Will Small
——— About Me ——— Research ———
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Papers
The Practicality of Practical Inference
[In Adrian Haddock and Rachael Wiseman (eds.), The Anscombean Mind, Routledge, 2022.]
In Intention, Anscombe says that practical reasoning is practical, not by virtue of its content, but rather by virtue of its form. But in her later essay ‘Practical Inference’, she seems to take this back, claiming instead that (1) the practicality of practical reasoning (or inference) resides in the distinctive use it makes of the premises, and (2) ‘it is a matter of indifference’ whether we say that it exemplifies a distinctive form. I aim to show that Anscombe is right about (1) but wrong about (2): the distinctive use (or teleology) of practical reasoning explains its distinctive formal features, and when the former is thought through, the latter are revealed to be more numerous and significant than Anscombe seems to recognize. DRAFT / PUBLISHED VERSION
Agency, Powers, and Skills
[In Luca Ferrero (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Agency, Routledge, 2022.]
Agential powers (abilities and skills)—for example, the ability to walk and the skill of baking—play a large role in everyday thought and conduct concerning human agency. We care about their acquisition, maintenance, and development, and are concerned about their loss. However, the role of agential powers in agency and the explanation of action has not been a focus of analytic philosophy of agency, and it is not well understood. Among several important issues that need to be resolved, the following are discussed here: the connection between agential powers and ‘basic action’; the specification of agential powers; the distinction between skills and abilities; and whether agential powers are dispositions—and if so, whether they are dispositions of a distinctive form. DRAFT / PUBLISHED VERSION
The Intelligence of Virtue and Skill
[In The Journal of Value Inquiry, 2021.]
Julia Annas proposes to shed light on the intelligence of virtue through an analogy with the intelligence of practical skills. To do so, she first aims to distinguish genuine skills and skillful actions from mere habits and routine behaviour: like skills, habits are acquired through habituation and issue in action immediately (i.e. unmediated by reasoning about what to do), but the routine behaviour in which habit issues is mindless and unintelligent, and cannot serve to establish or illuminate the intelligence of virtuous action. In a second step, she argues that virtue has the same kind of intellectual structure—and is acquired through the same kind of habituation—as skill. I argue that Annas’s proposal fails at the first step: her conceptions of the rational articulacy of skill and the immediacy that characterizes its exercise in action cannot be squared. I offer an alternative conception of the intelligence of skill and its exercise that draws on Aristotle’s conception of rational capacities as two-way powers. But as a virtue is not a two-way power, virtues and skills do not share a common intellectual structure. DRAFT / PUBLISHED VERSION
Anscombe on Action and Practical Knowledge
[In Ellen Fridland and Carlotta Pavese (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Skill and Expertise, Routledge, 2020.]
In order to assess the implications of an Anscombean conception of agency for the theory of know-how, I sketch the place of Elizabeth Anscombe’s account of the distinctive knowledge that an agent has of her intentional actions in her conception of agency. Anscombe thinks that this knowledge is non-observational, and that it is practical, in a sense that is explained. I resolve an interpretive difficulty in Anscombe’s Intention, arguing that, for Anscombe, intentional action indeed depends on know-how (mere “belief-how” is insufficient). Though Anscombe seems to think that know-how consists in a kind of practical capacity, this does not commit her to anti-intellectualism about know-how. However, it is suggested that an Anscombean conception of agency fits most naturally with a “bifurcationist” conception of know-how, according to which there is propositional know-how but also non-propositional “basic know-how.” DRAFT / PUBLISHED VERSION
Practical Knowledge & Habits of Mind
[In Journal of Philosophy of Education, 2020.]
Education aims at more than supplying learners with information, or knowledge of facts. Even when the transmission of information is at stake, abilities relevant to using that information are among the things that teachers aim, or ought to aim, to inculcate. We may think that abilities for critical reflection on knowledge, and critical thinking more generally, are central to what teachers should cultivate in their students. Moreover, we may hope that students acquire not merely the ability to (e.g.) think critically, but the propensity or habit of doing so. We hope that critical thinking will be something they do do, not something they merely can do; that they will become, not merely capable of inquiry, but inquisitive; and so on. If education aims at more than the inculcation of propositional knowledge, are these other aims non-cognitive, or non-epistemic? This essay aims to make progress on this question by critically examining Gilbert Ryle's conceptions of skill and habit. DRAFT / PUBLISHED VERSION
Basic Action and Practical Knowledge
[In Philosophers’ Imprint, 2019.]
It is a commonplace in philosophy of action that there is and must be teleologically basic action: something done on an occasion without doing it by means of doing anything else. It is widely believed that basic actions are exercises of skill. As the source of the need for basic action is the structure of practical reasoning, this yields a conception of skill and practical reasoning as complementary but disjoint. On this view, practical reasoning and complex intentional action depend on skill and basic action, but the latter pair are not themselves rationally structured: the movements a basic action comprises are not intentional actions, and they are not structured as means to an end. However, Michael Thompson and Douglas Lavin have argued that action that bears no inner rational structure is not intentional action at all, and that therefore there can be no such thing as basic action. In this paper, I argue that their critique shows that standard conceptions of basic action are indeed untenable, but not that we can do without an alternative. I develop an alternative conception of skill and basic action on which their basicness is not to be equated with simplicity: like deliberation and non-basic action, they are teleologically complex, but their complexity takes a different form. On this view, skill contrasts with deliberation—not because it is not a manifestation of practical reason, but—because the two are specifically different manifestations of practical reason. PUBLISHED VERSION
Agency and Practical Abilities
[In Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements, 2017.]
Though everyday life accords a great deal of significance to practical abilities—such as the ability to walk, to speak French, to play the piano—philosophers of action pay surprisingly little attention to them. By contrast, abilities are discussed in various other philosophical projects. From these discussions, a partial theory of abilities emerges. If the partial theory—which is at best adequate only to a few examples of practical abilities—were correct, then philosophers of action would be right to ignore practical abilities, because they could play no fundamental role in an account of human agency. For the idea that practical abilities do play a fundamental role in human agency to be worth considering, an alternative conception of them is needed. As a first step, I attempt some of the necessary ground-clearing work. DRAFT / PUBLISHED VERSION
Ryle on the Explanatory Role of Knowledge How
[In Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy, 2017.]
Contemporary discussions of knowledge how typically focus on the question whether or not knowing how to do ϕ consists in propositional knowledge, and divide the field between intellectualists (who think that it does) and anti-intellectualists (who think that it does not, and that it consists instead in the possession of the ability to ϕ). This way of framing the issue is said to derive from Gilbert Ryle. I argue that this is a misreading of Ryle, whose interest in discussing knowledge how was not primarily epistemological but rather action-theoretical, whose argument against intellectualism has for this reason been misunderstood and underestimated (by Jason Stanley, among others), and whose positive view aims to chart a middle course between intellectualism and anti-intellectualism. PUBLISHED VERSION
Bodily Movement and its Significance
[In Philosophical Topics, 2016.]
Much contemporary philosophy of action gives a central role to bodily movement. Those who tell the so-called standard story of action think that actions are bodily movements (arm raisings, leg bendings, etc.) caused by beliefs and desires, that cause further effects in the world (switch flippings, door movements, etc.) in virtue of which they can be described (as flippings of switches, shuttings of doors, etc.). Those who hold a disjunctive conception of bodily movement think that actions are bodily movements that involve intentions essentially, but they too think that when an agent raises a glass, there is an action (an arm raising, perhaps) that causes a distinct event (a glass rising), in virtue of which the action (=the bodily movement) may be redescribed as a raising of a glass. Against both views, it might be held that actions may constitutively involve the changes wrought on their patients—that action is, in the first instance, transaction. But if action consists fundamentally not in an agent’s moving herself, but in her moving (or otherwise changing) something else, then how should we think about the nature and philosophical significance of bodily movement? DRAFT / PUBLISHED VERSION
The Transmission of Skill
[In Philosophical Topics, 2014.]
The ideas that skill is a form of knowledge and that it can be taught are commonplace in both ancient philosophy and everyday life. I argue that contemporary epistemology lacks the resources to adequately accommodate them. Intellectualist and anti-intellectualist accounts of knowledge how struggle to represent the transmission of skill via teaching and learning, in part because each adopts a fundamentally individualistic approach to the acquisition of skill that focuses on individual practise and experience; consequently, learning from an expert’s teaching is rendered at best peripheral. An account of the transmission of skill that focuses on guided practice is shown to be immanent in an anti-individualist account of skill. This account takes seriously the Aristotelian ideas that skills are rational capacities and second natures by developing the thought that doing, teaching, and practising are three moments of an a priori unity: the life-cycle of a skill. DRAFT / PUBLISHED VERSION
Teaching and Telling
[In Philosophical Explorations, 2014.]
Recent work in the epistemology of testimony has raised the questions to what extent testimony is a distinctively second-personal phenomenon, and what might be the epistemic significance of its second-personal aspects. However, testimony, in the sense primarily investigated in recent epistemology, is far from the only way in which we acquire knowledge from others. My goal is to distinguish knowledge acquired from testimony—learning from being told—from knowledge acquired from teaching—learning from being taught, and to investigate the similarities and differences between the two with respective to the interpersonal dimensions of their structures. DRAFT / PUBLISHED VERSION
Practical Knowledge and the Structure of Action
[In Günter Abel and James Conant (eds.), Rethinking Epistemology, Vol. 2, DeGruyter, 2012.]
I argue that there is a cognition condition on intention and intentional action. If an agent is doing A intentionally, she has knowledge in intention that he is doing A. If an agent intends to do A, she has knowledge in intention that she is going to do A. In both cases, the agent has knowledge of eventual success, in this sense: she knows that it will be no accident if she ends up having done A. In both cases, the agent’s knowledge is of what is happening, or what is going to happen, in the world; it is not knowledge merely of her state of mind. This knowledge is practical: it the cause of what it understands; without it what is happening, or what is going to happen, is not an intentional action, and any practical thought of the agent’s about what is happening, or what is going to happen, does not hit the heights of intention. I demonstrate that famous examples (from Davidson and Bratman) purporting to show that the cognition condition should be rejected (or its content or scope weakened) are ineffective, because they trade on confusions about the different kinds of failure to which intentional action may be susceptible, confusions remedied via reflection on the structure of intentional action. I show that the cognition condition is grounded not in reflection about the directions of fit and guidance of different kinds of mental states, nor in the indicative content of linguistic expressions of intention, but in the calculative and temporal structure of intentional action itself. DRAFT / PUBLISHED VERSION
Reviews
Review of Self-Knowledge, ed. Anthony Hatzimoysis, OUP 2011.
In Mind 2014; doi: 10.1093/mind/fzu017 PUBLISHED VERSION
Review of Knowing How: Essays on Knowledge, Mind, and Action, eds. John Bengson & Marc A. Moffett, OUP 2011.
In European Journal of Philosophy December 2013, Volume 21, Issue Supplement S4; doi: 10.1111/ejop.12073 PUBLISHED VERSION
