Practical knowledge revisited

Ethics

Volumn 120, Issue 1, 2009, Pages 128-137

  Setiya, Kieran ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 73949156789     PISSN: 00141704     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/606000     Document Type: Note

References (52)

1. Sarah Paul, "Intention, Belief, and Wishful Thinking: Setiya on 'Practical Knowledge,'" Ethics 119 (2009): 546-57.
2. Her article is a discussion of Kieran Setiya, "Practical Knowledge," Ethics 118 (2008): 388-409.
3. J. David Velleman, Practical Reflection (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989).
4. G. E. M. Anscombe, Intention, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1963), 11.
5. See also Stuart Hampshire, Thought and Action (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1959), 95, 102.
6. Setiya, "Practical Knowledge," 390; the names are taken from Paul, "Intention, Belief."
7. Donald Davidson, "Agency," reprinted in Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 43-61, 50.
8. Paul, "Intention, Belief," 549,
9. following Setiya, "Practical Knowledge," 390-91.
10. Setiya, "Practical Knowledge," 391.
11. Paul, "Intention, Belief," 550-51. Note that "cognitivism" here is distinct from, but presupposed by, what is now called "cognitivism" in the philosophy of practical reason.
12. See Michael Bratman, "Cognitivism about Practical Reason," reprinted in his Faces of Intention (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 250-64;
13. and Kieran Setiya, "Cognitivism about Instrumental Reason," Ethics 117 (2007): 649-73.
14. Setiya, "Practical Knowledge," 396. For a different conception of partial intention,
15. see Richard Holton, "Partial Belief, Partial Intention," Mind 117 (2008): 27-58.
16. As proposed by D. F. Pears, "Intention and Belief," in Essays on Davidson: Actions and Events, ed. Bruce Vermazen and Merrill B. Hintikka (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 75-88, 78-79.
17. Paul, "Intention, Belief," 553.
18. The need for delicate handling of these counterfactuals was noted in Setiya, "Practical Knowledge," 391 n. 12.
19. See Pears, "Intention and Belief," 80-81.
20. Setiya, "Cognitivism."
21. See also Jacob Ross, "How to Be a Cognitivist about Practical Reason," Oxford Studies in Metaethics 4 (2009): 243-82.
22. Kieran Setiya, "Believing at Will," Midwest Studies in Philosophy 32 (2008): 36-52.
23. Kieran Setiya, "Knowledge of Intention," unpublished manuscript.
24. Setiya, "Practical Knowledge," Secs. III and IV.
25. Paul, "Intention, Belief," 554.
26. John McDowell, "Response to Crispin Wright," in Knowing Our Own Minds, ed. Crispin Wright, Barry C. Smith, and Cynthia Macdonald (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 47-62, 57-58.
27. See H. P. Grice, "Intention and Uncertainty," Proceedings of the British Academy 5 (1971): 263-79, 268.
28. An influential discussion is Tyler Burge, "Individualism and Self-Knowledge," Journal of Philosophy 85 (1988): 649-63.
29. Setiya, "Practical Knowledge," 407.
30. If the epistemic justification of decision requires antecedent knowledge of ability and this knowledge is always empirical, there will be problems in the epistemology of learning how. Before I attempt a new kind of basic action, I may have no empirical evidence that I am able to perform it; if such evidence is required, I am not epistemically permitted to try! We can generalize this puzzle by asking whether, in coming to believe to some degree that I am doing φ, by forming that intention, I must be empirically justified in believing, to the same degree, that I am able to do it. If it is permissible to try without empirical evidence of ability, the answer must be no. There are two ways to make sense of this. On the first, I need not believe, or have any justification to believe, that I am able to φ, so long as I have no serious grounds for doubt. (Compare the "perceptual dogmatism" of James Pryor, "The Skeptic and the Dogmatist," Noûs 34 [2000]: 517-49.) On the second, I have a priori justification to believe, at least to some degree, that I amable to φ.
31. (Compare Roger White, "Problems for Dogmatism," Philosophical Studies 131 [2006]: 525-57, sec. 9) The issues raised by these remarks deserve a more sustained discussion than is possible here.
32. Paul, "Intention, Belief," 556.
33. Setiya, "Practical Knowledge," 407-8.
34. This point is stressed in Paul, "Intention, Belief," 556.
35. Setiya, "Practical Knowledge," 408.
36. Setiya, "Practical Knowledge," 404-7. That Velleman cannot explain this was one of my complaints about his view.
37. Here I echo and respond to Paul, "Intention, Belief," 554.
38. Setiya, "Practical Knowledge," 407.
39. The term is due to Mark Johnston ("How to Speak of the Colors," Philosophical Studies 68 [1992]: 221-63, 233).
40. Its application to capacities is discussed by Michael Fara in "Masked Abilities and Compatibilism," Mind 117 (2008): 843-65, sec. 2. Despite my debt to Fara, my view differs from his (a) in giving the word "ability" to the simple conditional theorist; (b) in appealing to intentions and knowledge of means, not to what one is trying to do-the notion of trying is too opaque to be helpful here; and (c) in restricting attention to capacities exercised by acting intentionally
41. (cf. Fara, "Masked Abilities," 849).
42. Setiya, "Practical Knowledge," 403-4.
43. Setiya, "Practical Knowledge," 407.
44. Paul, "Intention, Belief," 555.
45. See Anscombe, Intention, 50.
46. Compare Velleman's reliabilist interpretation of Anscombe ( J. David Velleman, "What Good Is a Will?" in Action in Context, ed. Anton Leist [Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2007], 193-215, 199-204).
47. Apart from the fact that one need not be a reliabilist to stress the epistemic significance of non-accidental truth, Velleman mistakenly assumes that, for Anscombe, "an intention amounts to knowledge if it appropriately causes facts that make it true" (Velleman, "What Good Is a Will?" 201).
48. Anscombe emphatically denies that "the relation of being done in execution of a certain intention, or being done intentionally, is a causal relation between act and intention" (G. E. M. Anscombe, "The Causation of Action," reprinted in her Human Life, Action and Ethics, ed. Mary Geach and Luke Gormally [Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2005], 89-108, 95).
49. When she writes about practical knowledge as "the cause of what it understands," she means formal not efficient cause, and then only when "the description of the event is of a type to be formally the description of an executed intention" (Anscombe, Intention, 87-88).
50. Paul, "Intention, Belief," 556.
51. Setiya, "Practical Knowledge," Sec. III.
52. Here I am responding to a question raised by Paul, "Intention, Belief," 555.