Mikayla Kelley (University of Chicago), "Separating Action and Knowledge"

Forthcoming, The Philosophical Quarterly

By Mikayla Kelley

What must you know about an action of yours for it to be intentional? The answer: nothing. You can act intentionally without knowing anything about what you’re doing. Or so I argue in my “Separating Action and Knowledge”, forthcoming in The Philosophical Quarterly.

For those who aren’t steeped in the philosophy of action, let me give you a bit of context. There is a massive divide within philosophy of action between those who see knowledge as the key to understanding agency and those who don’t. Those in the former group tend to be sympathetic to G.E.M. Anscombe’s groundbreaking work on practical knowledge in Intention; those in the latter group tend to be sympathetic to Donald Davidson’s now orthodox development of a causal theory of action. For philosophers of action, the divide between Anscombeans and Davidsonians is something like the divide between consequentialists and deontologists. The disagreement runs deep and extends widely into other topics of debate.

Here’s a caricature of the debate over knowledge and action thus far. The Anscombean offers a knowledge condition on intentional action (such as: while intentionally Xing, you know that you are Xing). The Davidsonian offers a purported counterexample. The Anscombean offers a different knowledge condition on intentional action (such as: while intentionally Xing, you at least know that you are trying to X). The Davidsonian offers another purported counterexample. The Anscombean offers yet another knowledge condition; the Davidsonian offers yet another purported counterexample; and on it goes.

I try to escape this dialectic by offering an argument that explains why this dialectic arises in the first place: intentional action and knowledge are governed by thresholds under distinct pressures. This opens up a gap between intentional action and knowledge which is exploited by Davidsonian counterexamples. Let me explain.

Intentional action and knowledge are structurally similar. In particular, both are subject to a non-accidentality requirement. Knowledge requires a true belief, where the true belief is non-accidental in the sense of being warranted. A lucky guess doesn’t count as knowledge because the true belief isn’t warranted. Intentional action requires an intention that is realized by some behavior, where the behavior that realizes the intention is nonaccidental in the sense of being controlled. Winning the lottery doesn’t count as an intentional action because winning the lottery isn’t under one’s control.

But warrant and control are gradable: a belief can be more or less warranted, and a behavior can be more or less controlled. Thus, knowledge requires meeting a threshold of sufficient warrant and intentional action requires meeting a threshold of sufficient control. The key claim of the paper is that we shouldn’t think that these two thresholds align in the way required for there to be a knowledge condition on intentional action. The two thresholds are dependent on different factors, and so there are bound to be “gaps” between them. This is the Argument from Distinct Thresholds.

Much of the essay is spent arguing for the existence of these gaps. There are a number of routes one might take to this conclusion, but the route that I choose is to emphasize the central role that intentional action plays in ethical life. Ethics is almost definitionally about right and good action, where ‘action’ presumably means more specifically intentional action. And the control threshold is going to be set in such a way that intentional action can play this central role.

I am currently writing more on the connection between intentional action and ethical life. In work in progress (draft available), I argue that the concept of intentional action functions to prioritize behaviors for normative evaluation—it acts as an “evaluative filter” on our experience of the world. This function has consequences for how the control threshold works and for how we ought to use judgments of intentionality in deciding moral and legal sanctions. Another question of interest is whether the Argument from Distinct Thresholds generalizes to separate other related philosophical categories.

Thus, “Separating Action and Knowledge” is the tip of a philosophical iceberg, one which I will chip away at intentionally, hopefully (but not necessarily) generating some knowledge along the way.