Two Kinds of Practical Knowledge

e goal of this dissertation is to provide a unified account of two kinds of practical knowledge and the structure of intentional action. e topic of practical knowledge presents philosophical difficulties because of the modern tendency to picture cognition and the will as opposed: the will is concerned with changing the world, cognition with representing it as it already is. us the expression “practical knowledge” seems as if it can denote merely knowledge of a distinctive topic (compare: geographical knowledge). I defend the idea, however, that practical knowledge is a distinctive form of knowledge, or way of knowing (compare: perceptual knowledge). e aim of my dissertation, then, is to advance our understanding of what it is to know something practically. I do this by focusing on two kinds of practical knowledge and the ways in which they inform intentional action: agent’s knowledge—the knowledge an agent has of her intentional actions in progress and in prospect—and knowledge how—the general knowledge that enables an agent to perform particular actions. e investigation reveals that intending to do something, doing something intentionally, and possessing a rational power (that is, bearing a skill) are ways of knowing. I argue, followingG. E.M. Anscombe, that if an agent is doing something intentionally, she knows she is doing it. I extend this claim to intention for the future: if an agent intends to do something, she knows she is going to do it. An agent’s knowledge of her intentional actions in progress or prospect—of what she is doing intentionally when she’s doing it, and of what she’s going to do intentionally—differs, Anscombe claims, from knowledge she might have about her actions under nonintentional descriptions or about events that are befalling or will befall her. Famously, she thinks that agent’s knowledge is “non-observational”, by which she seems to have meant that it is based neither on observation nor on any sort of evidence; and this description has some intuitive plausibility: