Human Studies t6: 435-454, 1993. 1993 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

Premeditation and happenstance: The social construction of intention, action and knowledge
LENA JAYYUSI
Department of Communication Studies, Cedar Crest College, Allentown, PA 18104

Introduction Two major topics which have enlivened the human sciences in recent years have been: the problem of action attribution on the one hand, and the nature of 'mind' and the relationship between psychological constructs and their social contexts on the other. Throughout both concems, the focus on the pragmatics of language use has become central. The problem of action attribution (or ascription) has been of particular concem to sociologists and philosophers. One of the most recalcitrant issues in this domain has been the issue of action individuation. Austin (1973) has elegantly shown that what a person has done can be given a number of different descriptions, each bringing in 'more or less' of the consequences of the action into the description itself. The pivotal question here has been: are the descriptions to be treated as just so many different descriptions of the 'one' action performed by the actor, or can the actor be said to have performed as many different actions as there are descriptions. To use the example given by Austin: When a person pulls the trigger, firing the gun, shooting a donkey and killing it, are these four different actions or simply four descriptions of his one action? From the perspective of relatively recent developments in sociology, namely ethnomethodology, for which the study of social action has been the primary analytical focus, this philosophical debate has been fundamentally miscast. The issue of what actions are attributed to whom, how actions are to be described and what features of them are significant for their description, assessment or ascription is settled by members (or left unresolved) in the actual contexts of ongoing social interaction. All these matters are grounded in the network of conventions and judgments, procedures and relevances, that constitute the fabric of practical culture. The second problem, that of the relationship between psychological

436 constructs and social contexts, has been an abiding concem for psychology, philosophy, and of late, for sociology as well. In philosophy, Ludwig Wittgenstein (1968), and later philosophers working within his tradition (see, for example, Malcolm, 1968; Hunter, 1973; and Hacker 1986) have relocated the problems of subjectivity and cognition from the domain of a private, individual's world, filled with putatively private mental acts and essentially inaccessible 'subjective states' to a public world of convention and intersubjective criteria for the avowal, attribution and ratification/defeat of mental and psychological predicates. Psychological phenomena have, in this way, been transformed into social phenomena, and it has become clear that their understanding has to be grounded in the systematic analysis of the practial contexts of ascription and avowal. Such a program has notably been formulated and developed in the work of Jeff Coulter (1973, 1979, 1983, 1989). There has recently also been a growing 'social constructionist' approach within the ranks of social psychologists (see, for example, Gergen, 1985; and Harre, 1986), albeit most ofthe work remains couched in theoretic rather than analytic terms. This paper will attempt to look at a class of cases where both of these concems are conjoint features of practical contexts of attribution and accounting. If the ascription of mental predications (knowledge; belief; intention) are matters of practical assessment and constmction in-situ, and if the ascription of actions and the use of action descriptions are also matters of assessment in-situ, then in what ways are the two kinds of practices bound up? I propose to explore features of the logic of action description and attribution in contexts where 'knowledge' and 'intention' are themselves matters to be assessed and ascribed, and to reveal the reflexive logics of action/intention/knowledge attributions. In the process I will hope to show how the philosophical problem of action individuation find its resolution in the analysis of members' in-situ practices of action description and action attribution, and that the different kinds o/action description and action attribution, and the different sorts of narrative trajectories they make possible, can provide for the accomplishment of systematically different interactional tasks. In other words, they have a different logic-in-use, a different socio-logic. It is this socio-logic that is the focus of this paper. Let me then start with one of the ways that the problem of action attribution has been cast in the philosophical literature: namely the issue of action individuation. Philosophers have generally given two answers to this problem. On the one hand, Goldman (1971), for example, would argue that when a person pulls a trigger, firing a gun, shooting a man and killing him, that person can be said to have performed four different actions. Austin (1973), on the other hand, argues that these are merely/our descriptions of

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the same action, each description incorporating more or less of the consequences of the action. Without discussing the philosophical arguments in detail, I suggest that Austin's formulation comes closest to treating the problem of action as a problem of communicative practice (very much in keeping with the thrust of Austin's work in general). Yet, one would want to go further than him and say that those four different descriptions of the one action are four different kinds of description, something that can tum out to be of practical import for members in the oiganization of various accounts of their own and others' actions, and in the conduct of social life. Austin (1973: 106-107) wrote, and I quote: There is no restriction to the minimum physical act at all. That we can import an indefinitely long stretch of what might also be called the 'consequences' of our act into the act itself is, or should be, a fundamental commonplace of the theory of our language about all 'action' in general. Thus if asked 'what did he do?', we may reply either 'He shot the donkey' or 'He fired a gun' or 'He pulled the trigger' or 'He moved his trigger finger', and all may be correct. Indeed yes, they might all be formally correct. But they are not interchangeably meaningful, relevant or appropriate in any practical context. To answer 'He moved his trigger finger' when asked 'what did he do?' might be appropriate where a routine circus trick resulted in some injury, but absurd where a man is being led into the defendant's stand in court for indictment on a murder charge. A response such as "He shot his partner" is the kind of description we might expect to get in such a context. And if, instead, we were to be given the answer: "He fired his gun at his partner" we could legitimately assume that the man was up for indictment not on a murder charge but on attempted murder charges. In other words, these descriptions are intelligible in different kinds of practical contexts of accounting, description or ascription, and they are used to accomplish different accounting and interactional tasks. If we look at them systematically, we can see that this is because they make available different features of the context of the presumed action. Let us compare Austin's example with a range of similar ones:

Examples I-V A B C D shot Mr. X E killed Mr. X

Moved his pulled the fired the trigger finger trigger gun

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II. Pressed the button Pressed his finger over the syringe fired a missile emptied the contents of the syringe into her bloodstream hit the plane injected her with the poison blew a hole in the fuselage poisoned her downed the plane killed her

III.

IV.

ignited the Put the lighted match explosives to the explosives He put his finger into the hole plugged the hole in the dyke (with his finger)

blew the house up

blew them up

killed them

V.

kept the dyke from breaking

kept the water from flooding the valley

saved tbe town

If we look at the initial item in each example we can see that the description given is one that renders the mechanism of the action, and is in terms of it. It does not, however, make the consequences or outcome of the action described available, yet it holds within it, embedded in the specific description, a set of possible trajectories that can logically unfold from the actionas-described, and from which a further action description can be intelligibly made or selected, one that articulates within it yet more of the consequences. It points prospectively to an unfolding course of events that may be said to be logically or practically endogenous to the action-as-described. At the other end the final item provides an 'outcome' but no mechanism by which that outcome was accomplished. (Except for example II 'downed the plane' where the range of possible mechanisms is delimited.) It is an item that points retrospectively to a trajectory of acts and events that may have led up to this 'outcome'. But how the donkey was killed, the plane downed, the town saved is not given us in this description. If we look at the whole range of items in each example it will become evident that no single item renders entirely transparent both mechanism by which the action-asdescribed came about or was performed, and the ultimate outcome of that action-as-described that can be treated as logically or pragmatically endogenous to it in a given context. Of course, no category, no description can render transparent all contextual features, in itself. This is common place. However, the point, more specifically, is that: 1) Different action descriptions do, in themselves, render transparent significant features of an action's context - those that pertain to the action-as-performed (which I have loosely, so far, called 'mecha-

439 nism'), and those that pertain to the action-as-outcome; No one single description can render transparent or explicit all the features of a presumed action's trajectory that are conventionally and narratologically embedded within it.

2)

One might reasonably expect then that this would have some bearing on the organization of accounts of action, and the way that different sorts of action descriptions and attributions could be usable in the accomplishment of different interactional tasks. Indeed, and as one might expect, it turns out to be that accounts of actions exhibit a finely tuned inter-organization of different kinds of items so that mechanism/performance and outcome are both rendered, as necessary for any practical purpose at hand. Let us look briefly at a couple of example of how this can work before picking up one thread from this tangled web and running with it.

Data segment I. (From R. Arens 1969: 64)

Yet another example is provided by the fifth trial of Willie Lee Stewart on a charge of murder. Stewart had entered a grocery story about closing time. After ordering a soda and a bag of potato chips wbich he ate in the store, he pointed a pistol at the proprietor who was standing behind tbe counter with his wife and daughter. The women pleaded with Stewart to "take the money" and offered him the register. He, bowever, "didn't step back, be didn't step forward, be didn't change expression, be just fired". Only then did he open tbe register "and emptied it very calmly, walked out the door and closed it bebind bim."

Here we have an account that starts with the mention of a murder trial. This provides a rubric for the rest of the account, enabling us to understand the nature of the events of which it speaks, and to read the actions actually described as having had a named outcome: the demise of the proprietor. Given the outcome, the account is offered as a narrative that reconstructs the actions and events leading to that outcome in step by step detail - an account that gives a description of these events as-they-would-have-been witnessed - a scenic account. It is in this context that the description 'just fired' does its work. Firstly, it is co-selected together with other performance (or performance-related) descriptions that can 'scenically' render the actions/events. Secondly, precisely because it is a performance description, one that does not render the outcome within it, but points prospectively to one, it can work together with other such descriptions to render a temporally unfolding scene of action, and construct an agent-centered account rather than a recipient-centered one. 'Pointed a pistol', is a performance description that makes iinmediately relevant (morally and practically), a next action as sequel: fired, and/or outcome: shot/killed. 'Pointed a

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pistol' and 'fired' are two items that hearably and conventionally go together in tandem, as a first action and relevant next. But, as an agentcentered, temporally organized scenic description 'he pointed a pistol' at the proprietor and 'fired' is a description that can accept the insertion of another course of actions and/or events within it, where the sequel, or relevant next to the first item ('pointed'), is held in temporary abeyance. In this case we have, inserted between the first item ('he pointed a pistol...') and the sequel ('just fired'), the narrative sequence: "the women pleaded with Stewart to 'take the money' and offered him the register. He, however, 'didn't step back, he didn't step forward, he didn't change expression.'" It is made clear that the women's pleas had no uptake whatever. Given the women's pleas, and their object, any next action by the agent can get constituted in terms of a morally-implicative response or uptake. Here, no uptake whatsoever by the man pointing the pistol becomes accountable as a specific sort of response. This response is rendered in terms of an 'absence': 'he didn't step back, he didn't step forward, he didn't change expression.' Note here that this is thus scenically rendered over the course of three items, maintaining the sense of temporality by putting off the expectable next item, the sequel that is itself productive of the relevant ultimate outcome (the death of the proprietor). And like the 'just fired' that immediately follows them, these items are agent-centered. This way of organizing the account, and this co-selection of items and action descriptions, can constitute for them, and for their agent, a specific moral profile. Both in terms of its content and its organization, this account projects the agent's actions as having been deliberate and unemotional - in other words cold-blooded. In fact, this particular account is given as part of a chapter (Arens, 1969: 27-73) concemed with discussing the diagnosis of mental disorder by psychiatrists in criminal trials. The deliberate, unemotional character of the agents' actions, provided for by the description, constitutes the outcome as having been fully intended, and the agent as having been cognizant of his actions. Paradoxically, however, it is precisely this that provides possible grounds for the ascription of 'mental disorder' (whereby the agent is in some way deemed not properly cognizant of his action and its outcome). Given the other particulars made available within this account: namely that the victim is a stranger to the agent, and that the women were prepared to give Stewart the cash register before he shot the man, accountably rational grounds for the action may be seen to be absent, and the deliberate shooting is thereby seen to have been engaged in for no purpose beyond itself. We can see here one context within which the focus on the detail of a course of actions and events, in its witnessable sequence, can be relevant and can have moral and practical upshot. And we can see how the selection of

441 particular kinds of action descriptions can bring this off. Let us explore some further ways that action descriptions can accomplish different practical tasks. Consider the following

Data segment 2. (Arens, 1969: 208) The Defense: The Witness: The Defense: The Witness: The Defense: The Witness: The Defense: The Witness: How did you make out in the Military Service? Well, I didn't make out too good. What happened to you? I become to having headaches in the service and they put me in the hospital and I stayed there and they discharged me from the hospital. Do you remember what kind of a ward you were in when you went to that Army hospital? It was a mental ward. What did you do upon your discharge Mr.... (Rivers)? Well, I came out of the service and I was walking down - about a week after I was out of the service, I was walking down the street and a fellow shot out of the door at another fellow and hit me behind the leg and I went to Casualty Hospital and I lost my leg after that. How did you happen to lose your leg? Well, gangrene set in my leg and they had to take it off.

The Defense: The Witness:

I wish to focus briefly on the description of the shooting incident. Here again, we have a temporally unfolding scenic description, one in which two courses of action intersect. The use of 'shot out at,' like 'fired at,' does not explicitly render the outcome conventionally embedded in that action, but provides for its relevance programmatically. The intended target of the shooting is given here as having been 'another fellow.' Thus, the selection of this kind of action description, one that is 'outcome indeterminate,' permits the rendering (and the reading) of the actual outcome as having been unintended. And the scenic way in which this is done exhibits the intersection of the two activity trajectories, and the outcome thereof, as having been totally by chance. The witness could, of course, have provided for the accidental nature of his injury by saying: "I was walking down the street and a fellow shot me behind the leg by accident." But without a scenic description that could answer the potential question 'how,' rather than simply the question 'what happened,' the possibility of the injured man's having been in some way directly implicated in the 'accident' may remain open. At any rate, it is the totally chance character of the outcome, given in the chance intersection between two witnessable and observably distinct activity trajectories, an intersection located spatio-tempprally only in the bullet's hitting the back of the man's leg, it is this that offers a

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distinct 'moral' character to both event and recipient. The injured man, the witness, can here be seen as totally a 'victim,' and this account thus meshes in with the story of misfortune that is being collaboratively unfolded and produced by Witness and Defense over the course of the sequence from which this interchange comes (Arens, 1969: 202-212). Thus, in both data segments we have looked at, the selection of action descriptions is co-fitted with the selection of other details to produce a scenic as-though-witnessed account of 'what happened' and one that constitutes for the described actions and events, and the persons involved, an identifiable moral character. And further, this moral character, made available through the specific organization of temporal and scenic particulars, is one which tums on, and is given in, the depiction of an action as having been deliberate, and the outcome as coldly intended (what we might otherwise describe as pre-meditated) in the first example, and of the outcome as being a matter of happenstance, that is to say, completely by chance rather than intended, in the second example. In fact, 'intention,' 'deliberation,' 'chance,' 'happenstance,' 'mishap' etc. seem to be critical parameters for the moral constitution, assessment and description of actions and events, and feature pervasively and significantly in the conduct of social life, even if they do not explicitly surface as an issue in each and every practical setting. Any action can, in principle, be made subject to such considerations in-situ, and can thus be articulated into a second order moral action description. For instance, such an ordinary act as 'turning on the light' can be constituted as 'harassment,' 'escalating a quarrel,' or simply 'doing something mean' given the appropriate context. To help focus more closely on this issue let us tum to the work of Gilbert Ryle. In the Concept of Mind (1973), Ryle distinguishes a class of verbs which he calls 'achievement' verbs or 'find' verbs (he also variously calls them 'success' verbs or 'got it' verbs). These he contrasts with what he calls 'hunt' or 'try' verbs or 'task' verbs (the particular term he uses at any one point depends on the analytic point he is trying to make). He writes: One big difference between the logical force of a task verb and that of the corresponding achievement verb is that in applying an achievement verb we are asserting that some state of affairs obtains over and above that which consists in the performance, if any, of the subservient task activity. For a mnner to win, not only must he mn but also his rivals must be at the tape later than he; for a doctor to effect a cure, his patient must both be treated and well again; for the searcher to find the thimble, there must be thimble in the place he indicates it; and for the mathematician to prove a theorem, it must be tme and follow from the premises from which he tries to show that it follows. An autobiographical account of the agent's exertions and feelings does not by itself tell whether he has brought off what he was trying to bring off... It is a

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consequence of this general point that it is always significant, though not, of course, always true, to ascribe a success partly or wholly to luck. A clock may be repaired by a random jolt and the treasure may be unearthed by the first spade-thrust. Ryle goes on to say: When a person is described as having fought and won, or as having journeyed and arrived, he is not being said to have done two things, but to have done one thing with a certain upshot. ... Achievements and failures are not ... acts, exertions, operations or performances, but with reservations for purely lucky achievements, the fact that certain acts, operations, exertions, or performances have had certain results, (pp.143-144) If we tum back to our set of examples, I-V, we can pick out a number of descriptions which "indicate the fact that certain acts have had certain results," results that obtain over and above that 'subservient task activity' as Ryle puts it: 'killed,' 'downed,' 'saved,' 'poisened,' 'blew up.' I prefer to call these 'outcome' verbs. The notion of 'achievement' here being used by Ryle logically presumes that the result had been sought and intended. Thus it makes sense in this context to locate 'serendipity' (i.e., purely lucky achievement) as a qualifier, one which, were it to be applied, would be significant and indeed may undercut the claim to success or achievement, even the claim of an agent to have endeavored towards that end. But outcomes are not always sought or intended; at least they are not always treated as matters to be sought - for example: 'killed,' 'ruined,' 'destroyed' are bound up conventionally with negative moral judgments, and are practically productive of negative consequences for the agent, so much so that the disavowability of 'intention' to achieve these outcomes, or even of the endeavor to do so, may be.preferred. At any rate Ryle's aside on 'purely lucky achievements' ultimately stops short - the issue of intention, luck, chance, deliberation is of programmatic relevance in the organization of accounting practices: it is programmatically relevant for the way that 'outcomes' and thus actions and their agents, as well as their recipients, can get morally constituted. It is programmatically significant whether an 'outcome' can be found to have been endogenous to the course of action-asproject, or exogenous to it. In set I-V consider example 1. Each of the different kinds of descriptions there can make relevant a somewhat different set of questions or narrative trajectories: If he moved his trigger finger, was it inadvertently or did he mean to pull the trigger? Did he actually pull the trigger, or did he stop at the last minute. If he pulled the trigger: did the gun go off, or did it turn out not to be loaded? If he did fire the gun, did he hit Mr. X? Had he intended to hit him, or merely to frighten him off? And if he shot Mr. X, did he kill him? And had he meant to kill him, or merely to stop

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him? And furthermore, did he know that his man was in fact Mr. X, or had he killed him believing it was Mr. Y? The point to note here is that all these questions, and the kinds of accounts that can be spun around them, tum on the issue of intention and outcome. What outcome was intended in any action-as-described, what outcome eventuated, and whether a named outcome had actually been intended as such, are all matters which may be routinely displayed or hearably avoided, presumed or raised in the organization of an account's particulars, and whichever way that the account articulates such a matter may yet leave it open to contest. It is these matters that provide for the upgrading or downgrading of ascriptions of responsibility, for dramatic discourse on themes of fate and fortune, for complaints about professionalism, carelessness and so on. Each of these kinds of descriptions can be articulated into a different kind of narrative and interactional task. Furthermore, whether the agent can be constituted as having intended to shoot Mr. X when he pulled the trigger depends on whether we can presume or ascribe knowledge to him that the gun was loaded. And whether his firing at Mr. X and killing him can be rearticulated as an act of murder or self-defense might depend on whether he believed that Mr. X was pointing a real weapon at him or knew that it was simply a toy gun. Some years ago in the Boston area there was a report of a woman who had shot her husband dead in the dark of the night thinking he was an intruder, not realizing that he had, on impulse, decided to throw out the garbage. An account of the husband's demise as a mishap, in other words as an outcome that had not been intended, would presuppose attributing to her the belief that the man she confronted in her home in the dark was a stranger. But if one were to find grounds for attributing knowledge of the victim's identity to her, then it would be possible to locate, in that, further grounds for construing the outcome as having been fully intended by her, in other words for attributing to her the intention of shooting her husband, and for recasting her action as 'murder.' The point here is that attributions of knowledge and intention are finely intermeshed together in practical settings, and they are both finely intermeshed with the sorts of action attributions we make and the tasks that are accomplished by them. For a more detailed look at one of the ways that this can work let us now consider the following data segment:

Data segment 3. (From actual police interrogations of murder suspects; data collected by Rod Watson.)

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(White male accused of killing a black male) P - Police Officer, S - Suspect

31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.
P: S: P: S: P: S: P: S:

Well then did you know that you were shooting at G ... or did you shoot at him just because he was colored, period? He's a nigger. And that's why you shot him and er. That's why I shot him. Did you intend to kill him ... or? Yes...! yer. Do you think I'd fire at somebody if I didn't intend to kill them?

The context of this exchange is known in common to the two participants; it is the death-by-shooting of a black male, an event to be constituted as an outcome of some prior action by an agent, in this case the white suspect. In P's question on line 31 he uses the action description "shooting at..." The 'shooting at' is of course known by them to have resulted in its anticipatable outcome, namely that G was actually shot and killed. P asks S whether he knew that he was shooting at G or shot at him because of his race. Either alternative leaves one thing in place: that the shooting at the victim was not an accidental firing. To describe the 'shooting at' as an action performed-in-the-knowledge of the victim's identity, or as one located in some specifiable reason is hearably to close out the possibility of mishap. Both logically presuppose that the agent fired at his victim intentionally. But refiexively, it is precisely in asking such a question, set up as an alternative between these two choices, that the police officer is hearably presuming intention and attributing it retrospectively to the suspect. In other words, it might not be an issue for the police officer in-situ whether there had been an accidental firing of the gun - eye witness accounts, his knowledge of the suspect's prior record, any other number of features could have that matter settled for him. But it is in the way the question is constructed that he is hearably presuming intention, and constituting it as a non-contestable matter, or at least as not a matter to be concerned with. The choice given the recipient of the question is between answering to one or the other, each of which presumes an intentional shooting of a man (the victim). P's turn, in other words, seems to prefer an answer which supports and upholds the presumption of intentionality. Thus, the presumption of intentionality can be said to be 'over-determined' here, since the defeat of that presumption would require, not a simple answer to the question (one that falls within the options offered the recipient), but rather a rejection and defeat of the entire question or its premises. Note, moreover, that in each of the questions that compose this turn, there is a performance description

446 ('shooting at'), which already hearably presumes that the action-asdescribed was an intentional one - that the gun did not fire accidentally, and that the agent was not simply firing in the air, or trying to do target practice at some object in the street, etc. Thus, within the attribution environment provided in each of the two questions, there is a co-selection of items that uphold each other's sense such that we have a seamless attribution of intentionality. In line 33, S. indicates that race was the reason for his action, thus accepting and ratifying P's presumption. A transformation of race as a reason for shooting at G, to a reason for 'shooting him' is now effected by P. in line 34 - he uses an 'outcome' verb which is performance-related, displaying the mechanism by which the outcome was accomplished, the mechanism already given in the performance description used in line 31, an outcome-indeterminate description. 'Shooting at' is transformed into 'shooting.' It is a smooth transformation. And it accomplishes an upgrading of intentional attribution or presumption. On proposing a reason for why S shot G, the hearable presumption or attribution being made to S is that of an intention to achieve that outcome. S assents, again ratifying the presumption. A further transformation is not made - rather the next step is explicitly made. 'Kill' is a genuine 'outcome' verb - one that points to a prior trajectory of action that led to it but does not deliver it, and does not necessarily render whether the outcome had been intended or not. Given that indeed there is a man who has been killed, and that the suspect has not disavowed the presumption that he had intended to shoot (that is to hit) him, can strongly implicate the possibility that he had also intended to kill him, but cannot settle it. P therefore asks 5: "Did you intend to kill him ... or?" (line 36) and 5 answers in the affirmative (line 37). Intention with regards to 'outcome' here surfaces explicitly as an issue, and 5 then goes on to avow it openly and locate it at the same locus at which this interchange began - the point where he shot at, or fired at, the victim (lines 39-40). Thus, in this exchange, we have a gradual widening of the intenfional net that can thus morally constitute the action-leading-to-that-named-outcome as a particular kind of action, and upgrade the responsibility attributable to the agent. I want now to tum to the last segment of data which I will consider.

Data segment 4. (From a report in The Boston Herald American, 5 September 1983.) The Korean airliner, with 269 people aboard, was lost last Thursday from restricted skies near Soviet military installations. U.S. officials say a Soviet pilot shot down

447 the plane with a heat-seeking missile and contend that the Soviets must have known what they were shooting at. (italics added)

On 3 September 1983, U.S. newspapers and broadcasts were full of the story of KAL Flight 007, shot down by Soviet fighter planes over the island of Sakhalin in the Soviet Union. One of the most striking features of the coverage of that 'story,' in general terms, was the way that 'what happened,' although not actually known in its particulars, nor directly 'witnessed,' was treated and presented as 'known,' as clear and selfevident, not a 'mystery' in any sense. And yet, despite this over-all character of the news coverage of, and accounting for, the 'event,' an inspection of the details of the news narratives and their features reveals an organization of particulars that orients visibly to the fact that the 'full story' was not definitively KNOWN. And this organization of particulars was such that it would prospectively 'undercut' any possible 'disqualifying' items and fill in the 'gaps' so as to point to and uphold the 'story-as-ktiown.' In other words, there seemed to be (on the face of it) a 'paradox' at work here. On the hand, although the 'story' was not properly ktiown in all its detail, indeed not even in that detail which could have been 'accounttransforming,' the story was presented as known-in-general. On the other hand, although the story-in-general was presented, and indeed on occasion formulated explicitly as being 'known,' it was clear from the organization of the account's particulars, and the issues being oriented to, and attended to, that the 'story' was being addressed as in some ways 'not known.' This is a story that is known-in-general but unknown-in-its-particulars, and it is significant that not all stories have this character. Data segment 4, comes from one such account and runs under the headline: Prez to reveal Action on National T.V. To begin with, we can gather that a Korean airliner, carrying 269 people aboard, is missing. But we are also given a location for the 'onset' of that missing status: restricted skies near Soviet military installations. Thus an 'event' is provided and given its spatio-temporal boundaries: a civilian airliner 'was lost,' in the words of the report, at a particular time and place. The agent however, if there be one, has not been made available yet. 'Lost' is an outcome descriptor (whether used as verb or adjective), and does not provide 'career' or trajectory particulars. Here it is given a passive construction. Thus here we have the use of an 'outcome' descriptor that does not make available whether there was any 'culpable' moral agency involved in the production ofthe outcome. As an 'outcome' verb, 'lost' falls into a subclass of such verbs which, used without qualification, and even in the active voice, are hearable as providing for an unintended outcome. Therefore, although to say of someone "he lost it" can preserve the possibility of assigning culpability and responsibility to the agent (for being careless.

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stupid, reckless) it is so strongly hearable as providing for an unintended outcome that, for all practical purposes, it is not heard as an action attribution, and the question of 'intention' to lose is not routinely intelligible. Where there is a doubt raised as to the intentions of the agent, that is hearable as doubting whether the agent actually lost the object at all, or in fact, 'hid it,' 'gave it away,' 'threw it away' etc. To cast the outcome 'lost' in the passive then, as this report does, in other words with the agent deleted, preserves (paradoxically) the possibility of assigning an activity to an agent by which this visible outcome intendedly came about. A plane fiying at a great height and distance away is not directly accessible to our perceptions and apprehension. The setting is not directly witnessable, as would an event happening down the street, although it has its own 'witnessable indices' - blips on a radar screen. Given that communication has suddenly ceased with this plane, and its life indices have suddenly vanished, this first description (The Korean airliner ... was lost... etc.) seems to be truest to our 'first knowledge,' a 'tangible knowledge' so to speak. This first description is one that has not yet provided us with any 'transparency,' any real access to the event, only a located outcome which points to there having been an event of some kind. However, the outcome with its presumed antecedent 'event' is given a specific setting: "restricted skies near Soviet military installations." Such a scene-setting sets up an environment of categories that can be generative of possible accounts of the event for which we now have a visible outcome - and generative of 'candidate reasons' as well as a 'candidate trajectory.' Here we have an outcome with great moral significance (the presumed loss of lives) which routinely makes relevant the search for agency and the issue of agency is addressed in the next line: "U.S. officials say a Soviet pilot shot down the plane." In this construction, the fact that 'what happened' is not concretely known is oriented to - the solution given to the problem of the missing plane takes the form of a claim attributable to locatable persons: "U.S. officials say ..." This preserves the force of the prior description "was lost" but provides a candidate solution to the problem or puzzle. The content of the claim: "A Soviet pilot shot down the plane" can be thought of, and treated as, an attribution conjuncture - it involves the attribution of an action, directed towards some recipient, to an agent. And I would like to suggest here in passing that one needs to treat action descriptions and action attributions as just such attribution conjunctures - it is easy to see that a description such as "the father shot his little boy" is different in terms of its practical logic to one such as "the little boy shot his father": for it can generate a different set of moral implications, invoke a different order of ascribable knowledge, and raise a somewhat different set of conventional understandings and search procedures. The first may more easily get treated

449 as a description to be potentially rearticulated as 'infanticide,' the second more easily as 'mishap.' Now one thing about this conjuncture (...a Soviet pilot shot down the plane) is that it is hearable in an intentional mode namely that the plane's downing was an outcome endogneous to the pilot's course-of-action-as-project. There are probably a lot of convergent reasons why this is so, among which one might briefly mention: the active voice which conventionally (although not in formal logical terms) constitutes an 'outcome' as an action-intendedly-with-that-outcome; the filling of the qualifier slot post action attribution with the provision of an instrument by which the action/outcome was accomplished, our routine substantive and categorial knowledge of the world that might make it difficult to see a shooting down of a plane as accidental, the categories used to 'set the scene' for the event, etc. Yet the point to remember here is that the 'event' of which this claim speaks, the event which led to the plane's disappearance, is not given as 'known' in this account - it had not been ratified as a 'shooting down.' It could, therefore, turn out to have been an accidental collision, or routine military maneuvers in which the plane got accidentally mixed up. Thus, the claim being made is hearably to an 'event': that the plane was shot down by a Soviet pilot, and to an action: that the Soviet pilot deliberately shot down the plane - he had intended to shoot it down and succeeded in doing so. But of course, either of these two hearable claims could still be defeated, or questioned. Because the attribution is presented at this point as a claim: "U.S. officials say..." one of the questions that might remain is whether there indeed was such an event with those named mechanics and that outcome. Or, if one accepts this, one questions that may still remain practically open is whether the pilot had deliberately shot the plane down. But the matter does not end here. There is yet a further possible issue that may be raised, another potential indeterminacy that may surface - it has to do with whether the identification of the 'recipient' or 'object' of the action by the reporter and/or reader is identical with its identification by the agent in the performance of his action-as-described. In our data 'the plane' refers to KAL flight 007 with 269 passengers aboard - a civilian airliner. The attribution "a Soviet pilot shot down the plane" is, in this context, indeterminate as to whether it is being made in an opaque or transparent context (see Quine, 1960; Jayyusi, 1984: ch. 6): does the reporter mean to say that the Soviet pilot knew that he was shooting down a civilian airliner! And did the pilot in fact know that? Or did he perhaps think it was a spy plane, an issue that indeed surfaced in much of the argument and counter-argument over the affair. Thus for the attribution conjuncture, guardedly presented as a claim: "U.S. officials say a Soviet pilot shot down the plane" there could be at

450

least three significant matters to be ratified and accepted or defeated: there is first the issue of whether some other occurrence was in fact behind the plane's disappearance. Then, if it is accepted or passed that the plane had indeed been shot down by a Soviet pilot, there could be the matter of whether that had been intentional or not; had the pilot simply been trying to warn the plane to force it to land, etc. And then there is the question as to whether it was this plane, the civilian airliner, that the pilot had intended to shoot down. The difference between the last two questions (both of which pertain to the issue of intentionality in practical actions: the first to its ascribability, the second to its scope) can be highlighted by the different uses the concepts of 'accident' and 'mistake' could have here. To adapt one of Austin's (1970: 185) examples on shooting a neighbour's donkey: Suppose a policeman was doing target practice in a country field, and someone runs into the line of fire and gets shot. The policeman can then say: it was an 'accident.' He had not had any intention of shooting anyone. On the other hand, if he had been pursuing a suspect in the road, and thinking he had him covered at last, aimed at and shot him, only to find out that it was someone else, then he would be said to have shot that man 'by mistake.' He had had the full intention of shooting a man, but not this one. The terms of moral reprobation and assessment that could be made relevant in each case would be significantly different. Moreover, the applicability of the notion of 'mistake' here presupposes that the notion of 'accident' does NOT apply. In other words there is an order and an orderliness to the possibility of orienting to, raising or settling issues around these different pivots of contestability or kinds of potential indeterminacy - we can see that, both in this data, as well as in the police interrogation discussed earlier (Data segment 3). They cannot both, or all, be made meaningfully operative at once. In our present example, the three matters that we have noted as being potentially open to contest, particularly given the guarded character of the claim, have a certain order in relationship to each other - the order of issue or contest must needs move logically in a particular way. How such an order is made to work in the management of prospective 'hearings,' problems and questions, and what sort of accounting task it can be put to, is evident in the last line of this news report which reads: 'and contend that the Soviets must have known what they were shooting at.' Here we have it: the assertion, following the guarded claim, that the 'Soviets must have known what they were shooting at' deftly accomplishes a number of things in one go, and exhibits, as well as presumes, the finely tuned workings of what I call a 'laminated attribution order.' In using the term 'contend,' the account projects that the pivot of contestability in this matter is the Soviet's knowledge of the true nature of the object shot at and shot down. And in

451 making this the pivot of contestability, the account now presupposes and in the same breath projects that the outcome was brought about intentionally: that there was a deliberate shooting down - no accident. The attribution of intention is both indexed and accomplished at the same time. It is made in making the attribution of knowledge to the agent. And now, we come back full circle to the point initially made about this 'story': that it is treated in the account as a story that is known-in-general, but unknown-in-its-particulars. Indeed we can here see the working of a 'social construction of knowledge' in-situ. In the same breath that the intentional attribution is indexed and accomplished, the 'event' as a whole, as constructed in the attribution conjuncture is presupposed as 'given', and as having occurredas-described. The attribution conjuncture is now given and hearable as a real-world description, an 'actuality account' despite the guarded character of the account. It is in this way that the account visibly orients to the hidden seams within it (precisely the points at which alternative or oppositional accounts and items can be inserted, and round which queries and challenges can be generated), and manages them, elaborating itself as a seamless account. Thus, the construction of the event as 'known,' despite possible contests and indeterminacies, is possible through the economically and finely located and organized use of a 'laminated attribution order.'

Conclusion Ihave 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 different kinds 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

452 ascription, invocation or inference of 'intention' will presuppose or implicate a particular 'action description.' Put another way, particular 'action' attdbutions 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 a socio-logic of action or, looked at in another way, a socio-logic of knowledge-in-context, one that is simultaneously conceptual, normative and practical.

References Arens, R. (1969). Make mad the guilty. Spdngfield, IL: Chades C. Thomas Publisher. Austin, J.L. (1970). A plea for excuses. In Philosophical Papers. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Austin, J.L. (1973). How to do things with words. New York: Oxford University Press. Coulter, J. (1973). Approaches to insanity: A philosophical and sociological study. London: Martin Robertson. Coulter, J. (1979). The social construction of mind. London: Macmillan. Coulter, J. (1983). Rethinking cognitive theory. London: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin's Press. Coulter, J. (1989). Mind in action. Oxford: Polity Press. Gergen, K. (1985). The social constructionist movement in modern psychology. American Psychologist 40: 266-275. Goldman, Alvin I. (1971). The individuation of action. Journal of Philosophy 68: 761-774. Hacker, P.M.S. (1986). Insight and illusion: Themes in the philosophy of Wittgenstein. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harre, R. (1986). Social sources of mental content and order. In J. Margolis, P. Manicas, R. Harre and P. Secord (Eds.), Psychology: Designing the discipline. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Jayyusi, L. (1984). Categorization and the moral order. Henley, UK: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Malcolm, Norman (1968). Knowledge of other minds. In G. Pitcher (Ed.), Wittgenstein: The philosophical investigations. London: Macmillan. Quine, W.V. (1960). Word and object. New York: Wiley. Ryle, G. (1973). The concept of mind. Harmondsworth: Penguin University Books. Wittgenstein, L. (1968). Philosophical investigations. Trans. G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

453 Appendix

Examples I-V

B Moved his pulled the trigger finger trigger

II.

D fired the gun hit the plane injected her with the poison shot Mr.X blew a hole in the fuselage poisoned her killed Mr.X downed the plane killed her

Pressed the button Pressed his finger over the syringe

fired a missile emptied the contents of the syringe into her bloodstream

III.

IV.

Put the ignited the lighted match explosives to the explosives He put his finger into the hole plugged the hole in the dyke (with his finger)

blew the house up

blew them up

killed them

V.

kept the dyke from breaking

kept the water from flooding the valley

saved the town

Data segment 1. (From R. Arens 1969: 64)

Yet another example is provided by tfie fifth trial of Willie Lee Stewart on a charge of murder. Stewart had entered a grocery story about closing time. After ordering a soda and a bag of potato chips which he ate in the store, he pointed a pistol at the proprietor who was standing behind the counter with his wife and daughter. The women pleaded with Stewart to "take the money" and offered him the register. He, however, "didn't step back, he didn't step forward, he didn't change expression, he just fired". Only then did he open the register "and emptied it very calmly, walked out the door and closed it behind him."

454 Data segment 2. (Arens, 1969: 208)

The Defense: The Witness: The Defense: The Witness: The Defense: The Witness: The Defense: The Witness: How did you make out in the Military Service? Well, I didn't make out too good. What happened to you? I become to having headaches in the service and they put me in the hospital and I stayed there and they discharged me from the hospital. Do you remember what kind of a ward you were in when you went to that Army hospital? It was a mental ward. What did you do upon your discharge Mr.... (Rivers)? Well, I came out of the service and I was walking down - about a week after I was out of the service, I was walking down the street and a fellow shot out of the door at another fellow and hit me behind the leg and I went to Casualty Hospital and I lost my leg after that. How did you happen to lose your leg? Well, gangrene set in my leg and they had to take it off.

The Defense: The Witness:

Data segment 3. (Data collected by Rod Watson, University of Manchester) (White male accused of killing a black male) P - Police Officer, S - Suspect
31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. P: S: P: S: P: S: P: S: Well then did you know that you were shooting at G ... or did you shoot at him just because he was colored, period? He's a nigger. And that's why you shot him and er. That's why I shot him. Did you intend to kill him ... or? Yes...! yer. Do you think I'd fire at somebody if I didn't intend to kill them?

Data segment 4. (From The Boston Herald, 5 September 1983) The Korean airliner, with 269 people aboard, was lost last Thursday from restricted skies near Soviet military installations. U.S. officials say a Soviet pilot shot down the plane with a heat-seeking missile and contend that the Soviets must have known what they were shooting at. (italics added).