This paper argues that perception of one's body ‘from the inside’ provides one with an awareness of acting, and that this awareness explains a previously overlooked feature of one's knowledge of one's own actions. Actions are events: they occur during periods of time. Knowledge of such events must be sensitive to their course through time. Perception of one's body ‘from the inside’ allows one to monitor one's actions as they unfold, thereby sustaining one's knowledge of what one (...) is doing over the period of time in which one is doing it. (shrink)

Intuitively, the knowledge of one’s own intentional actions is different from the knowledge of actions of other sorts, including those of other people and unintentional actions of one's own. But how are we to understand this phenomenon? Does it pertain to all actions, under every description under which they are known? If so, then how is this possible? If not, then how should we think about cases that are exceptions to this principle? This paper is a critical survey (...) of recent attempts to answer these questions. I consider views under three headings: "special source" views, which hold that the knowledge of one's intentional actions has a non-perceptual source; "special domain" views, which hold that some but not all aspects of one's intentional actions are known in a special way; and "special character" views, which hold that the knowledge of intentional actions is special not because of where it comes from, but because of some other respect in which it is different in kind from the knowledge of other things. (shrink)

On the philosophy of action, with reference to Advaita, Nyāya, and Mīmāṃsā systems in Hindu philosophy.

I present an account of how agents can know what they are doing when they intentionally execute object-oriented actions. When an agent executes an object-oriented intentional action, she uses perception in such a way that it can fulfil a justificatory role for her knowledge of her own action and it can fulfil this justificatory role without being inferentially linked to the cognitive states that it justifies. I argue for this proposal by meeting two challenges: in an agent's (...) knowledge of her action perception can only play an enabling role (and no justificatory role) for the agent's knowledge and if perception has a justificatory role, then the agent's knowledge must be inferential. (shrink)

CHAPTER Simulation theory and mental concepts Alvin I. Goldman Rutgers University. Folk psychology and the TT-ST debate The study of folk psychology, ...

This paper argues that you have non-observational warrant for beliefs about the body in action. For example, if you mean to be drinking a cup of water, you can know independently of observation that you are moving your body in a way that is effective in enabling you to drink. The case I make centers on the claim that you have default warrant to trust your agency. You do well to trust your agency just in virtue of your status (...) as an agent, and are not required to earn permission to trust your agency through making use of evidence about how well your agency works. You have non-observational warrant for beliefs about the functioning of your agency, including beliefs about your body in action, inasmuch as those beliefs reflect trust in your agency. (shrink)

According to the standard story given by reductive versions of the Causal Theory of Action, an action is an intrinsically mindless bodily movement that is appropriately caused by an intention. Those who embrace this story typically take this intention to have a coarse-grained content, specifying the action only down to the level of the agent's habits and skills. Markos Valaris argues that, because of this, the standard story cannot make sense of the deep reach of our non-observational (...) knowledge of action. He concludes that we therefore have to jettison its conception of actions as mindless bodily movements animated from the outside by intentions. Here we defend the standard story. We can make sense of the reach of non-observational knowledge of action once we reject the following two assumptions: (i) that an intended habitual or skilled action is a so-called basic action—that is, an action that doesn't involve any finer-grained intentions—and (ii) that an agent, in acting, is merely executing one intention rather than a whole hierarchy of more or less fine-grained intentions. We argue that (i) and (ii) are false. (shrink)

Some philosophers think that knowledge or justification is both necessary and sufficient for rational action: they endorse knowledge-action or justification-action biconditionals. This paper offers a novel, metaphysical challenge to these biconditionals, which proceeds with a familiar question: What depends on what? If you know that p iff it is rational for you to act on p, do you know that p partly because it is rational for you to act on p, or is it rational (...) for you to act on p partly because you know that p? And a structurally similar question can be asked regarding justification-action biconditionals. I argue that proponents of these biconditionals cannot give a satisfactory answer to these questions. This is because each direction of these biconditionals strongly supports an opposite order of explanation to the one that is supported by the other direction. Given the traditional assumption that metaphysical explanations—even partial ones—are asymmetric, I argue that these biconditionals should be rejected. While knowledge might be necessary for rational action, and it might be sufficient, it cannot be both. And the same goes for justification. (shrink)

The relation between knowledge and action has been a lengthy debate in philosophy which traces back to Descartes and Locke. Purism holds that the practical factors related to action are fundamentally independent of the standard of knowledge, while pragmatic encroachment argues that practical considerations about action can impact judgments about knowledge. This traditional debate was put front and center recently by discussions on some knowledge attribution cases and relevant empirical studies. This paper reports (...) three empirical studies based on three pairs of classic knowledge attribution cases on Chinese participants. The results indicate that folk's understanding of knowledge is more compatible with purism and suggest a conversational implicature account of the connection between judgments about knowledge and action. (shrink)

Judging by our folk appraisals, then, knowledge and action are intimately related. The theories of rational action with which we are familiar leave this unexplained. Moreover, discussions of knowledge are frequently silent about this connection. This is a shame, since if there is such a connection it would seem to constitute one of the most fundamental roles for knowledge. Our purpose in this paper is to rectify this lacuna, by exploring ways in which knowing something (...) is related to rationally acting upon it, defending one particular proposal against anticipated objections. (shrink)

Knowledge of a language is a kind of knowledge, the possession of which enables a speaker to understand and perform a variety of linguistic actions in that language. In this paper, I pursue an agency-oriented approach to knowledge of language. I begin by examining two major agency-oriented models of knowledge of language: Michael Dummett's Implicit Knowledge Model and Jennifer Hornsby's Practical Knowledge Model. I argue that each of these models is inadequate for different reasons. (...) I present an Acquaintance Knowledge Model, in which a speaker's knowledge of a language is a combination of the speaker's first-order linguistic ability and second-order acquaintance with his ability and actions. (shrink)

“Knowledge” in Islam, Muslim culture and philosophy is considered as the key to understanding Muslim civilization, the formation of which took place in interaction with the cultures of peoples of the eastern and western parts of the former Roman Empire. The Byzantine theology and philosophy were of great importance for the points of contact and mutual enrichment of Muslim and Christian cultures in the Middle Ages, influencing the formation of Christian orthodox doctrine and the worldview of the ethnically diverse (...) peoples of the Byzantine oikumene. The phenomenon of “knowledge” in Muslim culture is presented in the article in connection with some contexts of Byzantine culture. “Knowledge”, as well as the categorical space of Muslim culture as a whole, on the one hand, allows us to understand the spirit of Islam as a phenomenon of religion, culture and civilization, and on the other hand, to determine the role and significance of this space in the formation and development of the main directions of Arab-Muslim philosophy formed in the “golden era” of Islam. The article considers the spiritual attitude to the “search for knowledge” in Islam: in the Koran and the Sunnah. Particular attention is paid to the concept of “knowledge” in the Arab-Muslim culture, while it is noted that written culture, book knowledge and education in general were the property of not only a narrow circle of rulers and religious figures in the Arab Caliphate. Within the framework of the categorical space of the Arab Muslim culture and philosophy, it should be borne in mind that the categories of “knowledge” (‘ilm) and “action” ('amal) constitute an inseparable unity within the framework of the Arab Muslim spiritual tradition in the context of the relationship between “theoretical” and “practical” mind. The role of “knowledge” and “action” within the framework of the Arab Muslim philosophical tradition is considered on the example of the teachings of al-Ghazali, who had a huge impact on the development of philosophy both in the Arab East and the European West. Being a key figure in the spiritual history of Islam and Muslim civilization, al-Ghazali considered knowledge not just as a value, but also as a virtue. An ardent champion of the role of reason, he connected theoretical reason with the understanding of spiritual realities that give us various systems of knowledge called sciences. The area of competence of practical reason, which should be based on the theoretical, al-Ghazali associated with human behavior. Practical reason directs human actions based on the will, based on and guided by a moral ideal. Al-Ghazali’s teachings are considered in notions and terms formed and developed in the Middle Ages within the Arab-Muslim culture and reflecting some meanings of such historical type of philosophical culture as the Greek-Byzantine classical Patristics. Al-Ghazali and the Byzantine Church Fathers shared a philosophical and theological understanding of man in his relation to the Creator and the phenomenon of “knowledge”. (shrink)

A number of researchers have begun to demonstrate that the widely discussed ?Knobe effect? (wherein participants are more likely to think that actions with bad side-effects are brought about intentionally than actions with good or neutral side-effects) can be found in theory of mind judgments that do not involve the concept of intentional action. In this article we report experimental results that show that attributions of knowledge can be influenced by the kinds of (non-epistemic) concerns that drive the (...) Knobe effect. Our findings suggest there is good reason to think that the epistemic version of the Knobe effect is a theoretically significant and robust effect, and that the goodness or badness of side-effects can often have greater influence on participant knowledge attributions than explicit information about objective probabilities. Thus, our work sheds light on important ways in which participant assessments of actions can affect the epistemic assessments participants make of agents? beliefs. (shrink)

According to Anscombe, acting intentionally entails knowledge in ac- tion. This thesis has been near-universally rejected due to a well-known counter- example by Davidson: a man intending to make ten legible carbon copies might not believe with confidence, and hence not know, that he will succeed. If he does, however, his action surely counts as intentional. Damaging as it seems, an even more powerful objection can be levelled against Anscombe: while act- ing, there is as yet no fact (...) of the matter as to whether the agent will succeed. Since his belief that he will is not yet true while his action is in progress, he can- not possibly know that he is indeed bringing about the intended goal. Knowl- edge in action is not only unnecessary for intentional action, it seems, but–at least as regards success-bound types of action–impossible to attain in the first place. -/- In this paper I argue that traditional strategies to counter these objections are unsatisfactory and propose a new account of knowledge in action which has two core features: (i) It invokes an externalist conception of justification which not only meets Davidson’s challenge, but also casts doubts on the tacit internalist premise on which his example relies. (ii) Drawing on recent work about by John MacFarlane, the proposed account conceives of claims to in action as assessment-sensitive so as to overcome the factivity objection. From a retrospective point of evaluation, previous claims about future events and actions can not only be deemed as having been true, but also as having been known. (shrink)

Taking the perspective of knowledge representation, we introduce a simple logic of agency where the agents’ actions are described by their precondition and effects and whose semantics is based on the concept of attempt. We give its syntax, semantics, and axiomatics and discuss the relation with other proposals, in particular Belnap and Horty’s ‘branching time and agent choice’ semantics (BT+AC) and Czelakowski’s relational semantics.

Recent proposals that frame norms of action in terms of knowledge have been challenged by Bayesian decision theorists. Bayesians object that knowledge-based norms conflict with the highly successful and established view that rational action is rooted in degrees of belief. I argue that the knowledge-based and Bayesian pictures are not as incompatible as these objectors have made out. Attending to the mechanisms of practical reasoning exposes space for both knowledge and degrees of belief to (...) play their respective roles. (shrink)

This paper argues that the role of knowledge in the explanation and production of intentional action is as indispensable as the roles of belief and desire. If we are interested in explaining intentional actions rather than intentions or attempts, we need to make reference to more than the agent’s beliefs and desires. It is easy to see how the truth of your beliefs, or perhaps, facts about a setting will be involved in the explanation of an action. (...) If you believe you can stop your car by pressing a pedal, then, if your belief is true, you will stop. If it is false, you will not. By considering cases of unintentional actions, actions involving luck and cases of deviant causal chains, I show why knowledge is required. By looking at the notion of causal relevance, I argue that the connection between knowledge and action is causal and not merely conceptual. (shrink)

Uses the thought of Wang Yang-ming, John Dewey, and Alfred North Whitehead to explain a more coherent theory of knowledge.

I maintain that an account of knowledge how to do something – an account which might be supposed to uncover ‘the nature’ of such knowledge – can't be got by considering what linguists tell us is expressed in ascriptions of knowing how. Attention must be paid to the knowledge that is actually being exercised when someone is doing something. I criticize some claims about ascriptions of knowledge-how which derive from contemporary syntactic and semantic theory. I argue (...) that these claims can no more provide an understanding of what it is to intend to do something than of what it is to know how to do something. Philosophy, not linguistics, must be the source of such understanding. (shrink)

What is the relation between first person authority and knowledge of one’s own actions? On one view, it is because we know the reasons for which we act that we know what we do and, analogously, it is because we know the reasons for which we avow a belief that we know what we believe. Carlos Moya (2006) attributes some such theory to Richard Moran (2001) and criticises it on the grounds of circularity. In this paper, I examine the (...) view attributed to Moran. I rebut the charge of circularity, but also reject the theory as an adequate interpretation of Moran. (shrink)

It is argued that knowledge is a form of action. It is a kind of successful attempt to attain the truth. The success must avoid a particular sort of “epistemic luck”. It must derive from competence rather than luck. Knowledge, then, is a judgment or belief that aims at truth and attains accuracy not by luck but through the agent’s cognitive adroitness, so that the attainment is apt. A higher grade of knowledge then requires that the (...) agent attain aptly not only the accuracy (truth) but even the aptness of that first-order success. This more fully apt success is on a higher level of epistemic achievement, and in this respect is a special case of a general truth of performance normativity that applies across domains of human performance, whether in the arts, in sports, in the professions, and so on. An attempt in general reaches that higher level of achievement by being not only apt but fully apt. (shrink)

The present study focuses on a grammatical category called evidentiality. The primary meaning of evidentiality is concerned with information source. That is, it expresses whether something has been seen, heard or inferred. The aim here is to conduct a conceptual study of evidentiality in which use is made of formal tools. The fundamental intuition is that the distinction between ‘evidence’as ‘proof’and ‘evidentiality’as ‘to do with proof’is a crucial one. Evidentiality is a dynamic notion to be analysed through the use of (...) knowledge by the agents, a knowledge in action, which involves an in-coming state and an out-coming state that is typical of the transmission of information. We propose our own approach in which the dynamics of knowledge in action is grasped in the context of a dynamic epistemic logic. (shrink)

I argue in favor of a certain connection between knowledge and the permissibility of action. On this approach, we do not think of the relation between those notions as reflecting a universal epistemic principle. Instead, we think of it as something resembling a platitude from folk psychology. With the help of some elementary tools from the logic of normativity and counterfactuals, I attempt to establish the connection by deriving it from more elementary principles. The new formulation involves a (...) ceteris paribus clause. Though it is often difficult to specify the exact content of a ceteris paribus clause, we will see that our clause is derived from a descriptive generalization with independent motivation. (shrink)

ABSTRACT One major problem in the process of knowledge assimilation is how to deal with inconsistency of new knowledge and the existing knowledge base. In this paper we present a formal, provably correct and yet computational methodology for assimilation of new knowledge into knowledge bases about actions and changes based on the slogan: what is believed is what is explained. Technically, we employ Gelfond and Lifschitz' action description language A to describe domains of actions. (...) The knowledge bases on domains of actions are defined and obtained by a new translation from domain descriptions in A into abductive normal logic programs, where a time dimension is incorporated. The knowledge bases are shown to be both sound and complete with respect to their domain descriptions. In particular, we propose a possible causes approach (PCA) to knowledge assimilation about evolving domains of actions, in contrast to Ginsberg's possible worlds approach (PWA) and Winslett's possible models approach (PMA). A possible cause of new knowledge consists of abduced occurrences of actions and value propositions about the initial state of the domain of actions, that would allow to derive the new knowledge. We show how to compute possible causes with abductive logic programming, and present some techniques to improve search efficiency. We use examples to compare our possible causes approach with syntax-based approaches, such as Ginsberg's possible worlds approach, and semantics-based approaches, such as Winslett's possible models approach, to belief revision/update. (shrink)

This chapter discusses butō dance as an example of improvisation that challenges not only the extant philosophical definitions of improvisation, but also some fundamental presumptions about self-government and agency that are current in action theory. In the first part of the chapter, I identify the main features of butō improvisation, with regard to the nature of its basic movement, and the kind of subjectivity implicated in its generation. I then raise some questions regarding the philosophical characterization of this form (...) of dance, and in the second part of the paper, I argue that butō improvisation undermines the intuitive distinctions between “ordinary” and “specialized action”, thereby eluding both the philosophical rationalistic theories of action as mediated by intentions, and the theories of arational action as expressive of individual subjectivity. My claim is that butō can be better interpreted as a shared action which is neither mediated by intentions nor expressive of the individual self, meant to generate a community by sharing the experience of the living body. This characterization has the advantage that it helps to put in the right perspective the puzzle about the normative standards of improvised action, which is addressed in the third part of the chapter. According to Nelson Goodman, improvisation as such undermines the very idea of a normative paradigm against which to evaluate possible solutions. In the case of butō, the absence of normative standards of action (e.g., success, correctness, or rightness) may be also connected to the absence of a subject in charge of his action. This is because butō improvisation does not count on the dancer as a pre-defined subject existing prior to and independently of her performance. In contrast to these interpretations, I hold that there are normative criteria for butō improvisation, which govern its explorative and generative functions by a training based on unselfing. This model turns away from the rhetoric of spontaneous free movements and the search for individual authenticity. It advocates for a model of intentional agency that it is not mediated by (individual or joint) intentions, but aspires to generate a community by sharing the experience of a living emotional body. (shrink)

This article deploys Peircean approach to bodily skills, foregrounding motricity as a semiotically mediated and a “suprasubjective” process. By examining two contrasting skills – javelin and martial arts – I draw out the relevance of dynamic movement to the semiotics of sport and embodiment. These contrasting movements expose different epistemological assumptions since they emerge in distinct cultural traditions. To attend to the cultural dimension of movement practices – including the mediation of signs making certain movement forms seem reasonable or desirable (...) in the first place – I highlight ecological dimensions of each somatic tradition. This ecological focus aligns with Peirce’s project of tracking how semiotic signs are positioned and mediated. To make ecological factors of motricity more recognizable, I contrast somatic engagements that take place on synthetic, predictable substrates and somatic engagements that take place on variable, unpredictable ground. In a similar way to the classic gestalt figure-ground relations, where perception of a figure depends on the particulars of the ground, I suggest that the ground upon which somatic action occurs shapes the way we make sense of it epistemologically. These different grounds – both literally and figuratively – operate representationally via thirdness: they lead us to conceptualize movement in culturally and historically particular ways. (shrink)

Book synopsis: The book illustrates the concept of action in three different contexts - the justification of actions, people's life history, and pragmatism. The special feature of this book is that a comprehensive view of this kind marks a departure from the atomistic approach of action theory, which in itself raises a number of questions. If actions are not justified by mental states, how can persons then act for reasons? How can persons' actions over time be described, and (...) what is the connection with the question of personal identity? If there is to be a unified understanding of the person, does the practical have to take precedence over the theoretical, and what does this mean for epistemology, for example? The ten contributors to this volume engage in an instructive manner with these and similar questions in the three sections of the book. (shrink)