On Knowing One's Own Actions

Abstract

Given the recent debates about self-knowledge and first-person authority it is surprising that there has not been more discussion about our knowledge of our actions. 2 It is surprising because our knowledge of our own actions seems, prima facie, to share many of the features of our knowledge of beliefs and perceptions, that have given rise to these debates. 3 At least this is what I want to suggest in this chapter. Indeed, perhaps the main motivation for this chapter is to place discussion of our knowledge of our own actions firmly alongside our knowledge of other psychological phenomena. I will outline what seem to be intuitively plausible features of our knowledge of our actions, and consider what account we might give of such knowledge that respects those features. A suggestion as to what form an account of our knowledge of our actions should take will be offered. These tasks will constitute the explicit content of the chapter. However, it is also my hope that discussion of the knowledge we have of our own actions will serve some further aims. I hope it will serve to extend the range of possible sources for selfknowledge. By 'self-knowledge' I mean not just knowledge of that thing which is in fact the knower, but knowledge of ourselves as ourselves. The account sketched here promises to give us a way of knowing of our own actions that is unavailable to anyone other than the acting subject. 1 This paper was mostly written during leave taken under the Research Leave Scheme of the Arts and Humanities Research Board. I am very grateful to them. I have benefited from very useful comments from participants of meetings in Fribourg, Girona, Manchester and Warwick (the latter in a seminar arranged as part of the AHRB Project in Consciousness and Self-Consciousness). Special thanks to the participants in a graduate research seminar on self-knowledge at UCL, and for comments to Alan Brown, David Levy, Paul Noordhof, Mark Sacks, Barry Smith and an anonymous referee for this volume. Particular thanks are due to the editors for their comments, interest and patience. 2 There was a flurry of papers on the subject in the early sixties. See O'Shaughnessy (1963); Anscombe (1963); Donnellan (1963); Broadie (1967); Olsen (1969); Danto (1963). Since then there has been Velleman's important discussion in his Practical Reflection. It was only after writing this paper that I came across Johannes Roessler's valuable contribution to this issue. See Roessler (this volume).

Practical Knowledge and Acting Together

“…O'Brien 2003;Setiya 2008). While an archer may not have practical knowledge that she is shooting an arrow that will hit the bull's eye, she will normally have practical knowledge that she is performing the basic action of relaxing the fingers on her string hand and releasing the arrow.…”

“…Furthermore, these cognitive commitments must arguably provide me with knowledge of what I am doing intentionally when I am acting (perhaps in virtue of my skills and know-how, see e.g. Setiya 2008;O'Brien 2003;Grünbaum 2009;Small 2012). That the commitment is true is not sufficient for intentional action.…”

Judging and the Scope of Mental Agency

“…Williams 1973), will include attending to the judgement and the agency involved (cf. Peacocke (1998) and O'Brien (2003) for a discussion of this kind of attention).…”

“…But judgements about the reasonableness of other judgements are clearly of neither kind. And see Peacocke (1998), Martin (1998), andO'Brien (2003) for more general objections to the constitutive account and its central claim that higher-and lower-order states are not distinct entities. One particular worry is, for instance, that the postulated constitutive link between the lowerand higher-order states does not seem to provide the resources to explain how the latter can be epistemically grounded on, and constitute genuine instances of knowledge of, the former.…”

“…But it seems that we typically do not need to engage in such elaborate reasoning in order to tell whether an episode is due to our own mental agency (cf. Peacocke 1998;O'Brien 2003).…”