Human beings are creatures who can describe their actions at various levels. Elizabeth Anscombe has famously introduced the example of a man who moves his arm, to pump water, to poison the inhabitants of a house, to overthrow a regime, to bring peace.* You can play with this case, or others, to create all kinds of variations: which of these descriptions does a person know of? Which elements could be outsourced to others, who might not know other descriptions? This is the stuff of comedies, tragedies, and detective stories. And arguably, it matters immensely when it comes to the introduction of AI and other digital technologies into our work.
I was reminded of this basic insight from the philosophy of action, about the multiple descriptions under which our actions can fall, when, the other day, I had to do the proofs for a paper. In the past, I had seen proofing as an act of care – a loving gaze that spots the last mistakes and makes the last improvements before a text goes out into the world. Not the most exciting part of academic work – the arguments have been made, after all – but a meaningful closure of the sometimes bumpy road to publication. I’m the generation who always got pdfs; generations before me did it on paper.