Intention and Knowledge

I propose to present a relation between knowledge (Wissen) and human action (Handlung) from the perspective of the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831). For this, I will use mainly of the Phenomenology of Spirit (Phenomenologie des Geistes) - published in 1807. According the philosopher himself, this work is a science of the experience of consciousness – this was the first name chosen by Hegel for this work (Vaz, 2014, p. 11-12). Throughout the work, it we can see that (...) the philosopher does not make a separation between knowledge and action. That is, he does not regard them as two separate and distinct moments. Therefore, the comprehension of first we knowledge and that only after, we act, or that even the comprehension that we act for the, after that, we may know, are, according Hegel's philosophy, erroneous and insufficient as explanatory models of knowledge and of the human action. On the contrary, the philosopher seeks to unite the two aspects: knowledge and action. Conceiving them as distinct but inseparable. The subject who knowing is the same who is acting. Such a dichotomy between knowing and acting, as is commonly defined, maintains knowledge and characterize it with as passive, inert and static, in front of action, which is as defined as active, dynamic, and mobile. On the contrary, according to the Hegelian philosophy, knowledge itself is already an active, dynamic, and living process (Hegel, 2012, §378). The relation of knowledge between the subject and the object is not a ready, given and immediate relation. On the contrary, this relation presupposes a construction that the subject exercises when he is knowing. The same occur is when the subject is acting. Therefore, a human action is by no means something finished, readily established, and so it only as needs to be performed. On the contrary, an action same itself is a knowledge, that is happening and succeeding as the action unfolds. (shrink)

Many philosophers claim that we have duty to know our motives. However, prominent theories of the mind suggest that we can’t. Such scepticism about knowledge of one’s motives is based on psychological evidence. I show that this evidence only mandates scepticism about knowledge of one’s motives if we rely on a mistaken assumption which I call ‘the myth of the one true motive’. If we reject this myth, we see that there is space to plausibly interpret the empirical data such (...) that knowledge of one’s motives is difficult, but not impossible. (shrink)

This chapter interprets G. E. M. Anscombe’s discussion in §31 of Intention of the relationship between expressions of intention and descriptions of matters of fact. For Anscombe, a statement like “I’m raising my arm” or “I’m going to get up at 7:00”, which expresses an intention by saying what is happening or is going to happen, is contradicted only by an opposing command or the expression of an opposing intention. I first challenge an interpretation of this passage as claiming that (...) the truth of statements like these is somehow independent of whether the action they describe is actually performed. Against this reading, my preferred interpretation highlights the fact that Anscombe is speaking here only of what contradicts expressions of intention, while her position is that statements like these describe the world in ways that will be contrary to, and so truth-functionally incompatible with, any opposing statements of fact. (shrink)

Wright’s judgement-dependent account of intention is an attempt to show that truths about a subject’s intentions can be viewed as constituted by the subject’s own best judgements about those intentions. The judgements are considered to be best if they are formed under certain cognitively optimal conditions, which mainly include the subject’s conceptual competence, attentiveness to the questions about what the intentions are, and lack of any material self-deception. Offering a substantive, non-trivial specification of the no-self-deception condition is one of the (...) main problems for Wright. His solution is to view it as a positive presumption, which is violated only if there is strong evidence to the effect that the subject is self-deceived. In this paper, I will argue that the concern about self-deception in Wright’s account is misplaced and generally unmotivated. (shrink)

Doxasticism is the thesis that intention is or involves belief in the forthcoming action (Velleman, Harman). Supporters claim that it is only by accepting that thesis that we can explain a wide array of important phenomena, including the special knowledge we have of intentional action, the roles intention plays in facilitating coordination, and the norms of rationality for intention. Others argue that the thesis is subject to counterexample (Davidson, Bratman). Yet some others contend that the thesis can be reformulated in (...) a way that avoids such counterexamples and preserves its explanatory significance (Pears, Setiya). Their suggestion is that we view intention as involving partial –rather than full—belief. I argue that while the move from full to partial doxasticism helps to accommodate such counterexamples, it does so in a way that undermines the ability of the resulting view to explain the coordinating roles of and rationality norms for intention. (shrink)

RésuméJe soutiendrai que la façon dont Davidson rend compte de l'intention pure peut être comprise comme une analyse de l'intention comme étant relative à un jugement dans une perspective en première personne. Selon Davidson, avoir la pure intention de faire A, c'est formuler un jugement tout bien considéré qu'il est désirable de faire A. Dans cette analyse anti-réductionniste, l'intention est traitée comme un état irréductible du sujet. J’établirai une comparaison entre cette analyse et celle de Wright et je montrerai comment (...) la position de Davidson peut être considérée comme une analyse non-réductionniste rapportant l'intention au jugement, selon les directions suggérées par Wright. J'expliquerai ensuite comment cette analyse peut aider à éclaircir diverses difficultés qui se présentent dans la conception que Davidson se fait ultérieurement de la signification et du contenu mental. (shrink)

I argue that practical knowledge can be understood as constituted by a kind of imagining. In particular, it is the knowledge of what I am doing when that knowledge is represented via extramental imagination. Two results follow. First, on this account, we can do justice both to the cognitive character and the practical character of practical knowledge. And second, we can identify a condition under which imagination becomes factive, and thus a source of ob-jective evidence. I develop this view by (...) extracting an account of self-knowledge via extramental imagination from the writings of Ibn ‘Arabi (1165-1240). (shrink)

A central debate in philosophy of action concerns whether agential knowledge, the knowledge agents characteristically have of their own actions, is inferential. While inferentialists like Sarah Paul hold that it is inferential, others like Lucy O’Brien and Kieran Setiya argue that it is not. In this paper, I offer a novel argument for the view that agential knowledge is non-inferential, by posing a dilemma for inferentialists: on the first horn, inferentialism is committed to holding that agents have only alienated knowledge (...) of their own actions; on the second horn, inferentialism is caught in a vicious regress. Neither option is attractive, so inferentialism should be rejected. (shrink)

In order to be doing something intentionally, must one know that one is doing it? Some philosophers have answered yes. Our aim is to test a version of this knowledge thesis, what we call the Knowledge/Awareness Thesis, or KAT. KAT states that an agent is doing something intentionally only if he knows that he is doing it or is aware that he is doing it. Here, using vignettes featuring skilled action and vignettes featuring habitual action, we provide evidence that, in (...) various scenarios, a majority of non-specialists regard agents as intentionally doing things that the agents do not know they are doing and are not aware of doing. This puts pressure on proponents of KAT and leaves it to them to find a way these results can coexist with KAT. (shrink)

It is a widely shared intuition that there is a close connection between knowledge-how and intentional action. In this paper, I explore one aspect of this connection: the normative connection between intending to do something and knowing how to do it. I argue for a norm connecting knowledge-how and intending in a way that parallels the knowledge norms of assertion, belief, and practical reasoning, which I call the knowledge-how norm of Intention. I argue that this norm can appeal to support (...) from arguments which parallel those for other epistemic norms, that it can deal with a number of prima facie problem cases, and that alternative conditions in a norm on intention are implausible. (shrink)

I argue that we sometimes visually perceive the intentions of others. Just as we can see something as blue or as moving to the left, so too can we see someone as intending to evade detection or as aiming to traverse a physical obstacle. I consider the typical subject presented with the Heider and Simmel movie, a widely studied ‘animacy’ stimulus, and I argue that this subject mentally attributes proximal intentions to some of the objects in the movie. I further (...) argue that these attributions are unrevisable in a certain sense and that this result can be used to as part of an argument that these attributions are not post-perceptual thoughts. Finally, I suggest that if these attributions are visual experiences, and more particularly visual illusions, their unrevisability can be satisfyingly explained, by appealing to the mechanisms which underlie visual illusions more generally. (shrink)

According to one interpretation of Aristotle’s famous thesis, to say that action is the conclusion of practical reasoning is to say that action is itself a judgment about what to do. A central motivation for the thesis is that it suggests a path for understanding the non-observational character of practical knowledge. If actions are judgments, then whatever explains an agent’s knowledge of the relevant judgment can explain her knowledge of the action. I call the approach to action that accepts Aristotle’s (...) thesis so understood Normativism. There are many reasons to doubt Normativism. My aim in this paper is to defend Normativism from a pair of arguments that purport to show that a normative judgment could not constitute an event in material reality and also the knowledge of such a happening. Both highlight a putative mismatch between the natures of, on the one hand, an agent’s knowledge of her normative judgment and, on the other, her knowledge of her own action. According to these objections, knowledge of action includes (a) perceptual knowledge and (b) knowledge of what one has already done. But knowledge of a normative judgment includes neither. Hence knowledge of action cannot simply be knowledge of a normative judgment. (shrink)

Philosophers of action of different persuasions have suggested that there is a tight connection between the phenomenon of intending and the phenomena of “being settled on” and of “settling” a course of action. For many, this connection supports an important constraint on intention: one may only intend what one takes one’s so intending as settling. Traditionally, this has been understood as a doxastic constraint on intention: what one takes one’s intention as settling is what one believes one’s so intending as (...) settling. This paper proposes an alternative conception of such a constraint. The idea is to conceive of it in terms of the attitude of reliance, rather than of belief. The aim of the paper is three-fold: to clarify the connection between intending to act and the phenomena of being settled on and of settling a course of action, to provide support for the reliance conception of the cited constraint, and to show that this conception drives a wedge in the familiar dispute, between doxastic and conative accounts of intention, as to whether intending to act necessarily involves the belief that one will so act. (shrink)

According to the standard story given by reductive versions of the Causal Theory of Action, an action is an intrinsically mindless bodily movement that is appropriately caused by an intention. Those who embrace this story typically take this intention to have a coarse-grained content, specifying the action only down to the level of the agent's habits and skills. Markos Valaris argues that, because of this, the standard story cannot make sense of the deep reach of our non-observational knowledge of action. (...) He concludes that we therefore have to jettison its conception of actions as mindless bodily movements animated from the outside by intentions. Here we defend the standard story. We can make sense of the reach of non-observational knowledge of action once we reject the following two assumptions: (i) that an intended habitual or skilled action is a so-called basic action—that is, an action that doesn't involve any finer-grained intentions—and (ii) that an agent, in acting, is merely executing one intention rather than a whole hierarchy of more or less fine-grained intentions. We argue that (i) and (ii) are false. (shrink)

A coherent practice of mens rea (‘guilty mind’) ascription in criminal law presupposes a concept of mens rea which is insensitive to the moral valence of an action’s outcome. For instance, an assessment of whether an agent harmed another person intentionally should be unaffected by the severity of harm done. Ascriptions of intentionality made by laypeople, however, are subject to a strong outcome bias. As demonstrated by the Knobe effect, a knowingly incurred negative side effect is standardly judged intentional, whereas (...) a positive side effect is not. We report the first empirical investigation into intentionality ascriptions made by professional judges, which finds (i) that professionals are sensitive to the moral valence of outcome type, and (ii) that the worse the outcome, the higher the propensity to ascribe intentionality. The data shows the intentionality ascriptions of professional judges to be inconsistent with the concept of mens rea supposedly at the foundation of criminal law. (shrink)

How must you think about time when you form an intention? Obviously, you must think about the time of action. Must you frame the action in any broader prospect or retrospect? In this essay I argue that you must: you thereby commit yourself to a specific prospect of a future retrospect – a retrospect, indeed, on that very prospect. In forming an intention you project a future from which you will not ask regretfully, referring back to your follow-through on that (...) intention, “What on earth was I thinking?” I argue that this broader attitude expresses the self-accountability necessary for practical commitment. (shrink)

En général, un agent peut dire ce qu’il est en train de faire sans l’observer au préalable, et il possède une certaine autorité sur ce qu’il en dit. Partant de ce fait, Elizabeth Anscombe a soutenu que la connaissance qu’un agent a de ses actions intentionnelles est un «savoir pratique» (practical knowledge) «sans observation». Cette thèse a été abondamment commentée, critiquée et reprise depuis la publication d’Intention il y a bientôt 70 ans. Ce qui a plus rarement été abordé est (...) l’étonnant parallèle entre ce que dit Anscombe à ce sujet, et certaines descriptions sartriennes de la conscience d’un agent intentionnel. Cet article tâchera de montrer que les pensées respectives de ce drôle de couple philosophique convergent sur l’idée que nous avons la capacité de dire ce que nous sommes en train de faire sans observation ni réflexion préalable. En critiquant une certaine image de l’intériorité de l'esprit, leur objectif commun est de rendre compte de cette conscience de soi toute particulière qui permet aux agents de savoir ce qu’ils font dans et par cette action même. Comment faut-il comprendre le rapport entre ces deux approches ? Sont-elles complémentaires ? Concurrentes ? Nous considérons qu’une réponse simple et tranchée à ces questions n’est pas possible d’avance, exige une étude comparative relativement poussée. Notre hypothèse est que le savoir pratique d’un agent est indissociable d’une certaine expérience de l’engagement pratique dans le monde que décrit Sartre. (shrink)

This paper aims to contribute a design-focused perspective on the ‘alternative paradigm research’ discussion. To clarify the aspect of ‘design-focus’ that we wish to refer to, we will use the term ‘areas of design practice’ to cover those activities that focus on the conception and production of artefacts, in contrast to the activities of theorizing and writing histories. The literature on academic research in areas of design practice encompasses a board range of subjects and terminology -- it refers to the (...) creative and performing arts, the arts, design, etc., however what we take to be common in the literature is an interest in research involving the creation of original artefacts. In this paper, we cluster together the currently academicized, previously vocational areas. -/- We claim that researchers in different disciplines operate in different research paradigms owing to different worldviews. A worldview is determined by a set of foundational beliefs that are taken on faith, and a research paradigm is defined by axioms and assumptions that are a consequence of that worldview. For example, the scientific view of the world is that it exists independently from the individual and the individual’s thoughts about it; and it is possible to find out objective facts about the world by following certain procedures. This worldview conditions a research paradigm with an ontology of a real external world; that methodologically the data that is collected in procedurally appropriate ways will yield objective facts about that world; and that epistemologically the researcher stands in a disengaged relation to the world that is being investigated. The procedures that are regarded as appropriate within a particular research paradigm form the research models that are acceptable in that paradigm, and these research models determine what one should do in order to extend knowledge in a particular subject. Of course, the scientific worldview is not the only one, and this paper will contrast it to the design worldview as indicating the emergence of a unique research paradigm. -/- The relationship between a community’s worldview and the academic models that it adopts may be functional or dysfunctional. We claim that the relationship in the areas of design practice is often dysfunctional. This is because the academic model has not developed authentically in relation to its fundamental beliefs, but has done so in response to external forces for academicization. When pushed into the academy, areas of design practice did not possess their own academic models that were effectively linked to its worldview. We claim that, as a result, these areas simply co-opted research models from other disciplines. -/- The paper proposes a rationalistic approach for investigating the relationship between worldview and research paradigm -- between fundamental beliefs, theoretical concepts and methodology in research models. The rationalistic approach enables a critique, which reveals that there are indeed problematic issues with adopting academic models from other research paradigms in an uncritical way, and concludes that areas of design practice should be investigated as an example of a distinct worldview. (shrink)