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. (shrink)

This idea that what is distinctive of intentional performances (or at least of those intentional performances that amount to skilled actions) is one’s practical knowledge in it —i.e., knowledge of what one is doing while doing it— famously traces back to Anscombe ([]1963] 2000). While many philosophers have theorized about Anscombe’s notion of practical knowledge (e.g., Setiya (2008), Thompson et al. (2011), Schwenkler (2019), O’Brien (2007)), there is a wide disagreement about how to understand it. This paper investigates how best (...) to understand practical knowledge for it to play the desired explanatory role in a reductive theory of intentional action, of intention-in-action, and of control-in-action. I argue that practical knowledge ought to be construed as a dynamic knowledge state and that structured practical senses (Pavese 2015) are needed to model it. (shrink)

Just as bodily actions are things you do with your body, mental actions are things you do with your mind. Both are different from things that merely happen to you. Where does the idea of mental action come from? What are mental actions? And why do they matter in philosophy? These are the three main questions answered in this paper. Section 1 introduces mental action through a brief history of the topic in philosophy. Section 2 explains what it is to (...) be a mental action in terms of intentional action. Section 3 argues that the fact that we can perform mental actions has some striking consequences concerning mental content. Section 4 shows how mental action helps to explain some important facts about self-knowledge and the normativity of thought. The conclusion mentions two further fruitful avenues for philosophical research on mental action. (shrink)

Intentional action is, in some sense, non-accidental, and one common way action theorists have attempted to explain this is with reference to control. The idea, in short, is that intentional action implicates control, and control precludes accidentality. But in virtue of what, exactly, would exercising control over an action suffice to make it non-accidental in whatever sense is required for the action to be intentional? One interesting and prima facie plausible idea that we wish to explore in this paper is (...) that control is non-accidental in virtue of requiring knowledge—either knowledge-that or knowledge-how (e.g., Beddor and Pavese 2021; cf., Setiya 2008; 2012 and Habgood-Coote 2018). We review in detail some key recent work defending such knowledge-centric theories of control, and we show that none of these accounts holds water. We conclude with some discussion about how control opposes the sort of luck intentional action excludes without doing so by requiring knowledge (that- or how). (shrink)

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. (shrink)

Donald Davidson established causalism, i.e. the view that reasons are causes and that action explanation is causal explanation, as the dominant view within contemporary action theory. According to his “master argument”, we must distinguish between reasons the agent merely has and reasons she has and which actually explain what she did, and the only, or at any rate the best, way to make the distinction is by saying that the reasons for which an agent acts are causes of her action. (...) “Davidson's challenge” to non‐causalists is to come up with an alternative, more convincing, way of drawing the distinction. In this paper, I argue that G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright offer such an alternative. Moreover, I argue that Davidson's own account of interpretation makes no use of his causalist claim. (shrink)

Well‐functioning agents ordinarily have an excellent epistemic relationship to their intentional actions. This phenomenon is often characterized as knowledge of what one is doing and labeled “practical knowledge”. But when we examine it carefully, it seems to require a particular kind of understanding ‐ understanding of the normative structure of one's action. Three lines of argument are offered to support this Necessity of Understanding thesis. The first appeals to the nature of intentional action and the second to our everyday reasons (...) explanation of action. The final line of argument draws on a practical amnesia case in which an agent forgets her overall goal while acting. Implications of the Necessity of Understanding thesis for the widely endorsed non‐observational view of practical knowledge are briefly discussed. It is argued that support for the non‐observational view is weaker than has been appreciated. (shrink)

Elizabeth Anscombe introduced the notion of “practical knowledge” into contemporary philosophy. Philosophers of action have criticized Anscombe’s negative characterization of such knowledge as “non-observational,” but have recently come to pay more attention to her positive characterization of practical knowledge as “the cause of what it understands.” I argue that two recent Anscombean accounts of practical knowledge, “Formalism” and “Normativism,” each fail to explain the productive character of practical knowledge in a way that secures its status as non-observational. I argue that (...) to do this, we must appreciate the role of know-how or skill in practical knowledge. (shrink)

There is an ongoing debate in the ontology of action about whether actions are processes, events, relations, or sui generis entities. This paper focuses on the process view, the view that actions are processes. I challenge it in two ways. First, I argue that some actions are not processes because their performance need not be associated with or accompanied by a process. Second, I critically discuss three main arguments that have been advanced to support the process view. My view, the (...) pluralist view, is that process-theorists are right to hold that certain actions are processes, but wrong to maintain that every action is a process: activities are processes, acts are not, and some acts are composed of a process whereas others are not. (shrink)

Basic actions are those intentional actions performed not by doing any other kind of thing intentionally. Complex actions involve doing one kind of thing intentionally by doing another kind of thing intentionally. There are both basic and complex mental actions. Some complex mental actions have a striking feature that has not been previously discussed: they have several distinct contents at once. This chapter introduces and explains this feature, here called “content plurality.” This chapter also argues for the philosophical significance of (...) this feature. The existence of content plurality offers a new explanation of transparent self-knowledge and suggests a new theory of inference. It also opens up a new conception of the relation between decisions to act and judgments about what ought to be done. (shrink)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Volume 103, Issue 3, Page 586-606, November 2021.

Elizabeth Anscombe characterised practical knowledge as knowledge ‘in intention’. As Anscombe recognised, accepting this view involves rejecting certain basic orthodox epistemological assumptions. But even once this is done, a challenge remains for a conception of practical knowledge as knowledge ‘in intention’. For while practical knowledge would appear to be a kind of propositional knowledge, intentions would appear to be a kind of non-propositional attitude. I call this the ‘Structural Challenge’ for an intention-based account of practical knowledge. After rejecting two suggested (...) responses – one which views intentions as propositional attitudes; one which views practical knowledge as non-propositional knowledge – I offer my own solution by showing how simply having and carrying out an intention to φ will ordinarily meet a plausible neutral condition on propositional knowledge. Knowing a fact will in general involve being mentally related to it via a successful exercise of relevant concepts. The account I develop turns on viewing a person’s carrying out an intention to φ as their constituting the fact that they are φ-ing, through a practical exercise of their concept of φ-ing. The resulting account sheds light both on the analogies, and on the crucial formal differences, between practical and theoretical knowledge. (shrink)

В статті послідовно обгрунтовано твердження про позаконтекстуальний характер метафізичного знання. Доведено, що метафізика як знання граничного рівня абстракції детермінує контекст, що надає їй статус чистої теорії про універсальні сутнісні основи існування та пізнання світу. Також метафізика як спекулятивний рівень граничних абстракцій визначає загальний контур реалізації та здійснення культури, від конкретно-історичного тлумачення яких залежить зміст культурного простору існування людини. Висловлено гіпотезу, що метафізика культури акцентує константні принципи специфіки людського буття, а ефективність та дієвість рефлексії феномену культури здійснюється шляхом визначення основоположного для (...) певної епохи діалектичного протиріччя. Відповідно, метафізика є вираженою смисловою конструкцією культури, яка продукує певний тип мислення, пам’яті та ідентифікації, тобто суб’єктивності; та соціальності як етико-аксіологічної моделі взаємодії з Іншим. Аргументовано, що класична метафізика з моменту її виникнення і протягом усього довгого, змістовного та продуктивного існування є своєрідною орієнтацією у просторі. Автор доводить, що культура – це збір простору в інтелігібельній конструкції, специфічний характер людського буття у Всесвіті, спосіб перебування людини у світі. Простір у метафізиці культури означає область локалізації «Его» і поле трансценденції одночасно. Аргументовано, що метафізика через простір культури дозволяє емпірично відчувати Всесвіт як Єдине, припускати наявність сенсу. Визначено поняття метафізики культури як сфери філософського дослідження феномену культури в її граничних, позадосвідних, сутніснісних принципах історичного розвитку та смислових трансформацій. На основі проведеного аналізу автор резюмує визначення феномену культури як специфічно людського способу освоєння простору та підкорення часу, а свідомості - як топології рефлексивних практик. (shrink)

When one is intentionally doing something, one represents that thing as a goal to be accomplished. One represents it practically. How should we characterize this practical representation further? In this paper, I argue that when one is intentionally doing something, one's representation of it as a goal to be accomplished must also be knowledge that one is intentionally doing that thing. And I argue that this knowledge must itself be one's intentionally doing that thing. I aim to show, then, that (...) insofar as representing practically just is knowing practically, it is equally acting intentionally. (shrink)

Contrary to popular philosophical belief, judgment can indeed be an intentional action. That's because an intentional judgment, even one with content p, need not be intentional as a judgment that p. It can instead be intentional just as a judgment wh- for some specific wh- question—e.g. a judgment of which x is F or a judgment whether p. This paper explains how this is possible by laying out a means by which you can perform such an intentional action. This model (...) of intentional judgment does not stand in tension with the fact that judgment is causally regulated for truth, and that it is correct only if it is true. On the contrary, the structure of intentional action explains how an intentional judgment has these features. An extended example is developed, and sufficient conditions on intentional judgment are laid out. (shrink)

This article consistently elaborates the extra‐contextual nature of metaphysical knowledge. Metaphysicsis seen as a semantic construction of culture that produces a certain type of thinking, memory, and identification: that is, subjectivity, and sociality as an ethical and axiological model of interaction with the world and the Other. The paper argues that metaphysics is a kind of orientation in space and that culture is a semiotic way of world orientation, or collection of spaces into an intelligible structure, a specific characteristic of (...) human existence in the universe. Indeed, metaphysics through the space of culture allows one to experience the universe empirically as unity, to assume the presence of meaning. Based on the analysis, the paper summarizes the definition of the phenomenon of culture as a specifically human way of mastering space and controlling time, consciousness as a topology of reflective practices, and virtual reality technology as a space of pure metaphysics. (shrink)