Knowledge of One's Own Intentional Actions

Abstract

In recent years a greatly increased interest has been shown in the concept of human action. Not surprisingly, one of the recurring problems has been to give an account of the knowledge we have of our own actions. It is recognized that this knowledge is generally different in certain important respects from the knowledge we have of other things, including the actions of other people. And often it is said that in at least the case of our present intentional actions we have non-observational knowledge of what we are doing, or that our knowledge is not based on evidence. While this commonly accepted doctrine of " knowledge without observation " may have the merit of telling us what kind of knowledge we do not have, this is also its great weakness ; for it fails to give any positive indication of what kind of knowledge we do have. The main object of this paper will therefore be to discuss the nature of the knowledge that a person has of his own observable intentional actions.The paper divides naturally into two sections. In the first I shall argue that if someone's action is to be classified as intentional under the given description(s), then there must be a non-contingent relation between his performing that action and his knowing what he is doing under its intentional description(s). In the second section I shall argue that only if the person has a certain (unique) kind of knowledge of his action could this noncontingent relation obtain. I shall also show that observation can be significantly involved in a person's knowledge of his own intentional actions ; but that when it is, it cannot be because he has made observations that he knows what he is doing.

On Knowing One's Own Actions

“…If they had to observe the movements of their bodies in order to ground their judgements we would expect their judgements to come much later. 11 This connection is noted byOlsen (1969) andBroadie (1997). Note that someone who denied that our knowledge of our actions was relatively a priori might still accept that they must be relatively transparent.…”

Logics of Responsibility

“…The fact that my framework allows situations where an agent intentionally does φ without knowingly doing φ implies that it deviates from what Marcus (2019, p. 4) called the knowledge thesis for intentional action, according to which "it is impossible for a person to do something intentionally without knowing that she is doing it." Although the knowledge thesis is defended by many philosophers (see, for instance Anscombe, 1963;Broersen, 2011b;Gorr & Horgan, 1982;Olsen, 1969), there is empirical evidence that "in various scenarios a majority of non-specialists regard agents as intentionally doing things that the agents do not know they are doing and are not aware of doing" (Vekony, Mele, & Rose, 2021, p. 1231. (b) | = ¬I α φ → □K α ¬I α φ: if at an index an agent did not p-d intend φ, then at that index the agent knew ex ante that it did not p-d intend φ.…”