Anscombe and Wittgenstein on Knowledge ‘without Observation’

Abstract This chapter, which is purely exegetical, suggests that close attention to the legacy of Anscombe’s mentor Wittgenstein can shed some unaccustomed light both on the idiosyncratic form of enquiry in her book Intention and on some of the particular conclusions found in that book. Section 22.2 points to a methodological parallel between Wittgenstein’s post-1945 investigations into the nature of everyday psychological concepts and Anscombe’s treatment of the concept of intention. In section 22.3, the Wittgensteinian provenance of Anscombe’s logical category ‘knowledge without observation’ is exhibited, and her extension of what falls under this form of knowledge (from Wittgenstein’s case of knowing the arrangement of one’s limbs, to matters concerning intention as well) is outlined. This extension will require a twist in how the intentional form of such knowledge is regarded as corrigible. Finally, section 22.4 identifies the odd form of knowledge just explicated with ‘practical knowledge’ as Anscombe sees it, and tries to show that some puzzles revolving around her invocation of Theophrastus’s principle and Aquinas’s view of the causal power of practical knowledge may be resolved thereby.