Practical Knowledge and Luminosity

Glasscock, Juan S. Piñeros

doi:10.1093/mind/fzz056

Cited by 18 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 49 publications

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“…But this is disputed and I do not take a stand on this here (e.g. Piñeros‐Glasscock, 2020; Shepherd & Carter, 2023; Vekony et al., 2021).…”

Section: The Special Epistemic Relationship Between An Agent and Her ...mentioning

confidence: 98%

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Practical understanding

O'Brien

2023

Philosophical Issues

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Well‐functioning agents ordinarily have an excellent epistemic relationship to their intentional actions. This phenomenon is often characterized as knowledge of what one is doing and labeled “practical knowledge”. But when we examine it carefully, it seems to require a particular kind of understanding ‐ understanding of the normative structure of one's action. Three lines of argument are offered to support this Necessity of Understanding thesis. The first appeals to the nature of intentional action and the second to our everyday reasons explanation of action. The final line of argument draws on a practical amnesia case in which an agent forgets her overall goal while acting. Implications of the Necessity of Understanding thesis for the widely endorsed non‐observational view of practical knowledge are briefly discussed. It is argued that support for the non‐observational view is weaker than has been appreciated.

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“…But this is disputed and I do not take a stand on this here (e.g. Piñeros‐Glasscock, 2020; Shepherd & Carter, 2023; Vekony et al., 2021).…”

Section: The Special Epistemic Relationship Between An Agent and Her ...mentioning

confidence: 98%

“…(e.g. Piñeros Glasscock, 2020;Beddor & Pavese, 2022;Shepherd & Carter, 2023). Clearly, there is a lot of prominent literature that takes knowledge of what one is doing as at least necessary for SER.…”

Section: The Special Epistemic Relationship Between An Agent and Her ...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Practical understanding

O'Brien

2023

Philosophical Issues

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“…If that were my aim, one might well wonder if the reward would be worth the trouble. Piñeros Glasscock (2020) argues that the real problem with the knowledge thesis is that any non-trivial version of it can ultimately be shown to conflict with general principles capturing important properties of knowledge-in particular, those aiming to capture the fact that a belief can constitute knowledge only if it is non-accidentally true. 9 A virtue of this type of argument, he notes, is that it does not in any way depend on intuitions about 9.…”

Section: Surprises and Flukesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Intentional Action, Know-how, and Lucky Success

Kirley

2023

Ergo an Open Access Journal of Philosophy

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Elizabeth Anscombe held that acting intentionally entails knowing (in a distinctively practical way) what one is doing. The consensus for many years was that this knowledge thesis faces decisive counterexamples, the most famous being Donald Davidson’s carbon copier case, and so should be rejected or at least significantly weakened. Recently, however, a new defense of the knowledge thesis has emerged: provided one understands the knowledge in question as a form of progressive judgement, cases like Davidson’s pose no threat. In this paper, I argue that this neo-Anscombean maneuver fails because it is founded on an untenable conception of the difference between intentional and merely lucky success. More specifically, the neo-Anscombean view conflates merely lucky success with subjectively surprising success. Unlike the former, subjectively surprising success may well be intentional, for it may well be the result of an exercise of knowledge-how. After sketching an alternative view that better captures the intuitive contrast between lucky and intentional success, I argue that the conflation of surprising and merely lucky success owes to a tacit commitment to the thesis that knowing how entails knowing that one knows how. This thesis is not only false, but distortive of the explanatory role of knowledge-how. This result, in turn, tells us something important about what practical knowledge cannot be.

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“…(PKP) should nonetheless be rejected. As I argue elsewhere, a version of Williamson's (2000) antiluminosity argument shows that the principle conflicts with deep-seated principles about knowledge (Piñeros Glasscock, 2020). Here is a quick version of the argument: 14 Suppose a musician is singing Marc Anthony's I Need to Know over and over for several hours, until she completely loses her voice so that by the end of the process she is no longer singing.…”

Section: More On (Lai)mentioning

confidence: 99%

The puzzle of learning by doing and the gradability of knowledge‐how

Glasscock

2021

Philos Phenomenol Research

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Much of our know‐how is acquired through practice: we learn how to cook by cooking, how to write by writing, and how to dance by dancing. As Aristotle argues, however, this kind of learning is puzzling, since engaging in it seems to require possession of the very knowledge one seeks to obtain. After showing how a version of the puzzle arises from a set of attractive principles, I argue that the best solution is to hold that knowledge‐how comes in degrees, and through practice a person gradually learns how to do something. However, the two standard accounts of know‐how in the literature, intellectualism and anti‐intellectualism, cannot properly account for the distinctive way in which know‐how is gradually acquired by practice, a process in which conceptual representations and practical abilities are intimately interwoven. Drawing on Gareth Evans's work, I outline an account that may do so, and use this account to distinguish between two forms of learning to explain why skill generally cannot be learnt through testimony, and requires practice.

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Practical Knowledge and Luminosity

Cited by 18 publications

References 49 publications

Practical understanding

Practical understanding

Intentional Action, Know-how, and Lucky Success

The puzzle of learning by doing and the gradability of knowledge‐how

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