There is a difference between those things one does that manifest agency and those things that merely happen to one or that are the effects of one's agency. My typing these words manifests my agency – is an action of mine – whereas growing older is merely happening to me and making sounds as I type is but an effect of my action. Actions are sometimes but not always done for reasons and are characteristically but perhaps not invariably known by (...) the agent without observation or inference. I'm typing in order to get my paper done on time, and I don't need to look to know that this is what I am doing, though I wouldn't know without hearing it that I am making noises as I type. In this paper I will offer an account of these facts about action. The account starts from the idea that an agent performing an action guides what she is doing. (shrink)

As persons, beings with a capacity for autonomy, we face a certain practical task in living out our lives. At any given period we find ourselves with many desires or preferences, yet we have limited resources, and so we cannot satisfy them all. Our limited resources include insufficient economic means, of course; few of us have either the funds or the material provisions to obtain or pursue all that we might like. More significantly, though, we are limited to a single (...) life and one of finite duration. We also age, and pursuits that were possible at earlier points within a life may become impossible at later stages; we thus encounter not only an ultimate time limit but episodic limits as well. Because we must live our lives with limited resources—material and temporal—we are pressed to choose among and to order our preferences. Without some selection and ordering, few if any of them would be satisfied, and we would be unable to live lives that are recognizably good at all. Moreover, we would be unable to function well as the autonomous beings that we are. Our practical task then is to form a coherent, stable, and attractive ordering of aims—to develop a conception of our good. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

Cases involving amoralists who no longer care about the institution of morality, together with cases of depression, listlessness, and exhaustion, have posed trouble in recent years for standard formulations of motivational internalism. In response, though, internalists have been willing to adopt narrower versions of the thesis which restrict it just to the motivational lives of those agents who are said to be in some way normal, practically rational, or virtuous. My goal in this paper is to offer a new set (...) of counterexamples to motivational internalism, examples which are effective both against traditional formulations of the thesis as well as against many of these more recent restricted proposals. (shrink)

Intellectualists tell us that a person who knows how to do something therein knows a proposition. Along with others, they may say that a person who intends to do something intends a proposition. I argue against them. I do so by way of considering ‘know how ——’ and ‘intend ——’ together. When the two are considered together, a realistic conception of human agency can inform the understanding of some infinitives: the argument need not turn on what semanticists have had to (...) say about ‘the subjects of infinitival clauses’. (shrink)

In acting intentionally, it is no accident that one is doing what one intends to do. In this paper, I ask how to account for this non-accidentality requirement on intentional action. I argue that, for systematic reasons, the currently prevailing view of intentional action – the Causal Theory of Action – is ill-equipped to account for it. I end by proposing an alternative account, according to which an intention is a special kind of cause, one to which it is essential (...) that it represents its effect. (shrink)

Direction of fit theories usually claim that beliefs are such that they “aim at truth” or “ought to fit” the world and desires are such that they “aim at realization” or the world “ought to fit” them. This essay argues that no theory of direction of fit is correct. The two directions of fit are supposed to be determinations of one and the same determinable two-place relation, differing only in the ordering of favored terms. But there is no such determinable (...) because of ineliminable asymmetries between the way that beliefs “aim at truth” and the way that desires “aim at realization.” This essay traces the ills of direction of fit theory to a misunderstanding of Anscombe and proposes a cure that distinguishes theoretical and practical thought by appeal to a distinction between thought in the form of a state and thought in the form of an event. (shrink)

Intuitions about intentional action have turned out to be sensitive to normative factors: most people say that an indifferent agent brings about an effect of her action intentionally when it is harmful, but unintentionally when it is beneficial. Joshua Knobe explains this asymmetry, which is known as ‘the Knobe effect’, in terms of the moral valence of the effect, arguing that this explanation generalizes to other asymmetries concerning notions as diverse as deciding and being free. I present an alternative explanation (...) of the Knobe effect in terms of normative reasons. This explanation generalizes to other folk psychological notions such as deciding, but not to such notions as being free. I go on to argue, against Knobe, that offering a unified explanation of all the asymmetries he discusses is in fact undesirable. (shrink)

Epistemologists and philosophers of mind both ask questions about belief. Epistemologists ask normative questions about belief—which beliefs ought we to have? Philosophers of mind ask metaphysical questions about belief—what are beliefs, and what does it take to have them? While these issues might seem independent of one another, there is potential for an interesting sort of conflict: the epistemologist might think we ought to have beliefs that, according to the philosopher of mind, it is impossible to have. This essay argues (...) that this conflict does arise and that it creates problems for traditional skeptical views in epistemology. In particular, it argues that on certain popular views about the nature of belief, it is impossible to adopt the near-global agnosticism recommended by the skeptical epistemologist. On other plausible views, it is possible only in special circumstances, and this limitation undermines skeptical epistemological claims. The only views about the nature of belief on which there are no metaphysical hurdles to adopting the agnosticism recommended by the skeptic are views that face powerful objections—objections that are completely independent of antiskeptical epistemological considerations. (shrink)

Argues from the possibility of basic intentional action to a non-propositional theory of knowing how. The argument supports a broadly Anscombean conception of the will as a capacity for practical knowledge.

Most contemporary action theorists accept – or at least find plausible – a belief condition on intention and a knowledge condition on intentional action. The belief condition says that I can only intend to ɸ if I believe that I will ɸ or am ɸ-ing, and the knowledge condition says that I am only intentionally ɸ-ing if I know that I am ɸ-ing. The belief condition in intention and the knowledge condition in action go hand in hand. After all, if (...) intending implies belief, and if ɸ-ing intentionally implies intending to ɸ, then in ɸ-ing, I intend to be ɸ-ing, and, by the belief condition, I believe that I am ɸ-ing, and if this belief is justified, and we are not in a Gettier situation, etc., then, I will also satisfy the knowledge condition. Moreover, the claim that when intentions properly result in action, the corresponding belief constitutes knowledge is a relatively safe assumption, at least as an assumption about what it is generally the case. (shrink)

There has been relatively little discussion, in contemporary philosophy of mind, of the active aspects of perceptual processes. This essay presents and offers some preliminary development of a view about what it is for an agent to watch a particular material object throughout a period of time. On this view, watching is a kind of perceptual activity distinguished by a distinctive epistemic role. The essay presents a puzzle about watching an object that arises through elementary reflection on the consequences of (...) two apparent truths about watching an object throughout a period of time. It proposes that the puzzle can be resolved by a view according to which for an agent to watch an object throughout a period of time is for that agent to maintain visual awareness of that object with the aim of perceptually knowing what that object is doing. The essay goes on to make some further suggestions about how the apparatus developed in connection with the notion of watching may enable us to offer related explanations of other kinds of perceptual activity. It proposes that a useful distinction can be drawn between perceptual activities like watching which have as their aim knowledge of what an object is doing and activities like looking or visually scrutinizing which have as their aims knowledge of the states or conditions of the objects of perceptual awareness. (shrink)

Is a belief that one will succeed necessary for an intention? It is argued that the question has traditionally been badly posed, framed as it is in terms of all-out belief. We need instead to ask about the relation between intention and partial belief. An account of partial belief that is more psychologically realistic than the standard credence account is developed. A notion of partial intention is then developed, standing to all-out intention much as partial belief stands to all-out belief. (...) Various coherence constraints on the notion are explored. It is concluded that the primary relations between intention and belief should be understood as normative and not essential. (shrink)

There is a common assumption that intention is a complex behavioural disposition, or a motivational state underlying such a disposition. Associated with this position is the apparently commonsense view that an avowal of intention is a direct report of an inner motivational state, and indirectly an expression of a belief that it is likely that one will A. A central claim of this article is that the dispositional or motivational model is mistaken since it cannot acknowledge either the future-direction of (...) intention or the authority of avowals of intention. I argue that avowals of intention - first-person, present-tense ascriptions - express direct knowledge of a future action, knowledge that is not based on examination of one's present introspectible states or dispositions. Such avowals concern a future action, not a present state or disposition; just as self-ascriptions of belief concern the outer not the inner, so self-ascriptions of intention concern the future outer, not the present inner. One way of capturing this future-direction is to say that avowals of intention - and perhaps sense intentions themselves - are a kind of prediction, and not a description of one's present state of mind. This position is suggested by Anscombe in her monograph Intention (1963), and treats avowals of intention as judgements about the future, which unlike ordinary predictions are not based on evidence. However, since talk of prediction everywhere suggests an evidence-based stance - that meaningful hypothesis about the likely occurrence of events is being proposed, an hypothesis that can be falsified by evidence - the description future-outer thesis is preferred. I defend this thesis against various objections, arguing that it complements Anscombe's characterisation of intentions as based on reasons. (shrink)

There is a fairly widespread—and very infl uential—hope among philosophers interested in the status of normativity that the solution to our metaethical and, more generally, metanormative problems will emerge from the philosophy of action. In this essay, I will argue that these hopes are groundless. I will focus on the metanormative hope, but—as will become clear—showing that the solution to our metanormative problems will not come from what is constitutive of action will also devastate the hope of gaining significant insight (...) into first-order, normative truths by focusing on what is constitutive of action. (shrink)

Argues that, in acting for a reason, one takes that reason to explain one's action, not to justify it: reasons for acting need not be seen "under the guise of the good". The argument turns on the need to explain the place of "practical knowledge" - knowing what one is doing - in intentional action. A revised and expanded version of this material appears in Part One of "Reasons without Rationalism" (Princeton, 2007).

According to Action-First theorists, like Jonathan Dancy, reasons for action explain reasons for intentions. According to Intention-First theorists, like Conor McHugh and Jonathan Way, reasons for intentions explain reasons for action. In this paper, I introduce and defend a version of the Action-First theory called “Instrumentalism.” According to Instrumentalism, just as we can derive, using principles of instrumental transmission, reasons to ψ from reasons to ϕ (provided there’s some relevant instrumental relation between ψ-ing and ϕ-ing), we can derive reasons to (...) intend to ϕ from reasons to ϕ (provided there’s some relevant instrumental relation between intending to ϕ and ϕ-ing). After providing some defense of Instrumentalism, I turn to two recent, important arguments for the Intention-First theory advanced by McHugh and Way, and I argue that neither of them succeed. I conclude that we should reject the Intention-First theory and that we have grounds for optimism about the Action-First theory. (shrink)

According to Action-First theorists, like Jonathan Dancy, reasons for action explain reasons for intentions. According to Intention-First theorists, like Conor McHugh and Jonathan Way, reasons for intentions explain reasons for action. In this paper, I introduce and defend a version of the Action-First theory called “Instrumentalism.” According to Instrumentalism, just as we can derive, using principles of instrumental transmission, reasons to ψ from reasons to ϕ (provided there’s some relevant instrumental relation between ψ-ing and ϕ-ing), we can derive reasons to (...) intend to ϕ from reasons to ϕ (provided there’s some relevant instrumental relation between intending to ϕ and ϕ-ing). After providing some defense of Instrumentalism, I turn to two recent, important arguments for the Intention-First theory advanced by McHugh and Way, and I argue that neither of them succeed. I conclude that we should reject the Intention-First theory and that we have grounds for optimism about the Action-First theory. (shrink)

Intentional action is often accompanied by knowledge of what one is doing—knowledge which appears non-observational and non-inferential. G.E.M. Anscombe defends the stronger claim that intentional action always comes with such knowledge. Among those who follow Anscombe, some have altered the features, content, or species of the knowledge claimed to necessarily accompany intentional action. In this paper, I argue that there is no knowledge condition on intentional action, no matter the assumed features, content, or species of the knowledge. Further, rather than (...) follow the usual methodology in this debate of arguing by counterexample, I present an argument that explains why we continue to find counterexamples: intentional action and knowledge are regulated by thresholds under distinct pressures; in particular, the threshold of control regulating intentional action is disparately influenced by the role of intentional action in practical normativity. (shrink)

This paper poses a challenge to theories of joint action. In addition to the typical requirement of explaining how agents count as acting together as opposed to acting in parallel or independently—the togetherness requirement—it is argued that theories must explain how agents can be spontaneously joined such that they can act together spontaneously—the spontaneity requirement. To be spontaneously joined is to be immediately joined. The challenge arises because the typical means of satisfying the togetherness requirement, for example, planning, expressing willingness, (...) and so forth, are forms of mediating, binding interaction and so seem to eliminate the possibility of spontaneity. Likewise, taking spontaneity seriously makes it difficult to see how the togetherness requirement can be simultaneously met. The challenge threatens the very idea of joint agency. (shrink)

According to a popular account, rationality is a kind of coherence of an agent’s mental states and, more specifically, a matter of fulfilling norms of coherence. For example, in order to be rational, an agent is required to intend to do what they judge they ought to and can do. This norm has been called ‘Enkrasia’. Another norm requires that, ceteris paribus, an agent retain their intention over time. This has been called ‘Persistence of Intention’. This paper argues that thus (...) understood norms of rationality may at times conflict. More specifically, Enkrasia and Persistence of Intention may place demands on the agent that are impossible to fulfil. In these cases, the framework of requirements does not provide us with norms that make us rational. A rival account, according to which rationality is a kind of responsiveness to one’s available reasons, can overcome the problem. (shrink)

This paper addresses a question about the moral status of Artificial Intelligence (AI): will AIs ever become moral patients? I argue that, while it is in principle possible for an intelligent machine to be a moral patient, there is no good reason to believe this will in fact happen. I start from the plausible assumption that traditional artifacts do not meet a minimal necessary condition of moral patiency: having a good of one's own. I then argue that intelligent machines are (...) no different from traditional artifacts in this respect. To make this argument, I examine the feature of AIs that enables them to improve their intelligence, i.e., machine learning. I argue that there is no reason to believe that future advances in machine learning will take AIs closer to having a good of their own. I thus argue that concerns about the moral status of future AIs are unwarranted. Nothing about the nature of intelligent machines makes them a better candidate for acquiring moral patiency than the traditional artifacts whose moral status does not concern us. (shrink)

When do companies deserve moral credit for doing what is right? This question concerns the positive side of corporate moral responsibility, the negative side of which is the more commonly discussed issue of when companies are blameworthy for doing what is wrong. I offer a broadly functionalist account of how companies can act from morally creditworthy motives, which defuses the following Strawsonian challenge to the claim that they can: morally creditworthy motivation involves being guided by attitudes of “goodwill” for others, (...) and these attitudes involve affect and/or phenomenal consciousness, which corporate agents cannot maintain. In response, I show that what matters about being guided by attitudes of goodwill is being directly concerned for others in one’s practical deliberation. Companies can achieve this direct concern through their decision-making procedures without affect or phenomenal consciousness. I also explore how a company’s moral creditworthiness, or lack thereof, should shape stakeholders’ relationship with it. (shrink)

Marušić & Schwenkler (Analytic Philosophy, 59, 309) offer a simple and elegant defense of strong cognitivism about intention: the view that an intention to φ is a form of belief that one will φ. I show that their defense fails: however simple and elegant, it fails to account for various aspects about intention and its expression, and faces distinctive challenges of its own, including a dilemma and counterexample. These also undermine Marušić & Schwenkler's claim to a best-explanation type of account (...) and recommend alternatives to strong cognitivism altogether. (shrink)

Elizabeth Anscombe held that acting intentionally entails knowing (in a distinctively practical way) what one is doing. The consensus for many years was that this knowledge thesis faces decisive counterexamples, the most famous being Donald Davidson’s carbon copier case, and so should be rejected or at least significantly weakened. Recently, however, a new defense of the knowledge thesis has emerged: provided one understands the knowledge in question as a form of progressive judgement, cases like Davidson’s pose no threat. In this (...) paper, I argue that this neo-Anscombean maneuver fails because it is founded on an untenable conception of the difference between intentional and merely lucky success. More specifically, the neo-Anscombean view conflates merely lucky success with subjectively surprising success. Unlike the former, subjectively surprising success may well be intentional, for it may well be the result of an exercise of knowledge-how. After sketching an alternative view that better captures the intuitive contrast between lucky and intentional success, I argue that the conflation of surprising and merely lucky success owes to a tacit commitment to the thesis that knowing how entails knowing that one knows how. This thesis is not only false, but distortive of the explanatory role of knowledge-how. This result, in turn, tells us something important about what practical knowledge cannot be. (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)

This paper develops a question-sensitive theory of intention. We show that this theory explains some puzzling closure properties of intention. In particular, it can be used to explain why one is rationally required to intend the means to one’s ends, even though one is not rationally required to intend all the foreseen consequences of one’s intended actions. It also explains why rational intention is not always closed under logical implication, and why one can only intend outcomes that one believes to (...) be under one’s control. (shrink)

According to a thesis famously associated with Anscombe'sIntention, knowledge is a necessary condition of intentional action: when acting intentionally, we know what we are doing. Call this the Agential Knowledge thesis. The Agential Knowledge thesis remains, of course, controversial. Furthermore, as even some of its proponents acknowledge, it can appear puzzling: Why should acting intentionally require knowing what you are doing? My aim in this paper is to propose an explanation and defence of the Agential Knowledge thesis, based on the (...) idea that acting intentionally is exercising control, in a relevant sense. My argument rests on two things: first, articulating a modal conception of the relevant sense of control, and, secondly, arguing that agential knowledge is distinctively practical. As I explain, the truth of the Agential Knowledge thesis opens promising paths for future work in the philosophy of action. (shrink)

Being incoherent is often viewed as a paradigm kind of irrationality. Numerous authors attempt to explain the distinct-seeming failure of incoherence by positing a set of requirements of structural rationality. I argue that the notion of coherence that structural requirements are meant to capture is very slippery, and that intuitive judgments – in particular, a charge of a distinct, blatant kind of irrationality – are very imperfectly correlated with respecting the canon of structural requirements. I outline an alternative strategy for (...) explaining our patterns of normative disapproval, one appealing to feasible dispositions to conform to substantive, non-structural norms. A wide range of paradigmatic cases of incoherence, I will argue, involve manifesting problematic dispositions, dispositions that manifest across a range of cases as blatant-seeming normative failures. (shrink)

Akratic belief, or belief one believes one should not have, has often been thought to be impossible. I argue that the possibility of akratic belief should be accepted as a pre-theoretical datum. I distinguish intuitive, defensive, systematic, and diagnostic ways of arguing for this view, and offer an argument that combines them. After offering intuitive examples of akratic belief, I defend those examples against a common argument against the possibility of akratic belief, which I call the Nullification Argument. I then (...) offer an Argument from Belief Attribution, using a discussion of the marks by which we typically attribute belief to defend attributions of akratic belief. I conclude by offering a way to explain what is puzzling about akratic belief, while allowing that it is possible. (shrink)

According to the doctrine of infallibility, one is permitted to believe p if one knows that necessarily, one would be right if one believed that p. This plausible principle—made famous in Descartes’ cogito—is false. There are some self-fulfilling, higher-order propositions one can’t be wrong about but shouldn’t believe anyway: believing them would immediately make one's overall doxastic state worse.

Philosophy is a reflective activity. So perhaps it is unsurprising that many philosophers have claimed that reflection plays an important role in shaping and even improving our philosophical thinking. This hypothesis seems plausible given that training in philosophy has correlated with better performance on tests of reflection and reflective reasoning has correlated with demonstrably better judgments in a variety of domains. This article reviews the hypothesized roles of reflection in philosophical thinking as well as the empirical evidence for these roles. (...) This reveals that although there are fairly reliable links between reflection and philosophical judgment among both laypeople and philosophers, the role of reflection in philosophical thinking may nonetheless depend in part on other factors, some of which have yet to be determined. So progress in research on reflection in philosophy may require further innovation in experimental methods and psychometric validation of philosophical measures. (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)

Noncognitivism about normative judgment is the view that normative judgment is a distinctive kind of mental state, identical neither to belief or desire, but desire-like in its functional role and direction of fit. Noncognitivism about intention (also called the “distinctive practical attitude” theory) is the view that intention is a distinctive kind of mental state, identical neither to belief or desire, but desire-like in its functional role and direction of fit. While these theories are alike in several ways, they have (...) rarely been discussed in concert. This paper studies the relation between these two theories, focusing on the question of whether noncognitivism about intention faces an analogue of the well-known Frege-Geach problem for noncognitivism about normative judgment. I argue that whether it faces the Frege-Geach problem depends on how it treats the distinction between what Anscombe called expressions of intention and personal predictions. I show that there is substantial pressure to treat that distinction as semantic, and that a variant of the Frege-Geach problem arises for versions of noncognitivism about intention that go this route. Yet some philosophers of action may be willing to resist this pressure, and I develop a pragmatic account of the distinction that would allow such philosophers to avoid the Frege-Geach problem altogether. I argue that this pragmatic account has significant independent appeal. Notably, it provides a way for noncognitivists about intention to undercut the force of a recent argument for cognitivism due to Berislav Marušić and John Schwenkler. (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)

Dichotomous thinking about mental phenomena is abundant in philosophy. One particularly tenacious dichotomy is between “automatic” and “controlled” processes. In this characterization automatic and unintelligent go hand in hand, as do non-automatic and intelligent. Accounts of skillful action have problematized this dichotomous conceptualization and moved towards a more nuanced understanding of human agency. This binary thinking is, however, still abundant in the philosophy of joint action. Habits and skills allow us agentic ways of guiding complex action routines that would otherwise (...) overwhelm our reflective capacities. In this paper, I look at how theories of skill, habit, and know-how in individual action can inform a non-dichotomous account of joint action. I argue that a fuller understanding of joint agency has to understand not only group know-how, but also the role of attention and the highly integrated types of control that allow agents to act together. (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)

This paper investigates ‘authoritative knowledge’, a neglected species of practical knowledge gained on the basis of exercising practical authority. I argue that, like perceptual knowledge, authoritative knowledge is non-inferential. I then present a broadly reliabilist account of the process by which authority yields knowledge, and use this account to address certain objections.

According to a standard assumption in epistemology, if one only partially believes that p , then one cannot thereby have knowledge that p. For example, if one only partially believes that that it is raining outside, one cannot know that it is raining outside; and if one only partially believes that it is likely that it will rain outside, one cannot know that it is likely that it will rain outside. Many epistemologists will agree that epistemic agents are capable of (...) partial beliefs in addition to full beliefs and that partial beliefs can be epistemically assessed along some dimensions. However, it has been generally assumed that such doxastic attitudes cannot possibly amount to knowledge. In Probabilistic Knowledge, Moss challenges this standard assumption and provides a formidable defense of the claim that probabilistic beliefs—a class of doxastic attitudes including credences and degrees of beliefs—can amount to knowledge too. Call this the probabilistic knowledge claim . Throughout the book, Moss goes to great lengths to show that probabilistic knowledge can be fruitfully applied to a variety of debates in epistemology and beyond. My goal in this essay is to explore a further application for probabilistic knowledge. I want to look at the role of probabilistic knowledge within a “knowledge-centered” psychology—a kind of psychology that assigns knowledge a central stage in explanations of intentional behavior. My suggestion is that Moss’s notion of probabilistic knowledge considerably helps further both a knowledge-centered psychology and a broadly intellectualist picture of action and know-how that naturally goes along with it. At the same time, though, it raises some interesting issues about the notion of explanation afforded by the resulting psychology. (shrink)

Many philosophers hold that if an agent acts intentionally, she must know what she is doing. Although the scholarly consensus for many years was to reject the thesis in light of presumed counterexamples by Donald Davidson, several scholars have recently argued that attention to aspectual distinctions and the practical nature of this knowledge shows that these counterexamples fail. In this paper I defend a new objection against the thesis, one modelled after Timothy Williamson’s anti-luminosity argument. Since this argument relies on (...) general principles about the nature of knowledge rather than on intuitions about fringe cases, the recent responses that have been given to defuse the force of Davidson’s objection are silent against it. Moreover, the argument suggests that even weaker theses connecting practical entities with knowledge are also false. Recent defenders of the thesis that there is a necessary connection between knowledge and intentional action are motivated by the insight that this connection is non-accidental. I close with a positive proposal to account for the non-accidentality of this link without appeal to necessary connections by drawing an extended analogy between practical and perceptual knowledge. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore the role for anticipated regret in major life decision-making, focusing on how it is employed by realistic decision-makers in a variety of realistic cases. I argue that the most obvious answers to how regret might matter in decision do not make these cases intelligible, but that we can make them intelligible through consideration of the significance of narrative in our own self-understanding.

The Greeks knew a virtue term that represented the ability to determine which norms deserved commitment, a virtue term usually misunderstood as “prediction of likely outcomes” or “being hesitant”:promêtheia. Plato’s uses of this term, almost completely ignored by scholarship, show a sensitivity to the prerequisites for the capacity for rational agency. We must add this virtue term to the usual suspects related to acting as a rational agent:sôphrosunê, dikaiosunê, phrônesis, andsophia.Promêtheiastands out for its importance in times of ignorance of the (...) future. (shrink)

Why are de se mental states essential? What exactly is their de se-ness needed to do? I argue that it is needed to fend off accidentalness. If certain beliefs – for example, nociceptive, proprioceptive or introspective beliefs – were not de se, then any truth they achieved would be too accidental for the subject to count as knowing. If certain intentions – intentions that are in play whenever we intentionally do anything – were not de se, then any satisfaction they (...) achieved would be too accidental for the subject to count as intentionally acting. How states hook on to their referent is relevant in a systematic but underexplored way to whether they non-accidentally achieve their aim – truth in the case of beliefs, satisfaction in the case of intentions. In the relevant cases, the way of hooking on to a referent needed to avoid being accidental is the way a de se state hooks on to its referent. (shrink)

This essay addresses the question how we know our conscious thinking. Conscious thinking typically takes the form of a series of discrete episodes that constitute a complex cognitive activity. We must distinguish the discrete episodes of thinking in which a particular content is represented in phenomenal consciousness and is present “before the mind’s eye” from the extended activities of which these episodes form a part. The extended activities are themselves contentful and we have first-person access to them. But because their (...) content is not represented in phenomenal consciousness, this access cannot be broadly observational. Instead, I argue, it is agential. Furthermore, that extended activities are intentional explains the possibility of a nonobservational form of introspective access to the discrete episodes in consciousness. (shrink)

According to the Strong Belief Thesis (SBT), intending to X entails the belief that one will X. John Brunero has attempted to impugn SBT by arguing that there are cases in which an agent intends to X but is unsure that she will X. Moreover, he claims that the standard reply to such putative counterexamples to SBT – namely, to claim that the unsure agent merely has an intention to try – comes at a high price. Specifically, it prevents SBT (...) from playing the kind of explanatory role the cognitivist requires. This article meets Brunero's challenge to SBT by offering an account of trying and intending to try that not only saves SBT from Brunero's criticism, but does so in a way that preserves the explanatory significance that cognitivists typically take SBT to have. (shrink)

This paper constructs a theory according to which an intention is not a mental state but an action at a certain developmental stage. I model intention on organic life, and thus intention stands to action as tadpole stands to frog. I then argue for this theory by showing how it overcomes three problems: intending while merely preparing, not taking any steps, and the action is impossible. The problems vanish when we see that not all actions are mature. Just as some (...) frogs are immature frogs, some actions are immature actions. (shrink)

The notion of an agent and the notion of a self are connected, for agency is one role played by the self. Millgram argues for a disunity thesis of agency on the basis of extreme incommensurability across some major life events. We propose a similar negative thesis about the self, that it is composed of relatively independent threads reflecting the different roles and different mind-sets of the person's life. Our understanding of those threads is based on theories of the narrative (...) construction of the self. Our disunity thesis is that there need be no overarching narrative that unifies those narrative threads. To explain how the threads hang together to produce coherent action, we make these positive claims: control normally switches smoothly and unconsciously between threads as circumstances require, within one thread there is likely to be acknowledgment of other threads, some situations require a temporary blending of threads, and some plans and policies reach across different threads and contribute to some coordination among them. Our account of a self provides an account of agency that has merits in comparison to Millgram's. Our narrative approach allows explanations of actions beyond rational deliberation. (shrink)

Anscombe thought that practical knowledge – a person’s knowledge of what she is intentionally doing – displays formal differences to ordinary empirical, or ‘speculative’, knowledge. I suggest these differences rest on the fact that practical knowledge involves intention analogously to how speculative knowledge involves belief. But this claim conflicts with the standard conception of knowledge, according to which knowledge is an inherently belief-involving phenomenon. Building on John Hyman’s account of knowledge as the ability to use a fact as a reason, (...) I develop an alternative, two-tier, epistemology which allows that knowledge might really come in a belief-involving and an intention-involving form. (shrink)