I can raise my arm directly at will, just like that, but I have no idea how I am able to do this.
It is clear that Danto conceives the sort of knowledge-how in question, which he says agents don’t need in order to perform basic actions, as a kind of practical knowledge – knowledge from which agents act, as opposed to the sort of knowledge about themselves that they might acquire when they view themselves as objects, as scientists might. I take it that, in Danto’s view, agents need to exploit such practical knowledge-how when they perform non-basic actions – to be able to do one thing by doing another involves knowing how to do the one thing by doing the other.
It is also clear that Danto conceives the sort of knowledge-that which agents possess concerning their repertoire of basic actions – knowledge that they can perform them directly at will – likewise, as practical knowledge. This comes through when he clarifies that such knowledge-that cannot be inductive knowledge. The point is not entirely obvious. After all, we are not born knowing what we can do at will, so how else could we possibly learn this other than through observation and induction? But if we consider the matter more closely, it is easy to see that there is a difficulty for the idea that our practical knowledge is based on induction. In every case, either what we observe is a case of doing something at will, or it is not. If it is, then we must already know that we can do it at will – for you can’t unknowingly do something at will. And yet, if what we observe is not a case of doing something at will, then our observation is not relevant to learning what we can do at will.
When Danto registers this point about how an agent’s knowledge of its repertoire of basic actions cannot be arrived at inductively, he registers a profound distinction between the first-person point of view from which we act and the third person point of view from which we observe and predict. It may seem as though this is only an epistemic point, about two different ways of knowing – first personal ways and third personal ways. But we shall see that, ultimately, it brings in train a metaphysical point about the nature of what can be known from these two different perspectives.
Descartes famously argued along these lines, from the special nature of first-person knowledge to a metaphysical dualism of mind and body. Most readers of Descartes presume that they find in his work an emphasis on the nature of consciousness as an attribute of an immaterial soul that is distinct from the material body. Danto is no Cartesian. He is interested in agency, not consciousness; and unlike Descartes, who also emphasized agency in his account of the mind, Danto’s interest in agency is an interest in directly embodied agency. Nevertheless, because his conception of embodied agency is a conception of something that can be known only from a first-person point of view, it leads him to posit a duality of the me and the not-me. Danto’s non-Cartesian dualism poses a problem of other bodies, which he claims is a much more important philosophical problem than the problem of other minds that is alleged to follow up on the nature of consciousness.
I will explain below why I do not think there is a problem of other bodies. But first I want to clarify that if Danto thinks there is one, then it is not open to him to embrace a purely biologistic conception of the agent and its capacities to perform basic actions. Admittedly, that conception does seem to fit many things he says. He says, for example, that an agent’s capacities to perform basic actions are capacities to directly control its body, and also that these capacities are a gift. I take this to mean that they are, somehow, metaphysically given. It may seem plausible that they are biologically given – that they are motor capacities through which an organism directly controls its biologically given body. This is not Danto’s view. He defines the agent’s body much more abstractly, as that over which the agent exerts direct intentional control when it performs basic actions. And he goes out of his way to point out that not every part of the human organism belongs to an agent’s body in this sense – hair, teeth, and so on do not. This point might not seem fatal to the equation of an agent’s capacities with biologically given motor capacities to control a biologically given body – after all, no biologist would say that an animal with motor capacities has motor control over all aspects of its animal body. But note that if we did equate an agent’s capacities for basic actions with biologically given motor capacities, then surely a biologist could study how agents are able to perform basic actions in a scientific way. And Danto would surely be right to point out that even if an agent were to learn such a scientific account of how motor capacities work, this would not supply the agent with the sort of practical knowledge that it needs in order to exercise its own agency, for agency is exercised from the first-person point of view, and not from the third person point of view from which scientific investigation is conducted. Were this not true, it would be impossible for Danto to so much as intimate that there might be a problem of other bodies.
2 The Distinctive Character of First-Person Knowledge Owes to Agency
Akeel Bilgrami aims to capture and fortify the Cartesian insight that our knowledge of our own minds is privileged in a way that our knowledge of the world is not. He summarizes the Cartesian insight in terms of two phenomena: authority and transparency. Our self-knowledge is authoritative because we cannot be in error when we self-ascribe psychological attitudes; our self-knowledge is transparent because we cannot be ignorant of our psychological attitudes either. Bilgrami argues that we cannot explain these features of self-knowledge in purely causal terms by positing such things as special perceptual abilities or a special functional organization, because any such causal condition for self-knowledge can in principle fail, whereas there is no room for epistemic failure from the first-person point of view – there is no room for either error or ignorance.
Some philosophers might infer that we do not really enjoy the sort of epistemic privilege that Bilgrami aims to explain; and they might seek support for their conclusion in such enterprises as psychoanalytic theory and cognitive science, both of which posit psychological phenomena with respect to which we clearly do not enjoy such epistemic privilege. But Bilgrami draws a different inference: such privilege is to be explained not in the causal terms of psychological science but rather in normative terms. This requires him to give up the common assumption that the psychological attitudes are causal dispositions to behave and to adopt a conception of them as commitments in the normative sense that Isaac Levi exploits for the purposes of decision theory. To believe something in this normative sense is to hold something true, and to be committed to reasoning and acting in the light of that truth. To value something in this normative sense is to hold it to be worthy of pursuit, and to be committed to reasoning and acting in the light of that worth. (Bilgrami does not use the term “worth” but speaks instead of objective desirability.) What distinguishes commitments from causal dispositions is that the subjects who undertake them believe they ought to live up to them by reasoning and acting in accord with them. Yet they are not guaranteed to live up to their commitments, for they can fail to live up to them compatibly with still holding them so long as they can recognize their failures, and are prepared to take their failures as grounds for self-criticism. What subjects cannot do is embrace commitments in this normative sense while being mistaken about, or ignorant of, what they are thereby committed to. Bilgrami concludes that it is a condition on having commitments at all that our knowledge of them incorporates the kind of epistemic privilege that Descartes claimed for our knowledge of our own minds – it must be authoritative and transparent.
It follows from Bilgrami’s normative account of self-knowledge that subjects who enjoy privileged knowledge of their own minds are agents, for only agents can undertake commitments, and strive to live up to them, and criticize themselves for their failures to live up to them. The converse holds as well in his view: only reflective creatures who knowingly reason and act from a first-person point of view, in the light of their own commitments, qualify as agents.
Bilgrami makes no mention of the sort of phenomenological approach to explaining the privileged character of self-knowledge
