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ABSTRACT
For Anscombe a solitary activity is intentional if the agent has self-knowledge of what she is doing. Analogously one might think that to partake in shared intentional activities is for the agents involved to have plural or collective self-knowledge of what they are doing together. I call this ‘the Plural Practical Knowledge Thesis’ (PPK). While some authors have advanced related theses about the nature of the knowledge involved in shared practical activities (see Laurence, B. [2011]. “An Anscombian Approach to Collective Action.” In Essays on Anscombe’s Intention, edited by Anton Ford, Jennifer Hornsby, and Frederick Stoutland. Cambridge: Harvard UP; Schmid, H.-B. [2016]. “On Knowing What We Are Doing Together.” In The Epistemic Life of Groups: Essays in the Epistemology of Collectives, edited by Michael S. Brady, and Miranda Fricker. Oxford: Oxford UP; Rödl, S. [2015]. “Joint Action and Recursive Consciousness of Consciousness.” Phenomenology and Cognitive Sciences 14: 769–779. doi:10.1007/s11097-015-9423-1; Rödl, S. [2018a]. “Joint Action and Pure Self-Consciousness.” Journal of Social Philosophy 49 (1): 124–136; Rödl, S. [2018b]. Self-Consciousness and Objectivity. Cambridge: Harvard UP) this alternative remains relatively underexplored in the current literature. The paper offers an account of plural practical knowledge based on the idea that shared activities of the relevant sort share a normative structure given by practical, means-end structures and proposes a paradigmatic methodology that generalizes this account to understand what different cases of collective intentional action have in common. It then discusses the differences between the proposed approach and those due to Schmid 2016. “On Knowing What We Are Doing Together.” In The Epistemic Life of Groups: Essays in the Epistemology of Collectives, edited by Michael S. Brady, and Miranda Fricker. Oxford: Oxford UP and Laurence 2011. “An Anscombian Approach to Collective Action.” In Essays on Anscombe’s Intention, edited by Anton Ford, Jennifer Hornsby, and Frederick Stoutland. Cambridge: Harvard UPand the reasons why it should be preferred.
Acknowledgements
I am indebted to many colleagues and audiences for invaluable feedback on this project. The ideas in this paper were first presented at academic events at the Institute of Philosophy in London and the University of Lisbon, both in 2013. Discussions around it gave rise to a project generously funded by a British Academy Mobility Grant (2015/6), for which myself and Johannes Roessler were Principal Investigators. Later versions were presented at the University of Copenhagen, the University of Cork, the University of Warwick, the University of Vienna, the University of Hradec Králové, Deakin University, UNSW, ANU, the ENSO V meeting, and the ESPP 25th conference. I am grateful to the audiences at all those venues for valuable discussions of earlier versions of the paper. I am especially thankful to Tom Crowther, Guy Longworth, Johannes Roessler, Naomi Eilan, and Steven Butterfill for their feedback on previous drafts as well as to two anonymous referees.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 The view that one typically knows what one is intentionally doing ‘without evidence or observation’ was first defended by Anscombe (Citation1969).
2 This does not mean that there is no role for observation in this form of knowledge. On the contrary, perception comes into it, but rather ‘as an aid' (Anscombe Citation1969, 53), as an enabling condition, making practical knowledge possible. Moran (Citation2004) exemplifies the role of observational knowledge in practical knowledge with a case in which someone is painting a wall yellow. In this case both the colour of the paint and the wall being painted are known by the agent observationally, through perception. Perceptual information of this kind is thus absolutely necessary to form specific intentions involving things surrounding us and to carry the corresponding actions out, but the crucial point is that the agent’s understanding of her intentional action, e.g. her intention of painting the wall yellow, is known practically and not perceptually.
3 It is important to note that this kind of knowledge is not of things that happen ‘internally’ but of facts, of things happening in the world, e.g. the wall being painted (see Moran Citation2004). The difference pointed out here between practical knowledge and observational knowledge, is not the difference between knowledge of the internal and knowledge of the external, but rather that between things I understand practically, i.e. that I understand as things that count as actions of mine, as done by me and up to me, and things that are not up to me in that way, e.g. the fact that the sun is rising or that the sky is cloudy.
4 It is worth noting here that this is an answer an agent is able to provide upon reflection, there is no implication that the agent needs to the thinking of this as she acts.
5 It is important to note that not every action can be given a formulation like this, in which it is explained for the sake of another action, for the chain must end somewhere in actions that are not motivated by or o pursued by engaging in other actions (see Laurence Citation2011, 278).
6 Yet, as pointed out above (fn.4), this does not require that Sally herself rehearses her reasons in deliberating about what to do at any given time. Rather, this is a pattern of rationalization that can be reconstructed in reflection which reveals the structure of her motivation.
7 This is Rödl’s (Citation2018b, 124) formulation following Meggle.
8 Laurence (Citation2011), Schmid (Citation2016), Rödl (Citation2018a, Citation2018b), Satne (Citation2020) do this is in different ways. More on their differences below.
9 As in the solitary case, this would mean that in the plural case, perception comes into this knowledge but rather ‘as an aid'. The idea here is that although in this case, as in the solitary case, perception permeates this knowledge through and through, the knowledge of what we are doing is practical, not perceptual.
10 This formulation is Roessler & Satne’s, Joint Practical Knowledge Project, British Academy Mobility Grant, 2015.
11 Bratman’s (Citation1992) analysis of shared intentional activities illustrates a view along these lines. See Longworth (Citation2019), for a defense of this claim.
12 The reference to the ‘normal’ case is important, for it signals out intentional actions from actions that are not intentional, as when Sally finds herself wandering in the street but she has no idea why. This knowledge is not something Sally has to entertain explicitly (see fn. 4 above).
13 I thank Jane Heal for pointing this to me, though rather mysteriously, when I first presented this paper publicly at a workshop at the University of Warwick in 2016.
14 For the sake of clarity and space, I am simplifying matters here. To indicate essential pronouns, identified by their self-reflective character, Castañeda introduced the star ‘*’. Following Castañeda’s convention, we can say that indeed the ‘I*’ is never identified by observation (Schmid Citation2016, 72). I cannot think of me* and not think of me* as me*, though this can happen with ‘that woman in the mirror’, that is, as long as I don’t see myself in seeing her. For the original analysis of the meaning of I* as ‘immune to error through mis-identification', see Evans’ classic piece (Evans Citation1982, 6.6), and Rödl (Citation2007) for discussion.
15 One might think that this is not entirely true for an individual can at least establish partially the identity of the group by knowing herself to be part of that group, yet Schmid argues that this is not the case even in this restricted sense, for I may take myself to be part of a group or a collective activity I do not really take part of, see Schmid (Citation2016; 72) and below.
16 Bratman (Citation1992) and Gilbert (Citation2013) advocate views like this, yet in quite different ways.
17 See Salice and Satne (Citation2020) for further elaboration of this point.
18 Bratman speaks to this issue by appealing to individuals having common knowledge of each other’s intentions and plans that mesh, that being what brings unity to their collective actions. One known problem about this strategy is that common knowledge itself remains conceptually mysterious; another has to do precisly with whether we can achieve with that view the proper kind of unity that allows for the rationality of collective action (see Rödl Citation2015 for an argument in this direction).
19 A qualification may be made at this point. The kind of unity that is missing here, as I explain below, is the unity of intentional action, yet we might think that the kind of collective action at issue in Laurence’s analysis exhibits some kind of unity, if not the unity of collective intentional action, that of collective action. The latter would amount to bringing about one single outcome as a result of a collection of individuals doing their parts, the former requires a kind of unity that makes this result not accidental.
20 Rödl (Citation2015) coined the expression ‘simulacrum’ to name actions that only seem to be joint but are not genuinely so.
21 This knowledge can be understood in terms of a disjunctive account of knowledge where ‘good cases’, i.e. cases where conditions are met, are cases of knowledge, and cases where conditions are not met, so that the fact that was to be known is not given, are straightforward failed cases of collective intentional action.
22 It is worth noting that these joint activities are not meant to be ‘basic’ in the foundational sense discussed above thereby implying that other joint actions are collectively intentional by inheriting some properties from these interactions. Rather, they are basic in the sense that they are done intentionally under the most minimal descriptions in which the actions of the individuals count as jointly intentional. For example, in playing catch, the appropriate minimal description capturing the joint intentional action would be this: ‘we are playing catch, I am throwing, you are catching’. In some cases, this can be captured by a demonstrative: ‘we are doing this’, where the demonstrative picks out an activity that the individuals are jointly engaged in here and now. For elaboration on these points, see Satne (Citation2020).
23 Note that someone might still want to claim that perception and memory are at work in all these cases precisely as ways of knowing what the others will do, e.g. as epistemic grounds for the premise of what John or Sally will do. The premise about what others are doing or will do, grounded on memory or perception will be construed as part of an inference on the part of each interacting agent, to the conclusion that we- both themselves and others- are jointly doing something together. This will amount to construing the knowledge of what we are jointly doing as inferential and observational, rather than practical. Yet, the Anscombean view of intentional action insists that memory and perception for the group case work exactly in the same way as they do in the solitary case, they are enabling conditions for practical knowledge, not grounds for that knowledge.
24 If we accept that basic joint intentional actions also count as cases of plural practical knowledge the immediate question is whether (c) is satisfied in this case, for how are the agents’ responses in that case informed by practical reasoning? The central idea here is that practical knowledge is not always a matter of reasonining, but also a matter of embodied sensory-motor responses to others and the world. For a detailed development of this claim see Satne (Citation2020).