Davidson on Practical Knowledge

Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy 3 (9) (2015)
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Abstract

Did Donald Davidson agree with G.E.M. Anscombe that action requires a distinctive form of agential awareness? The answer is No, at least according to the standard interpretation of Davidson’s account of action. A careful study of Davidson’s early writings, however, reveals a much more subtle conception of the role of agential belief in action. While the role of the general belief in Davidson’s theory is familiar and has been much discussed, virtually no attention has been paid to the singular belief. This essay makes a start on remedying this neglect. I begin, in section 1, by examining Davidson’s claim that for a desire or belief to rationalize and cause an action it must have a suitable generality. It must, he says, be ‘logically independent’ of the action itself. While he was clear about this requirement in the case of the desire that forms part of a person’s primary reason, I show in section 2 that his early treatment of belief confuses general and singular beliefs. This confusion reflects his failure clearly to distinguish the two roles belief can play in his account of action: as rationalizing cause and as agential awareness. Somewhat surprisingly, though, after he carefully drew the distinction and announced that intentional action requires practical knowledge, he pretty much ignored it. This may explain why some have assumed that Davidson parted ways with Anscombe on this. But a careful study of their writings shows that in fact they held remarkably similar views on the nature and need for practical knowledge

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David Hunter
Toronto Metropolitan University

References found in this work

Intention.G. E. M. Anscombe - 1957 - Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Problems of rationality.Donald Davidson (ed.) - 2004 - New York: Oxford University Press.
Practical knowledge.Kieran Setiya - 2008 - Ethics 118 (3):388-409.
Intention.Roderick M. Chisholm - 1959 - Philosophical Review 68 (1):110.

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