Action and knowledge
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- This dissertation mounts a defense of the claim, made by Elizabeth Anscombe in her monograph Intention, that when an agent is acting intentionally, he knows what he is intentionally doing immediately---without observation or inference. We can separate out three elements, which build on each other, in this claim: the agent is acting, is acting intentionally, and has knowledge of what he is doing. The progress of the dissertation roughly follows this rough division. The first two chapters are concerned with articulating what is at stake in the characterization of an agent as acting. Since someone can be doing something without its being the case that she will have done it, and the knowledge claim concerns the doing rather than the having done of an action, we should first of all investigate what is predicated of someone who is said to be underway toward an end. I begin in the first chapter at a further remove from intentional action, with an investigation of not necessarily agential process-claims in general; the second chapter begins the transition to acting intentionally be applying the considerations of the first to the agential context. The third and fourth chapters explicitly turn to acting intentionally. The third begins by addressing an argument meant to establish that intentional action is compatible with ignorance of what one is doing, and in doing so formulates a criterion for performing non-basic actions intentionally. The fourth chapter takes up teleologically basic actions and supplements the criterion of the third to give a sufficient and necessary condition on acting intentionally. The final pair of chapters addresses the knowledge element of the claim. In the fifth, I articulate the concern that the nature of action is such as to render it only knowable theoretically, and examine several theories that attempt to account for knowledge of action observationally or inferentially. This concern is viable in the context of the causal theory of action; in the sixth chapter, I endorse in its place a metaphysically modest teleological theory. With that in place, space is opened up for a neo-expressivist account of knowledge of intention in action, which, when combined with the results of the preceding chapters, redeems the knowledge claim.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2011 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Wolfson, Benjamin A |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Philosophy |
| Primary advisor | Bratman, Michael |
| Thesis advisor | Bratman, Michael |
| Thesis advisor | Hills, David James, 1947- |
| Thesis advisor | Hussain, Nadeem J. Z |
| Thesis advisor | Lawlor, Krista |
| Advisor | Hills, David James, 1947- |
| Advisor | Hussain, Nadeem J. Z |
| Advisor | Lawlor, Krista |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Ben Wolfson. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Philosophy. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2011. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2011 by Benjamin A Wolfson
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial No Derivatives 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC-ND).
Also listed in
Loading usage metrics...