Philosophy of Mind Seminar (Friday - Week 6, HT24)

Elizabeth Anscombe famously held that knowledge of one’s own actions is in an important sense ‘knowledge without observation’. Following her lead, many philosophers take the non-observational character of this form of self-knowledge to be one of its elementary, defining features. But can observation or perception ever play a role in grounding our knowledge of what we are intentionally doing? My goal in this session is to critically discuss this question in the light of relevant psychological data. 

Reflection on experimental paradigms and psychological and neurological conditions can help to put the Anscombean doctrine into perspective. I shall focus on peripherally deafferented subjects who require continuous visual feedback to execute very basic intentional bodily actions. These empirical cases show that visual perception can become a necessary condition for self-knowledge of such actions. But I shall further suggest that perception in these cases is plausibly also a partial ground of one’s agentive knowledge.

This claim, however, leads to a puzzle: how can perceptual sources, also available to another, ever ground the kind of self-knowledge we have regarding what we ourselves are intentionally doing? The puzzle can be dissolved, I shall tentatively argue, by exploiting the theoretical resources attached to the idea that self-knowledge of action can be attained in various ways. While this proposal is incompatible with the unqualified rejection of observational self-knowledge of action, (i) it still makes room for a number of central Anscombean theses; and (ii) it also takes steps to account for the connection between self-knowledge and other people’s knowledge of our very own actions.