Knowledge by Intention? On the Possibility of Agent’s Knowledge

1 Anscombe’s term for such knowledge in Intention is “practical knowledge”. However, I have avoided that term as I wish to defend the idea that agents have a distinctive non-observational knowledge of their actions without being committed to her claims about the existence of a kind of knowledge with a reverse direction of fit from ordinary knowledge. 2 The idea originates in English speaking philosophy with Wittgenstein’s qualified claim that “in a large class of cases it is the impossibility of taking an observant attitude towards a certain action that characterises it as a voluntary one” (Wittgenstein, 1958, p. 153). Anscombe makes a stronger claim with regard to intentional actions, that “the class of things known without observation is of great interest because of the class of intentional actions is a sub-class of it” (Anscombe, 2000 [1958], p. 14).