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PRACTICAL KNOWLEDGE 609
But how is this possible? I think this is possible only if there is what Anscombe, at one point
in Intention, calls “knowledge in intention” (Anscombe 2000: 57). Basically, this is the idea
that, in acting on an intention, one’s knowledge of what one is doing is constituted by one’s
intention itself. That is, my intention to do A is a thought through which I know that I am
doing A; and, since my intention is the cause of my doing A, this means that the relevant
thought is the cause of what is known through it. This is why, according to Anscombe, the
knowledge of my intentional action is practical knowledge, which she defines as knowledge
that is the cause of what it understands. If this idea could be rendered intelligible, it would
indeed explain why knowledge in intentional action is no accident. For, if the thought through
which I know what I am doing is the cause of my doing it, then the existence of my action
includes my knowledge of this action. So, the basic idea is that, in order to account for the
knowledge-requirement, what we have to understand is how the cause of an intentional
action can be, as such, a source of knowledge of this action. However, the difficulty certainly
is to understand how this idea of practical knowledge is to be spelled out in any detail. What I
want to argue now is that, given a certain widespread conception of practical thought, it is
indeed not obvious that there is a satisfactory way of spelling out this idea.
The conception of practical thought that I have in mind is defined by the assumption that a
practical thought is basically composed of two independent elements: a conceptual content
and a certain causal force. On this view, my intention to do A has a kind of content that it
shares with other kinds of thought (for example, with belief); a kind of content that is often
taken to be expressible in a proposition like “I am doing A” (at least if, as I assume, it is an
intention in action). To this kind of content different attitudes may be attached, which in turn
are to be distinguished in terms of their different causal roles. Very roughly, the idea is that
my intention is a practical thought in that it is the cause of what it represents, whereas a
belief is a theoretical thought in that it is causally dependent on what it represents (however
mediated this causal dependency might be). So, on this view, it is possible to understand what
it is for an agent’s intention to be a representation of the relevant movement without thereby
implying an understanding of the intention as being the cause of the movement. And,
accordingly, it is possible to understand what it is for the intention to be the cause of the
movement without thereby implying an understanding of the intention as being a
representation of the movement. This is what I want to call the compositional view of
practical thought.
What’s crucial is that, on this view, the fact that my intention is a representation of my doing
A does not include, and is not included in, the fact that it is the cause of my doing A. Its being
a representation of my doing A and its being the cause of my doing A are two independent
features of my practical thought. But if this is so, it is difficult to see how my intention can be
a thought that is, as such, knowledge of its own effect – as the knowledge-requirement
demands. To see the problem, consider that for my practical thought to be knowledge of its
own effect, there must be a non-accidental connection between my thought’s being the cause
of my doing A and its being a representation of my doing A. But, on the compositional view of
practical thought, representation and causal efficacy are independent of one another: taken as
such, there is nothing in the idea of causality that requires the presence of representation;
and, correspondingly, there is nothing in the idea of representation that requires the presence
of causality. So, it seems that there is nothing in the relevant notions of causality and
representation that explains why it is not just an accident if my thought represents what it
causes. Consequently, it seems that there is nothing that can account for my practical
thought’s qualification as knowledge of its own effect.
The problem is not just that my intention might fail to be causally efficacious. Rather, the
problem is that, if the causal efficacy of my intention is independent of its content, it seems to
be an accident that what my intention causes and what it represents come together in the
right way, namely so that the effect of my intention is the movement it represents. And if