T HE P OSSIBILITY OF P RACTICAL C OGNITION

Whereas the success and error conditions apply a condition on normative principles in general to the case of our action, nothing like the practical cognition condition applies to normative principles generally. I can digest well or badly. I can understand human digestion. I can act from that understanding by eating healthy stuff. Yet I cannot digest from my understanding of human digestion. Similarly, my cat can act well or badly. He cannot understand feline action, though, let alone act from his understanding of it. Still, this condition rings true because it modulates the success condition into the key of self-conscious agency. We can act self-consciously, and I can come to understand this capacity through training, exercising it, reflecting on it, and every other part of an education. I thereby can act in

17. I also will not address general metaphysical issues about modality. Let me explain why. There are, I take it, at least two choice points with respect to the relationship between capacities or potentialities generally and other modal notions. The first is about which modal notion is most closely related to potentialities. Should we primarily link them with counterfactuals, say, or with possibilities? The second is about the nature of that relationship. Does something have a potentiality because a relevant counterfactual is true or because something is possible, or is the counterfactual true or is something possible because the object has the potentiality? Is there any explanatory priority here? Nothing that I say here turns on specific answers to these questions. With respect to the first question, on any answer to it, capacities have some relationship to possibility, whether direct or indirect. That is all my view requires. With respect to the second question, my concern is with the distinctions needed in order to understand the conditions and theses of interest. So long as you make these distinctions, the order of explanation does not matter. My rhetoric no doubt betrays sympathy with a view that takes potentialities as basic and relates them to possibilities directly. Still, nothing I say requires or establishes that framework. At best, I only show that these ideas are most easily and clearly expressed in it, and even then only by exemplifying, not arguing. I owe a great debt to Barbara Vetter’s Potentiality with respect to these issues.

some way because I understand what the principle that governs my action requires, permits, or prohibits. Because human beings can act from thought about action, a principle governs my action only if I can act from my understanding of it. The practical cognition condition thus specifies the nature of compliance with respect to exercises of our capacity to act. It makes explicit what the success condition leaves implicit.

Inquiry into the conditions of agency should start with this condition because, as I shall explain, the notions of possibility in the error and alternate possibility conditions depend on the notion in it. But what notion does it use? Without an answer, the condition is indeterminate. Answering is hard, though, because of the objectivity and internality of the basic normative standard for our action. Let me explain these ideas before I link them with the issue about possibility.

We can ask at least two questions about the basic normative standard for our action. We can ask about its content, about what it requires, permits, and prohibits. We can also ask about its authority, about whether and why it governs our action. Why it and not another principle? Why does it govern us but not the other known animals, and why in action but not other things we do? An answer to the first question tells us what we must, may, and must not do, an answer to the second why we must, may, and must not do it.

Although we can ask these questions separately, their answers are not isolated. Even if I know what a principle would require, permit, and prohibit, it actually requires, permits, and prohibits me to act in certain ways only if it governs my action. Only then is it a normative standard for me. The answer to the second question is thus the holy grail of practical philosophy. It promises self-knowledge of our

capacity to act that accounts for the principle that governs us in action as such.18 _{An account of the} conditions of agency is part of this self-knowledge. It partially explains the possibility of moral, prudential, and rational requirements on our action as such by establishing the reality of conditions on their possibility.

An answer to this second question must explain two aspects of the basic normative standard for exercises of our capacity to act. On the one hand, this principle establishes an objective normative standard for them. Moral, prudential, and rational requirements govern us independently of the idiosyncrasies of our psychologies. Just reflect on being subject to them and you will recognize this objectivity. On the other hand, this standard is internal to us. These requirements are not alien to us. They do not force themselves upon us from outside. We instead can recognize ourselves in them. If we could not, they would be impositions on us. Our apparent experience of their objectivity would be a misleading effect of their arbitrary influence on us.

An account of the principle of our capacity to act must explain this internality and objectivity. As with just about anything with two aspects, though, trying to explain one seems to muck up explaining the other. Take the practical cognition condition. It allows for a host of interpretations. The crucial ambiguity lies in the ‘I can comply’ clause. One challenge is to figure out the proper notion of possibility such that the principle can establish an internal objective normative standard for our action as such. Another is to explain why that notion is the right one. Only then do we understand this condition and hence start to understand our agency. I shall discuss the first challenge in the rest of this section. In the

18. This task mirrors Kant’s claim that “reason should take on anew the most difficult of all its tasks, namely, that of self- knowledge, and to institute a court of justice, by which reason may secure its rightful claims while dismissing all its groundless pretensions” (Kant [1781/7] Axi). The task of critical philosophy is to come to reflective knowledge of the theoretical, practical, and reflective uses of reason. Self-knowledge of our capacity to act is reflective knowledge of that practical use.

next, I present two challenges to meeting the second.

What is the correct interpretation of this condition? What notion of possibility does it use? Logical possibility is too permissive.19 _{While I cannot be required to shut my eyes and not shut them, I} also cannot be required to curl all of my digits and flex at least one toe. This action is logically but not conceptually possible because the contradiction is in the substance of the description of the action, not its form. A principle that governs our action cannot require such things. Conceptual possibility, though, is also too permissive. Some conceptually possible actions are metaphysically impossible, like drinking water and not drinking H2O. The condition excludes principles that require such actions.

Physically impossible actions likewise fall outside the relevant sense of what I can do. I cannot be required to let myself free fall to Earth at a rate of acceleration greater than 9.83 m/s2_{. Not everything} that is physically possible for some being, though, is physically possible for us. I cannot be required to swim to the bottom of the Mariana Trench without mechanical aid. Human beings cannot survive under the sea. The pressure is too high, and we breathe air, not water. To confuse them is a danger. Since for fish it is the other way around, a suitable self-conscious fish can be required to act in this way. Still, the question ‘Does this principle govern?’ is incomplete until which beings it might govern in what activity is specified. When the question is ‘Does this principle govern my action?’, it is about me, who am not a fish, suitable or otherwise. With respect to human beings, this action is physically impossible, and a principle that governs our action cannot require such things. The notion of possibility in the condition is at least as restrictive as physical possibility relative to the kind of being subject to the principle.

There is more to us than what we can physically do, though, because we act from thought. I

19. I here indulge philosophers who distinguish logical, conceptual, and metaphysical possibility. If you do not like these distinctions, ignore them.

cannot be required to tell my partner that I love him in my sleep even though those sounds can exit my mouth while I sleep, perhaps even because of my thought about the goodness of such an event. Causation is weird. Likewise, I cannot be required to accidentally trip while I think about the circus even though I might end up on the ground while elephants and lions parade in my head. I can think about these things. They in some sense can happen. The thought can even efficiently cause the happening. Still, the happening cannot relate to the thought such that I can act in this way. A principle that governs our action cannot require such things. It instead requires something of me only if I can act from my understanding of the action. I must be able to act from thought about the action. Call this notion of possibility ‘practical cognitive possibility’. It is a bit hard to state precisely, as I shall explain at the end of the next section. For now, though, say that the condition uses a notion of possibility that is at least as restrictive as practical cognitive possibility relative to the kind of being subject to this principle.

As the name indicates, this notion provides the correct interpretation of the modal vocabulary in the condition. It in fact explains why the less restrictive notions of possibility condition principles that govern my action. Just think about being subject to a principle that requires an action that is impossible in any of those ways. How could I act from thought? Some are unthinkable. No acting from thought where there is no thought, and I thereby cannot comply with a principle that requires an unthinkable action of me. Some are thinkable but not doable by me because they are beyond human abilities. No acting from thought where there can be no act, and I thereby cannot comply with a principle that requires an undoable action of me. Others are thinkable and can happen but not in a such way that the happening is a doing of mine. No acting from thought there either. In none of these cases can I self- consciously comply with a principle that requires such an action of me. I thereby cannot be subject to

that principle. If I could, normative principles for my action would be foreign to me. They would be insensitive to the nature of human action, the nature of what they govern. I could not base my action on them. The correct interpretation of the condition thus uses the notion of practical cognitive possibility relative to the kind of being subject to the principle. It captures a minimal sense in which normative principles for my action are internal to me.