 A third motivation, which is at first glance independent, is that of accounting for a thesis that has received a great deal of airplay recently, namely, that when you act, you know what you’re doing. When you do things in order to make sense to yourself, you end up by and large knowing what you’re doing; thus the pervasiveness of practical self-knowledge is explained by invoking a desire for it. The desire is claimed both to be constitutive of agency, and announced to be empirically present in a normal human psychology. Now, a common response to Velleman’s insistence (2009, 136–138, 2015, 325) that people want to understand what they’re doing – moreover, that this is part and parcel of their desire to understand the universe of which they are a part – is incredulity. A quick reminder or two of where those responses are coming from: academics teaching large introductory courses look out on seas of apathetic faces that don’t seem to care about understanding much at all; outside the classroom, those same academics are committed to research – which, as the saying has it, is what you’re doing when you don’t know what you’re doing. And nonacademics rub shoulders with New Age aficionados of mystery, with defeated individuals who have made compromises in life they would rather not think about... briefly, with people who quite visibly would prefer not to understand what they are doing, even as they do it. Now, Velleman adduces the cognitive dissonance and attribution literatures as further confirming evidence (Velleman 2009, 37f; Cooper 2007 is an overview of the former), but his readers balk here also: after all, the striking feature of cognitive dissonance reduction is that subjects are unaware that they exhibit it, and are perturbed when it is pointed out to them. And indeed Velleman notices that what he ‘regard[s] as the height of rationality’ others ‘tend to regard... as irrational’ (2009, 92 n. 4). Because what Velleman takes as practical rationality in operation seems irrational to the agents themselves, it requires, precisely, not understanding what one is doing. 