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 form of thought that "aims at production" of things that lie within an agent's power; and then by showing how this Thomistic understanding of practical cognition seems to have been Anscombe's, too. Having done this, I question whether the thesis that agential knowledge is practical knowledge entails that an agent always has non-observational knowledge of what she is intentionally doing. I answer "Not": Anscombe's claims to the contrary rest on a misleading assimilation of human beings' finite agency to that of an infinite agent like God. (shrink)

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)

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 practical in having world to mind direction of fit and the essential function of guiding as yet uncompleted action. While practical knowledge is fundamentally different from theoretical knowledge in terms of mind-world relations, the practical and theoretical domains are still parallel in terms of justificatory and inferential relations, they are like mirror images of one another. It is shown that if this view of practical knowledge is accepted, convincing Gettier cases for practical knowledge can be constructed. An extensive analysis of these cases demonstrates the usefulness of the notions of practical deduction, abduction, and induction. (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)

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 (...) class='Hi'>knowledge characteristic of intentional action. This masking takes roughly the following form: when we are deceiving ourselves about what we are intentionally doing, we don't think about our action because it's painful to do so. (shrink)

According to one interpretation of Aristotle’s famous thesis, to say that action is the conclusion of practical reasoning is to say that action is itself a judgment about what to do. A central motivation for the thesis is that it suggests a path for understanding the non-observational character of practical knowledge. If actions are judgments, then whatever explains an agent’s knowledge of the relevant judgment can explain her knowledge of the action. I call the approach (...) to action that accepts Aristotle’s thesis so understood Normativism. There are many reasons to doubt Normativism. My aim in this paper is to defend Normativism from a pair of arguments that purport to show that a normative judgment could not constitute an event in material reality and also the knowledge of such a happening. Both highlight a putative mismatch between the natures of, on the one hand, an agent’s knowledge of her normative judgment and, on the other, her knowledge of her own action. According to these objections, knowledge of action includes (a) perceptual knowledge and (b) knowledge of what one has already done. But knowledge of a normative judgment includes neither. Hence knowledge of action cannot simply be knowledge of a normative judgment. (shrink)

Exploring Practical Knowledge investigates professional practices from a hermeneutic perspective. The book presents, discusses and applies notions such as practical knowledge, practical wisdom, tacit knowledge, and normativity to the professional lifeworld. These contributions focus on both specific practices and more general questions concerning theories and investigations of practice. This volume comes as the result of a cooperation of three research centres: The two Centres for Practical Knowledge in Bodø, Norway and in Södertörn, (...) Sweden, as well as the Research Group Value-Oriented Professionalisation at the University of Applied Sciences in Utrecht, the Netherlands. It offers empirical studies of professionals as well as discussing the underlying theories, approaches and methods of exploring practical knowledge - including the limits to any articulation of these aspects of professional action. In contrast to the objectivist paradigm that otherwise dominates professional studies, each chapter presents central perspectives and possibilities drawing from humanistic and interdiscipkinary research traditions. The book explores professions in a style accessible to scholars and practitioners alike. It is interesting for those studying practices within these professions and for vocational studies in education, social work, health care, police work, journalism, etc. (shrink)

Practical knowledge is discussed in close relation to practical expertise. For both anti-intellectualists and intellectualists, the knowledge of how to φ is widely assumed to entail the practical expertise in φ-ing. This paper refutes this assumption. I argue that non-experts can know how to φ via other experts’ knowledge of φ-ing. Know-how can be ‘outsourced’. I defend the outsourceability of know-how, and I refute the objections that reduce outsourced know-how to the knowledge of (...) how to ask for help, of how to get things done, or of external contents. Interestingly, outsourcing differs from social cooperation, collective agency, testimonial transmission, and many other notions in social-epistemological debates. Thus, outsourcing provides not only a hitherto unconsidered form of know-how but also a novel way for knowledge to be social. Furthermore, outsourcing plausibly involves a ‘social’ cognitive extension that does not rest on EMT or HEC. Given the outsourceability of know-how, we must reconsider the nature of know-how and expertise, as well as the relation between non-experts and experts. (shrink)

Systematic research in the wide field of practical knowledge is a recent phenomenon. In this paper, the approaches which have been developed in the main centres of research into practical knowledge in Norway and Sweden are compared with an emphasis on their potential for revitalizing the study of ethics. The focus on narratives and reflection based on the researcher’s own professional experience which is the distinguishing feature of the centre for practical knowledge at the (...) University of Nordland is seen as a very promising addition to the traditional repertory of ethical studies. (shrink)

According to a rich tradition in philosophy of action, intentional action requires practical knowledge: someone who acts intentionally knows what they are doing while they are doing it. Piñeros Glasscock argues that an anti-luminosity argument, of the sort developed in Williamson, can be readily adapted to provide a reductio of an epistemic condition on intentional action. This paper undertakes a rescue mission on behalf of an epistemic condition on intentional action. We formulate and defend a version of an (...) epistemic condition that is free from any luminosity commitments. While this version of an epistemic condition escapes reductio, it comes with substantive commitments of its own. In particular, we will see that it forces us to deny the existence of any essentially intentional actions. We go on to argue that this consequence should be embraced. On the resulting picture, intentional action is not luminous. But it still entails practical knowledge. (shrink)

We explore new connections between the epistemologies of mental rehearsal and suppositional reasoning to offer a novel perspective on skilled behavior and its relationship to practical knowledge. We argue that practical knowledge is "easy" in the sense that, by manifesting one's skills, one has a priori propositional justification for certain beliefs about what one is doing as one does it. This proposal has wider consequences for debates about intentional action and knowledge: first, because agents sometimes (...) act intentionally in epistemically hazardous environments, these justified beliefs do not always rise to the level of (practical) knowledge. Second, practical knowledge is more intimately related to basic knowledge than has been appreciated. Third, an attractive "middle way" opens between the Anscombian tradition of defending a necessary connection between intentional action and practical knowledge and the more recent tradition of explaining away substantive epistemic conditions on intentional action. (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)

he paper examines the thesis that participants in shared intentional activities have first-person plural ‘practical knowledge’ of what they are jointly doing, in the sense of ‘practical knowledge’ articulated by G.E.M Anscombe. Who is supposed to be the subject of such knowledge? The group, or members of the group, or both? It is argued that progress with this issue requires conceiving of collective activities as instances, not of supra-personal agency, but of interpersonal agency; specifically: as (...) involving communication. There is a sense, it is suggested, in which the basic form of plural practical knowledge is relational: ‘I am doing x with you.’. (shrink)

A series of papers on different aspects of practical knowledge by Roderick Chisholm, Rudolf Haller, J. C. Nyiri, Eva Picardi, Joachim Schulte Roger Scruton, Barry Smith and Johan Wrede.

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 paper I will show that Anscombean action theory can escape Paul’s critique by employing a sufficiently developed conception of practical knowledge. It will turn out that Anscombeans can precisely capture the difference between intended aim and foreseen side effect in terms of differences in the agent’s knowledge. (shrink)

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 agent’s knowledge is of what is happening, or what is going to happen, in the world; it is not knowledge merely of her state of mind. This knowledge is practical: it the cause of what it understands; without it what is happening, or what is going to happen, is not an intentional action, and any practical thought of the agent’s about what is happening, or what is going to happen, does not hit the heights of intention. I demonstrate that famous examples (from Davidson and Bratman) purporting to show that the cognition condition should be rejected (or its content or scope weakened) are ineffective, because they trade on confusions about the different kinds of failure to which intentional action may be susceptible, confusions remedied via reflection on the structure of intentional action. I show that the cognition condition is grounded not in reflection about the directions of fit and guidance of different kinds of mental states, nor in the indicative content of linguistic expressions of intention, but in the calculative and temporal structure of intentional action itself. (shrink)

According to a traditional account, moral cognition is an achievement gained over time by sharing a practice under the guidance and the example of the wise, in analogy with craft and apprenticeship. This model captures an important feature of practical reason, that is, its incompleteness, and highlights our dependence on others in obtaining moral knowledge, coherently with the socially extended mind agenda and recent findings in empirical psychology. However, insofar as it accords to exemplars’ decisive authority to determine (...) the standard of correctness for moral cognition, the model does not offer protection against arbitrariness and discrimination. The article argues that to understand the socially distributed nature of practical knowledge, we have to discard the notion of exemplars and reconceive of others as having equal normative standing. This claim allows us to revisit the conception of autonomy as key to distributed practical knowledge. While autonomy does not amount to selfsufficiency and self-reliance, it does demand independence of judgement and stands in contrast to servility, submission, and other sorts of defective ways of relying on others. The requirement of equal standing provides the basis for distinguishing between proper and improper reliance on others. Keywords: autonomy, Aristotle, exemplarism, extended mind, constructivism, practical knowledge, equal standing. (shrink)

Argues that the view propounded in "Practical Knowledge" (Ethics 118: 388-409) survives objections made by Sarah Paul ("Intention, Belief, and Wishful Thinking," Ethics 119: 546-557). The response gives more explicit treatment to the nature and epistemology of knowing how.

According to one influential philosophical view of human agency, for an agent to perform an action intentionally is essentially for her to manifest a kind of self-knowledge: An agent is intentionally φ-ing if and only if she has a special kind of practical and non-observational knowledge that this is what she is doing. I here argue that this self-knowledge view faces serious problems when extended to account for intentional actions performed by several agents together as a (...) result of a joint decision. This suggests that practical and non-observational knowledge is not essential to intentional action as such, since a theory of intentional action ought to be able to make sense of such paradigm cases of joint intentional action as well as cases of singular intentional action. Existing attempts to extend the self-knowledge view to joint intentional action face an unfortunate trilemma. These attempts must (i) require that participants have non-observational knowledge of each other’s non-observational knowledge, which in turn requires that the participants are either really one and the same agent, or that they are, for all relevant purposes, clones of each other; (ii) limit their explanatory scope to intentional actions performed by groups with a single decision maker at the top of an organisational hierarchy, which arguably are not really shared or jointly performed; or (iii) require that the intention of the group is the result of a public representational act that the group members will have observational knowledge of in a way that is incompatible with a core commitment of the self-knowledge view. I argue that each of these options is unacceptable given a self-knowledge view of intentional action. (shrink)

Statements purporting to convey practical knowledge in Anscombe's sense are subject to two distinctive kinds of error: errors in performance and errors of practical judgement. I argue that reflection on these kinds of errors sheds light both on the nature of practical knowledge and on the status of Anscombe's account of it. Briefly: practical knowledge is knowledge we ordinarily find intelligible in the light of the agent's non-defective exercise of practical judgement. (...) And Anscombe's account is not primarily designed to make practical knowledge intelligible to philosophers but to make explicit how such knowledge is seen as intelligible — and claims to such knowledge are seen to be justifiable — by those who are engaged in the practice of sharing it. I go on to consider how this interpretation bears on the disagreement between Anscombe's view and what she calls a 'contemplative' conception of knowledge. (shrink)

Forlagets beskrivelse: Informative, analytical and stimulating, this book examines the relationship between professional knowledge and clinical practice.Biography.

he paper examines the thesis that participants in shared intentional activities have first-person plural ‘practical knowledge’ of what they are jointly doing, in the sense of ‘practical knowledge’ articulated by G.E.M Anscombe. Who is supposed to be the subject of such knowledge? The group, or members of the group, or both? It is argued that progress with this issue requires conceiving of collective activities (of the kind affording ‘plural practical knowledge’)as instances, not of (...) supra-personal agency, but of interpersonal agency; specifically: as involving communication. There is a sense, it is suggested, in which the basic form of plural practical knowledge is relational: ‘I am doing x with you.’. (shrink)

Yves R. Simon (1903-1961) was one of this century’s greatest students of the virtue of practical wisdom. Simon’s interest in this virtue ranged from ultimate theoretical and foundational concerns, such as the relationship between practical knowledge and science, to the most concrete and immediate questions regarding the role of practical wisdom in personal and social decision-making. These concerns occupied Simon from his earliest published writing to the final notes and correspondence he was working on at the (...) moment of his untimely death. Throughout his life, practical wisdom and its related philosophical ramifications emerge time and again at critical junctures, throwing into bold relief some of the deeper dimensions of questions as diverse as the nature of democracy, the concept of law, and the theory of work. Practical knowledge constitutes a unifying motif of Simon’s entire encyclopedic effort. This volume reconstructs what would have been Simon’s final sustained writing on practical knowledge. It includes reworking of some previously published material, especially the landmark 1961 essay, "Introduction to the Study of Practical Wisdom," possibly the best treatment of the concept of "command" in recent philosophical writing. But it also reproduces, in a form closely corresponding to Simon’s intention, material drawn from notes and schemata, concerning issues such as the relationship between moral science and wisdom, the nature of practical judgment, and the relationship between practical knowledge and Christian moral philosophy. Also included are previously unpublished letters to Jacques Maritain on the controversy surrounding the theoretical-practical and practico-practical syllogisms, as well as Maritain’s responses. The volume concludes with applications of Simon’s general theory to a critique of the concept of a social science and to the notion of Christian humanism. This volume will appeal to moral philosophers interested in a range of normative issues, as well as social scientists and readers concerned with the philosophical foundations of modern culture. Virtue moralist, in particular, will find in Simon one of the profoundest commentators on this tradition in normative ethics. (shrink)

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.

Roughly speaking, intellectualists contend that practical knowledge is always a matter of having the right kind of propositional knowledge. This article argues that intellectualism faces a serious explanatory challenge when practical knowledge crucially relies on ecological information, i.e. when know-how is scaffolded. More precisely, intellectualists struggle to provide a satisfactory explanation of seeming know-how contrasts in structurally similar cases of scaffolded ability manifestation. In contrast, even if anti-intellectualism is similarly challenged, at least some varieties of (...) anti-intellectualism seemingly hold resources to account for the relevant contrasts. (shrink)

Practical Knowledge Versus Knowledge as Practice The main thesis of this essay is that practice is superior to a "theoretical vs. practical" distinction. In this sense, every sort of knowledge is essentially "practical"; so-called "theoretical" knowledge is an historically overemphasised borderline example of the practical. Based mostly on Wittgenstein's view, I shall gradually refine an opposition between theoretical and practical knowledge by analysing some related dualisms on an active, processual, communicative (...) and applicative concept of knowledge. Then I will provide some arguments as to why knowledge as a practical matter in this sense should be seen as, both logically and temporally, prior to the distinction. (shrink)

When I am asked “What are you doing?”, I answer e.g. “I am making coffee”. Anscombe called the knowledge that this kind of answer involves “practical knowledge”. Practical knowledge is knowledge not involving observation and inference. In this presentation I would like to apply this concept to the collectiveaction of many persons. Given that we are playing soccer if someone comes here and asks “What are you doing now?”, we can answer immediately “We are (...) playing soccer”. I would like to claim that the above answer “We are playing soccer” is ‘our’ knowledge of ‘our’ intentional action and the subject of this intention is ‘we’ and there is a collective intention and the subject of knowledge of this intentional action is also ‘we’ and this is collective knowledge, i.e. common knowledge. We anticipate the following objection against this claim: Who utters “We are playing soccer” is an individual and who answers is not “we” but an individual person and she is describing “our” action. I reply to this objection. Furthermore I consider the background knowledge of ‘our’ practical knowledge and try to extend the concept of ‘practical knowledge’. (shrink)

Several fields of research associated with the history of the early modern Iberian world have experienced a significant boost in recent decades: Iberian science as it relates to the Atlantic world, the history of European colonial empires, and the study of knowledge production in Latin American cultures. This expansion has coincided with a renewed interest of historians of the early modern period in practical knowledge and artisanal cultures. This paper presents an updated historiographic review of both lines (...) of research as well as of their close interconnections. In addition, it offers a re-interpretation of Iberian imperial science in the context of the European maritime expansion through the lens of artisanal epistemology. (shrink)

What does it take for a group of people to know how to do something? An account of collective practical knowledge ought to be compatible with the linguistic evidence about the semantics for collective knowledge-how ascriptions, be able to explain the practicality of collective knowledge, be able to explain both the connection between individual and collective know-how and the possibility of a group knowing how to do something none of its members know, and be applicable to (...) a suitably wide range of groups. In this paper I develop a view which can meet all of these desiderata, which combines a Fragmented account of collective knowledge (Habgood-Coote, 2019a), with the view that practical knowledge is an Interrogative Capacity (Habgood-Coote, 2019b). (shrink)

Education aims at more than supplying learners with information, or knowledge of facts. Even when the transmission of information is at stake, abilities relevant to using that information are among the things that teachers aim, or ought to aim, to inculcate. We may think that abilities for critical reflection on knowledge, and critical thinking more generally, are central to what teachers should cultivate in their students. Moreover, we may hope that students acquire not merely the ability to (e.g.) (...) think critically, but the propensity or habit of doing so. We hope that critical thinking will be something they *do* do, not something they merely *can* do; that they will become, not merely capable of inquiry, but inquisitive; and so on. If education aims at more than the inculcation of propositional knowledge, are these other aims non-cognitive, or non-epistemic? This essay aims to make progress on this question by critically examining Gilbert Ryle's conceptions of skill and habit. (shrink)

Argues that we know without observation or inference at least some of what we are doing intentionally and that this possibility must be explained in terms of knowledge-how. It is a consequence of the argument that knowing how to do something cannot be identified with knowledge of a proposition.

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.

Ryle’s account of practical knowing is much controverted. The paper seeks to place present disputations in a larger context and draw attention to the connection between Ryle’s preoccupations and Aristotle’s account of practical reason, practical intelligence, and the way in which human beings enter into the way of being and acting that Aristotle denominates ethos . Considering matters in this framework, the author finds inconclusive the arguments that Stanley and Williamson offer for seeing knowing how to as (...) a special case of knowing that. The paper then explores certain implications of the author’s position for the philosophy of mind and the grammatical analysis of constructions involving ‘know how to’. It ends with a neo-Rylean remark about Aristotelian nous. (shrink)

In this paper I examine the relation between intentional action and morality from the perspective of practical epistemology. In other words I study the relation between Elizabeth Anscombe's knowledge of one’s own intentional actions (knowledge in action) and Iris Murdoch's knowledge of what is good to do or what one ought to do in particular circumstances (knowledge in the circumstances). If practical knowledge in the former sense (knowledge in action) and practical (...) knowledge in the latter sense (knowledge in the circumstances) turn out to constitute exercises of one and the same capacity for knowledge, as I will argue they do, this will give us strong reason to believe that what is known in the two cases (i.e. intentional action and the moral fabric of the world) is in some sense the same. In examining the relation between practical knowledge of one’s own intentional actions and practical knowledge of what is good to do I draw from two traditions of thought on practical epistemology. The first is the tradition of Anscombe’s conception of knowledge in action and the second is the tradition of Murdoch’s conception of knowledge in the circumstances. What is striking about these traditions is that they tend to understand practical knowledge by reference to the possible involvement therein of perception. Thus Anscombe claims in her Intention[1] that knowledge in action is specified as knowledge without observation; a claim to the effect that the epistemological status of knowledge in action is determined by reference to the lack of a certain sort of involvement therein of perception. And Iris Murdoch in her Sovereignty of the Good[2] proposes that what makes knowledge in the circumstances knowledge is a form of sensitivity to particular features or aspects of the circumstances in which the agent finds herself. Thus, for Murdoch, knowledge in the circumstances owes its status as knowledge to the capacity of the agent to perceive what she ought to do in particular circumstances. In this paper I will argue that both of these forms of knowledge are instances of the exercise of one and the same capacity for knowledge. But the question now arises. How can we both claim that the two forms of practical knowledge are instances of the exercise of one and the same capacity for knowledge and that perception plays such a diverse role in their epistemological grounding? In the main body of this paper I will show how to interpret the Murdochian and the Anscombean claims so as to provide the materials with which we can answer this question. If the argument of this paper works, it will transpire that both of these forms of knowledge are instances of the exercise of our capacity for self-knowledge. This account of practical knowledge opens the way for understanding intentional action and the moral fabric of the world as knowable as the self. And it is thus that what is known in the two forms of knowing (i.e. intentional action and the moral fabric of the world) is in some sense the same. [1] Anscombe, 1957. [2] Murdoch, 1970. (shrink)

One of the main challenges in the philosophy of language is determining the form of knowledge of the rules of language. Michael Dummett has put forth the view that knowledge of the rules of language is a kind of implicit knowledge; some philosophers have mistakenly conceived of this type of knowledge as a kind of knowledge-that . In a recent paper in this journal, Patricia Hanna argues against Dummett’s knowledge-that view and proposes instead a (...) knowledge-how view in which knowledge of the rules of language is a kind of practical knowledge, like an agent’s non-propositional knowledge of counting. In this paper I argue, first, that Hanna misunderstands Dummett’s conception of knowledge of linguistic rules, and, second, that Dummett’s considerations of practical knowledge of language pose a problem for Hanna’s knowledge-how view. At the end of the paper, I briefly sketch an account of practical knowledge of language that meets the requirements set by Dummett. (shrink)

Moral realism faces two worries: How can we have knowledge of moral norms if they are independent of us, and why should we care about them if they are independent of rational activities they govern? Kantian constitutivism tackles both worries simultaneously by claiming that practical norms are constitutive principles of practical reason. In particular, on Stephen Engstrom’s account, willing involves making a practical judgment. To will well, and thus to have practical knowledge (i.e., (...) class='Hi'>knowledge of what is good), the content of one’s will needs to conform to the formal presuppositions of practical knowledge. Practical norms are thus constitutive of practical knowledge. However, I will argue that the universality principles from which Engstrom derives the formal presuppositions of practical knowledge are reflectively and psychologically unavailable. As a result, they cannot help Kantian constitutivism provide an answer to moral realism's worries. (shrink)

It is largely agreed that if constructivism contributes anything to meta-ethics it is by proposing that we understand ethical objectivity “in terms of a suitably constructed point of view that all can accept” (Rawls 1980/1999: 307). Constructivists defend this “practical” conception of objectivity in contrast to the realist or “ontological” conception of objectivity, understood as an accurate representation of an independent metaphysical order. Because of their objectivist but not realist commitments, Kantian constructivists place their theory “somewhere in the space (...) between realist and relativist accounts of ethics” (O’Neill 1988: 1). Furthermore, they argue that their practical conception of objectivity succeeds in making sense of certain features of morality, such as its categorical authority and its relation to rational agency, which escape rival theories (Korsgaard 1996b, Korsgaard 2003b). To this extent, constructivism claims a privileged place in meta-ethics. The legitimacy of this claim is widely challenged. Precisely because of its practical conception of objectivity, many – including some constructivists — regard constructivism as a first-order normative theory, rather than as a meta-ethical position, hence not on a par with realism. Some critics object that constructivism fails to offer a distinct meta-ethics because it is structurally incomplete and thus must be combined with a fully-fledged meta-ethics (Hussain and Shah 2006); others argue that it tacitly relies on realism (Timmons 2003; Shafer-Landau 2003; Larmore 2008). Thus far, the debate about the prospects of constructivism as a meta-ethical theory has been driven by the conviction that the case for or against constructivism depends on its ontological commitments. In this chapter, I propose a change in perspective. My aim is to defend constructivism as an objectivist account of practical knowledge. Its defining feature is the claim that practical knowledge is knowledge by principles. Its task is to establish a constitutive relation between knowledge of oneself as a practical subject and knowledge about what one ought to do. By focusing on the issue of practical knowledge I hope to show that the difficulty in situating Kantian constructivism firmly on the meta-ethical map, along with other meta-ethical theories, reflects ambiguities and oscillations about the practical significance of ethics. Even though the term is ambiguous, I retain the qualification “Kantian” for the constructivist theory I outline, and for two reasons. First, while the theory I outline differs from current agnostic or anti-realist variants, it is closer to its origins, since Kant treats practical reason as a cognitive capacity and takes moral judgments to be objective moral cognitions, which importantly differ from other sorts of rational cognitions because they bind us in the first person. Practical cognitions are common knowledge because they are such that all subjects endowed with rationality can arrive at them by reasoning and find them authoritative. Thus understood, Kantian constructivism carves a distinct logical space in the meta-ethical debate that other sorts of constructivism fail to identify. This is the second reason for keeping the qualification “Kantian”. On this formulation, constructivism is antagonistic to non-cognitivist theories denying that moral judgments have cognitive contents, because they deny that there is something to be known; but it is also a rival to cognitivist theories denying that knowledge can be practical in itself. How constructivism differs over the realist theories of practical reason is the least understood aspect of this debate. This essay aims to make the case that practical reason is both discursive and emotional. In contrast to foundational and anti-realist accounts of practical reasoning, it attempts to show that the moral feeling of respect plays a cognitive but non-evidential role in the account of the cognitive and practical powers of reason. The argument proceeds as follows. In section 1, I consider some prominent constructivist arguments against the model of applied knowledge and show that they are driven by non-cognitivist assumptions about the practicality of ethics and the legitimacy of epistemological claims. In section 2, I argue that these arguments do not succeed in disposing of the idea of practical knowledge as incoherent, because they trade on an ambiguity regarding the proper object of practical knowledge. To solve this ambiguity, I turn to Anscombe’s contrast between “practical” and “speculative” knowledge as models for understanding action. I thus suggest that Anscombe’s account of practical knowledge as knowledge of oneself as an agent is an important resource for Kantian constructivism. This finding prompts us to reset the current dispute about the ontological and epistemological commitments of Kantian constructivism, as illustrated in section 3. While constructivism does not postulate any moral ontology prior to reasoning, it attributes to reasoning the cognitive powers to establish a distinctive relation between the agent and her action. The task of sections 4-7 is to account for the distinctive features of Kantian constructivism understood as an objectivist account of practical knowledge. In section 4, I argue that in order for reasoning to accomplish its normative tasks, it should be conceived as a self-legislating activity. I respond to some objections to the idea of self-legislation as the form of rational willing by offering a dialogical view of practical reason. In section 5, I propose a non-standard interpretation of Kant’s argument of “the fact of reason” to show that the constructivist account of self-legislation does not build on realism about value, as its detractors claim. The “basis of construction” is the subjective experience of respect for the self-legislative capacity itself. This moral feeling conveys our awareness of rational agency and shows our responsiveness to the demands of practical reason. It is an emotional mode of practical knowledge of oneself as an agent (in the sense specified in section 2), but not as a mode of moral discernment. In section 6, I show how practical knowledge of oneself as an agent relates to practical knowledge about what one ought to do. I thus account for the relation between respect as emotional moral consciousness and respect as a deliberative constraint. Finally, in section 7, I reply to the objection of subjectivism. I explain how the complex sort of objectivity that Kantian constructivism affords is at the same time more ambitious and more modest than is generally assumed. (shrink)

According to G.E.M. Anscombe, an agent’s knowledge of his own intentional actions differs from his knowledge of his unintended behaviors as well as the knowledge others can have of what he intentionally does, in being secured “without observation”. I begin by posing a problem for any conception of this theory according to which non-observational knowledge must be independent of sense-perception, and criticize several recent attempts to get around the problem. Having done this, I develop an alternative (...) account of non-observational knowledge according to which its special character consists in the particular causal role of an agent’s self-awareness in bringing his intentional actions about. (shrink)

Abstract An important strand of theories of practice stress that individuals' practical knowledge, i.e., their ability to act in appropriate and/or effective ways, is mainly tacit. This means that the social scientist cannot find out about this knowledge by simply asking the individuals she studies to articulate how it is appropriate and/or effective to act in various circumstances. In this paper, I pursue the proposal that the method of participant observation may be used to find out about (...) individuals' practical knowledge. Surprisingly, the literature does not contain any systematic and comprehensive discussion of this suggestion. I distinguish and exemplify four types of observation that are indicative of individuals' practical knowledge. The observations may serve as a basis for the social scientist's formulations of this knowledge. Further, I point to two main ways in which things may go wrong when the social scientist uses participant observation to find out about individuals' practical knowledge. I argue that the social scientist can make reasonably sure to avoid these two potential difficulties. Accordingly, I conclude that these difficulties do not undermine the effectiveness of the method. In this sense, social scientists are right to use the method of participant observation to find out about individuals' practical knowledge. (shrink)

Stanley and Williamson :411–444, 2001) argue for intellectualism—the thesis that knowing how is a type of knowing that—in part by defending a thesis about the semantics of English ascriptions of knowing how. But ascriptions of practical knowledge seem to exhibit significant crosslinguistic variation. This observation has been invoked to argue that S&W’s analysis reflects a quirk of English rather than a general feature of the concept of knowledge. I argue that the type of argument employed by both (...) S&W and their critics presupposes that the categories of denotational semantics correspond to those of the theory of mental content. But the relation between the semantic theory and the theory of content is more complex than this. Specifically, a closer look at ascriptions of practical knowledge and other obligatory control constructions in various languages shows that semantic theory needs distinctions that are redundant from the perspective of the theory of content, and that important distinctions in the theory of content may fail to correspond to any distinctions in semantic theory. It follows that we may not be able to read off as much about mental states as S&W and their critics try to from the structure of their ascriptions. (shrink)

Kant developed a distinctive method of philosophical argumentation, the method of transcendental argumentation, which continues to have contemporary philosophical promise. Yet there is considerable disagreement among Kant's interpreters concerning the aim of transcendental arguments. On ambitious interpretations, transcendental arguments aim to establish certain necessary features of the world from the conditions of our thinking about or experiencing the world; they are world-directed. On modest interpretations, transcendental arguments aim to show that certain beliefs have a special status that renders them invulnerable (...) to skeptical doubts; they are belief-directed. This paper brings Kierkegaard's thesis of the “subjectivity of truth” to bear on these questions concerning the aim of transcendental arguments. I focus on Kant's argument for the postulate of God's existence in his Critique of Practical Reason and show that Kierkegaard's thesis of the subjectivity of truth can help us construe the argument as both belief and world directed. Yet I also argue that Kierkegaard's thesis of the subjectivity of truth can help us understand the source of our dissatisfaction with Kant's transcendental arguments: It can help us understand that dissatisfaction as an expression of what Stanley Cavell calls the “cover of skepticism,” the conversion of metaphysical finitude into intellectual lack. (shrink)

In this chapter, I compare and contrast Kant’s and Sidgwick’s arguments in defense of moral cognition as objective practical knowledge. Kant focuses on practical truths in terms of practical laws governing the mind in action, while Sidgwick is concerned with practical truths about action. I argue that this is a crucial difference in the understanding of practical knowledge, which is matched by a different understanding of moral phenomenology and of the significance of subjective (...) experience in accounting for the authority of moral obligations. Key to these differences is a more fundamental divergence regarding the nature of reflection, its dynamics, and its impact on agency. (shrink)

Speakers of a natural language regularly form justified beliefs about what others are saying when they utter sentences of the language. What accounts for these justified beliefs? At one level, we already have a plausible answer: there is a perfectly good ordinary sense in which users of a language know what its sentences mean, and it is very plausible that the hearer’s knowledge of the meaning of S helps explain her justification for her belief about what is said by (...) an utterance of S. But what exactly does our knowledge of sentence meanings consist in? In this essay I advance and defend the view that we know the meanings of sentences in virtue of having a certain distinctive kind of know-how that I call inferential practical knowledge. I argue that this view provides the best explanation for the justification of our beliefs about what is said. In particular, it provides a better explanation than the more conventional and widely accepted view that we know the meaning of S in virtue of possessing the theoretical knowledge that S has such-and-such meaning. (shrink)

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, both human and non-human agents unreflectively know which actions they should perform under which circumstances. Given these two roles of pratibhā, modern commentators have often claimed that states of pratibhā, as understood by Bhartṛhari, are intuitions. In this article, I will reconstruct Bhartṛhari's view and to explore its consequences, I will argue that, if Bhartṛhari’s theory of pratibhā is right, then a form of human exceptionalism – which makes rationality a unique trait of human beings – becomes difficult to maintain. (shrink)

This paper situates the problem of defeaters in a larger debate about the source of normative authority. It argues in favour of a constructivist account of defeasibility, which appeals to the justificatory role of moral principles. The argument builds upon the critique of two recent attempts to deal with defeasibility: first, a particularist account, which disposes of moral principles on the ground that reasons are holistic; and second, a proceduralist view, which addresses the problem of defeaters by distinguishing between provisional (...) and strictly universal principles. The particularist view fails to establish that moral principles have no epistemological import, but it raises important questions about their role in practical reasoning. The proceduralist view fails to distinguish between reasoning by default and reasoning by principles, but it shows that moral principles have a structural justificatory role. The constructivist view recognizes that the moral valence of normative claims vary across contexts, but denies that this is because of holism about reasons. Rather, it defends defeasibility within a constructivist account of reasoning where universality serves as the matrix of judgment. The constructivist view vindicates the justificatory role of universal moral principles, and makes room for some ordinary sources of defeasibility. (shrink)