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WHY COGNITIVISM?
[Preprint; final version forthcoming in the Canadian Journal of Philosophy ]
ABSTRACT Intention Cognitivism – the doctrine that intending to V entails, or even consists in, believing that one will V – is an important position with potentially wide-ranging implications, such as a revisionary understanding of practical reason, and a vindicating explanation of 'Practical Knowledge'. In this paper, I critically examine the standard arguments adduced in support of IC, including arguments from the parity of expression of intention and belief; from the ability to plan around one's intention; and from the explanation provided by the thesis for our knowledge of our intentional acts. I conclude that none of these arguments are compelling, and therefore that no good reason has been given to accept IC.
I
‘Intention Cognitivism’ is the view that intending to V entails, or even consists in, belief. Roughly, a future-directed intention to V is or entails believing that one will V ; a present-directed intention to V is or entails believing that one is V - ing. This paper urges the rejection of Intention Cognitivism, as it is a thesis lacking adequate support. The main considerations usually marshaled in support of the thesis are explored, and the conclusion is pressed that they are uncompelling. The idea that intention entails belief will henceforth be labeled ‘Weak Intention Cognitivism’, to be distinguished from ‘Strong Intention Cognitivism’, which will designate the thesis that intention consists in belief. Versions of Intention Cognitivism weak and strong have been put to use by various philosophers along the years with wide-ranging implications. First is the intrinsic significance of tracing any structural relations that hold between intention and belief, when seeking a theoretically adequate picture of mental economy. But the acceptance or otherwise of Intention Cognitivism also impinges on positions within a host of other debates in moral psychology and normative theory. For example, Gilbert Harman suggests that Weak Intention Cognitivism (WIC) offers the characteristic mark of intending, in contradistinction to other practical attitudes such as desires, hopes, wishes, and so on (1976: 432). If correct, Harman’s view would establish how intention differs from other practical attitudes, and indeed that it differs from them; it
would call into question the familiar view on which intending to V is reducible to a desire to F coupled with some instrumental belief about how V - ing promotes F.^1 Harman takes WIC further to anchor a unified picture of reasoning across the practical and theoretical domains. Theoretical reasoning for Harman is an attempt to increase overall explanatory coherence among one’s beliefs. And since intention entails belief, the same also holds for practical reasoning: WIC ‘brings these two sorts of reasoning under the same principle’ of belief consistency (1976: 435). Harman thus deploys WIC in the service of a unified understanding both of the nature of reasoning, and of the principles that govern it. Others have argued in a broadly similar spirit about the principles or requirements of rationality. They suggest that at least some requirements of rational coherence involving intentions actually derive from corresponding requirements of belief consistency.^2 Take for instance the rational requirement not to intend to V while intending to F and believing that one cannot both V and F. One who has this practically incoherent combination of attitudes is said to have a corresponding combination of inconsistent beliefs – viz. a belief that one will V , a belief that one will F , and a belief that one will not both V and F.^3 Cognitivists offer also a parallel explanation of instrumental rationality. Kieran Setiya proposes the following cognitivist version of the requirement for means-ends coherence: [ME-Cognitive] Rationality requires that [if you intend to V , and you believe that you will not V unless you M because you now intend to M , then you believe that you will M because you now intend to M ].^4 Setiya claims that ME-Cognitive can be used to derive the corresponding practical requirement: (^1) For versions of the familiar view, see Davidson (1963), and more recently Ridge (1998), and Sinhababu (2012). That intention may be reducible to desire combined with belief that one will V will remain a live possibility. (^2) See for example Wallace (2001), Ross (2009), and Setiya (2007). (^3) Cognitivist explanations of rational requirements are typically founded on Strong Intention Cognitivism, although arguably the weak version would be sufficient for the arguments to go through. The point matters little here, however, since the present target is the weak version which is entailed by the strong. If the arguments that follow succeed, therefore, neither version is available to prop up the cognitivist understanding of practical rationality. (^4) Setiya (2007b: 663 - 673 ).
kind of inference to the best explanation, the thesis itself should be believed. In fact, something like this pattern of inference from practical knowledge to Intention Cognitivism seems to be invoked by those who endorse both theses, and is handled accordingly below: it will be argued that Intention Cognitivism cannot actually explain knowledge of intentional action (Section III).^7 Before then, the following section (II) aims to cast doubt on Intention Cognitivism by undermining two other central motivations for believing the thesis: one based on how intentions and beliefs can be expressed using the same sentences; and the other based on how intentions allow for planning. The paper’s conclusion is thus that no adequate grounds for accepting WIC are currently available. If cogent, the appropriate response to this conclusion seems to be withholding judgment on the view, unless and until more compelling grounds emerge
II
One central source of motivation regularly invoked by Intention Cognitivists comes from the parity of verbal expression of intention and belief. ‘I am going to V ’, ‘I shall V ’, and ‘I will V ’ are all instances of canonical expressions of prospective intention using indicative sentences, used also to express beliefs; similarly for ‘I am V - ing’ as an expression of intention-in-action. And the thought seems to be that WIC best explains the parity of expression: it is because intention entails belief that one may express both attitudes with one and the same utterance. Of course, expression by means of the same sentence does little by itself to establish that both attitudes are actually expressed: at least the argument must show that the sentence in question is also uttered with the same force. The point is therefore often put by saying that intentions are canonically expressed by the assertoric utterance of ‘I am going to V ’ and the like. This supposedly ensures that in addition to intention, the speaker also betrays a corresponding belief. Often attributed to Anscombe (1957), the argument from parity of expression is heralded by Kieran Setiya as ‘the most powerful argument for [WIC]’.^8 Since this argument takes the form of an inference to (^7) The other payoffs of WIC mentioned above, to do with how it may account for the nature of, and the principles governing practical reason may also be deployed as part of an IBE in support of WIC. These further possibilities are not discussed here. For arguments against the cognitivist explanation of rational requirements of coherence, see Bratman (2009), Brunero (2009), and Broome (2013: 163-6). (^8) Setiya (2007b: 34). Others who endorse the argument in some form or another include also Velleman (2007: 206-7) and Grice (1971), among others. Grice sets out to show that ‘to say of someone that he intends to do A (without qualification) is … to imply or suggest that he does not think it doubtful whether he will in fact do A’ (1971: 264).
the best explanation, doubts over its cogency may have at least two sources. First, one may deny that there is in fact a genuine phenomenon here for WIC to explain; this is the first point raised immediately below (II.1). The assumption that intentions are expressed by asserting is called into question, thereby questioning also the purported parity with expressions of belief. The second doubt raised in this section (II.2) allows that parity of expression may be real, but puts forward a competing explanation for this fact which discredits the suggestion that WIC best explains the phenomenon. It is argued that even if intentions are generally expressed by asserting, the presence of a corresponding belief may be conversationally implicated rather than entailed.
II. 1 Parity of expression?
To start with, note that the linguistic evidence for a robust correlation between expressions of intention and belief is far from decisive. Sentences such as ‘I am going to V ’ and the like are no doubt a natural and ubiquitous way of expressing one’s intention; but they are hardly the only way. Often enough, one expresses one’s (future) intention by saying e.g. ‘I intend to V ’. And the latter of course is not used to express any belief that one will V. It might therefore be claimed that at least those intentions expressed by ‘I intend to V ’ do not exemplify the parity of expression WIC purports to explain. (Indeed, as discussed later, expressing one’s intention by uttering ‘I intend to V ’ seems to be a means of signaling that one is not confident, i.e. lacks the belief, that one will in fact V ). Further, even ‘I am going to V ’ and the like are not used exclusively to express intention but sometimes also other attitudes, such as hope (e.g. ‘I’m going to pass the exam’, uttered by the unprepared student attempting to reassure himself), wish or desire (‘I am going to be prime minister’, uttered by the five-year-old), incredulity, or even (uttered in a quivering or timid tone of voice) fear. Hence, there need To support this claim, Grice offers the following ‘imaginary conversation ’ [emphasis added]: X. I intend to go to that concert on Tuesday. Y. You will enjoy that. X. I may not be there. Y. I am afraid I don’t understand. X. The police are going to ask me some awkward questions on Tuesday afternoon, and I may be in prison by Tuesday evening. Y. Then you should have said to begin with, ‘I intend to go to the concert if I am not in prison’, or … ‘I should probably be going’, or ‘I aim to go’, or ‘I intend to go if I can’.
ascribed by the speaker. But a familiar idea is that avowals actually serve to directly express rather than report the mental condition the speaker is in. Avowal-expressivism is motivated on grounds independent of the present discussion, viz. primarily the prospect of vindicating the peculiar epistemic standing of avowals. The unparalleled epistemic security enjoyed by avowals is a very widely recognized phenomenon. Avowals are typically immediate , i.e. not made on any evidential base (observation, inference, etc.). Further, avowals are typically exempt from ordinary forms of epistemic assessment: they are presumptively regarded as true, and only rarely contested, criticized, or rejected. Indeed, avowals are epistemically privileged even in comparison with other first- personal non-mental ascriptions (‘My legs are crossed’; ‘There is a cube in front of me’; ‘I’m a patient person’), which either are typically based on evidence, or more readily challengeable (or both). A chief advantage of avowal-expressivism is that it accommodates the epistemically privileged position of avowals without recourse to what many regard as the problematic suggestion of a unique epistemic base or method, such as introspection. Briefly, the central idea is that avowals are on a par with natural expressions, e.g. groans and winces, in speaking directly from or giving voice to one’s mental condition, rather than reporting it. And this is what explains their distinctive and privileged epistemic standing: similarly to natural expressions, avowals are ungrounded in any evidential base and are typically immune to epistemic assessment.^11 Expressions of intention are arguably continuous with, if not a subset of, avowals. ‘I am going to V ’, ‘I will V ’, and ‘I am V - ing’ may not obviously seem to be making self-ascribed reports of intention (unlike ‘I intend to V ’); but they clearly seem to be reporting some such mental item – if not intention, perhaps a plan or a commitment or indeed an action, either ongoing or future, which is at least partly mental. Hence the present case affords a natural candidate for the attitude being expressed (unlike expressivist treatments (^11) For discussion, see for example Wright (1998), Bar-On and Long (2001), and Bar-On (2004). Bar-On’s sophisticated Neo-Expressivism incorporates a distinction between ‘expression’ in the sense of the act or process of expressing some sentence (‘expressionA’), and ‘expression’ in the sense of the product of that process (‘expressionP’). Considered as act, Bar-On insists that avowals expressA by directly giving voice to one’s mental condition; but considered as product, avowals are indicative sentences expressingP a proposition. The distinction allows Bar-On to uphold the epistemic security of avowals while circumventing some of the traditional obstacles facing avowal- expressivism, to do with how it might account for the salient syntactic and logico-semantic continuities between sentences in the expressivist domain and sentences in other, non-expressivist domains. On Bar-On’s account, any avowal made by a declarative sentence expressesP a proposition so that, once again, there need be no striking correlation between expressing intention and belief.
of some other types of claim, e.g. causal [‘the glass broke because it was struck’] or conditional [‘if the glass is struck, it will break’], where it is prima facie harder to see what the relevant attitude might be). Further, expressions of intention enjoy the sort of privileged epistemic status typical of avowals described above. Treating avowals of intention along expressivistic lines is therefore no less plausible than treating other avowals in this way. And, as already noted, such treatment is motivated independently of the present discussion of WIC, by how it upholds the epistemic security of avowals. The above remarks do not pretend to have established anything resembling a workable expressivistic conception of intention-avowals; they barely make a start in that regard. A fortiori , they can hardly claim to have refuted the assertoric conception. But that is anyway not their purpose. More modestly, they are meant to clear ground for the possibility of expressivism about intention-avowals. This is enough to invalidate the presumption that intentions are expressed by means of asserting propositions. And with that presumption invalidated, little is left of the parity of expression the cognitivist originally seizes on. The mere fact that intention is expressed – even standardly – by declarative sentences hardly indicates the existence of a striking correlation with expressions of belief: declarative sentences are (standardly) used to express any number of attitudes without also (standardly) expressing beliefs – cf. ‘I’d like to know what time it is’ used to ask a question, or ‘So happy to see you!’ spontaneously expressing joy, to cite just a few examples. This is the first doubt raised here about the support WIC supposedly gains from how it explains the verbal expression of intention. It is unclear that parity of expression is in fact a genuine phenomenon in need of explanation.^12 Of course, as noted, the above does not rule out the possibility that intentions are typically expressed by assertions, and hence that there is in fact a striking correlation with expressions of beliefs which WIC is uniquely positioned to explain. Nevertheless, the prima facie plausibility of the alternative expressivistic view shows that as it stands – i.e., prior to demonstrating that expressivism should be rejected – the argument from parity of expression is at best inconclusive.^13 (^12) It might be thought that the speech act of expressing intentions serves a function, e.g. to facilitate planning , which requires that one have the corresponding belief. This suggestion is addressed below. (^13) I am grateful to an anonymous referee for urging me to clarify the dialectical target of my argument.
which arguably confirms the above hypothesis that beliefs are merely conversationally implicated by expressions of intention.^16 The procedure takes a cue from Moore’s Paradox, which famously involves the absurd utterance ‘ p , but I don’t believe that p ’. Moore’s proposition may be perfectly true, and still there is something deeply odd about asserting it; hence the air of paradox. The oddity comes at least in part from expressing belief in some proposition, and then going on to deny believing that same proposition. The proposal here will be that if intention entails belief as the cognitivist maintains, a parallel to Moore’s original paradox should arise. A proposition which expresses an intention to V and goes on to deny believing that one will V (for prospective intention) or that one is V - ing (for intention-in-action) should come out as paradoxical. The second clause of ‘ p , but I don’t believe that p ’ reports the absence of an attitude that the first clause implies is present. Similarly, the second clause of ‘I am going to V but I don’t believe I will V ’ likewise reports the absence of an attitude that the first clause implies is present.^17 The modified Moorean proposition ‘I am going to V but I don’t believe I will V ’ is not fully analogous to the original. For one thing, different propositions occur in each clause (‘I am going to V’ ; ‘I will V ’). But this different structure was chosen merely to make salient that the proposition is a modification, not an instance, of Moore’s original paradox. As long as the reader can hear the first clause of ‘I am going to V but I don’t believe I am going to V ’ as expressing intention and not belief, she is free to substitute it without damage to the procedure it will serve. A more serious difficulty arises when intention-in-action is concerned. It is very hard not to hear ‘I’m building a house but I don’t believe I’m building a house’ as simply an instance of Moore’s Paradox. And it is not obvious that there is a suitable alternative formulation.^18 The best candidate seems to be ‘I’m V - ing but I don’t believe I’m managing to V ’. If this pulls too far from Moore’s original for a clear verdict on present intention to emerge, still the (^16) A standard test for whether a sentence is conversationally implicated considers whether the implication is cancelable by the speaker. Cancelability is discussed later in this section. (^17) The literature sometimes mentions, alongside Moore’s original ‘ommisive’ proposition, also its ‘commisive’ counterpart ‘ p , and I believe that not- p ’. To save words, only the omissive version of the modified Moorean proposition will be discussed here. (^18) ‘I intend to be building a house but I don’t believe I’m building a house’ sounds cumbersome and forced in virtue of its first clause. Moreover, the class of intentions-in-action as such cannot plausibly be understood as intentions to be V - ing. For many, perhaps most, intentions do not match this schema. These are intentions to actually complete some task or achieve some end (e.g. an intention poison the archduke, or to clean the house), rather than to be en route to completing or achieving it. Finally, ‘I intend to V but I don’t believe I’m V - ing’ seems unhelpful since it fails to mark out the first clause as applying in particular to present, rather than future, intention.
point about prospective intention stands: the following procedure demonstrates that parity of expression does not support WIC, at least as a thesis about the (pervasive) class of prospective intentions. (In fact, as explained in section III below, cognitivists tend to regard WIC as the feature that unifies prospective and present intention. This line of thought is undercut if WIC turns out to be unmotivated with respect to the former type). In any event, the implications of the following discussion will be pointed out for future and present intentions alike. A further disanalogy between Moore’s original paradox and its modified version is that the latter refers to two different attitudes and not just one. But that should not impugn its absurdity. To verify, consider ‘Ah, if only Arsenal win the league! But I don’t want Arsenal to win the league’. Hoping entails desiring, and hence this proposition is a Moorean absurdity. Its first clause expresses hope that some state of affairs will obtain, while the second denies wanting the same state of affairs to obtain. Our primary question is whether expressing an intention by asserting ‘I am going to V ’ and the like implies or merely conversationally implicates that one believes that one will V. Under the present procedure, the question becomes whether the absurdity of the Moorean proposition can be fully explained at the level of speech act, or whether the explanation runs deeper to the level of mental economy. It is a standard constraint on any explanation of Moore’s Paradox that it encompass both levels. Any adequate account of what exactly makes ‘ p , but I don’t believe that p ’ paradoxical should recognize the oddness both of asserting and of judging that proposition.^19 Similarly, if ‘I am going to V but I don’t believe I will V ’ is indeed a Moorean absurdity, this proposition should come out paradoxical both when considered as the object of assertion, and when considered as the object of a pair of mental items: a decision (to V ), and the absence of belief (that one will V ). If this constraint is not met, the present procedure suggests that the proposition is not in fact a genuine Moorean absurdity, contrary to what the verbal argument for WIC predicts. Consequently, the argument fails. (^19) See for example Heal (1994), who lists as a ‘first condition on a solution’ to the nature of Moore’s Paradox ‘that it must be of adequate generality to explain the oddness of both thought and assertion’ (1994: 6). Various different accounts of Moore’s Paradox have been proposed, broadly dividing into suggestions that judging or asserting the proposition would indicate a severe form of theoretical or alternatively of practical irrationality. For a useful recent survey, see the introduction to Green and Williams (2007). Green and Williams also count the oddness of both assertion and judgment as a constraint on any account of Moore’s Paradox (p. 10).
intention to try to make the copies. However, again, trying seems out of place here, too. For the case may be such that the man knows from experience that he can make the copies if only he presses hard enough; he is simply unsure whether he is doing so. Any connection that does hold between one’s intention and one’s cognitive states may be captured by weaker conditions than WIC. Even if intending to V entails neither believing that one will V nor believing that one is V - ing, still it may entail some related doxastic constraints such as believing that one can V , or believing that one might V , or not believing that one cannot V , or not believing that one will not V. Any of the above, or some combination thereof, may be well-placed to account for the relation between intention in belief in a way that is compatible with the above cases as described. To repeat, the point of rehearsing these familiar cases is not to establish their force as decisive counterexamples to WIC. The point is merely to highlight the possibility of interpreting them in a way that runs counter to WIC. In Bratman’s case and its variants, doubts over the stability of one’s intention translate to doubts over its successful execution due to forgetfulness, lack of self-belief etc., while the intention remains in place. That is a possible diagnosis.^22 The diagnosis falls short of conclusive verdict, and the cognitivist will urge that we resist it. But for present purposes, a prima facie plausible interpretation is all that is required. For it casts doubt over the thought that explanations of the oddness of ‘I am going to V , but I don't believe I will V ’, or ‘I’m V - ing but I don't believe I’m managing to V ’, must extend to the level of mental economy, as with genuine Moorean absurdities. A plausible explanation could instead be given which is limited to the occurrence of false implicatures when such sentences are uttered, thus countervailing any convincing support WIC claims from the assertoric expression of intention. The conclusion is bolstered by considering the standard test of cancelability. Grice famously observes that if a sentence is merely conversationally implicated and not entailed by another sentence, the implication can be canceled by the speaker.^23 Hence an utterance which explicitly removes the hearer’s expectation that one believes that one will V as one intends should not sound inappropriate. Consider then the sentence: ‘I am going to scale this mountain but I don’t believe I’ll make it – it’s going to be very (^22) Holton (2008: 31) reaches a similar conclusion about Bratman’s case. (^23) Grice (1989), ch. 2: ‘Logic and Conversation’, and ch. 17: ‘Presupposition and Conversational Implicature’.
hard’. Voicing doubts that one is able to scale the mountain should successfully remove the expectation that one believes that one will scale the mountain. Does it? If the cancellation seems to fail as the above utterance sounds inappropriate, this may be explained by a number of pragmatic factors. First, ‘I am going to scale this mountain but I don’t believe I’ll make it’ is easily heard as a straightforward instance of Moore’s Paradox, which is not how it should be interpreted here. Second, and relatedly, the utterance may seem to violate something like Grice’s Maxim of Quantity: one is in a position to utter e.g. the more informative ‘I intend to scale this mountain, but …’, which would circumvent any confusion over whether one is expressing belief or intention by uttering ‘I am going to scale this mountain, but … ’.^24 Finally, a further reason why the original utterance may seem awkward is that ‘I don’t believe I’ll make it’ is easily heard as equivalent to ‘I believe I won’t make it’, which avows or reports the belief that one will not scale the mountain. But the argument developed here against Intention Cognitivism does not assume that intending to V may entail believing that one will not V , and hence the two possibilities should be kept firmly apart. Bearing all these complicating factors in mind, a more perspicuous utterance to consider may be: ‘I intend to scale this mountain, but I suspect I might not make it – it’s going to be very hard’. And this utterance does not seem inappropriate. Having seen that an intention-expressing-assertion of ‘I am going to V ’ and the like may only conversationally implicate that one believes that one will V , we can use this observation to cast doubt over another consideration sometimes taken to support Intention Cognitivism. David Velleman asks: ‘If I am agnostic as to whether I will be in Chicago on Tuesday, why should anyone plan or act on the assumption that I will be there?’ (2007: 206). The reply suggested here is by now no doubt obvious. Others will know that Velleman intends to be in Chicago on Tuesday because he tells them. And it is plausibly his telling, not his intending, which gives them grounds to plan or act on the assumption that he will indeed be there. The possibility of others planning around one’s intention does not require that intention entail belief.^25 (^24) Saying ‘I intend to V’ rather than ‘I am going to V ’ may sometimes serve to weaken one’s commitment to V - ing, which is itself a complicating factor. (^25) If, as in the scenario Velleman imagines, the implicature that Velleman believes he will make it to Chicago is actually false, then his audience will be making plans on a misleading basis. According to the interpretation suggested in the text, this is because Velleman has failed to cancel the implicature. Cancellability is discussed earlier in this section.
see, what is this body bringing about? Ah yes! The opening of the window'. Or even like this 'Let me see, what are my movements bringing about? The opening of the window'. (1957: 51) But there is something deeply puzzling about the intuitive appearance of such knowledge as stated by Anscombe, which makes it a highly contentious idea. Unlike believing, desiring, and so on, to know that one is intentionally acting is to know that something is taking place in the environment outside one’s mind. It thus seems to outstrip mere self-knowing, and must after all rely on ordinary methods of gathering evidential support – observational, inferential, or whatever. One needs some assurance that one’s bodily movements are in fact successfully carrying out the action one intends to preform.^30 Intention Cognitivism is thought of as a crucial step towards upholding the intuitive picture of knowledge of action by first ensuring the presence of belief , which amounts to knowledge under favourable conditions. When one intends to V , one believes that one is going to V. When the intention is being realized, the belief becomes contemporaneous: one believes that one is V - ing. Thus Velleman writes:^31 When one says ‘I am going to take a walk’, one lets the hearer know that one is going to take a walk. One’s assertion is meant to provide the justification in virtue of which the hearer then knows that one is going to take a walk, and it is meant to provide that justification by virtue of expressing one’s own knowledge to the same effect. Hence, an expression of intention must at the same time be an expression of knowledge – of something known, in other words, by being the content of intention. But why suppose one’s belief that one is going to take a walk amounts to knowledge, if it is not supported by evidence? Velleman (1989: 56-57) argues that the belief-in-intention need not be formed on the basis of evidence since once the belief is formed, it is guaranteed to enjoy post-hoc justification: once one forms the intention to V , one is justified in believing that one will V because one is aware of the intention and is inclined to act as one intends. Hence on Velleman’s view, one is entitled to ‘jump to the conclusion’ that one is going to V since the conclusion is self-supporting. And similarly for knowing that one is currently V - ing: one’s belief that one is now V - ing need not antecedently be based on any evidence, since once the (^30) For this point, see e.g. Donnellan (1963). (^31) Velleman (2007: 201).
corresponding intention to be V - ing now is in place, the belief is guaranteed to be justified. Setiya questions Velleman’s account, claiming that one’s belief is justified not only post-hoc, but also in advance of forming the belief-cum-intention. On Setiya’s view, the justification is supplied, though not derived from, one’s knowledge how to perform the intended action (Setiya 2008: 401- 6 ). Most critical discussions of ‘practical knowledge’ question the claim the one could know that one is V - ing as one believes, absent any evidential or inferential base from which it is derived.^32 The focus in what follows will be different. As Velleman and Setiya make clear, the cognitivist strategy for vindicating self-knowledge of contemporaneous action entails self-knowledge of prospective action. But the latter is an implausible upshot that is untrue to the phenomenon, rendering doubtful any claim that the cognitivist strategy offers the best explanation thereof. Whatever truth may be in the idea of practical knowledge, it does not plausibly extend to practical fore knowledge.^33 To see this, notice first that at least on the face of it, the idea of practical foreknowledge does seem even more puzzling than its contemporaneous parallel. Proponents of practical contemporaneous knowledge are challenged to explain why evidential support is not required for the belief that one is V - ing despite various possibilities that one’s intention fails to exclude – e.g. that the window is not opening as one intends because there is a nail in the sash, or because the mechanism is faulty, or … And there are so many more such possibilities when foreknowledge is at issue. These include scenarios of the sort used in the previous section to argue that one might not believe that one is going to V as one’s intention may be abandoned prematurely. Even if, as Velleman suggests, one’s belief is self-supporting; and even if, as Setiya suggests, one’s belief is supported by one’s knowledge-how – still, this does not guard against scenarios where the intention is extinguished before the time comes to act through forgetfulness, change of heart, dithering, and so on. Such scenarios seem (at least sometimes) to represent close possibilities that do not similarly threaten knowledge of current action. At least initially, then, practical foreknowledge (^32) See, for example, Grice (1971), Langton (2004), and Paul (2009b). (^33) Moran (2004) also endorses foreknowledge of action.
In addition to interrupted actions and actions aborted by a change of mind, various possible errors in realizing one’s intention likewise do not seem to falsify one’s belief. Suppose one goes to the kitchen with the intention of making Breakfast tea, but absentmindedly reaches for a Chamomile teabag instead. Noticing the mistake does not convince one that it is actually Chamomile that one is making; one simply replaces the content of the cup with the right stuff. Overcoming a hitch is often enough itself a phase of the action, and does not force a retraction of one’s original statement that one is V - ing. Unscrewing a bolt is not a sign that one is disassembling a machine contrary to one’s intention, if one corrects the error and continues to assemble it.^36 The broadness and openness of progressive action-ascriptions arguably help to make plausible the idea of groundless self-knowledge of action by underscoring the relative safety of the belief that one is V - ing. Epistemic safety encodes an intuitive condition on knowledge whereby beliefs that amount to knowledge are not true thanks to accidentally favorable circumstances. An accidentally true belief would quickly degenerate into false belief if circumstances were to change slightly; knowing is modally more robust than that. And the openness and broadness of the progressive help to confirm the relative safety of one’s belief that one is V - ing as one intends, in the face of the various possibilities that would seem to falsify it. However, crucially these theoretical resources are unavailable when it comes to demonstrating that one’s belief that one will V is likewise relatively safe. For they are resources generated by distinctive features of the progressive. This confirms the initial expectation above that a plausible account of practical knowledge, if there is one, would not extend to cover foreknowledge – unlike the account offered by the cognitivist. Positing a belief in prospective intention as WIC does turns out to be an unwarranted overgeneralization in the present context, since the phenomenon of practical knowledge is at best restricted to the progressive. Notice that the problem cannot be avoided by appealing to how detailed the content of the belief is (as an anonymous referee suggested it might). Plausibly, other things equal, the safety of one’s belief (^36) There are plausibly limits to how gross the errors could be for it still to be the case that one is V - ing. Furthermore, Falvey (2000) concedes that observation here does play the auxiliary role of revealing to one that adjustments are required to bring the action back on course. But it is not the method by which one knows what one is intentionally doing. As Anscombe notes (1957: 53), with eyes closed one may perhaps fail to write legibly ; but one is still writing.
decreases the further in the future one’s V - ing is supposed to take place, as there are more close possibilities that one will not V. But equally plausibly, safety increases the sparser the content of the belief, i.e. the less specific V - ing is. For example, other things equal, the belief that one will have tea is safer than the belief that one will have chamomile tea. And one might suggest that the latter increase can compensate for the former decrease and restore sufficient safety: intentions that are further in the future, and hence their corresponding beliefs, tend to be sparser in content since they do not yet require detailed planning. However, for one thing, we do seem to have fairly detailed intentions for the remote future – e.g. the intention to meet up with our high school friends at the annual reunion in the school auditorium. Furthermore, however sparse the intention is, it will remain vulnerable to scenarios mentioned above, in which it is extinguished before the time comes to execute it, due to change of heart, forgetfulness, and so on. (Indeed, other things equal, the likelihood of extinction surely rises the further in the future the intended action takes place). To summarize the discussion in this section so far, the argument from practical knowledge overgeneralizes, implausibly implying the existence of practical foreknowledge. WIC can therefore hardly be considered the best explanation of practical knowledge. And consequently, WIC cannot claim support from how it best explains this phenomenon. A possible response circumscribes WIC accordingly. If the idea of practical foreknowledge is an undesirable implication, perhaps WIC should be more narrowly construed as applying to intention-in- action alone. Indeed, assuming that knowledge entails belief, the considerations above from the broadness and openness of the progressive may be taken to support the view that in acting with the intention to V , one knows – and hence believes – that one is V - ing. However, cognitivists would be ill-advised to adopt such a restriction. For one thing, it would undercut an important advertised feature of the view. The feature in question is the identification of the unifying mark of intention across its different manifestations, including prospective intention and intention-in-action.^38 Furthermore, the restriction to intention-in- action would similarly undermine some of the salient theoretical payoffs of WIC described in section I, (^38) Cf. Setiya (2015): ‘[T]he basic thought is that intention in action involves the belief that one is doing A. Doing something for a reason involves a belief about one's reason for doing it that constitutes intention in action. And prospective intention, or intention for the future, involves a belief about what one is going to do and why. Intention as involving belief is the thread that binds these phenomena together .’ (Emphasis added). And see also Setiya (2007b: 48-9). On the need to explain how the different manifestations of intention are related, see Anscombe (1957: 1).
