About this topic
Summary What are the relationships between action and knowledge, between doing something and knowing what one is doing? What is special about the first-person perspective on one's actions, and about the way we know our actions as opposed to other things? Do we (always, or often, or normally) know our intentional actions "without observation", and if so then what does this mean, and how is it possible?
Key works Anscombe 1957, which introduces the concept of "non-observational knowledge" as a mark of intentional action, is the seminal text in the 20th-century Anglophone literature on this subject. For an important early criticism of Anscombe's argument, see Donnellan 1963. More recently, Anscombean positions have been explored by Falvey 2000, Gibbons 2010, Grünbaum 2009, Grünbaum 2011, Hursthouse 2000, Moran 2004, Paul 2009, Pickard 2004, Rödl 2007, Schwenkler 2011, Schwenkler 2012, Setiya 2008, Velleman 1989, and in many of the essays collected in Roessler & Eilan 2003 and Ford et al 2011.
Introductions For an opinionated survey of the recent literature on this topic, see Schwenkler 2012.
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78 found
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  1. Conhecimento e ação na perspectiva de Hegel.Gabriel Rodrigues da Silva - manuscript
    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 (...)
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  2. Autonomy as Practical Understanding.Reza Hadisi - forthcoming - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy.
    In this paper, I offer a theory of autonomous agency that relies on the re-sources of a strongly cognitivist theory of intention and intentional action. On the proposed account, intentional action is a graded notion that is ex-plained via the agent’s degree of practical knowledge. In turn, autonomous agency is also a graded notion that is explained via the agent’s degree of practical understanding. The resulting theory can synthesize insights from both the hierarchical and the cognitivist theories of autonomy with (...)
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  3. On Self-Knowledge of Motives.Pablo Hubacher Haerle - forthcoming - The Monist.
    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 (...)
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  4. Knowing what you Want.Eric Marcus - forthcoming - In Lucy Campbell (ed.), Forms of Knowledge. Oxford.
    How do you know what you want? Philosophers have lately developed sophisticated accounts of the practical and doxastic knowledge that are rooted in the point of view of the subject. Our ability to just say what we are doing or what we believe—that is, to say so authoritatively, but not on the basis of observation or evidence—is an aspect of our ability to reason about the good and the true. However, no analogous route to orectic self-knowledge is feasible. Knowledge of (...)
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  5. Philosophy of Action from Suarez to Davidson.Constantine Sandis (ed.) - forthcoming
  6. From causation to conscious control.Lieke Joske Franci Asma - 2023 - Philosophical Explorations 26 (3):1-17.
    Surprisingly little attention has been paid to the nature of conscious control. As a result, experiments suggesting that we lack conscious control over our actions cannot be properly evaluated. Joshua Shepherd (2015; 2021) aims to fill this gap. His proposal is grounded in the standard causalist account of action, according to which, simply put, bodily movements are controlled by the agent if and only if they are caused, in the right way, by the relevant psychological states. In this paper, I (...)
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  7. Epistemic Luck, Knowledge-How, and Intentional Action.Carlotta Pavese, Paul Henne & Bob Beddor - 2023 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 10.
    Epistemologists have long believed that epistemic luck undermines propositional knowledge. Action theorists have long believed that agentive luck undermines intentional action. But is there a relationship between agentive luck and epistemic luck? While agentive luck and epistemic luck have been widely thought to be independent phenomena, we argue that agentive luck has an epistemic dimension. We present several thought experiments where epistemic luck seems to undermine both knowledge-how and intentional action and we report experimental results that corroborate these judgments. These (...)
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  8. Pratibhā, intuition, and practical knowledge.Nilanjan Das - 2022 - British Journal for the History of Philosophy 31 (4):630-656.
    In Sanskrit philosophy, the closest analogue of intuition is pratibhā. Here, I will focus on the theory of pratibhā offered by the Sanskrit grammarian Bhartṛhari (fifth century CE). On this account, states of pratibhā play two distinct psychological roles. First, they serve as sources of linguistic understanding. They are the states by means of which linguistically competent agents effortlessly understand the meaning of novel sentences. Second, states of pratibhā serve as sources of practical knowledge. On the basis of such states, (...)
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  9. Informed Consent, Error and Suspending Ignorance: Providing Knowledge or Preventing Error?Arnon Keren & Ori Lev - 2022 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 25 (2):351-368.
    The standard account of informed consent has recently met serious criticism, focused on the mismatch between its implications and widespread intuitions about the permissibility of conducting research and providing treatment under conditions of partial knowledge. Unlike other critics of the standard account, we suggest an account of the relations between autonomy, ignorance, and valid consent that avoids these implausible implications while maintaining the standard core idea, namely, that the primary purpose of the disclosure requirement of informed consent is to prevent (...)
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  10. Intentional Action, Know-how, and Lucky Success.Michael Kirley - 2022 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 9.
    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 (...)
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  11. Agency and Evidence.Berislav Marusic & John Schwenkler - 2022 - In Luca Ferrero (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Agency. Routledge. pp. 244-252.
    How does evidence figure into the reasoning of an agent? This is an intricate philosophical problem but also one we all encounter in our daily lives. In this chapter, we identify the problem and outline a possible solution to it. The problem arises, because the fact that it is up to us whether we do something makes a difference to how we should think of the evidence concerning whether we will actually do it. Otherwise we regard something that is up (...)
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  12. What Is the Bearing of Thinking on Doing?Marshall Bierson & John Schwenkler - 2021 - In Adrian Haddock & Rachael Wiseman (eds.), The Anscombean Mind. Routledge. pp. 312-332.
    What a person is doing often depends on that person’s thought about what they are doing, or about the wider circumstances of their action. For example, whether my killing is murder or manslaughter depends, in part, on whether I understand that what I am doing is killing you, and on whether I understand that my killing is unjustified. Similarly, if I know that the backpack I am taking is yours, then my taking it may be an act of theft; but (...)
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  13. Success and Knowledge in Action: Saving Anscombe’s Account of Intentionality.Markus Kneer - 2021 - In Tadeusz Ciecierski & Paweł Grabarczyk (eds.), Context Dependence in Language, Action, and Cognition. De Gruyter. pp. 131-154.
    According to Anscombe, acting intentionally entails knowledge in ac- tion. This thesis has been near-universally rejected due to a well-known counter- example by Davidson: a man intending to make ten legible carbon copies might not believe with confidence, and hence not know, that he will succeed. If he does, however, his action surely counts as intentional. Damaging as it seems, an even more powerful objection can be levelled against Anscombe: while act- ing, there is as yet no fact of the (...)
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  14. Teaching drunk: Work, the online economy, and uncertainty in action.Max F. Kramer - 2021 - Philosophy 96 (3):387-408.
    (Runner-up, Royal Institute of Philosophy 2020 Philosophy Essay Prize) Technological developments have led to the digitization of certain sectors of the economy, and this has many authors looking ahead to the prospects of a post-work society. While it is valuable to theorize about this possibility, it is also important to take note of the present state of work. For better or worse, it is what we are currently stuck with, and as the COVID-19 pandemic has ensured, much of that work (...)
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  15. Stipulative Agency.Derek Lam - 2021 - In David Shoemaker (ed.), Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility Volume 7. Oxford University Press. pp. 7-31.
    An agent’s knowledge of her own intentional actions (agential knowledge) is non-observational. Yet, intentional actions typically consist of happenings external to the agents. A theory is needed to explain how agents are warranted to form such beliefs independent of observation. This paper first argues for three desirable features of an ideal theory about agential knowledge. After showing that no existing theories possess all three, a novel theory that does is presented. According to this theory, agential knowledge is the same kind (...)
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  16. Review of Christian Kietzmann: Handeln aus Gründen als praktisches Schließen, 2019. [REVIEW]Sascha Settegast - 2020 - Zeitschrift für Philosophische Forschung 74 (2):310-313.
  17. Reconciling Practical Knowledge with Self-Deception.Eric Marcus - 2019 - Mind 128 (512):1205-1225.
    Is it impossible for a person to do something intentionally without knowing that she is doing it? The phenomenon of self-deceived agency might seem to show otherwise. Here the agent is not lying, yet disavows a correct description of her intentional action. This disavowal might seem expressive of ignorance. However, I show that the self-deceived agent does know what she's doing. I argue that we should understand the factors that explain self-deception as masking rather than negating the practical knowledge characteristic (...)
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  18. Ignorance and Blame.Daniel J. Miller - 2019 - 1000-Word Philosophy.
    Sometimes ignorance is a legitimate excuse for morally wrong behavior, and sometimes it isn’t. If someone has secretly replaced my sugar with arsenic, then I’m blameless for putting arsenic in your tea. But if I put arsenic in your tea because I keep arsenic and sugar jars on the same shelf and don’t label them, then I’m plausibly blameworthy for poisoning you. Why is my ignorance in the first case a legitimate excuse, but my ignorance in the second case isn’t? (...)
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  19. Basic Action and Practical Knowledge.Will Small - 2019 - Philosophers' Imprint 19.
    It is a commonplace in philosophy of action that there is and must be teleologically basic action: something done on an occasion without doing it by means of doing anything else. It is widely believed that basic actions are exercises of skill. As the source of the need for basic action is the structure of practical reasoning, this yields a conception of skill and practical reasoning as complementary but mutually exclusive. On this view, practical reasoning and complex intentional action depend (...)
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  20. Agency and observation in knowledge of one's own thinking.Casey Doyle - 2018 - European Journal of Philosophy 27 (1):148-161.
    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 (...)
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  21. Circumstantial ignorance and mitigated blameworthiness.Daniel J. Miller - 2018 - Philosophical Explorations 22 (1):33-43.
    It is intuitive that circumstantial ignorance, even when culpable, can mitigate blameworthiness for morally wrong behavior. In this paper I suggest an explanation of why this is so. The explanation offered is that an agent’s degree of blameworthiness for some action depends at least in part upon the quality of will expressed in that action, and that an agent’s level of awareness when performing a morally wrong action can make a difference to the quality of will that is expressed in (...)
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  22. Motor Intentions and Non‐Observational Knowledge of Action: A Standard Story.Olle Blomberg & Chiara Brozzo - 2017 - Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 6 (3):137-146.
    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. (...)
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  23. G.E.M. Anscombe on the Analogical Unity of Intention in Perception and Action.Christopher Frey & Jennifer A. Frey - 2017 - Analytic Philosophy 58 (3):202-247.
    Philosophers of action and perception have reached a consensus: the term ‘intentionality’ has significantly different senses in their respective fields. But Anscombe argues that these distinct senses are analogically united in such a way that one cannot understand the concept if one focuses exclusively on its use in one’s preferred philosophical sub-discipline. She highlights three salient points of analogy: (i) intentional objects are given by expressions that employ a “description under which;” (ii) intentional descriptions are typically vague and indeterminate; and (...)
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  24. Hvorfor handlingskunnskap ikke er slutningsbasert.Heine A. Holmen - 2017 - Norsk Filosofisk Tidsskrift 52 (4):161-179.
    The paper discusses the epistemological basis for how you know what you are doing intentionally (and why). In particular, it challenges and ulimately rejects the claim made by Sarah K. Paul that such knowledge has an inferential basis.
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  25. Reasonable foreseeability and blameless ignorance.Daniel J. Miller - 2017 - Philosophical Studies 174 (6):1561-1581.
    This paper draws attention to a fundamental problem for a version of the tracing strategy defended by a number of theorists in the current literature (Rosen 2004, Fischer and Tognazzini 2009). I argue that versions of the tracing strategy that require reasonable foreseeability are in tension with the view that blameless ignorance excuses. A stronger version of the tracing strategy is consistent with the view that blameless ignorance excuses and is therefore preferable for those tracing theorists who wish to continue (...)
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  26. Self‐Knowledge and the Guise of the Good.Amir Saemi - 2017 - Analytic Philosophy 58 (3):272-281.
    According to the Doctrine of the Guise of the Good, actions are taken to be good by their agents. Kieran Setiya, however, has formulated a new objection to the DGG based on the distinction between the notions of normative reasons and motivating reasons. Only the latter, Setiya claims, is required for intentional agency. However, I will argue that Setiya’s objection fails because it rests on the implausible assumption that motivating reasons are determined solely in terms of the content of the (...)
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  27. Action Reconceptualized: Human Agency and its Sources.David K. Chan - 2016 - Lanham: Lexington Books.
    In re-examining the concepts of desire, intention, and trying, David K. Chan brings a fresh approach toward resolving many of the problems that have occupied philosophers of action for almost a century. This book not only presents a complete theory of human agency but also, by developing the conceptual tools needed to do moral philosophy, lays the groundwork for formulating an ethics that is rooted in a clear, intuitive, and coherent moral psychology.
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  28. Handling og den praktiske kunnskapens metafysikk.Heine A. Holmen - 2016 - Norsk Filosofisk Tidsskrift:5-19.
    The following paper argues that the epistemology of action can best be understood via a metaphysical framework of knowledge where the latter is conceived as a metaphysically primitive relation holding between a subject (or mind) and a fact. In particular, it argues that we must separate sharply between the knowledge relation itself and the different means by virtue of which knowledge obtains. Once that distinction is in place, we can see that there is no obstacle to argue that ordinary knowledge (...)
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  29. Anscombe on Practical Knowledge.Kieran Setiya - 2016 - In Practical Knowledge: Selected Essays. Oxford University Press.
    Argues that, for Anscombe, 'practical knowledge' is only sometimes 'the cause of what it understands.' It is the formal cause when its object is 'formally the description of an executed intention.' Nor is such knowledge confined to the present progressive: we have practical knowledge of the future and the past.
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  30. Practical Knowledge: Selected Essays.Kieran Setiya - 2016 - New York, New York: Oxford University Press.
    In this collection, Kieran Setiya explores the place of agency in ethics, arguing for a causal theory of intentional action on which it is understood through the knowledge embodied in our intentions, and against the rationalist project of deriving norms of practical reason from the nature of the will.
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  31. Acting and Understanding.Alexander Stathopoulos - 2016 - Dissertation, University of St. Andrews
    This thesis concerns the question of what it is for a subject to act. It answers this question in three steps. The first step is taken by arguing that any satisfactory answer must build on the idea that an action is something predicable of the acting subject. The second step is taken by arguing in support of an answer which does build on this idea, and does so by introducing the idea that acting is doing something which is an exercise (...)
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  32. Knowing Achievements.Alexander Stathopoulos - 2016 - Philosophy 91 (3):361-374.
    Anscombe claims that whenever a subject is doing something intentionally, this subject knows that they are doing it. This essay defends Anscombe's claim from an influential set of counterexamples, due to Davidson. It argues that Davidson's counterexamples are tacit appeals to an argument, on which knowledge can't be essential to doing something intentionally, because some things that can be done intentionally require knowledge of future successes, and because such knowledge can't ever be guaranteed when someone is doing something intentionally. The (...)
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  33. Second Nature and Basic Action.Ben Wolfson - 2016 - In Roman Altshuler & Michael Sigrist (eds.), Time and the Philosophy of Action. New York, USA: Routledge. pp. 52-66.
  34. Action and the problem of evil.Heine A. Holmen - 2015 - International Journal of Philosophy and Theology 76 (4):335-351.
    Most contemporary action theorists deny the possible existence of intentionally evil actions or diabolic agency. The reason for this is a normative interpretation of agency that appears to be motivated by action theoretic concerns, where agents are conceived as necessarily acting sub specie bonie or under ‘the guise of the good’. I argue that there is nothing in human agency to motivate this view and that diabolic evil is not at odds with inherent features of our nature.
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  35. Action Knowledge & Will.John Hyman - 2015 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press UK.
    Human agency has four irreducibly different dimensions -- psychological, ethical, intellectual, and physical -- which the traditional idea of a will tended to conflate. Twentieth-century philosophers criticized the idea that acts are caused by 'willing' or 'volition', but the study of human action continued to be governed by a tendency to equate these dimensions of agency, or to reduce one to another. Cutting across the branches of philosophy, from logic and epistemology to ethics and jurisprudence, Action, Knowledge, and Will defends (...)
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  36. Understanding 'Practical Knowledge'.John Schwenkler - 2015 - Philosophers' Imprint 15.
    The concept of practical knowledge is central to G.E.M. Anscombe's argument in Intention, yet its meaning is little understood. There are several reasons for this, including a lack of attention to Anscombe's ancient and medieval sources for the concept, and an emphasis on the more straightforward concept of knowledge "without observation" in the interpretation of Anscombe's position. This paper remedies the situation, first by appealing to the writings of Thomas Aquinas to develop an account of practical knowledge as a distinctive (...)
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  37. KK and the Knowledge Norm of Action.Michael Da Silva - 2014 - Logos and Episteme 5 (3):321-331.
    This piece examines the purported explanatory and normative role of knowledge in Timothy Williamson‘s account of intentional action and suggests that it isin tension with his argument against the luminosity of knowledge. Only iterable knowledge can serve as the norm for action capable of explaining both why people with knowledge act differently than those with mere beliefs and why only those who act on the basis of knowledge-desire pairs are responsible actors.
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  38. Intentions, Intentional Actions and Practical Knowledge.Benedikt Kahmen - 2013 - In Markus Stepanians & Benedikt Kahmen (eds.), Critical Essays on "Causation and Responsibility". De Gruyter. pp. 253-270.
  39. Zum Verhältnis von rezeptivem und praktischem Wissen.John McDowell - 2013 - Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 61 (3):387-401.
    According to G. E. M. Anscombe, practical knowledge, an agent’s knowledge of what she is intentionally doing, is not contemplative or speculative; it does not owe its being knowledge to its being derived from what it knows. She argues for this on the ground that practical knowledge can be one of “two knowledges of the same thing”, where the other of the two is speculative. If we try to conceive practical knowledge as speculative, we fall into a hopeless picture in (...)
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  40. Practical Knowledge.Michael Schmitz - 2013 - Was Sollen Wir Glauben? Was Dürfen Wir Tun?, Sektionsbeiträge der GAP. 8.
    The contribution deals with knowledge of what to do, and how, where, when and why to do it, as it is found in a multitude of plans, rules, procedures, maxims, and other instructions. It is argued that while this knowledge is conceptual and propositional, it is still irreducible to theoretical knowledge of what is the case and why it is the case. It is knowledge of goals, of ends and means, rather than of facts. It is knowledge-to that is irreducibly (...)
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  41. On Doing and Knowing.John Schwenkler - 2013 - Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 87:249-259.
    I propose that the knowledge of what one is intentionally doing counts as “non-observational” because of the role it plays in guiding the action itself. I then consider an objection: is it possible for the knowledge of one’s present action to contribute to the guidance of what one presently does? I argue that this is indeed possible, and that the failure to see how this is rests on questionable metaphysical assumptions about the nature of causality.
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  42. Seeing what I am Doing.Thor Grünbaum - 2012 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 86 (2):295-318.
    I argue against the view that an agent’s knowledge of her own current action cannot in any way rely on perception for its justification. Instead, I argue that when it comes to an agent’s knowledge of her own object-oriented intentional action, the agent’s belief about what she is doing is partly justified by her perception of the object of action. I proceed by first proposing an account of such actions according to which the agent’s knowledge is partly justified by her (...)
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  43. Knowing How.Kieran Setiya - 2012 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 112 (3pt3):285-307.
    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.
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  44. Practical Knowledge and the Structure of Action.Will Small - 2012 - In Günter Abel & James Conant (eds.), Rethinking Epistemology Volume 2. Berlin, Germany: De Gruyter. pp. 133-227.
    I argue that there is a cognition condition on intention and intentional action. If an agent is doing A intentionally, she has knowledge in intention that he is doing A. If an agent intends to do A, she has knowledge in intention that she is going to do A. In both cases, the agent has knowledge of eventual success, in this sense: she knows that it will be no accident if she ends up having done A. In both cases, the (...)
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  45. Acting in ignorance.Jonathan Dancy - 2011 - Frontiers of Philosophy in China 6 (3):345-357.
    This paper considers and rejects the arguments that have been given in favour of the view that one can only act for the reason that p if one knows that p . The paper contrasts it with the view I hold, which is that one can act for the reason that p even if it is not the case that p.
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  46. The knowledge that a man has of his intentional actions.Adrian Haddock - 2011 - In Anton Ford, Jennifer Hornsby & Frederick Stoutland (eds.), Essays on Anscombe's Intention. Harvard University Press.
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  47. Ethics and the Nature of Action.Heine A. Holmen - 2011 - Dissertation, University of Oslo
    The following thesis starts from the question «why be moral?» and adresses an action-theoretic strategy for answering this question in the positive by reference to the constitutive natur of actions. In these debates, the epistemology of action has turned into a central issue. The thesis adresses these debates and develops a novel account of the epistemology: an account that may well turn out to provide a ground for the aforementioned constitutivist strategies.
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  48. Practical Knowledge and Foreseen Side Effects.Niels Van Miltenburg - 2011 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy (1):1-7.
    On Anscombe's view, intentional actions are characterized by a specific type of knowledge (practical knowledge) possessed by the agents that perform them. Recently, interest in Anscombean action theory has been renewed. Sarah Paul argues that Anscombean action theory faces a serious problem: It fails to discriminate between an action’s intended aim or purpose and its foreseen side effects. Since Anscombeans conceive practical knowledge as the formal cause of intentional actions, Paul dubs this a problem of “deviant formal causation.” In this (...)
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  49. Getting Inside the Acting Person.Steven J. Jensen - 2010 - International Philosophical Quarterly 50 (4):461-471.
    John Finnis claims that in order to judge actions we must approach them from the perspective of the acting person, so that the moral evaluation of actions appears to become private. This paper examines Elizabeth Anscombe’s claim that interior intentions can be discovered through exterior actions. Because deliberation is shaped by the causal features of the world, these causal structures can, when viewed from the outside, serve as a window into the private life of the mind. Therefore, we can usually (...)
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  50. Interpreting Anscombe’s Intention §32FF.Anne Newstead - 2009 - Journal of Philosophical Research 34:157-176.
    G. E. M. Anscombe’s view that agents know what they are doing “without observation” has been met with skepticism and the charge of confusion and falsehood. Simultaneously, some commentators think that Anscombe has captured an important truth about the first-personal character of an agent’s awareness of her actions. This paper attempts an explanation and vindication of Anscombe’s view. The key to the vindication lies in focusing on the role of practical knowledge in an agent’s knowledge of her actions. Few commentators, (...)
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