Lucy Campbell

Philosophy is witnessing an ‘Agential Turn’, characterised by the thought that explaining certain distinctive features of human mentality requires conceiving of many mental phenomena as acts, and of subjects as their agents. We raise a challenge for three central explanatory appeals to mental agency – agentialism about doxastic responsibility, agentialism about doxastic self-knowledge, and an agentialist explanation of the delusion of thought insertion: agentialists either commit themselves to implausibly strong claims about the kind of agency involved in the relevant phenomena, or make appeals to agency which seem explanatorily redundant. The agentialist literature does not contain a clear answer to this Agentialist Dilemma, and we put it forward here as a core challenge for the Agential Turn. But we also accept the fundamental motivation behind the Agential Turn, its critique and rejection of a purely passivist and spectatorial conception of the human mind. We close by urging the recognition of a broader category of rational subjectivity, a category which includes states which are neither active nor passive, but nevertheless form part of a subject’s rational point of view on the world.

Philosophy is witnessing an “Agential Turn,” characterised by the thought that explaining certain distinctive features of human mentality requires conceiving of many mental phenomena as acts, and of subjects as their agents. We raise a challenge for three central explanatory appeals to mental agency––agentialism about doxastic responsibility, agentialism about doxastic self‐knowledge, and an agentialist explanation of the delusion of thought insertion: agentialists either commit themselves to implausibly strong claims about the kind of agency involved in the relevant phenomena, or make appeals to agency which seem explanatorily redundant. The agentialist literature does not contain a clear answer to this Agentialist Dilemma, and we put it forward here as a core challenge for the Agential Turn. But we also accept the fundamental motivation behind the Agential Turn, its critique and rejection of a purely passivist and spectatorial conception of the human mind. We close by urging the recognition of a broader category of rational subjectivity, a category which includes states which are neither active nor passive, but nevertheless form part of a subject's rational point of view on the world.

Elizabeth Anscombe characterised practical knowledge as knowledge ‘in intention’. As Anscombe recognised, accepting this view involves rejecting certain basic orthodox epistemological assumptions. But even once this is done, a challenge remains for a conception of practical knowledge as knowledge ‘in intention’. For while practical knowledge would appear to be a kind of propositional knowledge, intentions would appear to be a kind of non-propositional attitude. I call this the ‘Structural Challenge’ for an intention-based account of practical knowledge. After rejecting two suggested responses – one which views intentions as propositional attitudes; one which views practical knowledge as non-propositional knowledge – I offer my own solution by showing how simply having and carrying out an intention to φ will ordinarily meet a plausible neutral condition on propositional knowledge. Knowing a fact will in general involve being mentally related to it via a successful exercise of relevant concepts. The account I develop turns on viewing a person’s carrying out an intention to φ as their constituting the fact that they are φ-ing, through a practical exercise of their concept of φ-ing. The resulting account sheds light both on the analogies, and on the crucial formal differences, between practical and theoretical knowledge.

Generally speaking, three distinct phenomena tend to hang together in human perception: perceiving that p, knowing that p, and knowing that one is perceiving that p. This chapter considers how these phenomena are related. I argue that understanding them in the context of a ‘Two-Tier’ epistemological framework, which I have developed in earlier work, automatically delivers an account of these relationships. In short, both perceptual knowledge (that p) and perceptual self-knowledge (that I am perceiving that p) are—in different ways, and for different reasons—explanatorily (but not epistemically) grounded in perceiving that p. The explanation turns in part on understanding perceptual self-knowledge as an aspect of our capacity for rational expression of our states of epistemic perception. We can get a feel for the nature of this capacity, I suggest, by focussing on its exercise in basic invitations to joint perceptual attention.

Forms of Knowledge explores the unity and heterogeneity of knowledge. Human knowledge, as we understand it in the everyday, would appear to make up a complex category, admitting of numerous forms, species, modes, or variations. Reflection on this complexity reveals a whole ecosystem of questions and issues worthy of careful philosophical investigation. Yet contemporary epistemology often tends to downplay the heterogeneity of knowledge, in part through a distinctively narrow focus (familiarly, primarily on ‘receptive’ propositional knowledge) and in part through a tendency to assume, rather than to investigate, the perfectly general applicability of the definitions of knowledge it develops. Against this background, many questions and issues concerning the heterogeneity of our ordinary knowledge categories remain under-explored, and discussions of these issues, when they do occur, are often isolated in disjoint areas of the literature. The result is that the unity and heterogeneity of knowledge has not been recognised as a distinctive topic in epistemology. This volume brings together philosophers working across a broad range of the philosophical literature—not only in contemporary theory of knowledge but also in the history of philosophy, the epistemology of understanding, the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of action, ethics, the philosophy of art and aesthetics, the philosophy of education, and the philosophy of psychiatry—to consider how best to theorise the heterogeneity, and the possible unity of some of the most central of our ordinary epistemological categories.

This chapter seeks to motivate, in a general way, the topic of this volume: the study of the unity and heterogeneity of knowledge. It identifies a certain class of questions concerning the structure of our ordinary knowledge categories—what I call ‘U/H questions’ (‘unity/heterogeneity questions’)—and illustrates the surprising lack of attention to these questions within contemporary epistemology. While U/H questions are rarely discussed or debated in epistemology, some of them are nevertheless ‘answered’, albeit often implicitly. Indeed, some of the most widespread and influential orthodoxies in epistemology turn out to be stances on U/H questions. The chapter suggests that failing to attend to U/H questions has led to these stances being accepted relatively uncritically, with little consideration of alternative positions, and with the result that the influence of such stances appears to far outstrip the clarity of their motivations. And this matters because—as the chapter also argues—the widespread acceptance of these stances may not be wholly benign. These ideas are made concrete in relation to two case-studies: first, the widespread apparent agreement that propositional knowledge deserves the overwhelming majority of epistemological attention by contrast with knowledge of other kinds (what I call the ‘propositional preference’); and second, the implicit allegiance to a widespread form of monism concerning the class of propositional knowledge (what I call ‘top-down monism’). In both cases, I try to illustrate how simply making U/H questions our explicit focus raises under-explored challenges for familiar positions and reveals potentially promising new theoretical alternatives, which otherwise remain obscured from view.

Matthew Boyle (2011) 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 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, but that these disappear if we instead adopt an Ability Account of knowledge, along the lines of that defended by John Hyman (1999/2015). I find claim (B) less compelling, and a secondary aim of the paper is to suggest that once we reject the Belief Account of knowledge, and move over to an Ability Account, we can jettison (B), as it it left with no explanatory role to play.

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 'practical truth', an idea she borrows from Aristotle, and 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 essentially 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 thicker ethical version and a thinner action-theoretical version of each notion. This allows us to maintain a - complex - version of the Simple View, on which practical knowledge in the thick ethical sense is knowledge of practical truth in the thick ethical sense, and practical knowledge in the thin action-theoretical sense is knowledge of practical truth in the thin action-theoretical sense. Although Anscombe did not make these distinctions explicitly, I argue that she nevertheless commits herself to them in her discussion.

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.

The account of intentional action Anscombe provides in her 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 they are actions 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 these provide, the distinction between ‘practical’ and ‘speculative’ knowledge, the formal features which mark this distinction, and Anscombe's characterization of practical knowledge as knowledge ‘in intention’.

Anscombe thought that practical knowledge – a person’s knowledge of what she is intentionally doing – displays formal differences to ordinary empirical, or ‘speculative’, knowledge. I suggest these differences rest on 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.