Knowledge in Action & Knowledge of Perception (original) (raw)
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This dissertation mounts a defense of the claim, made by Elizabeth Anscombe in her monograph Intention, that when an agent is acting intentionally, he knows what he is intentionally doing immediately—without observation or inference. We can separate out three elements, which build on each other, in this claim: the agent is acting, is acting intentionally, and has knowledge of what he is doing. The progress of the dissertation roughly follows this rough division. The first two chapters are concerned with articulating what is at stake in the characterization of an agent as acting. Since someone can be doing something without its being the case that she will have done it, and the knowledge claim concerns the doing rather than the having done of an action, we should first of all investigate what is predicated of someone who is said to be underway toward an end. I begin in the first chapter at a further remove from intentional action, with an investigation of not necessarily agential process-claims in general; the second chapter begins the transition to acting intentionally be applying the considerations of the first to the agential context. The third and fourth chapters explicitly turn to acting intentionally. The third begins by addressing an argument meant to establish that intentional action is compatible with ignorance of what one is doing, and in doing so formulates a criterion for performing non-basic actions intentionally. The fourth chapter takes up teleologically basic actions and supplements the criterion of the third to give a sufficient and necessary condition on acting intentionally. The final pair of chapters addresses the knowledge element of the claim. In the fifth, I articulate the concern that the nature of action is such as to render it only knowable theoretically, and examine several theories that attempt to account for knowledge of action observationally or inferentially. This concern is viable in the context of the causal theory of action; in the sixth chapter, I endorse in its place a metaphysically modest teleological theory. With that in place, space is opened up for a neo-expressivist account of knowledge of intention in action, which, when combined with the results of the preceding chapters, redeems the knowledge claim.
Practical Knowledge and Perception
"Theories of Action and Morality"
In this paper I examine the relation between intentional action and morality from the perspective of practical epistemology. In other words I study the relation between knowledge of one’s own intentional actions (knowledge in action) and knowledge of what is good to do or what one ought to do in particular circumstances (knowledge in the circumstances). If practical knowledge in the former sense (knowledge in action) and practical knowledge in the latter sense (knowledge in the circumstances) turn out to constitute exercises of one and the same capacity for knowledge, as I will argue they do, this will give us strong reason to believe that what is known in the two cases (i.e. intentional action and the moral fabric of the world) is in some sense the same. In examining the relation between practical knowledge of one’s own intentional actions and practical knowledge of what is good to do I draw from two traditions of thought on practical epistemology. The first is the tradition of Anscombe’s conception of knowledge in action and the second is the tradition of Murdoch’s conception of knowledge in the circumstances. What is striking about these traditions is that they tend to understand practical knowledge by reference to the possible involvement therein of perception. Thus Anscombe claims in her Intention[1] that knowledge in action is specified as knowledge without observation; a claim to the effect that the epistemological status of knowledge in action is determined by reference to the lack of a certain sort of involvement therein of perception. And Iris Murdoch in her Sovereignty of the Good[2] proposes that what makes knowledge in the circumstances knowledge is a form of sensitivity to particular features or aspects of the circumstances in which the agent finds herself. Thus, for Murdoch, knowledge in the circumstances owes its status as knowledge to the capacity of the agent to perceive what she ought to do in particular circumstances. In this paper I will argue that both of these forms of knowledge are instances of the exercise of one and the same capacity for knowledge. But the question now arises. How can we both claim that the two forms of practical knowledge are instances of the exercise of one and the same capacity for knowledge and that perception plays such a diverse role in their epistemological grounding? In the main body of this paper I will show how to interpret the Murdochian and the Anscombean claims so as to provide the materials with which we can answer this question. If the argument of this paper works, it will transpire that both of these forms of knowledge are instances of the exercise of our capacity for self-knowledge. This account of practical knowledge opens the way for understanding intentional action and the moral fabric of the world as knowable as the self. And it is thus that what is known in the two forms of knowing (i.e. intentional action and the moral fabric of the world) is in some sense the same. [1] Anscombe, 1957. [2] Murdoch, 1970.
Knowledge and the Nature of Action
Much of what we do seems to have the feature that Anscombe attributed to all our intentional actions: that of being known without observation of inference. There is, however, a *prima facie* tension between any attempt to show that this seeming feature actually does obtain and the causal theory of action explanation; as Davidson already pointed out in "Actions, Reasons, and Causes", there is no guarantee that one will know what is causing one to act, or even, potentially, that one has been caused to act---so that one would be performing an intentional action in ignorance. I argue that this tension cannot be overcome: one cannot reconcile a causal theory of action and immediate knowledge of action. The negative argument is prosecuted through an examination of Velleman's and Setiya's attempts to bring the two terms together: in each case one ends up needing to fall back on observation or inference. I close with some positive suggestions concerning the potential of a teleological theory of action explanation for redeeming the immediacy of practical knowledge.
Knowledge, practical knowledge, and intentional action
Ergo
We argue that any strong version of a knowledge condition on intentional action, the practical knowledge principle, on which knowledge of what I am doing (under some description: call it A-ing) is necessary for that A-ing to qualify as an intentional action, is false. Our argument involves a new kind of case, one that centers the agent's control appropriately and thus improves upon Davidson's well-known carbon copier case. After discussing this case, offering an initial argument against the knowledge condition, and discussing recent treatments that cover nearby ground, we consider several objections. One we consider at some length maintains that although contemplative knowledge may be disconnected from intentional action, specifically practical knowledge of the sort Anscombe elucidated escapes our argument. We demonstrate that this is not so. Our argument illuminates an important truth, often overlooked in discussions of the knowledge-intentional action relationship: intentional action and knowledge have different levels of permissiveness regarding failure in similar circumstances.
X-Knowledge of Action Without Observation
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (Hardback), 2004
This paper argues that perception of one's body 'from the inside' provides one with an awareness of acting, and that this awareness explains a previously overlooked feature of one's knowledge of one's own actions. Actions are events: they occur during periods of time. Knowledge of such events must be sensitive to their course through time. Perception of one's body 'from the inside' allows one to monitor one's actions as they unfold, thereby sustaining one's knowledge of what one is doing over the period of time in which one is doing it. 1. The actions with which Anscombe and this paper are concerned are bodily-not mental. Although the epistemology of bodily actions shares many features with the epistemology of mental actions, I shall not discuss the parallel here.
Philosophical Studies
Two traditions in action theory offer different accounts of what distinguishes intentional action from mere behavior. According to the causalist tradition, intentional action has certain distinguished causal antecedents, and according to the Anscombian tradition, intentional action has certain distinguished epistemological features. I offer a way to reconcile these ostensibly conflicting accounts of intentional action by way of appealing to “ability-constituting knowledge”. After explaining what such knowledge is, and in particular its relationship to inadvertent virtue and knowledge-how, I suggest that, among other things, appealing to ability-constituting knowledge can help us flesh out what it is for an agent’s reasons to non-deviantly cause and sustain her purposive behavior.
Epistemic Actions, Abilities and Knowing-How: A Non-Reductive Account
Social Epistemology, 2022
The aim is to provide a synoptic view of the epistemic landscape in respect of epistemic actions, abilities and knowing how. The resulting view consists of the following propositions: (1) knowledge-by-acquaintance cannot be reduced to propositional knowledge or to knowing-how or some combination of these; the same point holds for propositional knowledge in relation to knowledge-by-acquaintance and knowing-how, and to knowing-how in relation to knowledge-by-acquaintance and propositional knowledge; (2) These categories of knowledge are, nevertheless, interdependent in a number of senses; (3) Abilities are not the same thing as know-how; (4) Epistemic actions need to be distinguished from behavioral actions; (5) Judgements are epistemic actions which, if successful, result in knowledge and, therefore, the sharp contrast drawn between, on the one hand, comings to believe and, in particular, judgments and, on the other hand, actions-with respect to being freely chosen-is not sustainable; (6) Judgements manifest both abilities and know-how.