In my presentation at the MInds, Brains and Law conference (Swansea University 11-12 December), three questions were explored:
(1) How do I know what I do?
(2) What is the nature of this knowing?
(3) Can neuroscience shed any light?
To begin to answer the questions, an analogy was drawn between ‘doing’ and ‘seeing’. Of course, whatever their precise nature, these are very different faculties; sight enables visual knowledge of the external world and action enables practical engagement with that world. Still, in an important, epistemic, sense they are alike. The shared sense is captured in how we might report our knowledge of seeing and doing; I might say 'I just know that I see a tree' and 'I just know that I am making pancakes'. Doing, like seeing, is knowing. To put it in more familiar Anscombian terms, I know these things, non-observationally (without reflecting on my experience of seeing, to know that I see a tree, and without watching the rapid movements of my whisk-holding hand, to know that I make pancakes ).
Anscombe’s approach to intentional action is experiencing significant renewed interest, very much to be welcomed. Indeed preference for the view that we know our actions observationally seems, at least in part, merely to be a symptom of two (unnecessary) explanatory foci: first, on action as physical movement and second on sight as the method of observation. But, of course, if I am to observe what I am doing, I must minimally know where to ‘look.’ The exercise of physical movement misleads that this is a straightforward notion. Moreover, note that in order to know 'where to look' we must have prior knowledge of our action that is not of the observational kind.
None of this is to deny that observational knowledge is part of what makes intentional action possible. I cannot make pancakes without knowing how to go about it. But in this way, my observational knowledge of making pancakes enables action in the same way as other human abilities enable action: I cannot make pancakes without understanding the connection between my knowledge and the end sought, without moving physically, without having a motive and so on. As Moran puts it, action depends on but does not reduce to speculative knowledge. As Falvey speculates, the enabling knowledge is part of the activity. Anscombe’s focus on non-observational knowledge brings to the fore her concept of intention; to intend is just to have non-observational knowledge of (actively) being on the way to intentional action. There is no sensation of intending that accompanies a sensation of acting; the one is the other.
What does neuroscience tell us about any of this or vice versa? Hacker notes that aeroplanes cannot fly without engines, still, aeroplanes fly not engines. Patterson and Pardo tell us that if we open someone’s brain, we do not find anything we might call “thinking.” In the same way it is true that 'I' act, not my brain and that if we open up someone’s brain, we do not find anything we might call acting. But the problems that neuroscience faces if it is to account for the phenomenon of intending are even deeper if something like an Anscombian account is true.
Sure enough, action may have no discrete correlate in the brain because ‘I’ intend not my brain. But if intention just is knowing, non-observationally, what I do (or what I am on the way to doing), It may be that intention is not the kind of thing we have at all. It is certainly (on one interpretation of Anscombe), not a capacity that is exercised in doing. By this interpretation it seems that intention, is the experience, or recognition or consciousness of action that action itself is (‘is’ rather than gives). Neuroscience and reductionism will have to overcome a conceptual minefield in order to begin to account for it as a key feature of human nature.
Moore and others (Peter Raynor, Ruth Horry and Pim Haselager) were sceptical of this position. Some accepted the prevalence of non-observational knowledge in many contexts but disputed the kind of connection Anscombe makes between non-observational knowledge and intentional action. Others denied even that ‘seeing’ is knowing. It is good to see that this is an area receiving growing consideration. It perhaps adds another layer of conceptual complexity for neurolaw (which must deal with the prominent legal notion of intention), in particular, to address.
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