The authority of practical knowledge

[Truncated abstract] It is a commonplace that we often reason from the fact that an agent did not know she was doing something to the conclusion that they did not do that thing intentionally. In his account of intentional action, Aristotle raised this commonplace to the level of philosophical theory, making it part of the definition of intentional action, claiming that if an agent does not know what she is doing she cannot be doing that thing intentionally. It is widely believed that Aristotle was wrong about this, but the intuition that there is an important connection between what an agent knows or believes when she acts and the question of whether she acts intentionally remains. In this thesis I attempt to uncover the truth behind this intuition and provide an adequate account of the relation between intentional action and an agent's knowledge of what she is doing. Arriving at an adequate account will involve learning from the mistakes of previous attempts. Thus, in Chapter 1 I examine Aristotle's claim that if an agent does not know what she is doing she cannot be doing that thing intentionally. I argue that there is an inherent tension in Aristotle's account of intentional action between his commitment to this claim about the agent's knowledge and his commitment to a particular account of the causal-psychological antecedents of intentional action. Since many contemporary accounts of intentional action share this Aristotelian assumption about the casual-psychological antecedents of action, we should expect to find that these accounts face similar difficulties in accommodating similar claims about the connection between intentional action and an agent's knowledge of what she is doing.