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Intelligent activity requires the use of various intellectual skills. While these skills are connected to knowledge, they should not be identified with knowledge. There are realistic examples where the skills in question come apart from knowledge. That is, there are realistic cases of knowledge without skill, and of skill without knowledge. Whether a person is intelligent depends, in part, on whether they have these skills. Whether a particular action is intelligent depends, in part, on whether it was produced by an exercise of skill. These claims promote a picture of intelligence that is in tension with a strongly intellectualist picture, though they are not in tension with a number of prominent claims recently made by intellectualists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to T.M. Scanlon's buck-passing account of value, to be valuable is not to possess intrinsic value as a simple and unanalysable property, but rather to have other properties that provide reasons to take up an attitude in favour of their owner or against it. The 'wrong kind of reasons' objection to this view is that we may have reasons to respond for or against something without this having any bearing on its value. The challenge is to explain why such reasons are of the wrong kind. This is what I set out to do, after illustrating the objection more thoroughly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The notion of common knowledge is of interest because it raises problems about the complexity of the cognitive states which one can sensibly attribute to finite self-conscious creatures when they confront one another. Common knowledge is of interest also because we need to invoke it in explaining the rationality of certain actions, namely those co-operative enterprises of which many conventional social practices, including language, seem to be examples. In what follows nothing hangs on the use of the word knowledge in the phrase common knowledge. The account one seeks is to be of a structure which can accommodate the mediaeval "common knowledge" that the Sun circles the Earth. What is primarily at issue is the nature of the propositions people can entertain, the routes of perception and inference by which they might come to have confidence in those propositions and the manner in which theft beliefs contribute to justifying their actions.