What is the moral of davidson's carbon copier? Towards an anscombean account of practical knowledge

Abstract

It is intuitively attractive to hold that an agent does A intentionally only if she knows that she is doing A. Nevertheless, this thesis has been forcefully challenged by Davidson, who argues that an agent need not even believe that she is succeeding, but may still be acting intentionally when she succeeds. My aim is to show that this thesis is worth keeping. I pursue this aim by focusing on Velleman’s account of an agent’s knowledge as the best representative of recent attempts to rehabilitate the thesis. I argue that Velleman was right in that the possibility of an agent’s knowledge stems from its practical nature: its causal impact on the action which it represents. Unlike Velleman, however, I claim that the sense in which we know what we are doing in acting intentionally cannot be a matter of having true beliefs about the outcomes of our actions. I show that we must leave behind the conceptual framework that construes knowledge as a belief-like representation and recognize a sui generis agential attitude.