Abstract
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 are needed to model it.
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Notes
Some textual evidence for Anscombe’s anti-reductionism can be found in Anscombe (1971, p. 137).
This is by no means the only objection to a practical knowledge condition on intentional action. For example, Setiya (2008) argue that in case of basic actions, one might intentional perform an action without knowledge or belief that one is doing so. I bracket these objections here. See Pavese (2021a, 2020b) for discussion of these issues.
Anscombe often emphasizes that practical knowledge causes the success of the action and in this respect shares intentions’ direction of fit. By thinking of practical knowledge as closely related to intention-in-action, we might be able to account for the idea that practical knowledge is the cause of the action that it represents, and so accounts for its having both directions of fit.
I think the converse (that if one intentionally \(\phi \) then one intends-in-action to \(\phi \)) might not hold true, due to the sort of counterexamples to the so-called Simple View (i.e., that intentionally \(\phi \) requires intending to \(\phi \)) which Bratman (1987) raised. I cannot discuss this complex issue here, so I will bracket it.
Christensen et al. (2016) argue that cognitive control is present in expert skillful performance in the form of ‘higher-order action control’. Wu (2016) focuses on agentive control, which he thinks ‘yields phenomena of central philosophical interest: moral, rational, reason-based, skilled, conscious, epistemic and free agency’ (Wu, 2016, p. 101). Verbruggen and McLaren (2014) argue that adaptive and goal-directed behavior is to be understood in terms of agentive or executive control, in virtue of which people can regulate their behavior according to higher-order goals or plans. Finally, Toner et al. (2015) argue that skilled athletes use cognitive (or executive) control to maintain or improve their performance proficiency (see also Christensen et al., 2015, 2019; Fridland, 2014, Shepherd, 2014, 2021; Wu, 2011). These psychologists and philosophers all seem to consider it to be a hallmark of skillful performance that it is, in some sense to be specified, under the agent’s control.
Stanley (2011, p. 161) responds to the articulability objection by pointing out that there is a sense in which propositional knowledge is always verbalizable. A punch-drunk boxer, who can demonstratively refer to his re-enactment of the way of boxing against southpaws, and says, “This is the way I fight against a southpaw,” intuitively knows that this is the way he fights against southpaws. This knowledge has an essential demonstrative component. But the same goes for much of other propositional knowledge, for example the knowledge we express by saying, “This is the tool for the job,” or “That is going to be trouble.” So, the response goes, know-how is verbalizable just like propositional knowledge is supposed to be verbalizable. However, this reply to the articulability objection assumes that ways to execute tasks are always ostensible and as such can always be picked up by a demonstrative. This does not need to be so: on any single occasion, one may only act on parts of a way. So for example, consider a swimmer who knows how to swim, and so, according to intellectualism, knows a proposition about how to swim. And yet when he swims, he only swims in a particular way, that adapts well to the circumstances in which he finds himself.
It is also worth noting that in the recent literature, others have noted independently (cf. in particular Setiya, 2007, p. 25) that even Davidson’s carbon copier objection, and similar other cases, can be satisfactorily addressed when practical knowledge is understood along these lines. In Davidson’s example, someone is writing heavily on a page, intending to produce 10 legible carbon copies (Davidson, 1978). While writing, the agent does not know that they are producing ten legible carbon copies. Still, if they succeed in their goal, it seems that they did so intentionally. According to Epistemic Theory*, that is so because although the carbon copier might not know that they are producing ten carbon copies, they must know that they are writing firmly on a stack of copies in order to produce ten carbon copies. So the practical knowledge condition is satisfied. Indeed, the standard way of dealing with Davidson’s carbon copier objection (cf. in particular Setiya, 2007, p. 25) already provides a satisfactory response to Baseball.
An interesting question that I have not attempted to address here is whether an epistemic theory of intentional action is more defensible than the more familiar commitments of knowledge-first epistemology. An anonymous referee notes that some of the major challenges to Knowledge-First epistemology (as traditionally construed) do not obviously generalize to an epistemic theory of intentional action. For example, Brown (2008) has challenged knowledge norms of practical reasoning using high stakes cases; Roeber (2018) has argued that these challenges can be generalized beyond high stakes scenarios. While I am not myself fully persuaded by these challenges to the knowledge-first account of evidence, it may well turn out that an epistemic theory of intentional action is more defensible than the more familiar commitments of Knowledge First epistemology.
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Pavese, C. Practical knowledge first. Synthese 200, 375 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03848-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03848-y