Ballistic Action

Elizabeth Anscombe argued that a central feature of intentional action is that you know what you are doing without observation. Your knowledge of what you are doing does not come after your action, but is somehow constitutively bound up with it. The doing and the knowing involve either the same or closely related sensitivity; so acting intentionally turns out to be something like exercising your knowledge of what you are doing. She raises a number of problem cases for this principle, including the example of painting a wall yellow. How can you know you are painting a wall yellow without looking to see what colour is emerging on the wall? And those following her have raised further problem cases. Notably, Donald Davidson introduced the example of intentionally making ten legible carbon copies without know that that is what you are doing.