British Academy International Partnership and Mobility PM150167 (2015-2016) Joint Practical Knowledge: Shared Agency and Knowledge of Other Minds

A number of philosophers and psychologists have recently argued that understanding the nature and development of human knowledge of other minds requires understanding the relationship between such knowledge and characteristic human forms of interaction and shared agency (see recent work by Reddy, Avramides, Gallagher, Butterfill, among others). The project aims to explore a specific way to develop this approach, by articulating and probing a thesis we call the Joint practical knowledge thesis. A familiar claim in the philosophy of action, going back to seminal writings by Anscombe and Hampshire, is that one typically knows what one is intentionally doing without evidence or observation. The joint practical knowledge thesis says that the participants in shared intentional activities typically have non-evidential, non-observational knowledge of what they are doing under first-person plural descriptions. The project will also explore the potential of this thesis for understanding and advancing current debates about self- and other-knowledge in philosophy and developmental psychology.