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The Shape of Agency: Control, Action, Skill, Knowledge OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 03/11/20, SPi The Shape of Agency OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 03/11/20, SPi OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 03/11/20, SPi The Shape of Agency Control, Action, Skill, Knowledge JOSHUA SHEPHERD 1 OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 03/11/20, SPi 1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Joshua Shepherd 2021 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2021 Impression: 1 Some rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, for commercial purposes, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. This is an open access publication, available online and distributed under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution – Non Commercial – No Derivatives 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), a copy of which is available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of this licence should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2020937525 ISBN 978–0–19–886641–1 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198866411.001.0001 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A. Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work. OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 03/11/20, SPi This book is dedicated to Kelly, Zooey, and Finn. OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 03/11/20, SPi OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 03/11/20, SPi Table of Contents Acknowledgements xi 1. Introduction 1 2. Control’s Possession 6 2.1 Introduction 6 2.2 Control’s Exercise 7 2.3 Control’s Possession 15 2.3.1 Control with Respect to a Goal 18 2.3.2 Basic Levels of Control and Multiple Sets of Circumstances 19 2.4 Underlying Metaphysics 21 2.4.1 Ability 22 2.4.2 Dispositions and Explanation 24 2.5 Conclusion 28 3. Non-deviant Causation 30 3.1 Introduction 30 3.2 Non-deviant Causation Explained 32 3.3 An Alternative: Wu on Control and Non-deviance 34 3.4 Questions, Objections, and Replies 39 3.4.1 Cases of Easy Success 39 3.4.2 Cases of Rare Success 40 3.4.3 Cases of Strange Success 40 3.4.4 Cases of Partial Deviance 41 3.5 A Further Criticism 41 3.6 A Still Further Criticism 44 3.7 Conclusion 45 4. Varietals of Control’s Exercise 46 4.1 Control’s Exercise 46 4.1.1 A Difference with Bishop 46 4.1.2 Exercising Control over Omissions? 47 4.2 Voluntary Control 48 4.3 Direct and Indirect Control 52 4.4 What Is “up to” an Agent 54 4.5 Conclusion 56 OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 03/11/20, SPi viii Table of Contents 5. Intentional Action 57 5.1 Introduction 57 5.2 Intentional Action: Mele and Moser 57 5.3 Intentional Action 63 5.4 The Account Paraphrased 65 5.5 Ancillary Issues 65 5.5.1 Side-effects 65 5.5.2 The Simple View and the Single Phenomenon View 66 5.5.3 Senseless Movements 68 5.5.4 Belief and Knowledge 69 5.5.4.1 Explaining Intentional Success 75 5.6 A Problematic Case (Systematic Gettierization) 77 5.6.1 Sosa’s Response and my Own 78 5.7 Causalism and Reductionism 81 5.7.1 Basic Action and Intentionality 83 5.7.2 Action First 89 5.8 Conclusion 91 6. The Shape of Agency 92 6.1 Introduction 92 6.2 Standards, Coherence, and Success 92 6.3 Psychological Agency 95 6.4 Higher Animal Agency 101 6.5 Conclusion 106 7. Skill 109 7.1 Introduction 109 7.2 Control 112 7.3 Skill at Action 114 7.4 Action Domains 116 7.5 Skill at a Domain 122 7.6 The Gradability of Skill 125 7.7 How Agents Possess Skill: Skill for Free 127 7.8 Skill and Knowledge 129 7.8.1 Pavese’s View 129 7.8.2 Stanley and Williamson’s View 136 7.9 Conclusion 139 8. Knowledgeable Action 140 8.1 Introduction 140 8.2 A Word about the Knowledge State 141 8.3 Knowledge of Action’s Epistemic Features 141 8.4 Intention and its Limitations 144 OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 03/11/20, SPi Table of Contents ix 8.5 Perception and its Limitations 147 8.6 Conscious Awareness and its Limitations 150 8.6.1 Pickard and Bodily Experience 150 8.6.2 Peacocke and Awareness of A-ing 152 8.6.3 My Suggestion and its Limitations 154 8.7 Practical Reasoning in Action 155 8.7.1 The Epistemic Account 159 8.8 Knowledgeable Action 161 8.8.1 The Radical Case 162 8.9 Knowledgeable Action and Related Proposals 162 8.10 Conclusion: Knowledgeable Action and Agentive Excellence 165 9. Conclusion 168 References 173 Index 183 OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 03/11/20, SPi OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 03/11/20, SPi Acknowledgements I had a lot of help in writing this book. For comments, conversation, and inspiration along the way, I want to thank Al Mele, Myrto Mylopoulos, Ellen Fridland, Matt Parrott, Denis Beuhler, Will Davies, Carissa Véliz, Uriah Kriegel, Tim Bayne, Nick Shea, Wayne Wu, and Elisabeth Pacherie. Many thanks to the students in my seminar at Carleton in 2018 for reading an earlier version of this. For listening to earlier versions of this, and mak- ing it better, I want to thank Neil Roughley and his group at Duisberg- Essen, people at the summer mind workshop at Columbia, including John Morrison, Katia Samoilova, and Antonia Peacocke, Thor Grünbaum and many at the University of Copenhagen, Chiara Brozzo, Hong Yu Wong, and many at the University of Tübingen, the whole workshop in the mountains crew—Balaguer, Buckareff, Downes, Grzankowski, Jacobson, Pasnau, Roskies, Strevens, and even McKenna—for conversations and encourage- ment regarding an early version of chapters 7 and 8, Felipe de Brigard, Santiago Amaya, Manuel Vargas, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, and the audi- ence at that Duke workshop, my colleagues at Carleton and also my col- leagues at Universität de Barcelona, so many philosophers in the United Kingdom and Ireland, so many philosophers in Oxford and at the Uehiro Centre, and also the muses atop the Clarendon building. For providing funding at various stages of this thing’s development, I want to thank the European Research Council (Horizon 2020 grant 757698, for the project Rethinking Conscious Agency), and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research’s (CIFAR) program in Mind, Brain, and Consciousness, and the CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar program. For providing space to write, and music, and drinks of various sorts, I want to thank Doña Rosa in Barcelona, the many pubs of Oxford, and The Third in Ottawa. OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 03/11/20, SPi OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 03/11/20, SPi 1 Introduction The agent is the one that does things. There somehow in the midst of all the things that cause the agent to move, you find an agent in turn causing things. You find action. The agent displays activity. Those things that are not agents do nothing. There in the midst of all the things that cause them to move and that they in turn cause, you find . mere happenings, nothing else. No action; all passivity. —Really? Hogweed is not an agent—not in the sense above intended. And yet hog- weed will give you a nasty rash. Hogweed will render your skin extremely sensitive to the sun. You might end up with third degree burns, and scars. Hogweed does things. Come to think of it, what doesn’t do things? Numbers probably. Absences maybe. But lots of things do things. Trees fall. Stars burn. When passing through heavy water, neutrinos leave a kind of trail. When I say the agent is the one that does things—when I engage in this philosopher’s way of talking about agents—I must have a special notion in mind. At its most metaphorical, the notion is of two planes of existence. On one plane are mere happenings, and the things that partake in them. On this plane festers the hogweed, falls the tree, slowly cools the dead star, bombs quietly across space and time the neutrino. On the higher plane are agents. Doing things. But for real. This picture is gnomic. It frustrates. And yet it allures. The history of philosophical reflection on action gives the distinction between activity and passivity different names, and attempts to explain the distinction in differ- ent ways. But philosophers circle the distinction repeatedly (for a nice recent discussion, see Hyman 2015, both chapter 1 and the appendix). Aristotle wants to know the difference between being cut and cutting.
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