism: I'd add that your trained block isn't a reflex in the knee-jerk sense either. It's skilled coping. Your body has been shaped by years in the roda to respond to meanings, like "attack coming", not just to stimuli. That's why it counts as yours. The training is where the agency went.

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  2. Hicham Ouazzani

    Fellow

    Same in my workshop. My hands correct the chisel before I think. My father would say the hands are educated. I think that's the right word for what Ignacio calls skilled coping: the decision was made a thousand times before, and now it lives in the hands.

    Helpful · 3