Knowing-to in Wang Yangming

Since the 1940s, Western epistemology has discussed Gilbert Ryle’s distinction between knowledge-that and knowledge-how. Ryle argued that intelligent actions – manifestations of knowledge-how – are not constituted as intelligent by the guiding intervention of knowledge-that: knowledge-how is not a kind of knowledge-that; we must understand knowledge-how in independent terms. Yet which independent terms are needed? In this chapter, we consider whether an understanding of intelligent action must include talk of knowledge-to. This is the knowledge to do this or that now, not then or in general. Our argument is refined and buttressed by consideration of a text in Chinese philosophy, the Lüshi Chunqiu. This 3rd century BCE text, a compendium on good government, focuses on different types of knowledge that an effective ruler or a capable official should possess. A significant number of those discussions concern examples of knowing-how being manifested in particular situations. The text is explicitly aware of the importance of timeliness and awareness of context in manifesting know-how. Some might say that these are merely manifestations of knowing-how. But we see these examples as revealing characteristics of know-how that Ryle did not anticipate. Might knowing-to be an essential and irreducible aspect of intelligent action?

This dissertation mounts a defense of the claim, made by Elizabeth Anscombe in her monograph Intention, that when an agent is acting intentionally, he knows what he is intentionally doing immediately—without observation or inference. We can separate out three elements, which build on each other, in this claim: the agent is acting, is acting intentionally, and has knowledge of what he is doing. The progress of the dissertation roughly follows this rough division. The first two chapters are concerned with articulating what is at stake in the characterization of an agent as acting. Since someone can be doing something without its being the case that she will have done it, and the knowledge claim concerns the doing rather than the having done of an action, we should first of all investigate what is predicated of someone who is said to be underway toward an end. I begin in the first chapter at a further remove from intentional action, with an investigation of not necessarily agential process-claims in general; the second chapter begins the transition to acting intentionally be applying the considerations of the first to the agential context. The third and fourth chapters explicitly turn to acting intentionally. The third begins by addressing an argument meant to establish that intentional action is compatible with ignorance of what one is doing, and in doing so formulates a criterion for performing non-basic actions intentionally. The fourth chapter takes up teleologically basic actions and supplements the criterion of the third to give a sufficient and necessary condition on acting intentionally. The final pair of chapters addresses the knowledge element of the claim. In the fifth, I articulate the concern that the nature of action is such as to render it only knowable theoretically, and examine several theories that attempt to account for knowledge of action observationally or inferentially. This concern is viable in the context of the causal theory of action; in the sixth chapter, I endorse in its place a metaphysically modest teleological theory. With that in place, space is opened up for a neo-expressivist account of knowledge of intention in action, which, when combined with the results of the preceding chapters, redeems the knowledge claim.

Journal of East-West Thought, 2025

When the Ming dynasty Confucian Wang Yangming (1472-1529) proposed his tenet of the unity of knowing and acting (zhi xing heyi 知行合一), he did so because he believed that Zhu Xi (1130-1200), his revered Song dynasty predecessor and architect of the School of Principle (Neo-Confucianism), had wrongly conceptually divided knowledge and action, and that this had led to profound problems of an existential nature for the individual with real-world consequences. For Wang Yangming, the relation between knowledge and action is fundamentally one of identity, an identity grounded in the inherent, true condition of the vital being of the individual, in a unity of mind and body. He called this identity the original condition and original form of knowing and acting, explaining it in various ways. This article first explains how Wang Yangming positioned his tenet in relation to Zhu Xi's conceptualization of the relation between knowledge and action, and then elucidates his conception of the unity of knowing and acting in four orientations, according to the different senses in which knowledge/knowing are understood: as perception, as awareness, as what is known, and as the innate knowing. Originally appeared as a Chinese-language article written by Professor Dong Ping. 论“知行合一”的四重向度. 作者：董平（浙江大学哲学系教授、博士生导师）. 原载于《社会科学战线》2019年第2期. This is an edited and abbreviated version.

Gilbert Ryle has made the famous distinction between intellectual knowing-that and practical knowing-how. Since knowledge in Confucianism is not merely intellectual but also practical, many scholars have argued that such knowledge is knowing-how or, at least very similar to it. In this essay, focusing on Wang Yangming’s moral knowledge (liangzhi 良知), I shall argue that it is neither knowing-that nor knowing-how, but a third type of knowing, knowing-to. There is a unique feature of knowing-to that is not shared by either knowing-that or knowing-how: a person with knowing-to (for example, knowing to love one’s parents) will act accordingly (for example, love his or her parents), while neither knowing-that (for example, the knowing that one ought to love one’s parents) nor knowing-how (for example, the knowing how to love one’s parents), whether separately or combined, will dispose or incline its possessor to act accordingly (for example, love one’s parents).

Much of what we do seems to have the feature that Anscombe attributed to all our intentional actions: that of being known without observation of inference. There is, however, a *prima facie* tension between any attempt to show that this seeming feature actually does obtain and the causal theory of action explanation; as Davidson already pointed out in "Actions, Reasons, and Causes", there is no guarantee that one will know what is causing one to act, or even, potentially, that one has been caused to act---so that one would be performing an intentional action in ignorance. I argue that this tension cannot be overcome: one cannot reconcile a causal theory of action and immediate knowledge of action. The negative argument is prosecuted through an examination of Velleman's and Setiya's attempts to bring the two terms together: in each case one ends up needing to fall back on observation or inference. I close with some positive suggestions concerning the potential of a teleological theory of action explanation for redeeming the immediacy of practical knowledge.

Philosophical Studies

Two traditions in action theory offer different accounts of what distinguishes intentional action from mere behavior. According to the causalist tradition, intentional action has certain distinguished causal antecedents, and according to the Anscombian tradition, intentional action has certain distinguished epistemological features. I offer a way to reconcile these ostensibly conflicting accounts of intentional action by way of appealing to “ability-constituting knowledge”. After explaining what such knowledge is, and in particular its relationship to inadvertent virtue and knowledge-how, I suggest that, among other things, appealing to ability-constituting knowledge can help us flesh out what it is for an agent’s reasons to non-deviantly cause and sustain her purposive behavior.

Philosophical Studies, 2000

British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 2017

What is intentional action? In her (1957) Intention, Anscombe appeared to give not one, but two answers: first, intentional actions are actions to which a special sense of the question 'Why?' is applicable (9), 2 and second, they form a sub-class of the things a person knows without observation (14). Call these Anscombe's 'Why-Question Characterisation' (WQC), and her 'Agent's Knowledge Characterisation' (AKC), of intentional action. Anscombe never suggests that WQC and AKC deliver two different notions of intentional action, and anyway it is not plausible that 'intentional action' is ambiguous. We should assume, then, that Anscombe means WQC and AKC to converge on a single phenomenon. But she does not fully explain this convergence, at least not explicitly. Anscombe does link the two characterisations by saying that the special 'Why?' is refused application by both 'I was not aware I was doing that' (11), and 'I knew I was doing that, but only because I observed it' ( ). And this entails that if S grants application to the special 'Why?', asked of her φ-ing, then S knows that she is φ-ing without observation: WQC implies AKC. But if WQC and AKC both characterise intentional action, and intentional action is a univocal notion, then AKC must apply not just if but only if WQC applies, and Anscombe's remark noted above does not speak to this. And even being told that AKC and WQC apply to all and only the same phenomena would leave us with a puzzle: why should this be? After all, there is no general relationship between how some phenomenon is to be explained and how, by whom, or even whether, it is known. This paper offers a solution to the puzzle. The idea will be that both WQC and AKC characterise intentional actions as behaviours which 'have a point', where this point is dependent on their agents' recognition of it. Explaining why this is will require providing a holistic elucidation not only of WQC and AKC themselves, but of several other key concepts in Intention, including those of practical reasons, the sui generis kind of explanation of action in terms of these, the distinction between practical and speculative knowledge, the formal features which mark this distinction, and of Anscombe's characterisation of practical knowledge as knowledge 'in intention'. Before I offer this elucidation, I want to describe and diagnose an oddity in the way in which Intention has influenced the development of action-theory over the past forty years. Against this background, the need to solve the puzzle I have identified becomes particularly acute. The influence of Anscombe's Intention on the development of the philosophy of action is huge and well-recognised, but it takes a rather odd form. On the one hand, several of Anscombe's key ideas, distinctions, concepts and examples have been appropriated by philosophers writing in Intention's wake, and now form part of the standard action-theoretic toolkit. On the other, these ideas tend, in the hands of their appropriators, to take on a rather different form to that in which they appear in Intention. 3 The ideas with which this paper is centrally concerned -that of a special question 'Why?' and of non-observational or 'practical' knowledge of intentional action -are no exception to this tendency. I take each idea in turn. Whilst Intention was part of then-orthodox Wittgensteinian thinking about agency, 4 many of its key ideas have been filtered through their influence on Davidson, with the idea that intentional action is subject to the question 'Why?' representing a prime example. Briefly, the Wittgensteinian school was characterised by a rejection of causalist conceptions of central actiontheoretic concepts such as action done for reasons or voluntarily, and by a focus -instead -on the normative and epistemological dimensions of agency. 5 The causalist tradition had persisted in

Is there a unity between intentional action and intention? There is a division amongst philosophers on this question, some following Elizabeth Anscombe (1963) in arguing yes, while others - such as Gilbert Harman (2006) and Richard Holton (2009) - contend no. Recent studies in experimental philosophy undertaken by Knobe and Burra (2006) have been taken to lend weight to the side of the unity-deniers, as these studies seem to show that the two uses come apart in the practice of the folk. In this paper I examine these experiments, and then argue that they do not provide the support for the unity-denier camp that they are often taken to.