Self-Knowledge & Action

This project is part of an ongoing enquiry into the nature of intentional bodily action. Its topic is the propositional knowledge that agents have of their own intentional bodily actions / 'action knowledge', for short. And its concern is the value and nature of action knowledge.

I will claim that action knowledge is valuable to us because agents are simply incapable of acting intentionally unless they possess such knowledge, and acting intentionally is something we value. But how exactly is such knowledge of value to us? Is it of instrumental value (valuable because it is a means by which we may achieve a valued goal), or of intrinsic value (valuable not because of anything else we value, but for its own sake)? To say that action knowledge is of instrumental value to us implies that there is a merely contingent connection between such knowledge and what we value, which is not the case here. And to say that it is of intrinsic value to us implies that we do not value it because of the connection it bears to other things we value, which also seems false.

In the first part of this project, I will offer a resolution of this difficulty. I will argue that acting intentionally is intrinsically valuable. I will then claim that possessing action knowledge just is acting in a certain way, namely with knowledge of what one is intentionally doing, and that acting with such knowledge just is acting intentionally. This will allow me to claim that, because acting intentionally is intrinsically valuable, so is action knowledge.

The second part of the project focuses on a problem for understanding the nature of action knowledge. Intentional bodily actions are widely believed to involve at least two metaphysically distinct items: intentions, and bodily movements. So, it looks as if, in order to have action knowledge, agents need to know both that they have an appropriate intention, and that their body moves in an appropriate way. But now it seems that there is a difficulty. An agent surely needs the help of her senses in order to know how her body moves. In which case, it looks as if action knowledge cannot simply be self-knowledge, because traditional accounts maintain that self-knowledge is non-observational in the sense that it does not involve beliefs that are grounded in the operations of the senses. By the same token, an agent's knowledge of her own intentions must surely be non-observational. So, it also looks as if action knowledge cannot simply be observational, in the sense that it cannot simply involve beliefs that are grounded in the operations of the senses. Might it be a hybrid, involving as distinct elements observational knowledge of movement, and non-observational knowledge of intention? I will argue that it cannot be a hybrid in this way, and provide a different account of how it ought to be understood.

The account I will offer takes off from my resolution to the value problem. If possessing action knowledge is acting intentionally, the conditions for one to do the former will be the conditions for one to do the latter. In this light, I will develop an account that allows action knowledge to be a kind of self-knowledge, by claiming that items of observational knowledge are required as conditions for being able to do such-and-such intentionally, and as conditions for being able to know that one is doing such-and-such intentionally, but not as grounds for believing that one is intentionally doing such-and-such.

The research summarised here will result in three chapters for a co-authored monograph, where each author has responsibility for three chapters of the monograph. This monograph will be submitted for publication to a world-class academic publisher.