However, despite its centrality to Anscombe’s project, her concept of practical knowledge has not been widely understood. Part of the blame for this lies with Anscombe herself: she is anything but systematic, and she appeals to the concept of practical knowledge with a bewildering array of formulations, several of which are hard to see as connected to the others. A second explanation is that recent attempts to unpack Anscombe’s conception of agential knowledge have usually preceded without much attention to the Aristotelian and Thomistic texts whose ideas she is frequently incorporating — a lack I hope to remedy in this paper by relating Anscombe’s views to Aquinas’ discussion of practical cognition in the Summa Theologiae. But a final reason for this lack of understanding is the tendency among many of Anscombe’s interlocutors to focus just on her better-known claim that a person always knows “without observation” whatever he or she is intentionally doing (I, 13), without doing as much to explore Anscombe’s idea that there is something else distinctive about practical knowledge in contrast to knowledge that is “derived from the objects known” (ibid., 87). This is important, because the former doctrine is widely regarded as problematic, and an exclusive focus on it can bar us from considering what else might be right in Anscombe’s view. Together with the seeming inevitability of what Anscombe calls the “incorrigibly contemplative conception of knowledge” that she takes to be characteristic of modern thought (ibid., 57), all this makes the concept of practical knowledge seem an unlikely place to found a theory of action. However understandable, this situation makes it very difficult for Anscombe’s readers to be confident that we have gotten her view right, and thus to evaluate its philosophical promise. This is especially true if, as I suggested above, the claim that agential knowledge is practical knowledge is doing more philosophical work in Intention than the claim that it is knowledge without observation. As several commentators have noted, in the argument of Intention, the concept of non-observational knowledge appears early in the text when Anscombe is offering a preliminary characterization of which actions fall under the “certain sense of the question “Why?” that she takes to have application only to intentional actions (I, 9). This characterization of agential knowledge is purely negative — it tells us that it is not knowledge through observation; and Anscombe supplies several examples, including that of our way of knowing the positions of our limbs, to help us understand it. But of course agential knowledge is not precisely the same sort of knowledge as the knowledge of one’s bodily position, even if they share some features in common. Moreover, Anscombe herself is aware of many of the difficulties that arise when we try to understand agential knowledge as non-observational: indeed, she raises them herself in §§28–30 of Intention and considers what she regards as several insufficient responses to them, before moving in §31 to considerations that build toward proposing the concept of practical knowledge as the key element in a better solution. If we take Anscombe’s concept of non-observational knowledge for granted without understanding what is supposed to make this knowledge practical, then our grasp of her position is bound to be very partial, and focused on considerations that in her view were really quite secondary. Yet as I noted above, this is exactly what many of her recent interlocutors have tended to do.
