Richard Kim Public Lecture

A natural picture of intentional action puts understanding first: we determine what we are going to do and then carry it out. Anscombe rejects this ordering by locating practical knowledge in the acting itself rather than in antecedent mental states. But her focus on the logical structure of practical knowledge brackets a different question: how does an agent come to possess this knowledge in the first place? Early Confucian accounts of ritual formation make that developmental dimension visible. In the Analects, Confucius distinguishes between performing rites with and without ren (仁, humaneness): one can execute the movements of the rite without yet fully knowing what one is doing. Confucius’s own moral trajectory in Analects 2.4—from “establishing oneself” in ritual to acting spontaneously without transgression—traces a decades-long deepening of practical understanding. On this picture, one acts into understanding: the novice performs before grasping the full significance of the act, and through sustained ritual practice acquires the perceptual, affective, and deliberative capacities that make such knowledge possible. This suggests that practical knowledge is not merely a contemporaneous feature of intentional action, but also an achievement realized through formation, with implications for both moral psychology and ethics.