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Action, Intention and Knowledge

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Action, Intention and Knowledge Action, Intention and Knowledge Lucy Campbell Homerton College, Cambridge June 2015 This dissertation is submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Acknowledgements For financial support throughout my PhD I would like to thank the University of Cambridge, the Cambridge Philosophy Faculty and an anonymous donor without whose generosity this Thesis would almost certainly not have been completed. I would also like to thank my college, Homerton, who have made money available for me to attend conferences and other academic meetings away from Cambridge; this has been a great help. Parts of the work in this Thesis, and their antecedents, have been presented in Oxford, Cambridge and King’s College London, and I am indebted to audiences in each of these places for their time and attention and the helpful discussions which ensued. I would also like to thank the members of a reading group on action which was held in the Cambridge Philosophy Faculty during 2013, and in particular the stalwarts; Arif Ahmed, Jonathan Birch, Ali Boyle, Alexander Greenberg, Jane Heal and Thomas Land. Thanks also go to the King’s College London Philosophy Faculty for preparing me for the PhD, in particular to M.M. McCabe, to Shalom Lappin and to Mark Textor. For some excellent philosophical conversations, both recent and historical, about issues considered in the Thesis but also other interesting things, I thank Maria Alvarez, Luke Brunning, Mike Campbell, Katherine Cecil, Harry Cook, Chris Cowie, Ryan Cox, Tim Crane, Alex Davies, Fee Doherty, Alison Fernandes, Alexander Greenberg, Nathan Hauthaler, Ben Jeffery, John Maier, M.M. McCabe, Rory O’Connell, Nikita Perepelov, Emily Platten, “The Peters” Ridley and Sutton, Lukas Skiba, Henry Tyrrell, Ellisif Wasmuth, Jen Wright and John D. Wright. Chris Cowie, Ryan Cox, Tim Crane, Alison Fernandes, Alexander Greenberg and John Maier deserve particular thanks for reading and commenting on previous incarnations of various parts of the Thesis. I am very lucky to have been supervised from October 2011 by Jane Heal, and from October 2013 by Richard Holton. My meetings with Jane and Richard have been both enjoyable and incredibly useful, and the help they have given me far outstretches what I have been able to indicate in the occasional footnote. Jane in particular, who has supervised me throughout my entire PhD, has given me an extraordinary amount of her time, often meeting me once-weekly for months-long stretches. I am particularly indebted to Jane for keeping me on as a supervisee long after her retirement in 2012. She has read and re-read (and re-re-read) several drafts of each chapter as well as several other pieces, remaining at once encouraging and rigorously critical. And she has been a great help during those times when work wasn’t going so well and I was in low spirits. Her kindness, understanding and patience have been as important to my finishing this Thesis as has her excellent supervision. For friendship, fun and moral support, I would like to thank all of my friends, but especially those, old and new, who I have been lucky enough to have been in contact with not-too-seldom over the past four years; Dan Brigham, Chris Cowie, Julia Felder, Alexander Greenberg, Mynn Khine, M.M. McCabe, Peter Ridley, Jenni Sidey, Lukas Skiba, Henry Tyrrell, Isobel Urquhart, Ellisif Wasmuth and Mike Withey, and amongst those, to Alexander, Chris, Julia, Ellisif and Jenni in particular for so often keeping me company in the pub and occasionally elsewhere. Thanks to my parents for their ongoing support, and most of all to Alexander Greenberg, who has kept me as close to sane as is reasonable to hope for. Table of Contents Introduction …………………………………………………………………………………... i Part One: Motivating Intentionalism …………………………………………………………... 1 Chapter One: Practical Knowledge ……………………………………………………….... 3 Introduction ………………………………………………………………………….. 3 1. Practical Knowledge’s Content ………………………………………………………. 4 2. Practical Knowledge’s Apparent Features …………………………………………….. 6 3. The Special Relationship between Practical Knowledge and Intentional Action ………….. 11 4. Further Remarks on Practical Knowledge …………………………………………….. 15 5. Conclusion ………………………………………………………………………… 18 Chapter Two: Alternatives to Intentionalism ……………………………………………….. 19 Introduction ………………………………………………………………………….. 19 1. Lucy O’Brien’s Consciousness-Based Account ………………………………………... 20 2. Sarah Paul’s Inferentialist Account ………………………………………………….... 32 Concluding Part One ………………………………………………………………………... 41 Part Two: Cognitivist Intentionalism …………………………………………………………. 43 Chapter Three: Cognitivist Intentionalism …………………………………………………. 45 Introduction ………………………………………………………………………….. 45 1. Velleman’s Internalist Cognitivist Intentionalism ……………………………………… 45 2. Setiya’s Externalist Cognitivist Intentionalism ………………………………………… 56 Chapter Four: The Content of Intention …………………………………………………… 63 Introduction …………………………………………………………………………... 63 1. Preliminaries ………………………………………………………………………………. 64 2. An Argument Against Propositionalism ………………………………………………. 68 3. Three Responses and Conclusion …………………………………………………….. 74 Concluding Part Two ………………………………………………………………………… 81 Part Three: A Better Intentionalism …………………………………………………………… 83 Chapter Five: Anscombe’s Non-Cognitivist Intentionalism ………………………………….. 84 Introduction …………………………………………………………………………... 84 1. Intentional Action, Practical Knowledge, ‘Why?’ ………………………………………. 86 2. Merits and Clarifications ……………………………………………………………... 96 3. Three Prima Facie Problems …………………………………………………………... 106 Chapter Six: Non-Propositionalist Intentionalism …………………………………………… 111 Introduction …………………………………………………………………………... 111 1. Non-Propositionalist Intentionalism ………………………………………………….. 114 2. The Why Knowledge? Problem: Clarifications ………………………………………… 120 3. Why Practical Knowledge is Knowledge ………………………………………………… 127 4. Knowledge and Mental Engagement ………………………………………………….. 134 5. Conclusion ………………………………………………………………………….. 141 Conclusion ……………………………………………………………………………………. 143 Bibliography …………………………………………………………………………………... 147 Introduction a. The Thesis to be advanced: Non-Propositionalist Intentionalism This Thesis recommends a way of thinking about the knowledge we have of our own intentional actions or, as I will call it, practical knowledge. On this view, one’s knowledge of what one intentionally does is constituted by the intention involved in doing it, on the condition that the intention is executed. Intentions are understood as differing from beliefs both normatively and semantically. They differ normatively in that they set standards on how things are to go or to be going, whereas beliefs have standards set for them by how things are, were or will be. And they differ semantically because whereas beliefs are propositional attitudes, intentions are not, or at least are not fundamentally so. I call this view Non-Propositionalist Intentionalism about Practical Knowledge, or Non- Propositionalist Intentionalism – NPI – for short. The ‘Intentionalism’ part of the name indicates a view on which practical knowledge is constituted by intention, and the Non- Propositionalist part indicates that intentions are here understood as – unlike beliefs – not propositional attitudes. NPI is a response to the problems I find in various attempts to understand how practical knowledge could be constituted by a true belief held in epistemically favourable circumstances, and is a development of the view I find in Anscombe’s Intention. In addition to its key claim - that practical knowledge is constituted by intentions, on the condition that they are executed - NPI involves two other commitments, one epistemological and one action-theoretic. The first is a commitment to understanding knowledge per se as neutral between its practical and theoretical manifestations, as a certain kind of mental engagement with a fact; a kind apt to underwrite certain specifically epistemic capacities, such as the capacity to express and to make inferences from what one knows. Possessing these capacities can be a matter of having a belief which is true and held in epistemically favourable circumstances, but it can also be a matter of having an intention which is being or will be executed. Knowledge manifested in the first way is ‘theoretical’ and knowledge manifested in the second way is ‘practical’. The second commitment is to a non-reductive conception of the relationship between the phenomena (concepts) of practical knowledge, intentional action and intention-execution. These three phenomena are understood as three distinct yet essentially related facets of a single underlying phenomenon. The concepts which pick out each of these three facets are to be conceptually elucidated in terms of one another. Thinking of someone as φ-ing intentionally, as executing their intention to φ, or as having practical knowledge that they are φ-ing is thinking of them as instantiating a single phenomenon under three different aspects. I argue that NPI is the best way to jointly meet several constraints on a good account of practical knowledge, which will be introduced and explained throughout the Thesis. i b. The structure of the discussion The Thesis falls into three parts; NPI is introduced and defended in Part Three. Let me sketch the argumentative route which will take us there. Part One introduces our target phenomenon - practical knowledge - and motivates accepting some version of Intentionalism; the view that practical knowledge is somehow constituted by the agent’s intention. In Chapter One practical knowledge
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