ABSTRACT
This chapter assesses the implications of an Anscombean conception of agency for the theory of know-how. It sketches 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. The chapter resolves an interpretive difficulty in Anscombe’s book 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: her conception of agency is incompatible with Dreyfus’s prominent version of anti-intellectualism, whereas Pavese’s intellectualism acknowledges the indispensability of practical capacities to 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.’
