Semantics of action II: On Ricoeur's discourse of action

For Ricoeur, the discourse of action – more specifically, the ‘say your doing’ – can and must be examined from different levels and from different traditional philosophical per-spectives, as follows: (1) conceptual analysis (i.e. the analysis of concepts used to de-scribe action), (2) logical analysis of statements of action (i.e. the proposition by which action is expressed and represented), and (3) the logic of action (i.e. the argumentative construction through which a strategy of action is built and justified or explained). To better articulate the last point, Ricoeur refers to the Anglo-Saxon philosophy of action – a tradition resulting from Frege’s propositional logic, and thanks to Austin, Strawson and Searle grounded in a theory of the speech act (acts of speech, acts of discourse). Ricoeur examines what this analysis is and what its contribution can be to a philosophy of action. To him, conceptual analysis and a theory of statements are not sufficient to bring out the discursive character of the discourse of action. In fact, it is a speculative integration able to connect linguistic acts with the dimension of human intention and intentionality (G. E. M. Anscombe) that should be pursued. This chapter aims to recon-sider Ricoeur’s analysis to evaluate the problematic aspects of his model.