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Practical Reflection
“What do you see when you look at your face in the mirror?” asks J. David Velleman in introducing his philosophical theory of action. He takes this simple act of self-scrutiny as a model for the reflective reasoning of rational our efforts to understand our existence and conduct are aided by our efforts to make it intelligible. Reflective reasoning, Velleman argues, constitutes practical reasoning. By applying this conception, Practical Reflection develops philosophical accounts of intention, free will, and the foundation of morals. This new edition of Practical Reflection contains the original 1989 text along with a new introduction and is the latest entry in The David Hume Series of Philosophy and Cognitive Science Reissues, which keeps in print previously published indispensable works in the area of cognitive science.
- GenresPhilosophy
360 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1989
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April 27, 2022
Velleman argues that practical knowledge -- knowledge we have of what we are doing (e.g., I know that I am writing a 'goodreads review' right now) -- is a kind of theoretical knowledge (e.g, I know that the sun doesn't revolve around the earth). Practical reasoning, or deciding what to do, is thus much more similar to theoretical reasoning, or figuring out what is the case, than we might've thought. Let me summarize his views and then provide some of my own thoughts.
Velleman argues that we can usually know what we are doing because once we do something, we have already gone through a selection process that eliminates the possibility of acting upon intentions to perform actions that are unintelligible to us. In effect, the actions we perform are usually ones that are knowable to us. According to Velleman, we are driven by a fundamental desire for our actions to be intelligible to us. An action we perform is intelligible if we can describe our action and explain why we are doing it. Thus, if we perform an action that is intelligible, this amounts to our being able to know that we are performing it. If we performed an action that was not intelligible, we would be unable to recognize or know what we are doing.
This fundamental desire makes it the case that we are constantly practically reflecting on what to do next, so that we can guarantee that our next action will be intelligible to us. If we catch ourselves in an act that we fail to understand (e.g., I find myself walking into the living room and realize that I do not know why I went there), we will stop our activity. We will try to recall what we are doing; this amounts to our trying to recollect our previously formed intentions to perform some intelligible action. If we fail to retrieve such intentions, we will abandon our current action, and instead decide to undertake a new action that is intelligible. So, this desire restrains us from deciding on doing anything that we would not be able to know. Once we begin undertaking an action, it will be the case that from the outset we already know what we are doing. Velleman describes the role of this fundamental desire in practical reflection that precedes action a “mechanism of self-understanding."
Velleman thus opposes Anscombe’s infamous claim that practical knowledge holds independently of what happens in the world. According to Anscombe, I may know that I am writing a sentence, even if unbeknownst to me, the ink is invisible so that I fail to produce any words. This might seem ridiculous at first, but it will make sense once we examine Anscombe’s understanding of intentional action, which I will focus on in the final section of this paper. Knowledge typically depends on what happens in the world. If I claim to know that my mother’s birthday is in September, but in fact it is in November, I cannot be said to know her birthday. So if Anscombe is correct, it is dubious whether practical knowledge is a form of knowledge. Velleman disagrees with Anscombe’s claim, but thinks that she is in the ballpark, given practical knowledge usually holds as long as we intend to do something, independently of our considerations of what goes on in the world.
Practical knowledge consists in justified, true belief of what we are doing. According to Velleman, we can justify our belief that we are performing a certain action by appealing to the facts that we have previously formed the intention to perform this action and that it is an empirical regularity that we usually succeed at performing our intended actions. Forming an intention is thus a “self-fulfilling prediction." Once we intend to do something, the action we intend to perform is intelligible to us. We desire for our actions to be intelligible to us, and so will act upon intentions to perform only intelligible actions. This means that it is most likely we will act upon our intention, once it is formed. So the formation of an intention gives us reason to think that we will most likely act upon it, and we usually heed this reason and go through with the action. Moreover, we usually successfully undertake our intentions. Together, these facts provide sufficient justification for us to believe that whatever action we are performing is just the action that we intended to perform. This belief could be falsified if we make a mistake, or something unexpected hinders us; but as long as we do successfully perform it, our belief is justified and true, amounting to knowledge.
This implies that Velleman’s position partially vindicates Anscombe’s second infamous claim that practical knowledge is non-observational. According to Anscombe, arriving at practical knowledge does not involve our observing what goes on in the world, just as arriving at knowledge of the position of our limbs does not. I may know that my leg is bent without needing to check on its position. Anscombe does not offer a definition of observation, however. As a first pass, observation may be understood as our engaging on some additional cognitive or perceptual activity to arrive at some fact, in contrast to our grasping something spontaneously or instinctively. Depending on our interpretation, Anscombe might take this non-observational character of practical knowledge to require that it is non-inferential; drawing inferences amounts to engaging in some additional cognitive activity. According to Velleman, we usually arrive at knowledge of our actions not by observing what goes on in the world, but by our inferring from the facts that we have formed a certain intention and that we usually successfully perform our intended actions. So his view agrees with Anscombe’s that arriving at practical knowledge need not require observing what happens in the world. But his view disagrees with Anscombe’s that practical knowledge is non-inferential.
For Velleman, the only distinguishing mark of practical knowledge is its subject matter: its object is our intentional action, whereas knowledge in general can take any sort of thing in the world as its object. Otherwise, practical knowledge consists in justified, true belief, as knowledge in general does. But what does intentional action consist in? Velleman does not discuss this. By conceptualizing practical knowledge as a relatively straightforward case of knowledge, however, Velleman presumes a certain understanding of intentional action. It must at least satisfy the condition that it is the action that the agent and others would identify if they observed the actual consequences of the agent’s movements, regardless of what the agent intended.
Velleman compares knowledge we have of our beliefs with that we have of our actions. Both are spontaneous; we don't have to do deductive reasoning or effortfully remember to arrive at them. But they are spontaneous in different ways. Moreover, both of them involve our "thinking what we like"; but this comes out in different ways across the cases. In belief, we're justified in holding the blief, and we like thinking our belief because we're already inclined to think this; it's like expressing a hunch, phenomenologically. In practical knowledge, we think what we like in the sense that we'll become justified in holding the thought we want to come true by holding it -- once we know our action as such, we are motivated to perform it, in order to be intelligible to ourselves.
I think Velleman raises a fascinating question about the relationship between deciding to act and holding beliefs. It seems that we have freedom and voluntariness in only the former. Velleman affirms that, and thinks the two are related insofar as deciding what to do is a matter of predicting what we in fact will do, like any case of theoretical reasoning where we determine what is the matter of fact regarding some case. I wonder if he's captured only one side of the story, or has even gotten things backwards. This is a very fuzzy and preliminary thought, but I'm wondering whether it's possible that we first decide what to do, and then when we undertake that action, we come to form the beliefs that the various conditions that must be in place in order for acting upon this to be plausible, or for that action to possibly be successful, are true. Forming these beliefs isn't necessary an explicit and definitely not deliberate matter; the phenomenology is more like implicit faith or trust in those various conditions.
It's interesting to think about how we can create a very diverse variety of beliefs through this means. Many of our beliefs are about abstract or spatially/temporally distant things, rather than concrete objects before our eyes (e.g., I believe that love is a matter of protecting another person's wellbeing -- here, 'wellbeing' and the act of protecting it is all very abstract). Our actions can be very complex, involving ends that appeal to very abstract or spatially/temporally distant things (e.g., when I give my friend a call, I do so with the aim to protect his wellbeing; or, oppositely, I could do so to escape my own loneliness). So we can "generate" so much of the world, so many things to believe in, by acting with very particular intentions or ends.
In this sense, deciding what to do is like a matter of prediction or theoretical knowledge once we reconceptualize theoretical knowledge to be constituted by all these circumstances presupposed by the ends of our actions. Our motives and what shows up to us as real are deeply connected. Seeing things this way makes Velleman's initially perhaps crazy sounding account much more plausible. We're not just demoting freedom to facts, but also we're raising facts to freedom, in the sense that by freeing choosing some of our actions, we indirectly also shape or create facts.
Velleman argues that we can usually know what we are doing because once we do something, we have already gone through a selection process that eliminates the possibility of acting upon intentions to perform actions that are unintelligible to us. In effect, the actions we perform are usually ones that are knowable to us. According to Velleman, we are driven by a fundamental desire for our actions to be intelligible to us. An action we perform is intelligible if we can describe our action and explain why we are doing it. Thus, if we perform an action that is intelligible, this amounts to our being able to know that we are performing it. If we performed an action that was not intelligible, we would be unable to recognize or know what we are doing.
This fundamental desire makes it the case that we are constantly practically reflecting on what to do next, so that we can guarantee that our next action will be intelligible to us. If we catch ourselves in an act that we fail to understand (e.g., I find myself walking into the living room and realize that I do not know why I went there), we will stop our activity. We will try to recall what we are doing; this amounts to our trying to recollect our previously formed intentions to perform some intelligible action. If we fail to retrieve such intentions, we will abandon our current action, and instead decide to undertake a new action that is intelligible. So, this desire restrains us from deciding on doing anything that we would not be able to know. Once we begin undertaking an action, it will be the case that from the outset we already know what we are doing. Velleman describes the role of this fundamental desire in practical reflection that precedes action a “mechanism of self-understanding."
Velleman thus opposes Anscombe’s infamous claim that practical knowledge holds independently of what happens in the world. According to Anscombe, I may know that I am writing a sentence, even if unbeknownst to me, the ink is invisible so that I fail to produce any words. This might seem ridiculous at first, but it will make sense once we examine Anscombe’s understanding of intentional action, which I will focus on in the final section of this paper. Knowledge typically depends on what happens in the world. If I claim to know that my mother’s birthday is in September, but in fact it is in November, I cannot be said to know her birthday. So if Anscombe is correct, it is dubious whether practical knowledge is a form of knowledge. Velleman disagrees with Anscombe’s claim, but thinks that she is in the ballpark, given practical knowledge usually holds as long as we intend to do something, independently of our considerations of what goes on in the world.
Practical knowledge consists in justified, true belief of what we are doing. According to Velleman, we can justify our belief that we are performing a certain action by appealing to the facts that we have previously formed the intention to perform this action and that it is an empirical regularity that we usually succeed at performing our intended actions. Forming an intention is thus a “self-fulfilling prediction." Once we intend to do something, the action we intend to perform is intelligible to us. We desire for our actions to be intelligible to us, and so will act upon intentions to perform only intelligible actions. This means that it is most likely we will act upon our intention, once it is formed. So the formation of an intention gives us reason to think that we will most likely act upon it, and we usually heed this reason and go through with the action. Moreover, we usually successfully undertake our intentions. Together, these facts provide sufficient justification for us to believe that whatever action we are performing is just the action that we intended to perform. This belief could be falsified if we make a mistake, or something unexpected hinders us; but as long as we do successfully perform it, our belief is justified and true, amounting to knowledge.
This implies that Velleman’s position partially vindicates Anscombe’s second infamous claim that practical knowledge is non-observational. According to Anscombe, arriving at practical knowledge does not involve our observing what goes on in the world, just as arriving at knowledge of the position of our limbs does not. I may know that my leg is bent without needing to check on its position. Anscombe does not offer a definition of observation, however. As a first pass, observation may be understood as our engaging on some additional cognitive or perceptual activity to arrive at some fact, in contrast to our grasping something spontaneously or instinctively. Depending on our interpretation, Anscombe might take this non-observational character of practical knowledge to require that it is non-inferential; drawing inferences amounts to engaging in some additional cognitive activity. According to Velleman, we usually arrive at knowledge of our actions not by observing what goes on in the world, but by our inferring from the facts that we have formed a certain intention and that we usually successfully perform our intended actions. So his view agrees with Anscombe’s that arriving at practical knowledge need not require observing what happens in the world. But his view disagrees with Anscombe’s that practical knowledge is non-inferential.
For Velleman, the only distinguishing mark of practical knowledge is its subject matter: its object is our intentional action, whereas knowledge in general can take any sort of thing in the world as its object. Otherwise, practical knowledge consists in justified, true belief, as knowledge in general does. But what does intentional action consist in? Velleman does not discuss this. By conceptualizing practical knowledge as a relatively straightforward case of knowledge, however, Velleman presumes a certain understanding of intentional action. It must at least satisfy the condition that it is the action that the agent and others would identify if they observed the actual consequences of the agent’s movements, regardless of what the agent intended.
Velleman compares knowledge we have of our beliefs with that we have of our actions. Both are spontaneous; we don't have to do deductive reasoning or effortfully remember to arrive at them. But they are spontaneous in different ways. Moreover, both of them involve our "thinking what we like"; but this comes out in different ways across the cases. In belief, we're justified in holding the blief, and we like thinking our belief because we're already inclined to think this; it's like expressing a hunch, phenomenologically. In practical knowledge, we think what we like in the sense that we'll become justified in holding the thought we want to come true by holding it -- once we know our action as such, we are motivated to perform it, in order to be intelligible to ourselves.
I think Velleman raises a fascinating question about the relationship between deciding to act and holding beliefs. It seems that we have freedom and voluntariness in only the former. Velleman affirms that, and thinks the two are related insofar as deciding what to do is a matter of predicting what we in fact will do, like any case of theoretical reasoning where we determine what is the matter of fact regarding some case. I wonder if he's captured only one side of the story, or has even gotten things backwards. This is a very fuzzy and preliminary thought, but I'm wondering whether it's possible that we first decide what to do, and then when we undertake that action, we come to form the beliefs that the various conditions that must be in place in order for acting upon this to be plausible, or for that action to possibly be successful, are true. Forming these beliefs isn't necessary an explicit and definitely not deliberate matter; the phenomenology is more like implicit faith or trust in those various conditions.
It's interesting to think about how we can create a very diverse variety of beliefs through this means. Many of our beliefs are about abstract or spatially/temporally distant things, rather than concrete objects before our eyes (e.g., I believe that love is a matter of protecting another person's wellbeing -- here, 'wellbeing' and the act of protecting it is all very abstract). Our actions can be very complex, involving ends that appeal to very abstract or spatially/temporally distant things (e.g., when I give my friend a call, I do so with the aim to protect his wellbeing; or, oppositely, I could do so to escape my own loneliness). So we can "generate" so much of the world, so many things to believe in, by acting with very particular intentions or ends.
In this sense, deciding what to do is like a matter of prediction or theoretical knowledge once we reconceptualize theoretical knowledge to be constituted by all these circumstances presupposed by the ends of our actions. Our motives and what shows up to us as real are deeply connected. Seeing things this way makes Velleman's initially perhaps crazy sounding account much more plausible. We're not just demoting freedom to facts, but also we're raising facts to freedom, in the sense that by freeing choosing some of our actions, we indirectly also shape or create facts.
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