"Practical Truth via Practical Soundness"

I demonstrate that there are two distinct senses of practical truth at work in Anscombe’s philosophical writings, and that she characterizes the distinction as between truth in agreement with desire and truth in agreement with right desire. I explore her strategy of articulating these distinct senses and their interrelationship via her account of practical soundness, as distinguished both from practical validity and from merely purported practical soundness. Only her thin sense of practical truth in agreement with desire, invoking merely purported practical soundness, is directly relevant to Anscombe’s accounts of intention and action. But I argue that when she turns from the theory of action to ethics, her robust sense of practical truth in agreement with right desire, invoking practical soundness, takes centered stage. These distinctions in turn shed light upon Anscombe’s grounds for holding that her account of sound practical inference exorcises the moral ought of her contemporaries.