Publications
Journal articles
Self-Knowledge: Expression without Expressivism (2020) in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
Mental-state self-ascriptions – statements like “My feet ache”; “I want to leave the party” – characteristically combine two distinctive features. They are first-person authoritative, in the sense that if we take a speaker issuing a self-ascription to be sincere, then we will also strongly presume that what they say is true; and they are epistemically asymmetrical with other forms of assertion, in that they appear epistemically ungrounded in reasons, evidence, or epistemic method. Expressivists about self-ascriptions try to accommodate self-ascriptions’ epistemic asymmetry by offering a *non-epistemic* account of their first-person authority. They reject or downplay the idea that self-ascriptions express self-*knowledge*, instead explaining their characteristic features in terms of the idea that they are *avowals*, statements which express the first-order states they self-ascribe. I do two things in this paper. First, I reject Expressivism and motivate an epistemic account of first-person authority. Second, I develop an account of self-knowledge and self-ascription which, rather than contrasting knowing one’s own states of mind and expressing them, explains self-knowledge in terms of the capacity for self-expression. This becomes possible given a general epistemological reorientation towards a ‘forwards-looking’ conception of knowledge, as a certain kind of rational capacity to respond to a fact.
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Propositionalism about Intention: Shifting the Burden of Proof (2019) in Canadian Journal of Philosophy 49(2): 230-252
A widespread view in the philosophy of mind and action holds that intentions are propositional attitudes. Call this view ‘Propositionalism about Intention’. The key alternative holds that intentions have acts, or 'do-ables', as their contents. Propositionalism is typically accepted by default, rather than argued for in any detail. By appealing to a key metaphysical constraint on any account of intention, I argue that on the contrary, it is the do-ables view which deserves the status of the default position, and Propositionalism which bears the burden of proof. I go on to show that this burden has not been met in the literature.
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Two Notions of Intentional Action? Solving a Puzzle in Anscombe's Intention (2018) in British Journal for the History of Philosophy 26(3): 578-602
The account of intentional action which Elizabeth Anscombe provides in her (1957) Intention has had a huge influence on the development of contemporary action theory. But what is intentional action, according to Anscombe? She seems to give two different answers, saying first that intentional actions are those to which a special sense of the question ‘Why?’ is applicable, and second that they form a sub-class of the things a person knows without observation. Anscombe gives no explicit account of how these two characterizations converge on a single phenomenon, leaving us with a puzzle. I solve the puzzle by elucidating Anscombe's two characterizations in concert with several other key concepts in Intention, including, ‘practical reasons’, the sui generis kind of explanation which these provide, the distinction between ‘practical’ and ‘speculative’ knowledge, the two formal features which mark this distinction, and Anscombe's characterization of practical knowledge as knowledge ‘in intention’.
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An Epistemology for Practical Knowledge (2018) in Canadian Journal of Philosophy 48(2): 169-177
Anscombe thought that practical knowledge – a person’s knowledge of what she is intentionally doing – differs formally to ordinary empirical or ‘speculative’ knowledge. I suggest that these differences stem from the fact that practical knowledge involves intention analogously to how speculative knowledge involves belief. But this claim conflicts with the standard conception of knowledge, according to which knowledge is an inherently belief-involving phenomenon. Building on John Hyman’s account of knowledge as the ability to use a fact as a reason, I develop an alternative two-tier epistemology, which allows that knowledge might really come in a belief-involving and an intention-involving form.
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Self-Knowledge, Belief, Ability (and Agency?) (2018) in Philosophical Explorations 21(3): 333-349
Matthew Boyle has defended an account of doxastic self-knowledge which he calls “Reflectivism”. I distinguish two claims within Reflectivism: (A) that believing that p and knowing oneself to believe that p are not two distinct cognitive states, but two aspects of the same cognitive state, and (B) that this is because we are in some sense agents in relation to our beliefs. I find claim (A) compelling, but argue that its tenability depends on how we view the metaphysics of knowledge, something Boyle does not explicitly consider. I argue that in the context of the standard account of knowledge as a kind of true belief – what I call the 'Belief Account' of knowledge – the claim faces serious problems, and that these simply disappear if we instead adopt an alternative 'Ability Account' of knowledge. I find claim (B) less compelling, and a secondary aim of the paper is to suggest that once we move from a Belief Account of knowledge towards an Ability Account, there is no explanatory role for (B) left to play.
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Edited Collection
Forms of Knowledge
I am putting together an edited collection investigating the different forms which knowledge can take. The collection takes its mark from the idea that there are genuine differences in structure between different kinds of knowledge. It investigates differences between kinds of knowledge which take different objects - between knowledge-that, knowledge-how, knowing-o (etc?) - but also the different forms the knowledge-relation can take within each of these categories.
Details, including full list of contributors, to follow. |
Book chapters
On Anscombe on Practical Knowledge and Practical Truth, forthcoming in Roger Teichmann ed., The Oxford Handbook of Elizabeth Anscombe (OUP)
A central idea in Anscombe's philosophy of action is that of practical knowledge, the formally distinctive knowledge a person has of what she is intentionally doing. Anscombe also discusses the notion of 'practical truth', an idea she borrows from Aristotle, which on her interpretation is a kind of truth whose bearer is not thought or language, but action. What is the relationship between practical knowledge and practical truth? What we might call the 'Simple View' of this relationship holds that practical knowledge is knowledge of practical truth. But the Simple View isn't obviously available, since we have practical knowledge of all of our intentional actions, whereas an action manifests practical truth in Aristotle's sense only if it is a case of doing or living well. I suggest that we distinguish a stronger ethical version and a weaker action-theoretical version of each notion. This allows us to maintain a - complex - version of the Simple View, on which practical knowledge in the strong sense is knowledge of practical truth in the strong sense, and practical knowledge in the weak sense is knowledge of practical truth in the weak sense. Although Anscombe did not make these distinctions explicitly, I argue that she nevertheless commits herself to them in her discussion.
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Perception, Perceptual Knowledge, and Perceptual Self-Knowledge, forthcoming in A. Giananti, J. Roessler, & G Soldati eds., Perception and Self-Consciousness
Perceiving that p tends to go hand in hand with (or perhaps essentially goes hand in hand with) two forms of knowledge: perceptual knowledge that p, and perceptual self-knowledge that one is perceiving that p. This paper aims to understand the relationships between these three phenomena. I do so by drawing on a framework I have been developing in previous work, in which propositional knowledge is understood as the ability to rationally respond to a fact, an ability which is explained in different ways in different kinds of case. I suggest that perceptual knowledge and perceptual self-knowledge are both grounded in states of epistemic perception: epistemically perceiving that p is apt to furnish a person both with the ability to rationally respond to the fact that p, and also with the ability to rationally respond to the fact that she is perceiving that p. The work describes a 'direct' account of perceptual knowledge (understood without appeal to perceptually warranted belief), and a 'constitutivist' account of perceptual self-knowledge (on which perceiving that p is in principle sufficient for knowing that one is perceiving that p).
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Book reviews
metapsychology.net/index.php/book-review/philosophy-of-action-from-suarez-to-anscombe/Review of Philosophy of Action from Suarez to Anscombe, Constantine Sandis ed. Routledge (2018)
With Alexander Greenberg, in Metapsychology Online 23(35).
With Alexander Greenberg, in Metapsychology Online 23(35).
PhD Thesis
Action, Intention, and Knowledge
(2015)
Abstract
I deliver an account of ‘practical knowledge’, the knowledge we have of our own intentional actions. Part One introduces the target notion by describing three philosophically interesting features it appears to have (Ch. 1), and dismisses two broad approaches to understanding it – a ‘consciousness-based’ and an ‘inferentialist’ approach (Ch. 2). A third approach is thus motivated. ‘Intentionalist’ accounts of practical knowledge see practical knowledge as somehow constituted by the agent’s intention. Part Two considers and rejects a version of Intentionalism which I call Cognitivist Intentionalism – CI. Cognitivist Intentionalists think of intentions as a kind of belief. Practical knowledge is constituted by intention in whatever way ordinary knowledge is constituted by belief, and practical knowledge as a special kind of knowledge because its constituting attitude is, by dint of being an intention, special. I dismiss two versions of CI, showing them both to be internally problematic (Ch. 3). I then argue that intentions are not propositional attitudes (Ch. 4), thus ruling out any version of CI: if intentions were beliefs they would have to be propositional attitudes. Part Three considers the remaining options for Intentionalism. According to what I call Non-Cognitivist Intentionalism - NCI - practical knowledge is constituted by intentions, understood as distinct from beliefs, just in case they are executed. NCI, I argue, happily accommodates practical knowledge’s philosophically interesting features. But it is hard to see why executing an intention should constitute knowing, and how a kind of propositional knowledge could be constituted by a non-propositional attitude, which Chapter Four argued intentions to be. Chapter Six develops NCI into the stronger NPI - Non-Propositionalist Intentionalism. In NPI the non-propositional character of intentions is central. According to NPI, practical knowledge is a kind of propositional knowledge which is constituted by a non-propositional attitude, and a kind of knowledge which is not constituted by belief. I explain how this can be.
Click here to read Action, Intention, and Knowledge |
Longer summary
Action, Intention, and Knowledge aims to deliver an account of ‘practical knowledge’, understood as the knowledge we at least typically have of our own intentional actions. Part One (Chapters 1 and 2) motivates thinking that practical knowledge is in some sense constituted by the agent’s intention – a view I refer to as Intentionalism. Chapter 1 introduces our target phenomenon, first in terms of its content and then by noting the philosophically interesting features which it seems to display. Our knowledge of what we do intentionally at least appears to be first-person authoritative, epistemically ungrounded in perception, observation, or inference, and not to represent any kind of discovery about oneself. And knowledge of this kind seems to be especially tightly related to intentional action, its object. Any good account of practical knowledge will have to explain these properties. Chapter 2 rejects two approaches to thinking about practical knowledge - two alternatives to Intentionalism - by rejecting representative examples: Lucy O’Brien’s consciousness-based account, and Sarah Paul’s inferentialist account. I argue that neither does justice to practical knowledge’s philosophically interesting properties.
Part Two starts to consider Intentionalism, and in particular a view I call Cognitivist Intentionalism – CI - the idea that practical knowledge is constituted by intentions, understood as a kind of belief. I reject two versions of CI in Chapter 3; an internalist version due to David Velleman and an externalist version due to Kieran Setiya. Neither account manages to explain practical knowledge’s interesting properties. Chapter 4 argues that intentions are not propositional attitudes, which entails that they cannot be a kind of belief. I conclude that any version of CI must therefore be rejected. Part Three considers and develops what I think is a better Intentionalist account. I start with an interpretation of Anscombe’s Intention, on which she offers a Non-Cognitivist Intentionalism – NCI. On Anscombe’s view, practical knowledge is constituted by intentions, which are not a kind of belief. I explain how this view easily explains the properties of practical knowledge which the earlier accounts failed to. But Anscombe comes up against two major problems. First, how are we to make sense of the idea that practical knowledge is constituted by intention and not by belief: isn’t knowledge per se constituted by belief? And second, if Anscombe’s view is to be consistent with the conclusion of Chapter 4 - that intentions are not propositional attitudes – then her view will be one on which practical knowledge – a kind of propositional knowledge – is constituted by an attitude which is not propositional. But how could this be? Chapter 6 develops NCI into the stronger NPI; Non-Propositional Intentionalism. NPI explicitly contains the claim that intentions are not propositional attitudes. I argue that because intentions constitute practical knowledge only on the condition that they are executed (something Anscombe accepted too), and because executing an intention involves precipitating something with propositional structure, viz. the fact that one is acting, although they are non-propositional attitudes, intentions might yet constitute a kind of propositional knowledge. And they do in fact constitute a kind of knowledge – despite being distinct attitudes from beliefs – because when our intentions are executed, we turn out to display certain capacities which seem essential to knowing. Because someone who is executing, or who will execute, her intention thereby possesses these epistemic capacities in relation to the fact that she is acting as she is, we can think of her as thereby knowing that she is acting as she is. And she has this knowledge in virtue of her intention to act, rather than in virtue of a belief that she is acting. I conclude by summarising the argument and suggesting avenues for further investigation. |