Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-dnltx Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-18T20:24:05.498Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Anscombe on ‘Practical Knowledge’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

Richard Moran
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Among the legacies of Elizabeth Anscombe's 1957 monograph Intention are the introduction of the notion of ‘practical knowledge’ into contemporary philosophical discussion of action, and her claim, pursued throughout the book, that an agent's knowledge of what he is doing is characteristically not based on observation. Each idea by itself has its own obscurities, of course, but my focus here will be on the relation between the two ideas, how it is that the discussion of action may lead us to speak of non-observational knowledge at all, and how this notion can be part of the understanding of a kind of ordinary knowledge that we have reason to consider practical rather than speculative. Anscombe mentions several quite different things under the heading of ‘non-observational knowledge’, and she first introduces the notion of the nonobservational for purely dialectical purposes, associated with the task of setting out the field she wants to investigate, in a way that avoids begging the very questions she means to raise. She needs a way of distinguishing the class of movements to which a special sense of the question ‘Why?’ applies, but which doesn't itself employ the concepts of ‘being intentional’ or ‘acting for a reason’. Section 8 begins: “What is required is to describe this class without using any notions like ‘intended’ or ‘willed’ or ‘voluntary’ and ‘involuntary’. This can be done as follows: we first point out a particular class of things which are true of a man: namely the class of things which he knows without observation.” (p. 13) She first illustrates this by the example of knowledge of the position of one's limbs, the immediate way one can normally tell, e.g., whether one's knee is bent or not. But examples of this sort are in fact ill suited to shed light on the idea of ‘practical knowledge’, which is the true focus of the idea of the non-observational in the study of action. When we see this we will be better able to see why Anscombe is concerned with the non-observational in the first place, and how this concern is tied to other characteristic Anscombian theses, for instance that an action will be intentional under some descriptions but not others, and that practical knowledge is distinguished from speculative knowledge in being “the cause of what it understands” (p. 87). And we will be able to understand how it is that an agent can be said to know without observation that he is doing something like painting the wall yellow, when this knowledge so patently involves claims about what is happening in the world, matters which it seems could only be known observationally.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 55 , September 2004 , pp. 43 - 68
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2004

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Anscombe, G. E. M., Intention (Cambridge, USA, Harvard, 2000; originally published by Blackwell, Basil, 1957).Google Scholar

2 This difference is often missed, but it is clearly made out in Rosalind Hursthouse's paper ‘Intention’, in Teichmann, Roger, ed., Logic, Cause, and Action (Cambridge, 2000)Google Scholar, where she credits Keith, Donnellan's‘Knowing What I Am Doing’, in The Journal of Philosophy, v. 60, n. 14; 1963.Google Scholar

3 Anscombe's own worry at this point in the text is something different. Her worry at this stage of the argument is that “if there are two ways of knowing here, one of which I call knowledge of one's intentional action and the other of which I call knowledge by observation of what takes place, then must there not be two objects of knowledge? How can one speak of two different knowledges of exactly the same thing?” (p. 51) For now, I simply want to mark this question and leave it aside, since it is not clear just what kind of difficulty this is. For one thing, the position and movement of one's limbs has already been mentioned as something that can be known in two very different ways, without this raising issues of two different objects of knowledge. (This difficulty is also noted by Hursthouse, op. cit. p. 97.) Later we will consider a different version of Anscombe's question: If another person can often be said simply to see what I am doing, how can I know the very same thing without observation?

4 “I think that it is the difficulty of this question that has led some people to say that what one knows as intentional action is only the intention, or possibly also the bodily movement; and that the rest is known by observation to be the result, which was also willed in the intention. But that is a mad account; for the only sense I can give to ‘willing’ is that in which I might stare at something and will it to move.” (51–2)

5 For this reason, I think that the issues she goes on to take up at this point in the text do not directly address this question. For it is directly after the discussion of the shopping list and the difference in ‘direction of fit’ that she introduces the idea of ‘practical knowledge’ as a corrective to the modern “incorrigibly contemplative conception of knowledge.” (p. 57) But we should recall at this point that the shopping list and the analogy with commands seems most directly relevant to our category ( C ), the case of ‘Practical Foreknowledge’, and not to the case of knowledge of what I am currently doing, where this is said to include non-observational awareness of some happening beyond my immediate physical movements, our category ( B ). And yet it is these problems associated with the examples of opening the window and writing with one's eyes closed that Anscombe takes herself to be pursuing at this point in the text.

For criticism of Anscombe on Practical Foreknowledge, see Velleman, D., Practical Reflection (Princeton, 1989), especially pp. 18–22 and 102–5;Google Scholar and for a response to Velleman's account see Wilson, George, ‘Proximal Practical Foresight,’ Philosophical Studies 99 (2000), 3–19.Google Scholar

6 “Say I go over to the window to open it. Someone who hears me moving calls out: What are you doing making that noise? I reply ‘Opening the window’. I have called such a statement knowledge all along; and precisely because in such a case what I say is true—I do open the window; and that means that the window is getting opened by the movements of the body out of whose mouth those words come.” (p. 51, emphasis added)

7 “The only description that I clearly know of what I am doing may be of something that is at a distance from me. It is not the case that I clearly know the movements I make, and the intention is just a result which I calculate and hope will follow on these movements.” (p. 53)

8 This section in particular has benefited from some comments from Helen Steward.

9 P. 15, Practical Reflection (Princeton, 1989)Google ScholarPubMed

10 Early in Intention Anscombe briefly connects the non-observational character of practical knowledge, with the role of such knowledge in selecting from all the extensionally true descriptions of a person at a given moment: “Well, if you want to say at least some true things about a man's intentions, you will have a strong chance of success if you mention what he actually did or is doing. […] I am referring to the sort of things you would say in a law court of you were a witness and were asked what a man was doing when you saw him. That is to say in a very large number of cases, your selection from the immense variety of true statements about him which you might make would coincide with what he could say he was doing, perhaps even without reflection, certainly without adverting to observation.” (p. 8)

The person in Velleman's situation has available to him “the immense variety of true statements” about himself and his situation, but lacks what would enable him to say what he is doing.

11 I have been helped here by some remarks of David Velleman, although my way of putting this point may not be in line with his.

12 See, for instance, Burge, Tyler, ‘Content Preservation’, Philosophical Review 102, No. 4 (October 1993).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13 This is not to say that nothing a person does can fall outside of what he intended, that accidents are not possible, or that we don't sometimes respond to accidents by saying “Look what you've donel“

14 For all I've said here, it may be that such non-observational awareness of the position of one's limbs is a necessary condition for ordinary agency. What I'm concerned to argue here is that such awareness does not play any constituting role for one's limbs being in a certain position.

15 Earlier versions of this paper were delivered at the University of Edinburgh at the conference on ‘The Will in Moral Psychology’ in July 2002, and at the Royal Institute of Philosophy conference on ‘Agency and Action’ held at Oxford University in September 2002, and I'm grateful to the audiences on both those occasions. In the early stages of writing I had especially encouraging conversations with Martin Stone and Ed Minar. I also benefitted from the comments of Luca Ferrero, Richard Holton, Jennifer Hornsby, Adam Leite, Lucy O'Brien, Michael Smith, David Velleman, Bernard Williams, and George Wilson. Special thanks to the editors of this volume for comments at the final stages.