ABSTRACT
“The Unity of Action, Perception, and Knowledge” places virtue epistemology within a broader project of metaphysical, semantic, and conceptual analysis that targets human attainments more generally, whether they take the form of action, perception, or knowledge. We consider the problem of causal deviance as it arises for Donald Davidson’s account of intentional action, and for our own account of human knowledge, and we consider a similar problem for Paul Grice’s causal analysis of perception. These can be viewed as metaphysical analyses of their respective targets. Thus viewed they are defensible against common objections—of either vicious circularity or insufficient content—that have been thought lethal.
Those accounts are also defensible, moreover, against critiques that have been thought to favor disjunctivist alternatives. Prominent such critiques apply only to a specific, and optional, form of analysis: namely, analysis into logically independent factors merely conjoined in the analysis. To the contrary, metaphysical analyses can be causal analyses that do not take that form. Action, perception, and knowledge are all forms of manifested competence, where a competence is a disposition to succeed in a given field of aimings—these being performances with an aim—whether the aim be intentional and conscious, or teleological and functional.
In conclusion, the chapter sketches a methodology appropriate for our inquiry