Practical Knowledge and Luminosity

Mind ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 129 (516) ◽  
pp. 1237-1267 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juan S Piñeros Glasscock
Keyword(s):  
Practical Knowledge ◽  
Intentional Action ◽  
Donald Davidson ◽  
Perceptual Knowledge ◽  
Necessary Connections ◽  
Practical Nature

Abstract 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 (e.g. basic actions, intentions, attempts, etc.) 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.

scholarly journals Davidson on Practical Knowledge

2015 ◽  
Vol 3 (9) ◽  
Author(s):  
David Hunter
Keyword(s):  
Early Treatment ◽  
Practical Knowledge ◽  
Intentional Action ◽  
Donald Davidson ◽  
Careful Study ◽  
Primary Reason ◽  
Standard Interpretation ◽  
General Belief

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.  <br /><p> </p>

scholarly journals Anscombe and Davidson on Practical Knowledge. A Reply to Hunter

2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (6) ◽  
Author(s):  
Olav Gjelsvik
Keyword(s):  
Practical Knowledge ◽  
Intentional Action ◽  
Donald Davidson ◽  
Careful Consideration ◽  
Observational Knowledge

David Hunter has recently argued (in this journal) that Donald Davidson and Elizabeth Anscombe were in basic agreement about practical knowledge. In this reply, it is my contention that Hunter’s fascinating claim may not be satisfactorily warranted. To throw light on why, a more careful consideration of the role of the notion of practical knowledge in Anscombe’s approach to intentional action is undertaken. The result indicates a possible need to distinguish between what is called ‘practical knowledge’ and ‘(non-observational) knowledge of what one is doing’, and shows that Hunter’s claim concerning the closeness of Anscombe to Davidson only has plausibility for knowledge of what one is doing. Contrary to an interesting suggestion by Hunter, the paper argues that it is hard to see how Davidson’s position can benefit substantially from making use of the notion of knowledge of what one is doing.

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karin Nisenbaum
Keyword(s):  
Practical Knowledge ◽  
Intentional Action ◽  
German Idealism ◽  
Human Action ◽  
The World ◽  
Fundamental Tension

The concluding chapter draws on the story of Rosenzweig’s near conversion to Christianity and return to Judaism to explain why, for Kant and his heirs, what is at issue in reason’s conflict with itself is our ability to affirm both the value of the world and of human action in the world. The chapter explains why Rosenzweig came to view the conflict of reason as the manifestation of a more fundamental tension between one’s selfhood and one’s worldliness, which could only be dissolved by understanding human action in the world as the means by which God is both cognized and partly realized. To make Rosenzweig’s ideas more accessible, the chapter compares them with contemporary interpretations of Kant’s views on the nature of practical knowledge and (intentional) action. It also shows how the book’s take on the issues that shaped the contours of post-Kantian German Idealism can help us see that the conflict of reason can be regarded as the underlying concern that recent competing interpretations of this period share.

scholarly journals Reconciling Practical Knowledge with Self-Deception

Mind ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 128 (512) ◽  
pp. 1205-1225 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Marcus
Keyword(s):  
Practical Knowledge ◽  
Intentional Action ◽  
The Self ◽  
Correct Description ◽  
Knowing That ◽  
Do So

Abstract 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 (at least in a straightforward sense) 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 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.

Practical Knowledge

Philosophy ◽  
2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Hunter
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Practical Reasoning ◽  
Practical Knowledge ◽  
Intentional Action ◽  
Theory Of Action ◽  
Bodily Sensation ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Philosophical Questions

A person typically knows what she is doing when she does something intentionally, and she usually knows this without having to observe herself. This so-called practical knowledge raises many philosophical questions. Does intentional action require practical knowledge and, if so, what is the strength of this requirement? What is it about intentional action that requires it, since a person can be doing something unintentionally without knowing about it? What is the source or ground of this knowledge? How is it related to observation, bodily sensation, and proprioception? How is a person’s practical knowledge connected to the reasons she has for acting and to practical reasoning more generally? In what sense, if any, is a person’s practical knowledge the “cause” of what it understands, as Anscombe famously claimed? While the notion of practical knowledge was central to the theory of action in the middle decades of the 20th century, it lost this place in the 1960s. But the last ten years has seen a renewed interest in the notion. This article aims to chart both the early debates and the recent discussions of practical knowledge. While it organizes the literature according to certain questions and topics, other ways to organize the literature are possible and nearly all of the texts would fit equally well under several headings.

scholarly journals Practical Knowledge and Acting Together

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Olle Blomberg
Keyword(s):  
General Theory ◽  
Joint Action ◽  
Practical Knowledge ◽  
Special Kind ◽  
Intentional Action ◽  
Philosophical View ◽  
Observational Knowledge

This chapter explores a problem that joint action raises for an influential philosophical view of the nature of intentional action. According to this view, an agent is intentionally -ing if and only if she has a special kind of practical and non-observational knowledge that she is -ing. It is here argued, however, that this view faces serious problems when extended to make sense of the possibility of an intentional action performed by several agents together. Since a general theory of intentional action should be applicable to both singular and joint intentional action, this suggests that practical and non-observational knowledge is not essential to intentional action as such.

scholarly journals Deviant Formal Causation

2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah K. Paul
Keyword(s):  
Side Effects ◽  
Practical Knowledge ◽  
Intentional Action ◽  
Causal Theory ◽  
Theory Of Action ◽  
Causal Theory Of Action ◽  
Causal Chains ◽  
The Right ◽  
Formal Causation

What is the role of practical thought in determining the intentional action that is performed? Donald Davidson’s influential answer to this question is that thought plays an efficient-causal role: intentional actions are those events that have the correct causal pedigree in the agent's beliefs and desires. But the Causal Theory of Action has always been plagued with the problem of “deviant causal chains,” in which the right action is caused by the right mental state but in the wrong way. This paper addresses an alternative approach to understanding intentional action inspired by G.E.M. Anscombe, interpreting that view as casting practical thought in the role of formal rather than efficient cause of action and thereby avoiding the problem of deviant (efficient) causal chains. Specifically, on the neo-Anscombean view, it is the agent’s “practical knowledge” – non-observational, non-inferential knowledge of what one is doing – that confers the form of intentional action on an event and is the contribution of thought to determining what is intentionally done. This paper argues that the Anscombean view is subject to its own problematic type of deviance: deviant formal causation. What we know non-observationally about what we are doing often includes more than what we intend to be doing; we also know that we are bringing about the foreseen side effects of acting in the intended way. It is argued that the neo-Anscombean view faces difficulty in excluding the expected side effects from the specification of what is intentionally done, whereas the Causal Theory has no such difficulty. Thus, the discussion amounts to an argument in favor of the Causal Theory of Action.

The Spatial and Temporal Constitution of Social Action: A Critical Reading of Giddens

1985 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 407-424 ◽  
Author(s):  
M Storper
Keyword(s):  
Social Theory ◽  
Social Action ◽  
Practical Knowledge ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Intentional Action ◽  
Social Practices ◽  
Discursive Strategies ◽  
Material Resources ◽  
Time Space ◽  
Inconsistent Theories

A number of social theorists have attempted to elaborate poststructuralist analytics that capture the dialectics of social structure and human agency. Giddens proposes a ‘general theory’, centered on the notion of ‘structuration’. He is particularly important to geography because he suggests that the spatiality of social practices belongs at the center of social theory and historical analysis. Systems of social practices are defined by their time–space characteristics. There are problems in the corpus of Giddens's work that require attention, however, before such a theory can be fully viable. These include: Giddens's derogation of intentional action in favor of practical knowledge; his notion that structure is ‘instantiated’; his concept of power; his treatment of material resources; and his lack of attention to discursive strategies. From an examination of these areas of Giddens's work, it can be seen that he advances several, inconsistent, theories of social change. In a reinvigorated theoretical human geography, based on the analysis of interaction in time and space, these problem areas must be tackled.

Practical Knowledge

2019 ◽  
pp. 155-200
Author(s):  
John Schwenkler
Keyword(s):  
Practical Knowledge ◽  
Intentional Action ◽  
Thomas Aquinas ◽  
Efficient Cause ◽  
The World ◽  
Self Knowledge ◽  
Strict Requirement ◽  
Observational Knowledge

This chapter discusses the argument of Sections 44-48 of G.E.M. Anscombe’s Intention. It begins by situating her appeal to the concept of practical knowledge in relation to the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas. Following this, the chapter shows how several elements in Aquinas’ account are drawn on by Anscombe in her argument that an agent’s self-knowledge of her act is “the cause of what it understands”. It is argued that Anscombe meant to characterize an agent’s practical knowledge as both formal and efficient cause of its object. Finally, the chapter considers whether Anscombe succeeds in defending her thesis that intentional action is necessarily known without observation. Here it is argued, first, that knowledge of one’s act is not a strict requirement of doing something intentionally, and second, that the role of observation in an agent’s self-knowledge is different from that of evidence in observational knowledge of the world.

The Unity of Action

2019 ◽  
pp. 49-92
Author(s):  
John Schwenkler
Keyword(s):  
Intentional Action ◽  
Donald Davidson ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Difference ◽  
The Way

This chapter discusses the argument of Sections 19-27 of G.E.M. Anscombe’s Intention. It begins by considering Anscombe’s arguments that action is not intentional because of an “extra feature” of the agent, and that the concept of intentional action, as something to which a special sense of “Why?” can be given application, depends on the possibility of expressing intention for the future and describing one’s further intentions in acting. The chapter then considers Anscombe’s treatment of these last two concepts, showing how they yield a rich account of action as a teleological unity. Consideration is paid to the difference between Anscombe’s account of the unity of action and that of Donald Davidson. Finally, Anscombe’s account of the distinction between intention and foresight is discussed, with particular attention to the way that foreseen consequences stand in a different relation of dependency to an action than things that a person brings about intentionally.

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