A metaphysics for practical knowledge

Frost, Kim

doi:10.1080/00455091.2018.1516972

Cited by 17 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…Anscombe (1975) or Lewis (1979), and others deny that practical knowledge is propositional, e.g. Frost (2019). For the purposes of this paper, I want to remain agnostic on this issue.…”

Section: Kietzmannmentioning

confidence: 99%

Practical knowledge and error in action

Kietzmann

2020

Philos Phenomenol Research

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G.E.M. Anscombe’s account of practical knowledge raises a puzzle for cases of practical error, i.e. cases where, due to a mistake of mine, I am not in fact doing what I mean to be doing. It can seem that in such cases, we must both affirm and deny the presence of practical knowledge. It must be present, because practical error presupposes that there is an intentional action in which the mistake occurs, which in turn presupposes practical knowledge as a formal‐causal condition. At the same time, practical knowledge can’t be present, because I am not doing what I think I am doing, and therefore can’t have knowledge of what I am doing. I discuss and reject various attempts to deal with the problem. The solution I propose and defend against objections relies on applying the Aristotelian‐Thomistic conceptual framework of form and matter to intentional action.

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“…Anscombe (1975) or Lewis (1979), and others deny that practical knowledge is propositional, e.g. Frost (2019). For the purposes of this paper, I want to remain agnostic on this issue.…”

Section: Kietzmannmentioning

confidence: 99%

Practical knowledge and error in action

Kietzmann

2020

Philos Phenomenol Research

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“…Answering this question is not straightforward since, as theorists of practical knowledge are quick to admit, the notion itself is contested, as are interpretations of how Anscombe understood it. 21 Debates are live regarding the sense(s) in which this knowledge has been said to be non-observational (Schwenkler 2015), as well as noninferential (Setiya 2008), how this knowledge relates to perception (Pickard 2004;Grünbaum 2011), whether this knowledge should be construed as a judgment or not (Small 2012;Marcus 2018;Frost 2019;Stout 2019), how this knowledge relates to intention (Falvey 2000;Paul 2009), whether to understand this knowledge's causal role in terms of formal causation (see Moran 2004), or efficient causation, or both (see Schwenkler 2015), whether this knowledge could be understood as a form of knowledge-that, or knowledge-how, or whether it is sui generis (see Frost 2019). Answering this practical knowledge objection in a way that is comprehensive regarding all of these debates threatens to fracture along many of these points.…”

Section: Practical Knowledge and Intentional Actionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…But before we press this perceived advantage, let us briefly consider a development of the framework we oppose that might have something to say. This is due to Frost (2019), who develops his account of practical knowledge in part by considering, side-by-side, a failure and a success. He draws on a well-known passage in Anscombe (2000: 82), in which the agent closes her eyes and writes 'I am a fool' on a blackboard.…”

Section: Practical Knowledge and Intentional Actionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Knowledge, Practical Knowledge, and Intentional Action

Shepherd

Carter

2023

Ergo an Open Access Journal of Philosophy

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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.

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“…Note that, asShepherd and Carter (2021) argue, these cases make trouble forFrost's (2019) view that the control-involving execution of action is a capacity to know particular actions. The basic reason is that, while Rapinoe often intentionally makes penalty kicks, and Rose often intentionally makes 12-foot putts, their success is too risky to attribute knowledge of these actions.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Intentional action and knowledge-centered theories of control

Carter

Shepherd

2023

Philos Stud

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Intentional action is, in some sense, non-accidental, and one common way action theorists have attempted to explain this is with reference to control. The idea, in short, is that intentional action implicates control, and control precludes accidentality. But in virtue of what, exactly, would exercising control over an action suffice to make it non-accidental in whatever sense is required for the action to be intentional? One interesting and prima facie plausible idea that we wish to explore in this paper is that control is non-accidental in virtue of requiring knowledge—either knowledge-that or knowledge-how (e.g., Beddor and Pavese 2021; cf., Setiya 2008; 2012 and Habgood-Coote 2018). We review in detail some key recent work defending such knowledge-centric theories of control, and we show that none of these accounts holds water. We conclude with some discussion about how control opposes the sort of luck intentional action excludes without doing so by requiring knowledge (that- or how).

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A metaphysics for practical knowledge

Cited by 17 publications

References 19 publications

Practical knowledge and error in action

Practical knowledge and error in action

Knowledge, Practical Knowledge, and Intentional Action

Intentional action and knowledge-centered theories of control

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