Anscombe on Practical Knowledge

“The Cause of What It Understands”

Abstract

According to G. E. M. Anscombe’s proposal, agents have a special way of knowing about their own intentional actions - they have the capacity to know what they are intentionally doing without relying on any evidence from observation, inference and so on. Anscombe dubbed this special knowledge “practical knowledge” and took it to be an essential mark of agency. This article attempts an explanation and vindication of this Anscombean approach to agency.

The discussion falls into four sections. In the first section, I clarify the nature of Anscombe’s practical knowledge and argue that the principal task for us is to spell out how one can be justified in believing not just what one intends, but what one is intentionally doing without any evidence. In Section II, I discuss what is generally considered to be the most promising way of dealing with this task: the reliabilism strategy. On this view, practical knowledge is justified because there is a reliable efficient-causal link between an agent’s intention to φ and his/her actually doing φ. I am willing to accept the reliabilism strategy as being basically on the right track. However, in Section III, I argue that the reliabilism strategy overlooks an important element of Anscombe’s discussion, namely that practical knowledge is the “formal cause” of what it understands, i.e., intentional actions. With this observation in place, we can give an even more comprehensive account of the nature of practical knowledge. In Section IV, I close with a suggestion that the structure of practical knowledge so understood is surprisingly similar to the structure of the knowledge that makers of artifacts are said to have, and this similarity can support the claim that practical knowledge is knowledge about an objective, public world.