A subject may know the intention with which they performed an action, while other people have only their own explanations of that action. These are different relations to the action. Their conflation becomes especially apparent when a multitude of other people’s explanations is set against the subject’s knowledge of themselves, and the subject then begins to adopt those explanations as their own self-description.
Intention and External Explanations
Suppose subject H performed action X with a certain intention and knows what that intention was. Other subjects may assert that H acted out of fear, for attention, out of self-interest, or from a desire to prove something. The mere appearance of these explanations does not change H’s original intention.
Another person’s explanation is already a reworking of the meaning of the action from that other subject’s position. Even if it accurately conveys particular circumstances, this does not make it the original meaning with which H acted. When such a reworking is presented as H’s original intention, it becomes a false representation of that intention. H, too, may subsequently reinterpret their own action, but H was within the relation from which the action was performed and is therefore closer to its original meaning than an external observer.
Fragmentation of Others’ Opinions
Other people’s explanations can be multiplied without any new information about the action. Each version can be supplemented with clarifications, shades of motive, and new stories. Such fragmentation increases the number of reworked opinions but does not bring them closer to the action’s original meaning. If they take the place of the intention known to H, their sheer number does not undo the substitution.
By assigning each explanation the same formal weight as H’s knowledge of their own intention, one can create an apparent quantitative superiority of conjectures. This advantage is produced by the counting rule and the chosen granularity of description. It does not turn a multitude of conjectures into evidence against H’s knowledge.
Adopting Another Person’s Description
There is another transition as well. At first, the explanation exists as another subject’s relation to H: someone attributes an intention to H. Then H may adopt this explanation and begin to define themselves through it. In that case, another person’s interpretation is already operating within H’s self-description.
Adoption itself does not prove that the explanation is true. Numerous repetitions may prompt H to doubt their previous understanding of their action, but revising that knowledge requires grounds related to the action and intention themselves. Otherwise, the number of other people’s interpretations quietly takes the place of such grounds.
Distinguishing the Relations
H’s knowledge of their own intention, another person’s conjecture, and another person’s description adopted by H may coincide in wording while remaining different in origin and grounds. Normalizing these statements as equivalent elements erases the distinction between the relations if their quantity is then used to judge what is true.
This is a particular case of the fragmentation of alternatives, supplemented by the transition from another person’s opinion to the subject’s self-description. H’s proximity to the original meaning of the action does not make every later self-description of theirs true by definition. But the possibility of such reinterpretation does not make H’s original relation to their own intention equivalent to a multitude of reworkings by others.
