**3. Basic Activities and Slips**

Basic activities are of special interest to our enquiry. Basic activities are those activities we automatically know how to perform; we pull them o ff by doing nothing else. They are the very source of agency, the material of which all other actions are made. As such they are a necessary condition for all other matters connected to agency. When someone performs basic activities, they do so by making bodily movements that constitute the fundamental atoms of what they are attempting to accomplish, grounding every other action. They do so without any need to determine the means by which the action should be performed. Basic activities are such that the agen<sup>t</sup> knows how to perform them, say, "just like that." Consider the example from Hornsby of someone saying "grass is green" [31]. The utterance is performed through movements of the tongue, mouth, teeth, etc. The agen<sup>t</sup> does not make these movements because they believe that they are a means of saying "grass is green"; they probably have no particular beliefs about them and are hardly aware of them. They do not do them intentionally in the way they intentionally utters the sentence as a whole. From the agent's perspective, basic activities have a teleological structure, and one can perform them without any need to understand their details correctly. On such a teleological view, basic activities are relative to the agent: acts that are basic for one agen<sup>t</sup> may not be for another. Moreover, something that is basic for an agen<sup>t</sup> in one setting may not be in another. Consider the agen<sup>t</sup> for whom using their own hot-water kettle is a basic action while using a hot-water kettle of unfamiliar design is not.

The possibility of slips is of special interest to the naturalistic view we defend. Slips—performances one can successfully do while intending something else—genuinely reveal what one can do in a basic sense, "just like that", precisely because one has all the necessary bodily skills to perform them. Because of that capacity, one can reasonably be expected to be able to perform them intentionally as well. A basic activity is one the agen<sup>t</sup> can perform even while making a slip. We think those things that one is able to do even while making a slip are the ones that truly are basic. In other words, "slipping behavior" reveals basicness. A slip is the kind of performance that would often, in another context, be meaningfully intended. After all, slips are not random. Verbal slips show lexical biases, tend to result in grammatically correct utterances, and rarely violate the syntactic constraints of the language; so Fromkin [32] (p. 183) writes: "according to all linguists who have analyzed spontaneous speech errors, the errors are nonrandom and predictable". This is important, because it illuminates how an agent's knowledge how is operative when they slip. When an agen<sup>t</sup> slips by grasping the salt instead of the sugar, then this is not because they are incompetent in distinguishing salt from sugar. What the slip shows is misdirected competence. Slips are small episodes of misdirected behavior in otherwise correctly performed action sequences, often closely resembling the correct act. Salt is not so far from sugar in terms of appearance or use. Contrast the act of grasping the salt instead of the sugar with that of accidentally taking a handful of soil from a pot of tulips: such action surely would be ba ffling, because it differs so much from what is expected. The point becomes particularly clear with so-called slips of the tongue: the agen<sup>t</sup> who slips speaks comprehensible words, not mere nonsense.

To specify even more, slips are executive failures; you go left instead of right, you pour milk instead of water, you push the button marked "1" instead of the one marked "2" etc. In the case of a slip, the agen<sup>t</sup> bluntly does something different from what they mean to be doing. The failure is not at a cognitive level, thus the agen<sup>t</sup> does not fail because they have a false belief and the like [33–36]. Crucially, the agen<sup>t</sup> slips despite knowing that their performance is an error. The agen<sup>t</sup> who is about to add milk to their coffee, but pours juice instead does not err because they cannot tell the difference between milk and juice: clearly, they can. Competence does not provide immunity from slips: the person who slips does not do so because they lack the relevant ability. They are fully able to grab, lift, and pour from a container; they just happen to grab the wrong one. They slip not because their movements are beyond their control, like those made by someone suffering from a compulsive disorder or Anarchic Hand syndrome,<sup>4</sup> but because, then and there, they simply make the wrong movements. Among other things, an important thing to notice here is that the agen<sup>t</sup> has the correct propositional content and is normally able to apply it, but, for some reason, their knowledge that and their knowledge how came apart and they acted in some sense successfully: they performed actions that belong to their basic action repertoire (they pull them off "just like that")—i.e., they poured milk instead of juice, they did not start singing into the jug or jump up and down—on a different propositional content than they meant to act on. How can knowledge that and -how come apart like this if knowledge how is merely a species of the former? The topic of basicness in general and the above discussed split between knowledge how and knowledge that in particular is not discussed by Stanley. He does not consider the basicness of activities the way we do. Instead of focusing on basicness, he focuses on knowledge of truths and is ignorant towards executive mistakes in the sense we are interested in here, it just is not among his concerns. He states that when you learn some truths about swimming, then you know how to swim and after the acquisition of that fact it seems, on his intellectualist account, that you can, of course, do something wrong when swimming, boxing and cycling, but, crucially, you cannot bluntly apply the wrong content and be wrong about how you should swim or cycle. When you have learned how to swim, you simply know. In other words, when you have gained the knowledge of swimming, you cannot "unknow" it, in the same way as after the moment you genuinely learned the truths about how to walk, you cannot be wrong about walking, to walk is something you know how to do. One of our points is that Stanley's account can make one lose sight of neuro-psychological facts like the simple point that human beings sometimes slip and in the slip, knowledge how and knowledge that come apart, as we have shown in the above examples. The failure to see this is one of the things that we find biologically misconceived in the intellectualist account. This is, in a nutshell, our critique: slips show how knowledge how has epistemic properties not present in knowledge that. When an agen<sup>t</sup> slips, they do something different from what they intended; nonetheless, the performance is guided by their knowledge how. This reveals a divide between the knowledge that actively guides behavior: the knowledge how that the agen<sup>t</sup> applies sub-consciously; and the knowledge how they intend to guide their behavior in the first place, which they are under the illusion of acting on even as they slips. We argue that this divide between two levels of knowledge how operative in the slip case has no parallel when it comes to knowledge that. Therefore, knowledge how cannot be reduced to knowledge that. As we will explain in further detail below, a reason for why slips occur can be a slip-up in the communication between different cognitive processes in the mind of the agen<sup>t</sup> at the time of acting.

<sup>4</sup> Addressing Anarchic Hand syndrome, Marcel [37] (p. 77) writes: "the affected hand performs unintended but complex, well-executed, goal-directed actions. Often when the patient is trying to do something with the unaffected hand, the other hand appears to do the opposite or compete with it."
