A Critical Introduction to Knowledge-How 147250710X, 9781472507105

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A Critical Introduction to Knowledge-How

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BLOOMSBURY CRITICAL INTRODUCTIONS TO CONTEMPORARY EPISTEMOLOGY Series Editor:

Stephen Hetherington, Professor of Philosophy, The University of New South Wales, Australia

Editorial Board:

Claudio de Almeida, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil; Richard Fumerton, The University of Iowa, USA; John Greco, Saint Louis University, USA; Jonathan Kvanvig, Baylor University, USA; Ram Neta, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, USA; Duncan Pritchard, The University of Edinburgh, UK Bloomsbury Critical Introductions to Contemporary Epistemology introduces and advances the central topics within one of the most dynamic areas of contemporary philosophy. Each critical introduction provides a comprehensive survey to an important epistemic subject, covering the historical, methodological, and practical contexts and exploring the major approaches, theories, and debates. By clearly illustrating the changes to the ways human knowledge is being studied, each volume places an emphasis on the historical background and makes important connections between contemporary issues and the wider history of modern philosophy. Designed for use on contemporary epistemology courses, the introductions are defined by a clarity of argument and equipped with easy-to-follow chapter summaries, annotated guides to reading, and glossaries to facilitate and encourage further study. This series is ideal for upper-level undergraduates and postgraduates wishing to stay informed of the thinkers, issues, and arguments shaping twenty-first century epistemology.

Titles in the Series Include:

A Critical Introduction to the Epistemology of Memory, Thomas D. Senor A Critical Introduction to Formal Epistemology, Darren Bradley A Critical Introduction to Scientific Realism, Paul Dicken A Critical Introduction to Skepticism, Allan Hazlett A Critical Introduction to Testimony, Axel Gelfert

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A Critical Introduction to Knowledge-How J. ADAM CARTER AND TED POSTON

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

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Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2018 © J. Adam Carter and Ted Poston, 2018 J. Adam Carter and Ted Poston have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the Authors of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any ­information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the authors. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4725-0710-5 PB: 978-1-4725-1492-9 ePDF: 978-1-4725-0757-0 ePub: 978-1-4725-0987-1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Carter, J. Adam, 1980- author. Title: A critical introduction to knowledge how / J. Adam Carter and Ted Poston. Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. | Series: Bloomsbury critical ­introductions to contemporary epistemology | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017030575 (print) | LCCN 2017044598 (ebook) | ISBN 9781472509871 (ePub) | ISBN 9781472507570 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781472514929 (hardback: alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Knowledge, Theory of. | Philosophy of mind. Classification: LCC BD181 (ebook) | LCC BD181 .C265 2018 (print) | DDC 121–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017030575 Series: Bloomsbury Critical Introductions to Contemporary Epistemology Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

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Contents Acknowledgements  vi

1 A brief history of knowledge-how  1 2 The case for intellectualism  29 3 Knowledge-how and epistemic luck  61 4 Knowledge-how and cognitive achievement  85 5 Knowledge-how and testimony  113 6 Knowledge-how and knowledge of language  135 7 Knowledge-how: Normativity and epistemic value  165 8 Knowledge-how: Future directions  191 Notes  215 Bibliography  232 Index  243

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Acknowledgements W

e are grateful for the feedback on this project at multiple stages from Samuel Baker, Caleb Cohoe, Bolesław Czarnecki, Trent Dougherty, Emma C. Gordon, John Greco, Josh Habgood-Coote, Stephen Hetherington, Anne Jeffrey, Lorraine Keller, Kevin Meeker, Andrew Moon, Jesús Navarro, Duncan Pritchard and Jason Stanley. We owe a special debt of gratitude to Stephen Hetherington for his wise guidance throughout this project.

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1 A brief history of knowledge-how

Our familiarity with the universal, a cognitive state, overflows of itself into an activity which is practical. This is just what we call an intelligent action. Perhaps, it is a pity that the theory of knowledge and the theory of conduct have fallen into separate compartments. It certainly was not so in Socrates’ time, as his interest in the relation between eidos and techne bears witness. If we studied them together, perhaps we might have a better understanding of both. (PRICE 1946, 36)

W

hat makes an action intelligent? Suppose that professional golfer Phil Mickelson holes a ten-foot putt on a sloped green through great skill, while an unskilled novice, Fil Nickelson, sinks the same putt by amazing luck. Phil’s act is intelligent; Fil’s act is just lucky. What accounts for the difference between these two acts? It is not success, after all, because both putts go in the hole. It must thus be something else, something about the way Phil but not Fil performed – but at this point, things become controversial quickly. Granted, Phil seems to know how to do what he just did, whereas Fil doesn’t. But in virtue of what, exactly?

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The contemporary debate over the nature of knowledge-how is an attempt to provide a philosophical theory of the nature of intelligent action. The contemporary landscape is populated, on the one hand, by intellectualists who hold that knowledge-how is propositional knowledge and, on the other hand, by anti-intellectualists who hold that knowledge-how is distinct from propositional knowledge. Intellectualists claim that knowing how to perform some action just is knowing some fact. Anti-intellectualists claim that knowing how to perform an action is a different kind of knowledge from knowing some fact. Our goals in this book are to layout the issues that motivate this debate and to offer a sustained argument in favour of anti-intellectualism. In this introductory chapter we set the stage for the contemporary debate. The debate over the nature of intelligent action begins with Gilbert Ryle’s book The Concept of Mind (1949). Ryle is concerned to rebut a view of the nature of intelligent action that he finds in Descartes’s views about the relation between the mind and the body. Descartes argues that the mind – the seat of thoughts, desires and experiences – is a different kind of substance from the body. The mind is immaterial, existing independently of the body, but nonetheless intimately joined to the body. By contrast, the body is a substance that occupies space. In Descartes’s view a bodily action is intelligent only if it is guided by the mind. The metaphor Descartes uses of the mind directing the body is that of a captain piloting a ship. Descartes’s view about the nature of the mind and the body is known as Cartesian Dualism. Ryle thinks that the Cartesian is committed to an implausible view of what makes a bodily action intelligent. On Ryle’s interpretation, the Cartesian holds that an action is intelligent only if it is preceded by a prior mental act which guides the bodily act. On this view, Phil’s putt is intelligent only if he first formulates a set of instructions to move the body in such and such a manner and then executes those moves. Ryle dismissively refers to this view as ‘the ghost in the machine’. He presents a famous regress argument against such a view while attempting to tie a Cartesian view to an intellectualist conception of practical knowledge. We discuss Ryle’s arguments in the second part of this chapter. In the first part we look at some of the ways that Plato and Aristotle thought of knowledge and its relation to action. Julia Annas

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remarks, ‘It is a commonplace in study of ancient philosophy that ancient accounts of knowledge and of virtue were influenced by the notion of techne, translated “craft”, “skill” or “expertise”’.1 She argues that the ancient notion of skill or expertise does not map perfectly onto contemporary discussions of knowledge-how, but nonetheless Plato’s and Aristotle’s works contain important insights that can be brought to bear on the contemporary debate. While neither of us are historians of philosophy, we do think it important to understand the history of a philosophical problem. It can be difficult to escape a particular perspective on a contemporary problem, but by studying the history of philosophy, we can see different attempts to grapple with, and even conceive of, philosophical problems. The student of the contemporary debate over knowledge-how does well to acquaint herself with Plato’s and Aristotle’s views of the nature of knowledge states and their connection with action. To this end, we explore some of Plato’s and Aristotle’s views about knowledge and skill.

1.1  Plato and Aristotle on knowledge-how Ancient Greek has several different words for states of knowledge: episteme, gnosis, noûs, phronesis, sophia and techne. In this section we survey some of Plato’s and Aristotle’s views about states of knowledge, in particular their views relating to episteme and techne. Episteme is normally translated as knowledge, expertise or understanding, while techne is translated as skill or expertise. Both episteme and techne are closely connected to conceptual mastery, to the mastery of a subject that an expert possesses. We must use care, however, to avoid reading too much of our current views into a translation of episteme and techne. David Roochnik, for instance, maintains that in Plato’s Socratic dialogues the words episteme and techne are used interchangeably to express a general conception of expertise.2 Our overall goal in this section is to examine some of the arguments Plato and Aristotle present regarding the relationship between knowledge and skilful action. These issues are interesting even apart from their overall contribution to understanding the

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contemporary debate over intellectualism. We hope to show that there are some crucial insights we can glean from Plato’s and Aristotle’s conception of knowledge and action. This is not the place for a thorough exegetical analysis of Plato’s and Aristotle’s use of episteme and techne. Rather we focus on crucial arguments in their texts – Plato’s use of the craft analogy in the early dialogues and Aristotle’s discussion of the different cognitive virtues – to extract arguments that bear on the relationship between knowledge-that and knowledge-how.

1.1.1  Plato on knowledge and skill There is a common structure to the Socratic dialogues.3 Socrates presents an interlocutor with a question about the nature of some virtue. What is courage, moderation, piety, wisdom or justice? In Plato’s dialogue Laches the subject is the nature of courage. Socrates wants an account, a logos, of the nature of courage. The nature of courage is not given by a list of courageous and cowardly acts. Socrates assumes that one possesses the virtue only if one knows the nature of the virtue. Consequently, a virtuous person must be able to give an account of the virtues. Socrates then proceeds to demolish various proposals about the nature of the virtue made by his interlocutors. The result of these dialogues is puzzlement (aporia). The participants have not adequately articulated the nature of the virtue in question. Why ought we go along with Socrates in granting that a necessary condition for possessing a virtue is knowing its nature? What argument, if any, does Plato give for this claim? Plato’s central argument is the craft analogy. He reasons that possessing virtue requires knowledge because virtuous acts are similar to products made through the expertise of craftsmen. The analogy begins with the observation that the individual crafts (e.g. horsemanship, architecture, carpentry) are kinds of knowledge. Craftsmen possess a skill to bring about a valuable product, and they can do this in a wide variety of contexts and conditions. In this connection, their ability is robust; craftsmen are not flummoxed by a change in conditions. Moreover, they can train others in their area of expertise. Because they possess a teachable

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skill, the craftsmen must possess some account or principle (logos) by which they reliably bring about a specific end. The knowledge craftsmen possess is the only valuable knowledge that Socrates uncovers in the city. Plato’s Apology tells the story of Socrates upsetting the ‘wisdom’ of the elite. Socrates is puzzled by the oracle’s proclamation that he is the wisest person in Athens. Socrates knows that he isn’t wise and seeks to show that the oracle must be wrong because there are other wise people in the city. He interviews the culturally elite – the poets, the priests and the politicians – and finds that they all lack knowledge. He, at least, is wiser than the professional ‘knowledge’ workers because he knows that he lacks knowledge. After being disappointed by the one-percenters, Socrates turns his attention to the craftsmen. These individuals produce valuable items for the city: well-bred horses, fine houses, works of art and so on. Socrates is not disappointed in his search for knowledge among the craftsmen. He finds that they indeed possess ‘valuable knowledge’ (22d). And yet Socrates finds that the knowledge they possess leads them to be overly confident in their estimation of the highest good. In their pronouncements about the highest good, neither the elite nor the craftsmen know. The craftsmen’s knowledge provides the beginning of the craft analogy. The expert carpenter and the expert metallurgist possess a valuable and teachable craft, the ends of which are produced by knowledge. So, Socrates reasons, similar skilful activities that achieve some end also proceed from knowledge. The courageous man, for instance, produces courageous acts out of many possible cowardly and foolhardy actions. The ability to reliably bring about courageous acts resembles the ability to reliably build a fine home. The just person aptly chooses the appropriate action out of a sea of unfitting acts. This ability manifests a competence that suggests that the acts proceed from knowledge. The craft analogy aims to show that virtue requires knowledge. But what is the nature of this knowledge? Is the knowledge akin to knowing the definition of a prime number, or is it similar to a natural competence which is not explicitly guided by a definition? The key question for Plato is the nature of the logos, which is the object of knowledge. Is the logos a rational principle or a natural principle? That is, is the logos a definition that one has in one’s mind that needs

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to be made explicit by dialectic, or is the logos a genetic principle similar to DNA that organizes a complex biological structure? What is lurking in the background for Plato is the question of whether virtue is teachable. If it is teachable, then the knowledge the virtuous person possesses is different from an innate ability; it is, as Plato conceives it, knowledge that can be communicated. If it turns out that knowledge of virtue cannot be communicated, then this is evidence that it’s a very different kind of knowledge than knowledge that is normally transferred by speech.4 We can develop Plato’s views on the nature of knowledge of virtue by looking at the Meno. This dialogue is focused on the nature of virtue and what it is to know virtue. Plato wields the craft analogy to conclude that knowledge of human virtue (Greek: arête) is techne. Just as the craftsmen possess knowledge pertaining to their craft which enables them to train others, so the morally excellent person possesses some knowledge that would enable her to teach others. The technai (the crafts) are teachable, skill-based instances of knowledge. A person with techne is able to charge a student for training, in part, because the expert possesses a logos he can impart by teaching. Plato, of course, is not committed to the claim that each craft can be summarized in a pithy remark; life is short and the art is long. Nevertheless, Plato does seem committed to the claim that this knowledge is transmittable by words. In the Meno, then, the craft analogy implies that knowledge of moral excellence ought to be transmittable by words. There ought to be teachers of virtue and generations of virtuous students. But Socrates observes that unlike craft knowledge, moral knowledge is not reliably transmitted from teacher to pupil. The Meno ends with the conclusion that virtue may not be knowledge but ‘a gift from the gods which is not accompanied by understanding’ (100a). But Socrates holds out some hope that there may be ‘another statesmen who can make another into a statesman’. Plato then remarks that ‘such a man would … be the only true reality compared, as it were, with shadows’ (100a). This suggests that true virtue is based on knowledge that can be communicated but that such virtue is incredibly rare. Socrates seems to think that virtue requires knowledge. But it is not to be modelled as craft knowledge. David Roochnick develops an argument that moral knowledge is different from craft knowledge

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on the basis of the value neutrality of the crafts. Each craft – for example, medicine – is value neutral. The medical expert knows how to make a person sick or well. Medical expertise itself does not indicate whether a person ought to be healed. While the crafts are value neutral, the moral virtues are not value neutral. So, the moral virtues are not technai. The value neutrality of the crafts implies a gap between knowledge of a techne and its being put to good use.5 A person skilled in carpentry is able to make good or bad homes. The person with moral knowledge does not have a gap between knowledge and application. To reliably choose wrongly is to manifest that one lacks moral knowledge. There is an aspect to this argument worth bringing out: only those already possessing moral excellence would be persuaded to take up study of it.6 The fact that virtue is value-laden suggests that only the good can be persuaded to study it. If this is the case, then human excellence cannot be taught from the ground up. Only those already possessing the virtue can receive instruction in it. This contrasts sharply with the crafts. One need not have any aptitude for carpentry to study carpentry and eventually become a carpenter. The skills a carpenter requires are transferable. Yet the morally excellent individual was not at one point beyond the reach of excellence. Excellence, as it were, is either present or not. If it is not present, it is hopeless to teach it, and if it is present, then it need not be completely taught. This is one way of understanding the Meno Paradox. One can’t acquire moral knowledge without already possessing some moral knowledge. If moral knowledge is not techne, how should we understand it? What is this nontechnical knowledge? Roochnik suggests that moral knowledge is distinct from the crafts in that the latter are decomposable in parts that can be gradually learnt.7 There is Carpentry 101 but not Moral Excellence 101. Roochnik hypothesizes that this fits with the thesis of the unity of the virtues. Moral excellence is a whole that cannot be acquired by the gradual accumulation of parts. Knowledge of moral excellence requires a grasp of an entire structure that may not be grasped piecemeal. This would explain why human virtue cannot be taught. So where does Plato’s argument concerning techne leave us? First, we learn that conceiving of episteme and techne as two distinct

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kinds of knowledge, that is, propositional knowledge and practical knowledge, is misleading. Both express a knowledge state, but it is not the difference between purely theoretical knowledge and purely practical knowledge.8 Both episteme and techne are expert knowledge, and, in the ideal case, they are based on a logos that is teachable. Second, Plato clearly supports the idea that crafts are knowledge disciplines. Carpentry proceeds on the basis of a logos. This logos can be transferred to those that lack it. Because the crafts have a teachable logos, we may conclude that a person knows how to ply a craft in virtue of grasping the nature of the craft. On this basis the craftsman is able to offer explanations of his craft. This involves knowing some facts about the nature of the craft but it also involves a skilful ability to know what to do in appropriate circumstances. Via the connection to logos, there is a limited intellectualism in Plato about the crafts. Techne is distinct from a mere ability. It is an ability guided by knowledge. A crucial question, though, is what is the nature of this knowledge. In Section 2.3.1, we discuss a non-standard form of intellectualism that is compatible with Plato’s views on the nature of techne and also compatible with our anti-intellectualist position. Yet, third, in the Socratic dialogues, we are presented with the claim that not every activity that involves knowledge is modelled as a standard craft. Moral excellence involves knowledge but it cannot be built up from the ground floor. Moral excellence is a kind of knowledge that cannot be decomposed; it has a unity. This feature of moral knowledge – the unity of ethical knowledge – is significant. The parallel with contemporary debates on knowledge-how suggests that knowledge-how has a kind of unity to it. As we’ll see in a moment with the second Rylean regress, knowledge-how isn’t decomposable in parts where one can add knowledge of one fact and thereby acquire knowledge-how.

1.1.2  Aristotle on knowledge and skill Aristotle disagrees with Plato’s view that ethical knowledge is the application of knowledge of a general ethical principle to a specific case. Rather ethical knowledge is uniquely practical. Aristotle

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distinguishes between several different knowledge states in the Nicomachean Ethics. In this work Aristotle provides a general account of the nature of human virtue. As we’ve seen in Plato’s early dialogues, the craft analogy provides the key insight to understanding the nature of living well as a human being. As Plato sees it the excellent person knows the logos pertaining to a welllived life. On Aristotle’s view, the cognitive states are just one of several components to human excellence. Human excellence is a multifaceted state involving the proper alignment of habits of the body and mind together with external goods. Aristotle’s explicit remarks on thinking-related virtue occur in Book 6 of the Nicomachean Ethics. He distinguishes between five cognitive states: episteme, techne, phronesis, noûs and sophia. Earlier in books 4 and 5 Aristotle identified virtues of character; these are the virtues of those parts of a human that are responsive to reason but not themselves part of the reasoning faculty. The virtues of character are part of what makes a person good. In the same way the virtues of the reasoning faculty are elements of a good person. Aristotle has particular conceptions of each of these states. The theoretical cognitive states are episteme, noûs and sophia. Episteme is akin to understanding why some necessary truth holds; one has episteme in virtue of being able to demonstrate the fact (see 1139b). It is knowledge of theorems by way of being able to derive their truth from the axioms. A geometer has episteme regarding the fact that the interior angles of a triangle sum to 180 degrees in virtue of being able to prove that this is so. The geometer not only knows that this is true but also understands why it is so and can demonstrate this understanding by doing the proofs. Noûs is the cognitive state of grasping the first principles of a field in such a way that one grasps the explanatory structure of the entire field. One has noûs of the axioms when one knows both that the axioms hold and that they are adequate for proving the theorems of which one has episteme. Aristotle thinks that each science has a structure of first principles and theorems. The biological sciences, for instance, will have an explanatory structure such that a person may be said to have episteme of the nature of a horse when he has noûs of the relevant first principles and can deduce the relevant theorems from those principles.9

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Sophia is a combination of noûs and episteme of the finest things. A person with sophia has a firm grasp on the first principles and theorems – the explanatory structure – of the most excellent things. Sophia is the pinnacle of human achievement. Aristotle writes, ‘Wisdom (sophia) must be the most finished of the forms of knowledge …. Wisdom must be comprehension combined with knowledge – knowledge of the highest objects which has received as it were its proper completion’ (1141a). Aristotle distinguishes the theoretical cognitive states from the practical states of techne and phronesis. In Posterior Analytics II.19, Aristotle explains, ‘And from experience, or from the whole universal that comes to rest in the soul, there comes a principle of skill and of understanding – of skill if it deals with how things come about, of understanding if it deals with what is the case’. Aristotle is saying that repeated experience is necessary to grasp the universal, a general principle that applies to many cases. A medical student, for instance, needs experience to come to grasp the universal relating to health. Once the medical student has sufficient experience, he begins to acquire techne relating to health. In this passage Aristotle also distinguishes techne, which is considered with how things come to be, from noûs, which deals with what is. On Aristotle’s view, techne is craft knowledge whose object is the production of goods. In the medical case, this would be the production of health in the body. Aristotle says, ‘Every skill (techne) is to do with coming into being, and the exercise of the skill lies in considering how something that is capable of either being or not being, … may come into being’ (1140b). In his view, the productive nature of skill marks it off from the nature of understanding that grasps a fact. The medical expert’s knowledge of how to produce health in the body is suitably different from the geometer’s knowledge that all right triangles have diagonals equal to the sum of the squares of their sides. A curious feature of Aristotle’s view is that he restricts techne to the production of things. Skilled action that is concerned with human performance or human good is not techne. Aristotle refers to this knowledge as phronesis, which is action regarding what is beneficial for a person or state, concerning ethics and political science. Aristotle says, ‘It is a true and practical state involving reason, concerned with

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what is good and bad for a human being’ (1140a). Phronesis does not concern producing particular objects that may benefit a person such as the construction of a good steam bath. Rather it concerns the general acts that contribute to living well, and this may include acts that involve acquiring such products. Aristotle’s conception of techne and phronesis are knowledge states directed to practical ends. If one possesses techne, then one knows how to produce certain goods. If one possesses phronesis, then one knows how to act well. Both involve instrumental reasoning, but whereas techne is a matter of applying a certain means to the end of production, phronesis is a matter of applying a certain means to the good of a human. In Nicomachean Ethics VI 4 Aristotle offers a teleological argument to distinguish techne from phronesis. Aristotle reasons that because the goals to be achieved are different the cognitive states involved in producing the good are different. It is plausible that this teleological reasoning can be extended to demarcate techne and phronesis, on the one hand, from episteme, noûs and sophia on the other hand. The former have as ends the production of things or actions; whereas the latter have as ends truths.10 Thus we may draw a teleological distinction between knowledge-that and knowledge-how on the basis of a difference in ends. Propositional knowledge is teleologically ordered to grasping facts. Knowledgehow is teleologically ordered to action. Another difference in Aristotle’s thoughts about knowledge states concerned with action is that he denies that one acts with knowledge in producing bad ends. Because it is not a good trait of a human being to be thoroughly deceptive, one cannot act with phronesis to break promises, treaties and contracts. This differs from the contemporary notion of skilful action. A person can cheat skilfully. On Aristotle’s view, however, the action that such a person performs is not in accord with virtue and hence not done with a thinking-relating virtue. At best the action involves a kind of cleverness which is a simulacrum of a cognitive virtue. Aristotle thus conceives of phronesis as a kind of knowledge that involves ethical normativity. The parallel with respect to knowledge-how would be that certain kinds of intentional activities only count as knowledge to the extent that they constitutively involve a good. Thus someone who is a skilful liar does not know how to lie because there is no such thing as knowing how to lie. Rather there

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is just the complex behaviour that has a wrong end. In this respect, Aristotle’s view is different from contemporary views on the nature of knowledge-how but it is worth pursuing further.

1.1.3  Taking stock We can see in both Plato and Aristotle an awareness that knowledgeinvolving states are not all the same. Plato’s craft analogy suggests that moral knowledge is modelled as craft knowledge, but, through Socratic dialectic, that suggestion is not vindicated. Aristotle distinguishes states of knowledge on the basis of their goals. Some knowledge states aims for truth; others aim for action. As we shall see shortly, this difference in states of knowledge is explicitly argued for by Gilbert Ryle.

1.2  Ryle’s anti-intellectualism As we saw in the introduction, it can be very difficult to specify the difference between intelligent and non-intelligent action. Recall Phil Mickelson’s smart putt on the sloped green and Fil Nickelson’s lucky putt on the same green. According to one line of thinking, the difference between Phil’s act and Fil’s act is that Phil’s stroke is guided by the mental act of considering certain regulative propositions (e.g. where to line up the putter, how far to take it back, etc.).11 Gilbert Ryle thought this view, which he unsympathetically calls the ‘Intellectualist Legend’, has got it all wrong as a philosophical theory of intelligence. He attempts to bring out the core difficulty by several regress arguments. The target of Ryle’s regress arguments is something of a ‘monster’ to pin down.12 In order to extract the main contours of Ryle’s antiintellectualist project, we’ll start by articulating more carefully the position Ryle took himself to be challenging and how this position connects to the matter of whether knowledge-how is just a kind of knowledge-that. Once these issues are clarified, we’ll examine in some detail Ryle’s most famous regress, which he advanced in Chapter 2 of The Concept of Mind (1949). Finally, we will turn to a further regress

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argument offered in his short paper ‘Knowing How and Knowing That’ (1945). Our goal will be not only to present Ryle’s anti-intellectualist arguments, but also to see if they actually hold water.

1.2.1  Ryle’s target To put things into perspective, Ryle (1949) attacked the Intellectualist Legend in the service of what he took to be a more important point at the time – namely, to reject the Cartesian dualist’s account of mental states and correspondingly to defend his own behaviourist conception of such states.13 Behaviourism was the view that thoughts, desires and experiences – characteristic mental states – are identical to dispositions to behave in certain ways. For example, the mental state of being in pain is, according to the behaviourism, a complex disposition involving accelerated heartbeats, flushed skin tone, crying, etc. Ryle’s goal was to replace the Cartesian’s emphasis on the internal nature of mental states with the behaviourist stress on the relevance of behaviour to characterizing the nature of the mental. As Jennifer Hornsby succinctly puts it, ‘The Cartesian thinks that the mental is separate from the physical. Ryle wanted it to be clear that the states of mind implicated in intelligent bodily action are inseparable from the bodily action itself.’14 This larger point won’t much concern us here because hardly anyone is a behaviourist these days. As things stand, Ryle’s main argument against the Intellectualist Legend has had a comparatively more enduring effect, and especially so in mainstream epistemology. The effect is that – at least up until Stanley and Williamson (2001) – mainstream epistemology has operated under a by and large unchallenged presumption that there is ‘a fundamental distinction’ between knowing that something is the case and knowing how to do something.15 Moreover, this way of thinking became the orthodox line thanks to Ryle’s attacks of the Intellectualist Legend around the middle of the twentieth century, though this is a somewhat mysterious matter. As Yuri Cath comments: Ryle clearly thought that [his primary argument against the Intellectualist Legend] somehow also supported the conclusion

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that one cannot define knowing how in terms of knowing that. But the irony is that … he never explicitly stated such an argument himself.16 It will be instructive for our purposes, then, to work out just how the intellectualist’s line on knowledge-how can be understood as a kind of ‘special case’ of the wider ‘Intellectualist Legend’ that Ryle explicitly attacked in his primary argument. To do that, we’ll need to make more precise what the Intellectualist Legend involves, as a philosophical theory of intelligence. The Intellectualist Legend is best thought of as breaking down into two components – namely, into a claim about mind and a claim about action, respectively.17 The ‘mind’ claim is a claim about what makes any state (e.g. the state of knowing how to do something or the state of knowing some fact) count as a state of intelligence. The thesis here is straightforward:

Intellectualist Legend (IL)Mind: A state is an intelligent state just in case it is, or involves, an internal state of considering a proposition.18 One kind of state of intelligence is the state of knowing how to do something. Even when Phil Mickelson is not actually hitting a drive, for example, we will say that he knows how to hit a drive – and in saying this about Phil, we are attributing to him a state of intelligence. Notice, then, that a substitution of the state of ‘knowing how to do something’ into (IL)Mind reveals a special case of (IL)Mind: S’s knowledge how to do something is, or involves, an internal state of considering a proposition (e.g. knowledge-that p). Accordingly, then, we have the following thesis which is entailed by the mind component of Ryle’s Intellectualist Legend, about the relationship between knowledgehow and knowledge-that.

Knowledge-howI.L.: S’s knowledge how to do something is, or involves, an internal state of considering a proposition.19 Knowledge-howI.L. is stronger in its commitments than the version of this thesis typically endorsed by contemporary philosophers who claim to be intellectualists about know-how. We’ll return to this

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issue in due course. For now, though, it should suffice to see how, by challenging (IL)Mind, Ryle is implicitly challenging a version of the intellectualist thesis that knowing how to do something is a matter of possessing propositional knowledge. At any rate, the Intellectualist Legend Ryle set out to challenge was a philosophical theory of intelligence not limited to a claim about the nature of states of intelligence, but also a thesis about when actions count as exercising states of intelligence. According to Ryle’s intellectualist opponent, actions are intelligent only in virtue of their connection to internal intelligence states (e.g. propositional knowledge). The idea is that:

Intellectualist Legend (IL)Action: S exercises a state of intelligence when φ-ing if and only if S’s φ-ing is steered or guided by an internal state of considering a proposition.20 Notice that (IL)Action is the component of the Intellectualist Legend that submits a direct answer to the question of what makes Phil’s action of hitting a drive intelligently performed. This property is lacked by an amateur who happens to go through the very same motions. Now, just as we saw knowledge-howI.L. can be understood as a special case of (IL)Mind, similarly, a special case of (IL)Action will be:

Exercising know-howI.L.: S exercises S’s knowledge how to φ if and only if S’s φ-ing is steered or guided by an internal state of considering a proposition. As Ryle sees it, the Intellectualist Legend runs into insurmountable problems, and this is a point he argues for through a series of ‘regress arguments’. We will now consider two such regresses, beginning with the most famous one.

1.2.2  First regress Ryle’s primary regress argument from The Concept of Mind highlights a purported commitment of the Intellectualist Legend and insists that this commitment leads to absurdity. The key idea Ryle attempts to exploit, in motivating the regress is this: if the Intellectualist Legend

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were a correct philosophical theory of intelligence – that is, if (IL)Mind and (IL)Action are true – then intelligent action must always involve two things, a doing and a contemplation of a way to do that precedes or accompanies the doing.21 Ryle refers to this commitment as a ‘dual operation of considering and executing’.22 But this idea, taken to its natural conclusion, is a disaster. Ryle explains, The crucial objection to the intellectualist legend is this. The consideration of a proposition is itself an operation the execution of which can be more or less intelligent, less or more stupid. But if, for any operation to be intelligently executed, a prior theoretical operation had first to be performed and performed intelligently, it would be a logical impossibility for anyone ever to break into the cycle.23 Most anyone can sense a regress lurking here. What has been a matter of some dispute is just how to formulate it. For instance, Yuri Cath observes, ‘Despite its fame, Ryle’s regress objection has proven to be the most elusive of existing objections to intellectualism. For one thing, there is little agreement over not only the status but also the very structure of the best version of a regress argument against intellectualism.’24 One especially clear way to do so owes to Jason Stanley in his important book Know How (2011). Stanley captures the thrust of the regress argument in two premises:25 Premise 1: The intellectualist view entails that for any operation to be intelligently executed, there must be a prior consideration of a proposition. Premise 2: The consideration of propositions is itself an operation the execution of which can be more or less intelligent, more or less stupid. Premises (1) and (2) jointly entail that for any intelligent action, there must be an infinite number of prior actions. The regress is vicious. Stanley remarks: So, acting intelligently requires a prior action of considering a proposition, and considering a proposition intelligently requires

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a prior action of considering a proposition. Presumably, if any of these prior actions is performed stupidly, then the original action will not be performed intelligently. But then acting intelligently requires the performance of an infinite number of prior actions.26 In short then, as Ryle sees it, the Intellectualist Legend is committed to the position that we can do something – namely, entertain an infinite number of propositions – which (given our cognitive and temporal limitations) we can’t do. So the Intellectualist Legend is false. What to make of this argument? Unsurprisingly, the devil is in the details. Let’s tackle these two premises of the regress argument one at a time.

Problems with premise (1) Ryle thinks Premise (1) is true by virtue of the nature of the intellectualist view. A few paragraphs before presenting his regress, Ryle claims that the view that ‘action exhibits intelligence’ is usually expressed in ways that make clear reference to the ‘observance of rules, or the application of criteria’ with respect to which the agent must ‘first go through the internal process of avowing to himself. He must preach to himself before he can practice.’27 Ryle also suggests that (1) may be true because it explains why intelligent action is guided by a relevant principle rather than many other irrelevant principles. For example, why, in tying one’s shoelaces, does one not recall some cooking recipe?28 Ryle may be suggesting that there is a prior act of selecting the relevant principle to act on. But setting aside the matter of how Ryle actually argues for (1), let’s consider whether the intellectualist view is really committed to the ‘prior consideration of a proposition’ as a necessary ingredient of intelligent action?29 One reason to think it is not would be as follows: if Premise (1) is true, then the intellectualist position is, as Stanley (2011a) puts it, ‘an absurd datum of phenomenology’. But if intellectualism is false, it is not false because it is an absurd datum of phenomenology. Put differently: there must be a reasonable way to state the view, which would be different from what we encounter in (1). So, Premise (1) is false.

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And indeed, that Premise (1) reduces intellectualism to an absurdity is precisely why Stanley (2011a) and Weatherson (2017) think we should reject Premise (1). The idea is that: for many propositions φ, we all too often seem to employ our knowledge that φ without ever contemplating φ. Consider Carl Ginet’s quotidian doorknob example. I exercise (or manifest) my knowledge that one can get the door open by turning the knob and pushing it (as well as my knowledge that there is a door there) by performing that operation quite automatically as I leave the room; and I may do this, of course, without formulating (in my mind or out loud) that proposition or any other relevant proposition.30 Ginet’s point obviously generalizes. If we exercise propositional knowledge in this case more or less automatically, without considering any propositions, then surely we do it all the time. But then, pace Premise (1), intelligent execution of an action obviously doesn’t involve the consideration of any proposition.31 And if that’s right, then Ryle’s Intellectualist Legend is effectively a strawman. And if so, then what will be of philosophical interest is not whether Ryle’s implausible version of intellectualism is regress-bait, but whether a more charitable version is subject to a regress argument.

Can The Concept of Mind regress be saved? The prospects for defending Premise (1) turn importantly on how one unpacks the phrase ‘considering a proposition’. If ‘considering a proposition φ’ is supposed to involve consciously entertaining φ, then it looks like Premise (1) is wildly implausible as a datum of phenomenology.32 The natural inclination will be to weaken the first premise to characterize the intellectualist position in a way that does not require much to count as ‘considering a proposition’, which is what Ginet’s doorknob example shows is manifestly wrong with the initial premise. But, as we’ll see, attempts to weaken the first premise to avoid Ginet’s example render the second premise implausible. What must be circumvented then, by any proponent of Ryle’s regress, is the following kind of double-edged sword:

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Premise 1 (Strong)



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Premise 1 (Weak)

Advantage

Premise 2 is plausible

Premise 1 is plausible

Disadvantage

Premise 1 is not plausible

Premise 2 is not plausible

Stanley recognizes this problem. He considers the following attempt to weaken Premise 1 so as to avoid Ginet-style counterexamples. In particular, he considers interpreting ‘considering a proposition’ not as ‘positively avowing a proposition’ but, more weakly, as having ‘relevant representations triggered’. Thus, we get: Premise (1)Weak−1: The intellectualist view entails that for any operation to be intelligently executed, there must be a prior consideration of a proposition in so far as a relevant representation is triggered. By making the analogous substitution in Premise (2), Stanley says we get: Premise (2)Weak−1: The triggering of representations is itself an operation the execution of which can be more or less intelligent, less or more stupid.33 But, the double-edged sword worry threatens; while Premise (1)Weak−1 looks more plausible than the original Premise (1), Premise (2)Weak−1 looks much worse than the original Premise (2). Indeed, Premise (2)Weak−1 looks no more plausible than the claim that one can more or less intelligently be the recipient of inputs. Thus, Ryle’s regress does not gain any traction by switching out ‘positively avowing’ with the weaker ‘triggering’ interpretation of considering a proposition. Let’s consider now another attempt, drawing inspiration from Ginet’s point that intelligent action can be automatic. It’s tempting to think that Premise (1) could be rendered compatible with Ginet’s observation so long as ‘consideration of the proposition’ is understood as not needing to be intentional. Here’s a try: Premise (1)Weak−2: The intellectualist view entails that for any operation to be intelligently executed, there must be a prior

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consideration of a proposition, where the consideration needn’t be intentional.34 As Noë notes, though, if Ryle were to frame the first premise this way, then ‘all would be lost’ for the purposes of generating the regress. After all, making the relevant substitutions in Premise (2), we get: Premise (2)Weak−2: The unintentional consideration of a proposition is itself an operation the execution of which can be more or less intelligent, less or more stupid.35 Again, it looks like insofar as Premise (1) is construed weakly enough to dodge Ginet-style counterexamples, the corresponding Premise (2) will feature an engagement with a proposition that hardly strikes us as of the sort that could be intelligent or stupid. There is a twist on this regress, considered by Stanley and Williamson (2001), and framed specifically in terms of knowing-how and knowing-that. Premise (1)S&W If one F s, then one employs knowledge-how to F. Premise (2)S&W If one employs knowledge-that p, one contemplates the proposition that p. It follows from these two premises that if knowledge-how to F employs knowledge-that p, then one contemplates the proposition that p. This would commit the intellectualist to an absurd claim. Ryle didn’t specifically explicitly argue this way, but suppose he did. Would this be an effective regress against the position that knowledge-how is a kind of knowledge-that? Stanley and Williamson (2001) think not. This is because Premise (1)S&W is true only if we let F range over only intentional actions. After all, it doesn’t follow from Hannah’s digesting food that she knows how to digest food. But then, with the scope of F restricted to intentional actions, the regress doesn’t get off the ground given that knowing-that need not be accompanied by the contemplation of a proposition.36 At this point, the prospects are not very promising for finding a compelling argument against the view that knowledge-how is a kind

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of knowledge-that, by way of tweaking Ryle’s own regress in the Concept of Mind aimed at the Intellectualist Legend.

1.2.3  Second regress Ryle’s first regress argument does not succeed. He provides a different regress argument in a later paper. In the following we examine the prospects for this regress argument.

The argument In his paper ‘Knowing How and Knowing That’, Ryle (1945, 6–8) resurrects a regress presented originally in Lewis Carroll’s famous paper ’What the Tortoise Said to Achilles’ (1895). A pupil fails to follow an argument. He understands the premisses and he understands the conclusion. But he fails to see that the conclusion follows from the premises. The teacher thinks him rather dull but tries to help. So he tells him that there is an ulterior proposition which he has not considered, namely, that if these premisses are true, the conclusion is true. The pupil understands this and dutifully recites it alongside the premisses, and still fails to see that the conclusion follows from the premisses even when accompanied by the assertion that these premisses entail this conclusion. So a second hypothetical proposition is added to his store; namely, that the conclusion is true if the premisses are true as well as the first hypothetical proposition that if the premisses are true the conclusion is true. And still the pupil fails to see. And so on for ever. He accepts rules in theory but this does not force him to apply them in practice. He considers reasons, but he fails to reason. It’s a matter of some dispute precisely what this example should be taken to show.37 Ryle himself thought it showed that knowledgehow is not a kind of propositional knowledge. The structure of the argument is as follows:

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1 If knowing-how is a kind of knowing-that, then S knows how

to φ if for some finite set of propositions P, S knows that p for each p such that p ∈ P. 2 There is no finite set of propositions P such that knowing that

p for each p: p ∈ P entails that one knows how to infer p from rule R. (From the Carroll example) 3 Therefore, it is not the case that S knows how to φ if for

some finite set of propositions P, S knows that p for each p such that p ∈ P. 4 Therefore, knowing-how is not a kind of knowing-that.

Premise (1) is restricted to finite sets because no intellectualist thinks know-how requires knowing an infinite number of propositions. That said, the premise doing the heavy lifting here is Premise (2). And the argument for this premise gains its support by a regress argument. To see this we can just assume, for reductio, the negation of the premise. ¬(2): There is a finite set of propositions P such that knowing that p for each p: p ∈ P entails that one knows how to perform an inference. Now, if [¬(2)] is true, then so is the following: One More Fact: There is a proper subset of P (call it P  ∗) such that by knowing all the propositions in P  ∗ plus one further proposition, one knows how to perform an inference. But here’s where trouble lurks. Let P ∗ be the set of propositions that includes: ●●

The argument’s two premises

●●

The argument’s conclusion

●●

Further premises about the implication of the conclusion by the premises.38

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Ryle takes Carroll’s case of the pupil and teacher to show that what we’ve called One More Fact is false because there won’t ever be a P  ∗ such that knowing all the propositions in P ∗ plus some ‘further proposition’ entails that one knows how to perform an inference. After all, for any further proposition p that could be added to P  ∗, it is possible that the pupil still cannot perform the inference. But, since One More Fact is false, so is ¬(2); accordingly, Ryle has (through the Carroll case) defended premise (2) of the argument that knowinghow is not a kind of knowing-that.

Lines of resistance Intellectualists do not think this argument is any more successful than the first regress. Let’s consider now some strategies for resisting the conclusion. Strategy 1: Here’s an idea that sounds sensible. Call it Krasia:39 Krasia: If one knows that an inference rule φ is true, then one is disposed to infer in accordance with φ when the time comes. Krasia is initially plausible. After all, if you often fail to infer in accordance with some inference rule, we’d hesitate to attribute to you knowledge of that rule. But if Krasia is true, then a critic of Ryle is in a position to turn the argument around. The argument could run: (i) If one knows that an inference rule φ is true, then one is disposed to infer in accordance with φ; (ii) The pupil is not disposed to infer in accordance with φ; (iii) The pupil does not know that φ is true. Ryle’s critic, who insists that knowledge-how entails knowledge-that, can then argue that what Carroll’s story shows is precisely what the intellectualist would predict: that knowing-how to perform an inference requires something the pupil lacks, propositional knowledge of the inference rule. It is his lack of knowledge that prevents him from performing the inference.40 Strategy 2: Notice that regardless of whether an intellectualist accepts Krasia, the intellectualist might deny a stronger version of the principle, which (for convenience sake) we can call Krasia+.

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Krasia+: If one knows that an inference rule φ is true, then it is not possible that one fail to infer in accordance with φ when the time comes. Now, perhaps all the case of the pupil and student forces the intellectualist to admit is that Krasia+ is false, where Krasia+ says that one will never fail to apply a known inference rule when the time comes. Stanley thinks that not just intellectualists, but anyone, should reject Krasia+. He explains: If one has some knowledge, whether propositional or nonpropositional, how can there not be a possibility of failing to apply it when the time comes?41 The rationale for rejecting Krasia+ is just that it is always possible to fail to apply one’s knowledge in practice, no matter how we construe that knowledge. But with reference to this rationale, knowhow construed in terms of ability (or otherwise, for that matter) will be in the same boat as know-how articulated in terms of relations to propositions – and then it looks like Ryle’s appeal to the Carroll example marshals no support for any other view of knowledge-how over intellectualism.

1.3  Ryle’s legacy We’ve now seen the key contours of Ryle’s anti-intellectualist project. What conclusions can be drawn? One overarching conclusion seems to be that Ryle’s arguments come up short. The main problem with Ryle’s first regress is that it seems to go through only if we characterize the Intellectualist Legend as committed to a thesis that is manifestly implausible. Indeed this is so even if, as Bengson and Moffett (2011a, 22) note, we sometimes recite our regulative propositions out loud (e.g. ‘righty-tighty, lefty-loosy’). As Stanley remarks: The reasonable intellectualist about intelligent action will hold that an action is intelligent in virtue of being guided by propositional knowledge, but deny that this entails that intelligent action

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requires a prior act of self-avowing the propositional knowledge that guides one’s action.42 But, as we saw in Section 1.2.2, once the ‘avowing’ element of the view is dropped, then the second premise of the regress argument can be easily rejected. And, thus, the regress thwarted. In effect, then, Ryle’s primary regress argument doesn’t give us reason to deny the more reasonably articulated intellectualist thesis about knowledgehow. Likewise, our reconstruction of Ryle’s use of the Lewis Carroll case in Section 1.2.3 does not turn out to compellingly support a case against the intellectualist’s thesis about knowledge-how. This is, we saw, because there are some straightforward, reasonably plausible, moves one can make to resist the conclusion – only two of which we’ve actually considered here.43 Ryle’s own legacy in epistemology is not limited to the negative component of his anti-intellectualism; epistemologists have, by and large, proceeded as though there is a fundamental distinction between knowing-how and knowing-that, which was precisely the claim Ryle makes in his positive proposal. Following Bengson and Moffett (2011a) we can think of Ryle’s proposal as admitting of both a mind and an action component; the key idea for Ryle is that – in order to get around the regresses that he took to be the fatal undoing of his intellectualist opponent – know-how and activities that exercise it should be explained in terms of abilities and dispositions, rather than in terms of knowledge of propositions. Here is more or less the proposal Ryle commits himself to:

Anti-intellectualismknow-how: A state is a state of knowing how to φ if that state essentially involves a certain ability or disposition to φ, rather than propositional attitudes. Anti-intellectualismExercising–know-how: S exercises her knowledge how to φ if S’s φ-ing actualizes her ability or disposition to φ.44 If, as Ryle thought, knowledge-how is something one has just when one has a certain ability (rather than when one knows that p for some relevant p), then notice that the ‘consideration of regulatory

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propositions’ that he thought generated the regress for his opponent does not even enter the picture. Moreover, if know-how is construed as an ability or disposition, we seem to have a straightforward explanation for what’s going on in the Carroll case. Regardless of which propositions the student knows, what prevents him from inferring in accordance with modus ponens is that he doesn’t know how to do this – that is, he lacks the ability to do so. Now, as Stanley has noted, Ryle can’t so obviously circumvent the regresses he adduced against the intellectualist simply by viewing know-how as an ability. But this point won’t concern us. The point stands that Ryle’s arguments against the intellectualist don’t in themselves provide any compelling reason to prefer his own position to (say) a reasonable intellectualist view. We’ll have to look elsewhere, beyond the regresses, for such arguments.

1.4 Further reading ●●

Annas, J. (2011). Practical expertise. In Bengson, J. and Moffett, M. A., editors, Knowing How: Essays on Knowledge, Mind, and Action, pages 101–12. Oxford: Oxford University Press

●●

Bengson, J. and Moffett, M. (2011a). Two conceptions of mind and action: Knowing how and the philosophical theory of intelligence. In Bengson, J. and Moffett, M., editors, Knowing How: Essays on Knowledge, Mind, and Action, pages 3–55. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

●●

Fantl, J. (2016). Knowledge how. In Zalta, E. N., editor, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, Spring 2016 edition.

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Ryle, G. (1949). The Concept of Mind. University of Chicago Press (Chapter 2).

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Ryle, G. (1945). Knowing how and knowing that: The presidential address. In Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, volume 46, pages 1–16.

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Stanley, J. (2011a). Know how. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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1.5  Study questions 1 What is Plato’s craft analogy meant to show? 2 How does Aristotle distinguish between techne and

phronesis, on the one hand, and episteme, on the other hand? 3 Explain the view that Ryle challenged under the description of

the ‘Intellectualist Legend’. 4 According to Ryle, ‘The consideration of a proposition is itself

an operation the execution of which can be more or less intelligent, less or more stupid.’ Is this observation relevant to the first regress argument Ryle advanced against the Intellectualist Legend? Explain. 5 How does Stanley respond to Ryle’s first regress argument? 6 What is Ryle’s second regress argument? Is it sound? If so,

why; if not, why not?

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2 The case for intellectualism

2.1 Introduction

O

ne lesson from Chapter 1 was that the regresses Ryle famously tried to pin on his intellectualist opponent had bite only if intellectualism is characterized so that it’s committed to an ‘absurd datum of phenomenology’. The absurd datum of phenomenology, recall, was that an agent knows how to do something only if she actively contemplates some proposition. This thesis, we saw, should be rejected outright. What matters for all parties to the debate is that there is a more reasonable way to state the intellectualist position: Intellectualism: S knows how to φ in virtue of S’s having some propositional attitudes vis-à-vis φ-ing.1 Intellectualism, thus articulated, is not ‘regress-bait’ – and this is good news for the prospects of intellectualism. But a thesis needs more to recommend it than the credential that it ‘avoids regresses’. So, then, why be an intellectualist? This will be the guiding question of this chapter, and in what follows we’ll be exploring the question in an organized way. But before doing so, some quick preliminary points are in order. Firstly, since one notable strategy of argument for intellectualism takes the shape of demonstrating anti-intellectualism to be an unacceptable alternative, it’s important to get clear what the rival thesis is actually saying. Pared down to the very core: the key idea separating the positions is whether certain propositional attitudes are sufficient

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for knowledge-how. It is the denial of the intellectualist’s claim that certain propositional attitudes are sufficient for knowledge-how that makes one strictly an anti-intellectualist.2 Though, in merely denying this claim, one hasn’t yet offered any alternative. Thus – and this is important – anti-intellectualists have almost categorically maintained (beyond just the denial of the intellectualist’s thesis about propositional attitudes) a further positive thesis that knowledge-how is grounded in the possession of abilities or dispositions. Consider Bengson and Moffett’s remark that ‘one of Ryle’s most important contributions was to uncover a general, theoretically significant fault line in the theory of knowledge, mind and action, to which [the terms “intellectualism” and “anti-intellectualism”] rightly apply’.3 The core contention of the intellectualist side of this line is that states of intelligence and exercises thereof are grounded in propositional attitudes. The core contention of the anti-intellectualist side, by contrast, is that ‘states of Intelligence and exercises thereof are grounded in powers, abilities, or dispositions to behave, not in propositional attitudes’.4 Thus antiintellectualism, understood as a positive thesis about what it is in virtue of which a given agent S knows how to φ, says: Anti-Intellectualism: S knows how to φ in virtue of S’s having some ability to φ. Thus, intellectualism and anti-intellectualism each imply the following claims about necessary and sufficient conditions for knowledge-how. Intellectualism–sufficiency: If S has some propositional attitudes vis-à-vis φ-ing, then S knows how to φ. Intellectualism–necessity: If S knows how to φ, then S has some propositional attitudes vis-à-vis φ-ing. Anti-Intellectualism–sufficiency: If S has the ability to φ, then S knows how to φ. Anti-Intellectualism–necessity: If S knows how to φ, then S has the ability to φ. Keeping these differences in mind, there are admittedly several ways one might attempt to organize the philosophical case for

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intellectualism. One natural thought would be to do so along the most well-worn division line for evaluating the intellectualist thesis in the literature – arguments from cognitive science on the one hand, and linguistic arguments on the other.5 However, dividing the case for intellectualism into these two categories of argument would be misleading. For one thing, cognitive science-based evaluations of the intellectualist thesis, drawing from a claimed difference between declarative and procedural knowledge (i.e. knowledge-that can be easily articulated and knowledge exercised in tasks which cannot be easily articulated), are almost entirely anti-intellectualist in spirit.6 As Glick remarks: The case from cognitive science, in essence, is that empirical data shows that know how can be possessed and exercised even when there is reason to doubt that propositional knowledge is present.7 While arguments from cognitive science play an important role in evaluations of the intellectualist position, such considerations do not play a substantial role in accounting for its motivation. Moreover, the linguistic/cognitive science divide fails to capture a range of important arguments for intellectualism that take the dialectical shape of arguments against anti-intellectualism. We thus propose to divide the case for intellectualism into the categories of linguistic strategies and broadly non-linguistic strategies.

2.2  Linguistic arguments for intellectualism Intellectualism, as we just saw, is the thesis that one knows how to φ in virtue of having some propositional attitudes about φ-ing. Plausibly, propositional attitudes less than knowledge (e.g. mere unjustified belief) will not suffice, and so the intellectualist view is that knowledgehow is a species of propositional knowledge. Propositional knowledge is knowledge of some fact, and it is also indicated as ‘knowledgethat’ where the that-clause is some sentence expressing a true proposition. For instance, ‘John knows that 33 = 27’ indicates that

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John has propositional knowledge of the fact that 3 cubed is 27. So, knowledge-that is knowledge of a true proposition. An intellectualist about know-how claims that knowledge-how is knowledge of a true proposition. On an intellectualist account, one knows how to perform some action if and only if one knows that this is a way to perform the action. In the following we examine arguments for intellectualism that stem from semantic accounts of embedded questions.8

2.2.1  The development of formal semantics As we saw in the first chapter, the modern debate over the nature of knowledge-how goes back to Gilbert Ryle. A more recent development to this debate appeals to the relatively recent field of formal semantics. This field develops as an extension of the logical study of language. Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell introduced and developed a formal language to analyse the logical significance of language. For example, Russell’s treatment of the nature of definite descriptions used logic to analyse puzzles relating to ordinary sentences such as ‘The present king of France is bald.’ This sentence has a meaning, but, because there is no present king of France, it fails to refer to any existing person. The grammatical subject of the sentence is empty; it is as if words are being used without any cognitive significance. This conflicts, though, with the fact that we do understand the sentence. The puzzle was to understand the meaning of a sentence that appeared to refer to an individual that doesn’t exist. Reference is a real relation that requires existing relata and so the apparent meaning of such sentences poses a philosophical puzzle. Bertrand Russell’s theory of definite description uses the tools of modern logic to dissolve this puzzle. On his view, the sentence ‘the present king of France is bald’ has a more elaborate logical structure. Its logical structure is revealed by the following: (∃x)(x is the king of France & (∀y)(if y is the king of France, then x = y) & x is bald). This is read as follows. There exists an x such that x is the king of France, and for all y if y is the king of France, then x is identical to

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y and x is bald. Thus, on Russell’s analysis, this sentence implies that there is a king of France, there is only one king of France, and he is bald. Thus, given Russell’s analysis the sentence does not require reference to a non-existent individual. The logical structure of the sentence does not require any singular terms. Rather the sentence’s structure is revealed by quantification over propositional functions (e.g. ‘x is the king of France’). On this analysis, the sentence is meaningful but false since it implies that there is a king of France. The general approach of using the resources of formal logic to analyse the structure of ordinary sentences has a wide appeal. In the 1950s Richard Montague, a student of Alfred Tarski at Berkeley, extended the model-theoretical approach to an analysis of natural language. It was widely held by logicians of the day that natural languages were too rich to be usefully analysed by model-theoretical semantics. Montague showed otherwise, developing a formal semantics known as ‘Montague grammar’.9

2.2.2  Stanley’s master argument Jason Stanley’s linguistic argument for intellectualism grows directly out of this tradition.10 He uses formal semantics to develop a sophisticated analysis of sentences involving ‘know-how’. Stanley argues that an account of knowledge-how must fit in a general account of the semantics of embedded questions. An embedded question is a clause that begins with a question word: ‘who’, ‘what’, ‘when’, ‘why’ and ‘how’. The sentence ‘John knows how to ride a bike’ contains an embedded question ‘how to ride a bike’. Similarly, the sentence like ‘John knows where to ride a bike’ contains the embedded question ‘where to ride a bike’. Thus, Stanley reasons, an account of knowledge-how needs to grow out of a more general account of knowledge-wh, which itself will grow out of a general theory of the semantics of embedded questions. He aims to show thus that a good semantic theory for knowledge-wh and embedded questions supports the view that one knows how to φ in virtue of having some propositional attitudes about φ-ing. Let us turn now to a more detailed presentation of his arguments.

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Stanley’s main thesis is that ‘knowing how to do something is the same as knowing a fact’.11 A fact is a true proposition. It is something that can be believed and asserted. On his view a subject, S, knows how to φ if and only if S knows that, for some way w, w is a way to φ. We can formulate Stanley’s main argument thus: Stanley’s master argument 1 Sentences that ascribe knowledge-how contain embedded

questions. 2 If a sentence ascribing knowledge-how to a subject S is

true, then S knows an answer to the embedded question contained in the ascription of knowledge-how. 3 If S knows an answer to the embedded question contained in

the ascription of knowledge-how, then S knows that p, where p is a correct answer to the embedded question. Thus, 4 If a sentence ascribing knowledge-how to a subject S is true,

then S knows that p, where p is a correct answer to the embedded question.

Defence of 1 The first premise situates a treatment of the semantics of knowledgehow within a general semantics for embedded questions. Stanley provides the following list of sentences with knowledge verbs that all contain embedded questions. 1 (a) John knows whether Mary came to the party.

(b) John knows why Obama won. (c) Hannah knows what Obama will do in office. (d) Hannah knows who Obama is. (e) Hannah knows what she is pointing to. (f) Hannah knows how Obama will govern. (g) Hannah knows why to vote for Obama. (h) Hannah knows how to vote.12

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Each of these constructions contain an embedded question. In (a) the embedded question is ‘whether Mary came to the party’; in (b) it is ‘why Obama won’; in (c) it is ‘what Obama will do in office’; and so on. Knowledge-how is not special in this respect. It too contains an embedded question. Notice that both (f) and (h) contained embedded questions: (f) ‘How Obama will govern’ and (1h) ‘how to vote’. The difference between (f) and (h) is that the former contains a finite clause, a clause marked for tense, and the later contains an infinitival clause, one not marked for tense. This difference, while significant, does not affect whether constructions involving ‘knowledge-how’ contain embedded questions.13

Defence of 2 Premise 2 relates (i) sentences that ascribe know-how to (ii) knowing the answer to the embedded question ‘how to φ?’ The primary defence for 2 comes from reflection on all the other cases of knowledge-wh, that is, cases (a)–(g). Consider (a): John knows whether Mary came to the party. If John knows whether Mary came to the party, then John knows the answer to the question ‘did Mary come to the party?’ Similarly, with (b), if John knows why Obama won, then John knows the answer to the question ‘why did Obama win?’ Similar considerations hold for other cases of knowledge-wh. Moreover, the occurrence of the finite clause with ‘know-how’ in (f) fits the pattern of the other cases. If Hannah knows how Obama will govern, then Hannah knows the answer to the question ‘how will Obama govern?’ Thus, reflection on (a)–(g) supports the claim that if a sentence ascribing knowledge-wh to a subject S is true, then S knows an answer to the embedded question continued in the ascription of knowledge-how. A principle of simplicity supports the thought that this pattern continues to all cases of knowledge-how. Unless there are significant reasons to think that knowledge-how differs significantly from other kinds of know-wh, one should infer that properties of know-wh are also properties of know-how. In Chapter 5 we return to this issue when we discuss the difference between knowledge-how with a finite clause such as ‘knows how Obama will govern’ and knowledgehow with an infinitival clause such as ‘knows how to vote’. For now,

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though, we will rest the intellectualist’s case on the parallel between (a)–(g) and (h).

Defence of 3: Karttunen’s semantics Premise (3) states that ‘If S knows an answer to the embedded question contained in the ascription of knowledge-how then S knows that p, where p is a correct answer to the embedded question.’ This premise connects knowing the answer to a question with propositional knowledge. The defence of this premise requires some working knowledge of the semantics of embedded questions. To grasp the motivation for premise (3) one needs to understand why the best semantic accounts of knowledge-wh imply that intellectualism is true. The complete argument for premise (3) would involve more space that we can allot. We refer the reader to Jason Stanley superb book Know How.14 In place of a complete argument for premise (3), we shall develop Lauri Karttunen’s (1977) early semantic theory of embedded questions and observe how it naturally extends to provide an intellectualist account of knowledge-how. This will involve smoothing out some rough edges but the overall picture we offer is not far from Stanley’s presentation. Karttunen’s account of embedded questions begins with the idea that questions have semantic objects.15 A semantic object can be thought of as a meaning. Declarative sentences have semantic objects – that is, propositions. Consider the sentence ‘John knows that snow is white.’ This sentence relates John via a knowledge relation to the proposition 〈snow is white〉. Similarly, questions have semantic objects. The sentence ‘John knows whether it rained last night’ relates John via a knowledge relation to the question ‘whether it rained last night’. Since we have a semantic object for propositional knowledge, we should also have a semantic object for questions. Karttunen’s specific account of questions develops in response to perceived inadequacies with C. L. Hamblin’s (1973) early account. Hamblin argued that the semantic content of a question is its set of possible answers. For a yes/no question about p, its content is the set {p or ¬p}. For example, the content of ‘Is it raining?’ is {it is raining or it is not raining}. For an open-ended question like ‘who came to the

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party?’ its content is the set of propositions of the form: x came to the party, where ‘x’ ranges over individuals. This set can be more concisely expressed using lambda notation. This notation is widespread in linguistics because of its use as a λ-determiner. A determiner like ‘every’, ‘most’ and ‘some’ binds a variable that would otherwise be free. For example, the universal quantifier, ∀, binds the variable x in the sentence ‘(∀x) x runs’ to express the sentence that ‘everyone runs’. Using lambda notation we can express this as the set of all people who run λx, x runs. That expression is equivalent to the more familiar set theoretical notation: {x: x runs}. To express the content of the question ‘is it raining?’ we write: Is it raining? = λp (p = the proposition that it is raining or p = the proposition that it is not raining) This is read as be read the set of propositions, p, such that p=it is raining or p=it is not raining. We can express the content of the question ‘who came?’ thusly: λp(∃x(p = the proposition that x came)). This reads: the set of propositions, p, such that there exists an x such that sentences of the form ‘x came’ are either true or false. So the question ‘Who came?’ has as its content the set of possible answers to that question. We are interested in the implications of this account for knowledge-wh. The sentence ‘Tim knows whether John walks’ involves a knowledge relation Tim stands in to the question ‘whether John walks’. On Karttunen’s semantics this involves knowledge relation to set {John walks or John does not walk}. More specifically, we can say that the property expressed by ‘knows whether John walks’ is the following. [knows whether John walks] = λx(knows(x,λp (p & (p=the proposition that John walks) or (p=the proposition that John doesn’t walk)))).16 In this case the question embedding verb ‘knows whether’ is a function from individuals to a composite function from propositions to truth values. This implies that Tom knows whether John walks if

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and only if if John walks, then Tom knows that and if John doesn’t walk, then Tom knows that. Stanley observes that Karttunen’s semantic account of embedded questions can be generalized to apply to ‘know why’ and ‘knowhow’. Karttunen’s account of ‘know who’ requires quantification over persons. Stanley claims that an account of ‘why’ questions will involve quantification over reasons, and an account of ‘how’ questions will involve quantification over ways of doing things.17 Stanley provides the following two examples. [How does Bill swim] = λp ∃w (p & p = the proposition that Bill swims in way w). [Why does Bill swim] = λp ∃r (p & p = the proposition that Bill swims for reason r).18 We can see a clear basis for intellectualism in Karttunen’s account. John knows how Bill swims if and only if John stands in the knowledge relation to λp ∃w (p & p= the proposition that Bill swims in way w).19 Why did we say ‘stand in the knowledge relation to λp ∃w (p & p = the proposition that Bill swims in way w)’ rather than knows that φ, where φ is the correct answer of the form ‘Bill swims in way w?’ The reason is that on Karttunen’s account knowledge-wh and knowledgethat belong to different semantic categories. Knowledge-wh relates a knower to a set of possible answers whereas knowledge-that relates a knower to a proposition. As Stanley observes this posed a problem with Karttunen’s account because his account didn’t validate the following inference: (a) Bill knows whether John walks; (b) John walks; so, (c) Bill knows that John walks.20 Karttunen met this problem by a meaning postulate relating knowledge-wh to knowledge-that.21 We shall ignore this complication and assume that Karttunen’s account predicts that if John knows how Bill swims, then John knows that Bill swims in way w, for some way of swimming. The last remaining part of an argument for intellectualism is to apply Karttunen’s account to an infinitival use of ‘know-how’. Karttunen’s semantics for ‘how to φ’ predicts the following: [how does one ride a bike] = λp ∃w (p & p = the proposition that one rides a bike in way w).

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Thus, we would expect that John knows how to ride a bike just in case John stands in the knowledge relation to λp ∃w (p & p = the proposition that John rides a bike in way w). This does involve some self-knowledge on John’s part since John is the subject of the knowledge. We ignore this detail. Karttunen’s account suggests that John knows how to ride a bike in and only if John knows that w is a way to ride a bike. There are a few more steps to get from Karttunen’s semantics to the specific account that Stanley offers, but one can clearly see the basis in formal semantics. Thus, Stanley gives us the following intellectualist account. (INT) A subject S knows how to φ if and only if there is some contextually relevant way w such that S stands in the knowledgethat relation to the proposition that w is a way for S to φ, and S entertains this proposition under a practical mode of presentation.22 What’s new here is the idea that S entertains this proposition under a practical mode of presentation. But, like Karttunen’s account, the core idea is that the semantics for know-how require that S stand in a knowledge relation to some proposition that w is a way to φ.

2.3  The non-linguistic case for intellectualism In this section, we’ll evaluate the broadly non-linguistic case for intellectualism in two parts, negative and positive. What we’re calling the ‘negative case’ for intellectualism emerges from alleged defects in the anti-intellectualist thesis, which we’ll outline and evaluate in Sec. 2.3.1. In Sec. 2.3.2, we evaluate briefly three positive (non-linguistic) strands of argument in favour of the intellectualist’s position: (i) Snowdon’s ‘substantive knowledge’ argument; Stanley’s argument from cognitive science; and (iii) Bengson and Moffett’s argument for non-propositional intellectualism.

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2.3.1  The negative case Bengson and Moffett maintain that one good reason to be an intellectualist is that ability possession is neither necessary nor sufficient for knowledge-how.23 Their argument strategy is by counterexamples to both the necessity and sufficiency claims. If their combined argument is right, then the thesis that one knows how to φ in virtue of possessing the ability to φ is off the table, leaving (ceteris paribus) intellectualism looking like the viable alternative. We’ll now engage with this negative case for intellectualism in some detail.

Against the anti-intellectualist’s necessity condition Let’s look first at the necessity leg of the anti-intellectualist’s position, according to which ability possession is necessary for know-how: Anti-intellectualism – Necessity (AI-N): S knows how to φ only if S has the ability to φ. Notice that something like AI-N is surely what Ryle himself had in mind when he diagnosed the Lewis Carroll case of the pupil and student (see Section 1.2.3). Recall that Ryle insisted that the student failed to know how to draw the inference, despite all the propositional knowledge Ryle granted that the student possessed about the premises and conclusion. Moreover, the explanation Ryle advanced for why the pupil lacked know how was that the student lacked the ability to draw the inference. Present in Ryle’s thinking is that ability possession is a necessary condition for know-how. And indeed, to the extent that anti-intellectualists are committed to the core insight that when one knows how to φ it will be in virtue of one’s possessing the relevant φ-abilities, an endorsement of some version of AI-N looks unavoidable for the intellectualist. That said, Bengson and Moffett offer the following counterexample to AI-N:24 ski instructor.

Pat has been a ski instructor for twenty years, teaching people how to do complex ski stunts. He is in high

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demand as an instructor, since he is considered to be the best at what he does. Although an accomplished skier, he has never been able to do the stunts himself. Nonetheless, over the years he has taught many people how to do them well. In fact, a number of his students have won medals in international competitions and competed in the Olympic games.25 Bengson and Moffett’s diagnosis is that, in ski instructor, Pat (i) knows how to do the stunts, despite (ii) lacking the ability to do them. If this diagnosis is correct, then AI-N is false. A natural reply to their diagnosis of the case, on behalf of the antiintellectualist, proceeds as follows: 1

is a case where one merely knows how one φs while lacking the ability to φ. ski instructor

2 A genuine counterexample to (AI-N) must be one where the

agent both (a) lacks the ability to φ and (b) knows how to φ. 3 Knowing how one φs does not entail knowing how to φ. 4 Thus, ski instructor is not a counterexample to (AI-N).

Call this the one-φs-reply. Is the one-φs-reply a viable strategy on behalf of the anti-intellectualist? Bengson and Moffett are not convinced. In an attempt to counter this move, they offer a kind of counterreply via comparison. Their strategy grants that knowing how one φs does not entail knowing how to φ. However, they insist that, despite the intuition relied on in the anticipated one-φs-reply to ski instructor, Pat actually does know how to do the stunts after all, and so doesn’t merely know how one does them. In support of this claim, they invite us to compare Pat with Albert, a scientist who doesn’t ski, but who knows how one does the stunts by knowing what muscles contract in what ways. The suggested line of thinking here is that we should draw three key conclusions from the comparison of Pat’s situation with Albert’s situation. ●●

Both Pat and Albert know how one does the stunts.

●●

Neither is able to do the stunts (by stipulation).

●●

Only Pat, but not Albert, knows how to do the stunts.

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Granted, this is not a counterintuitive way to think about the situation. But, to the extent this diagnosis looks viable, it is presumably because – by way of comparison – Pat seems ‘more engaged’ with the activity in question than Albert, given that Pat is a skier himself and Albert merely reads books, despite the fact that neither can do the stunts in question. A rationale for Bengson and Moffett’s diagnosis thus relies on a kind of pairing insight – namely, one which pairs Pat (more engaged) with knowing-how to do something and Albert (less engaged) with knowing how one does something.

Table 2.1:  Pairing Insight Knowing how to φ Knowing how one φs Pat (who is a skier) Albert (who is not a skier)

Engaged Detached Engaged Detached

Pat Albert

Knowing how to φ Knowing how one φs

An objection to relying on such a pairing insight, as a rationale for dismissing the one-φs-reply is that we can just as easily run an argument by comparison that appeals to an equally intuitive alternative pairing insight, to reach a very different conclusion concerning Pat, one that is compatible with the one-φs-reply. To appreciate this point, consider the case of Kamil: kamil. Kamil is able to do all of the jumps Pat teaches with ease (and

knows the relevant physiology). Given Pat’s inability to actually do the jumps Kamil can do, it seems just as natural to say that Kamil knows how to do the jumps but Pat merely knows how one does the jumps. That is, it is just as natural to say this as it is to say in Bengson and Moffett’s counter-reply that Pat (the coach) knows how to do the jumps but Albert (the scientist) merely knows how one does the jumps. When Pat is compared with Kamil (who can actually do the stunts) rather than with Albert (who does not even ski), the following pairing insight seems intuitive:

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Table 2.2:  Alternative Pairing Insight Knowing how to φ Knowing how one φs Kamil (who can do the jumps) Pat (who cannot do the jumps)

Engaged Detached Engaged Detached

Kamil Pat

Knowing how to φ Knowing how one φs

The alternative pairing insight seems every bit as intuitive as Bengson and Moffett’s pairing insight. But if that is the case, then their counterreply by comparison to the one-φs-reply is not successful. It does not provide a good reason for thinking that the one-φs-reply is off the table, as a way for the anti-intellectualist to defend AI-N against the ski instructor counterexample. Thus, we have no good reason to regard ski instructor as a decisive counterexample to (AI-N).

Against the anti-intellectualist’s sufficiency condition Anti-intellectualists maintain that having the ability to φ is not just necessary for knowing how to φ, but also sufficient for doing so, though this point needs a quick adjustment.26 It is obviously false that someone – say, Jack – knows how to build a campfire with flint and steel were he to possess an unreliable ability to do so; say, he succeeds 1 out of an average of 50 attempts. In such a case, Jack doesn’t know how to build a fire, even though he gets it right rarely by happenstance. Accordingly, following Bengson and Moffett, we can restrict the anti-intellectualist’s claim about the sufficiency of ability for knowhow as follows, so that reliability is part of the formula: Anti-intellectualism – sufficiency (AI-S): If S is reliably able to φ, then S knows how to φ. Again, the core anti-intellectualist claim that one knows how to φ in virtue of possessing the relevant abilities rather than propositional

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attitudes looks to stand or fall with AI-S no less than with AI-N. Consider now a case – aimed at undermining AI-S – that has received considerable recent attention:27 salchow.

Irina, who is a novice figure skater, decides to try a complex jump called the salchow. When one performs a salchow, one takes off from the back inside edge of one skate and lands on the back outside edge of the opposite skate after one or more rotations in the air. Irina, however, is seriously mistaken about how to perform a salchow. She believes incorrectly that the way to perform a salchow is to take off from the front outside edge of one skate, jump in the air, spin and land on the front inside edge of the other skate. However, Irina has a severe neurological abnormality that makes her act in ways that differ dramatically from how she actually thinks she is acting. So despite the fact that she is seriously mistaken about how to perform a salchow, whenever she actually attempts to do a salchow (in accordance with her misconceptions), the abnormality causes Irina to unknowingly perform the correct sequence of moves, and so she ends up successfully performing a salchow. Although what she is doing and what she thinks she is doing come apart, she fails to notice the mismatch. Bengson and Moffett’s line on the case is ‘it is clear that Irina is reliably able to do a salchow. However, because of her confusions regarding how to execute the move, she cannot be said to know how to do a salchow.’28 It’s hard not to agree with the observation that Irina fails to know how to do a salchow, given her confusion. Also, given that ‘whenever she actually attempts to do a salchow (in accordance with her misconceptions), the abnormality causes Irina to unknowingly perform the correct sequence of moves’, it also looks like Irina’s possessing a reliable ability to perform the salchow is equally uncontroversial. But the second point requires some closer inspection. To get a feel for why something might be amiss with Bengson and Moffett’s diagnosis of the salchow case, it will be helpful to briefly consider a famous case in the literature on reliabilist epistemology – namely, Plantinga (1993a)’s ‘brain lesion’ case, which challenges the

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reliabilist’s core thesis that one knows that something is so if one has a reliably formed, true belief that it is so. In Plantinga’s brain lesion case, we are to imagine that our hero, Al, has a strange brain lesion that reliably causes him to believe that he has a brain lesion. Suppose, further, that Al has no other item of evidence that supports this conclusion. Now, one popular explanation for why Al’s reliable brain lesion-caused belief fails to qualify as knowledge proceeds as follows:29 knowledge requires that a belief’s correctness be attributable to the agent’s exercise of cognitive ability;30 and it’s hard to see how Al’s correctly believing the target proposition is attributable to any ability to which we can credit Al. As John Greco puts it, beliefs attributable to the brain lesion belief generating process are in an important sense not attributable to any abilities belonging to Al’s own cognitive character.31 We’ll consider shortly the implications of this idea for Bengson and Moffett’s diagnosis of salchow. But first, compare the brain lesion case with an even more radical case in the reliabilist literature: Keith Lehrer’s (1990) case of ‘TrueTemp’ who has (unbeknownst to him) a temperature-detecting device implanted in his head that regularly produces accurate beliefs about the ambient temperature. A natural reaction will be to point out that despite TrueTemp’s reliability, his correctness is nonetheless not a production of his own efforts or faculties, but rather, the production of a cause external to TrueTemp’s own cognitive agency. Now, granted, it is possible that external devices might be incorporated into one’s cognitive character after a long period of calibration, perhaps as an instance of what Clark and Chalmers call extended cognition.32 However, unless the case were supplemented in such a way a great deal further, it remains a case where one’s reliably attained success is not attributable to one’s ability. Now to the extent that we should resist, in the brain lesion and TrueTemp cases, the attribution of Al’s and TrueTemp’s correctness to Al’s and TrueTemp’s ‘abilities’, we have a precedent for denying an individual an ability to do something even when she reliably can do the thing in question successfully. Moreover, given Irina’s ‘severe neurological abnormalities’ which cause a mismatch between what Irina does and what she thinks she is doing, there is cause to think that we should not attribute the successful salchow to Irina’s ability

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any more than we should attribute Al’s correct brain lesion belief to an ability of Al’s (or for that matter, credit TrueTemp’s correct temperature belief to some ability TrueTemp has himself). In each case, we have instances in which what causes the relevant success is not appropriately integrated in the agent’s cognitive psychology to warrant an attribution of the success in question to the agent’s own ability. Now, granted, even if the foregoing is right, then although salchow fails as a counterexample to AI-S, one might point out that the case remains a counterexample to a stronger version of the sufficiency leg of the anti-intellectualist’s ability claim, which articulates abilities in terms of mere doings. This stronger thesis is formulated thusly: Anti-intellectualism (Sufficiency-Strong) [AI-SW] If S reliably φs, then S knows how to φ. It doesn’t much matter, however, that salchow counts against this stronger version of the sufficiency leg of the anti-intellectualist thesis – given that no anti-intellectualist writing today opts for the implausibly inclusive AI-SW over the more reasonable AI-S. Unlike AI-S, AI-SW is manifestly false. Whereas crediting an individual with cognitive or action-relevant abilities entails at least minimal agency, attributions of the form ‘S reliably φs’ do not. Accordingly, S reliably φs indicates only that there is a reliable connection between S and φ-ing. For instance, Inspector Jacques Clouseau, in the Pink Panther series, regularly solves crimes. Yet Clouseau is so inept and incompetent that it’s practically a miracle each time that he uncovers the crime. As it happens with Clouseau, the world works out in his case to ‘correct’ each mistake such that he reliably solves crimes. Clearly, though, Inspector Clouseau does not know how to solve crimes. Clouseau has no relevant ability. It is, in fact, a defining characteristic of anti-intellectualism that the mark of knowledgehow is ability possession – something AI-S preserves, but AI-SW doesn’t. Although Bengson and Moffett have relied in several papers on the salchow case,33 it is not their only case against AI-S, and it is

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worth considering whether their other alleged counterexample could succeed where salchow appears not to. Consider kytoon: kytoon.

Chris forms the desire to build a kytoon – a lighter-thanair kite that may, like a balloon, be filled with gas (e.g. hydrogen, hot air, or helium). She has never built a kite before, let alone a kytoon. But she is very good with her hands and thus is confident in her ability to make one. Seeking information about how to build a kytoon, information she currently lacks, Chris goes online and performs a Google search for ‘building a kytoon.’ She finds a website with instructions. The instructions are long, but she is able to understand and follow each step with a modest amount of effort. Over the course of the next few days, she succeeds in executing the steps. The result of her efforts is her own personal kytoon, which she then proceeds to learn to fly.34 Bengson and Moffett’s diagnosis of the kytoon case is interesting. They write that although the information Chris has at the time of her decision to build the kytoon is inadequate to build a kytoon, ‘there is a clear sense in which her situation is not hopeless. Her current information state, coupled with the information she will encounter once she performs a Google search, will together be sufficient to reliably build a kytoon.’35 Bengson and Moffett reason from this observation to the conclusion that, consequently, ‘Chris is, at the time of her decision, reliably able to build a kytoon’ even though, at the time of her initial decision ‘she does not know how to φ (build a kytoon).’36 As with the salchow case, kytoon is one where we should be happy to grant that the protagonist lacks know-how. However, we think there is a respect in which salchow actually does better than kytoon. In salchow, Irina lacked the ability to do a salchow despite reliably doing a salchow. This was why salchow, though not effective against AI-S, was at least effective against the implausibly formulated AI-SW. In kytoon, by contrast, we submit that Chris not only lacks the ability to make a kytoon at t1 (the time of her decision) but moreover, it is problematic to say she reliably can do so, at t1. More carefully: we have no reason to think she reliably can build a kytoon at t1 on the basis of the rationale Bengson and Moffett offer. Their diagnosis of the case relies on a

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background assumption to the effect that: an agent A can reliably φ at time τ provided that the following two conditions hold: A’s current information state at τ coupled with the information that at τ + 1 A will encounter, will be sufficient to reliably φ. But brief reflection shows this general principle to be lacking. Just consider the following case: (the time of her decision) but moreover, it is problematic to say she reliably can do so, at t1. More carefully: it’s not apparent, on the basis of the rationale they offer, that Chris reliably can build a kytoon at t1. Consider that their diagnosis of the case relies on a background assumption to the effect that: an agent A can reliably φ at time τ provided that the following two conditions hold: A’s current information state at τ coupled with the information that at τ + 1 A will encounter, will be sufficient to reliably φ. But brief reflection shows this general principle to be open to counterexample. Just consider the following case: speech: Wesley is supposed to recite, as part of a school production,

a key paragraph from Winston Churchill’s famous ‘Iron Curtain’ speech. Wesley’s present information at t1 includes the line: ‘From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an Iron Curtain has descended across the continent.’ Wesley, due to a poor memory, can’t remember the rest. However, at t1, given antecedent events and conditions in conjunction with laws of nature, Wesley will (at t2) acquire a piece of paper blowing in the wind, which contains the remainder of the speech. Because Wesley is such that, at t1 his present information state plus the information he at t2 will acquire are sufficient for reliably reciting the ‘Iron Curtain’ speech37, the rationale Bengson and Moffett rely on in the kytoon case implies that Wesley can reliably recite the Iron Curtain speech at t1, although that is absurd. kytoon is a case where the protagonist (at the time of the decision to make the kytoon) not only lacks an ability to do so, but moreover, it’s implausible that Chris reliably can build a kytoon at t1 given the explanation they advert to. Of course, we leave it open that perhaps a better explanation could be formulated for why Chris is reliably able to build a kytoon at t1. Though even armed with such an explanation, kytoon would then progress only to the same position as salchow – a case that counts against only an implausibly inclusive formulation of the anti-intellectualist’s

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sufficiency thesis, and not one that counts against the reasonable articulation of the view in terms of ability possession.

2.3.2  The positive case In this section, we examine three non-linguistic positive considerations that count in favour of the intellectualist thesis due to Snowdon (2004), Stanley and Krakauer (2013) and Bengson and Moffett (2011b).

Snowdon’s ‘substantive’ knowledge argument Paul Snowdon (2004), like Bengson and Moffett, wants to reject both the necessity and sufficiency claims made by the intellectualist. In service of challenging the sufficiency claim, Snowdon raises a series of examples that differ in a very important respect from the salchow and kytoon cases. Snowdon’s cases aim to establish that ability possession isn’t sufficient for know-how by demonstrating that some propositional attitudes are necessary for know-how. Here are three cases he offers to support this suggestion:38 chess:

For example, I am thinking about a chess puzzle and, as we say, it dawned on me how to achieve mate in three. Surely, the onset of this knowledge consisted in my realizing that moving the queen to D3, followed by moving the knight to … etc., will lead to mate in three. train:

S knows how to get from London to Swansea by train before midday. S’s knowing how to do that surely consists in knowing that one first catches the 7.30 a.m. train to Reading from Paddington, and then one … etc. word:

Finally, if someone knows how to insert footnotes using Word, then they know that the way to insert footnotes is to click on Insert and then on Reference, and so on. Snowdon reveals his formula for generating these cases. He comments that ‘One way to think about such examples is to note that in the construction ‘S knows how to G’ the place filled by ‘G’ can be occupied by descriptions of actions of very different kinds

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and levels.’39 By ‘levels’ Snowdon means that: just as ‘G’ can pick out a basic physical activity such as scratching one’s nose, ‘G’ might also pick out a less physical, complex activity such as ‘applying to Oxford University’ or ‘applying for a bank loan’ where propositional knowledge seems front and centre.40 Snowdon’s point in short is that even if ability possession seems sufficient for commanding certain basic physical tasks, propositional knowledge seems required to know how to do other more complex kinds of activities. The pattern of cases Snowdon offers would not favour intellectualism over anti-intellectualism if the propositional knowledge at issue in each case were thought to be just an accidental feature of cases where one knows how to do something. Snowdon is thus relying on a stronger suggestion: that in the cases he offers, it looks like knowing how to do something entails having certain items of propositional knowledge. Problematically though, for Snowdon, φ entails ψ is not an argument against φ in virtue of χ. Tiger Woods might not be able to win a golf tournament without having arms; this does not mean it’s not the case that, whenever Tiger wins a golf tournament, it is in virtue of shooting the lowest score. And this is true even if, to be clear, shooting the lowest score is not something Tiger can ever do without having arms. To illustrate our point, consider a case of the metaphysical grounding relation noted by Fine: ‘the particle is accelerating in virtue of increasing its velocity over time.’41 Let’s call Fine’s particle P. We can easily imagine a range of cases, C1, C2 and C3, where P would not have accelerated had it not been hit with a bat. We might then claim that in at least three cases, it’s true that being hit by a bat is necessary for P’s acceleration, in that P would not have accelerated had P not been hit with a bat. Such examples however would not count against the metaphysical grounding claim that the particle is accelerating in virtue of increasing its velocity over time. Even if knowing how to do something in some cases entails propositional knowledge, this much is compatible with the claim that when one knows how to do that thing, it is in virtue of possessing certain abilities. While the observation in each case – that particular instances of know-how entail propositional knowledge – is (obviously) clearly compatible with the claim made by the intellectualist, it is nonetheless not incompatible with the claim made by the anti-intellectualist.

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Intellectualist arguments from cognitive science As we saw in the previous section, Jason Stanley is the leading contemporary exponent of intellectualism on linguistic grounds. Recently, Stanley has collaborated with cognitive neuroscientist John Krakauer to advance an intellectualist case on cognitive neuroscientific grounds. Stanley and Krakauer (2013)’s collaborative work, published in the journal Frontiers of Neuroscience, takes a focal point a classic case in cognitive neuroscience – the case of an anterograde amnesia patient ‘HM’ (Milner 1962) – which has been important in the discovery of multiple memory systems. HM was a patient with intractable epilepsy who underwent bilateral temporal lobectomy and was subsequently found to have persistent and pervasive anterograde amnesia – he would rapidly forget events soon after they occurred. ... The psychologist Brenda Milner had HM perform a mirror drawing task in which he had to trace the outline of star with a pencil through a mirror with vision of his own arm obscured (Milner 1962). HM showed improvement over 3 days on this task even though on each day he had no explicit memory for ever having encountered the task before nor even a feeling of familiarity with it.42 Now, the HM case at least seems to show that motor learning can be retained even though one’s knowledge about the activity in question is not. Unsurprisingly, the HM case has been taken to support a distinction between knowledge and skill that would appear prima facie unreconcilable with an intellectualist construal of knowledge-how. But despite received thinking about the case vis-à-vis knowledge and skill, Stanley and Krakauer (2013) think that suitable appreciation of the case’s details reveals that the case points in the other direction. In particular, they write: Here is a fact about HM. Each time HM performed the task he received explicit verbal instruction, and was able to use that knowledge each time. HM of course forgot that he had used explicit knowledge. But that of course does not entail he did not require the knowledge at the time.43

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They argue further that in similar studies of patients with medial temporal lobe lesions like HM’s, where the objective was to demonstrate that improvement in motor performance does not positively correlate with an ability to (explicitly) remember aspects of the task, it was clear that ‘the amnestic patients could not perform any of the tasks unless instruction was provided on each day’.44 Let’s distinguish two issues here. First, are Stanley and Krakauer correct that the case of HM fails to establish anti-intellectualism? The rationale for anti-intellectualism found in the cognitive science literature has an intermediary step. The line of thought is that HM shows that there is a distinction between declarative and procedural knowledge. And further, that because, as it is widely thought by cognitive scientists working in AI, declarative and procedural knowledge map on to propositional and ability knowledge, the HM case is taken to support a distinction between theoretical and practical knowledge that is inconsistent with intellectualism. We do not take a stance on whether this line of thought is ultimately successful. Stanley and Krakauer, and Stanley (2011, ch. 7), raise several important problems with the tacit identification of the declarative/procedural distinction with the knowledge/ability distinction. Our aim is rather to assess whether the HM case does provide positive support for intellectualism. So, second: are they correct that this case provides strong support for intellectualism? We think it does not. The relevant datum Stanley and Krakauer (2013, 503) cite is that ‘the amnestic patients could not perform any of the tasks unless instruction was provided on each day.’ These instructions would be soon forgotten but the instructions were required for the performance of the task. Thus, the performance of the tasks depends on having the relevant propositional attitudes when the explicit instructions were received. To evaluate whether this supports intellectualism, we need to think about the relationship between grounding and dependence. In particular, Stanley and Krakauer need the claim that (i) the performance depends on possessing propositional attitudes to support the claim that (ii) the performance is in virtue of the propositional attitudes. We argue that (i) doesn’t support (ii). Theodore Sider (2017, 1) notes that there is one sense of metaphysical grounding that is picked out by the dependence relation. For instance, for two facts F1 and F2, we might say that F1 depends

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on F2 in a way that is meant to be equivalent to other grounding expressions such as: F1 holds in virtue of F2, F1 is grounded in F2. Another sense of dependence is captured by the idea that, for F1 and F2, F1 depends on F2 only if were F2 not to hold, F1 would not hold. In this respect, F1’s holding depends on F2’s holding in the sense that F2 is necessary for F1.45 While the metaphysical grounding relation is thought to imply necessity, it’s not the case that opposite holds. That is, it’s not the case that F2’s being necessary for F1 entails that F1 holds in virtue of F2. Consider this example, offered by Fine to illustrate the point: it is necessary that if the ball is red and round, then it is red but the fact that the ball is red does not obtain in virtue of its being red and round.46 The relevance of this point is as follows: even if Stanley and Krakauer’s observation that the patients could not perform any of the tasks unless instruction was provided on each day could establish dependence in the sense of necessity, given that necessity doesn’t entail metaphysical grounding, it’s not the case that Stanley and Krakauer’s observation entails the further point about metaphysical grounding. But since intellectualism is a thesis about what grounds what, the argument comes up short. This is of course not to say that they could not appeal to the data to attempt to defend the stronger claim; it suffices to say that without a further positive argument to this effect, intellectualism isn’t positively supported over antiintellectualism by their observations. That said, we can envision less interesting intellectualist positions by simply weakening the relevant relation between know-how and knowledge. For instance, Stanley and Krakauer’s observations do support a position Weatherson (2017) has called weak causal intellectualism according to which ‘the possession of [knowledgehow] is, often, caused by the possession of a piece of knowledge’. But most anti-intellectualists will be happy to accept weak causal intellectualism.

Non-propositional intellectualism Though Bengson and Moffett are avowed intellectualists about knowledge-how, they are not intellectualists of the standard form. We see the debate between intellectualism and anti-intellectualism as

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over the question of what is it in virtue of which an action is intelligent? Bengson and Moffett’s (2011b) aim to distinguish this question – which they call the question about what grounds knowledge-how – from the nature question. Namely: what is the nature of knowledge-how – namely, is it a propositional attitude relation, or something else? Even though the debate has proceeded as if these two questions are the same, Bengson and Moffett think that one can give separate answers to these two questions. So they resist orthodox intellectualism, which claims that the grounds of knowledge-how and the nature of knowledge-how are the same: propositional knowledge. The basic contour of their proposal is that knowledge-how is grounded in propositional attitudes, though its nature is not a propositional attitude relation (between agent and proposition) but rather an objectual attitude relation between an agent and a way of φ-ing. Objectualism is, as they see it, a kind of further alternative about the nature of knowing how that is neither ‘propositionalist’ (a matter of standing in a propositional attitude relation) nor ‘dispositionalist’ (a matter of possessing a certain disposition or dispositions). According to objectualism, the nature of knowledge-how consists in ‘a nonpropositional, non-behavioural-dispositional objectual attitude relation (e.g. a knowledge-of relation), and the relatum is a non-propositional item (e.g. a way of φ-ing)’.47 As they remark, their objectualist intellectualism ‘combines intellectualism with a non-propositionalist view of the nature of knowledge how’.48 There are further details to the position, but first it will be helpful to look at their guiding rationale for opting for a non-propositional variety of intellectualism over the orthodox variety, which is, in short, that: ‘no extant theory has seemed capable of respecting all three of the following attractive but prima facie incompatible theses about knowing how: (i) Knowing how is not merely a kind of knowing that. (ii) Knowing how is practical: it bears a substantive connection to

action. (iii) Knowing how is a cognitive achievement: its status as a piece

of practical knowledge is not merely coincidental.”49

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As Bengson and Moffett see it, orthodox intellectualism, like Stanley’s version we’ve considered, can’t accommodate (i) and (ii). Of course, reductive intellectualists deny that (i) is a genuine desiderata of an account of knowledge-how. But that leaves (ii). The worry is that orthodox intellectualism does not capture the practical character of knowledge-how. However, and by contrast, Bengson and Moffett claim that anti-intellectualists of any stripe cannot accommodate (iii) – the idea that knowledge-how is a cognitive achievement. Intellectualism paired with objectualism, they insist, can accommodate (i), (ii) and (iii). The details of Bengson and Moffett’s proposal are rich, though we’ve not the space to engage with them all here. Rather, we want to raise, with respect to this general argument strategy, a potential oversight: if anti-intellectualism paired with objectualism would do just as well vis-à-vis (i)–(iii), then their intellectualist’s invoking strategy of objectualism wouldn’t (at least on the basis of the rationale offered) support intellectualism over anti-intellectualism. A simple way to explore this suggestion will be to consider some available responses to the question: in virtue of what does one know how to φ? Here we can envision: Answer 1: S knows how to φ in virtue of S’s having some propositional attitudes vis-à-vis φ (Intellectualism) Answer 2: S knows how to φ in virtue of S’s having some ability to φ, rather than some propositional attitudes (Anti-intellectualism) Answer 3: S knows how to φ in virtue of S’s having some objectual attitude vis-à-vis a way of φ-ing (?) To be clear, Bengson and Moffett, in taking objectualism as an alternative to propositionalism and dispositionalism, do not consider how it might feature as an alternative to the standard dichotomy of intellectualism and anti-intellectualism. It is appropriate to ask, then, what kind of position is Answer 3? Further, can the kind of position represented by Answer 3 accommodate each of (i-iii) of Bengson and Moffett’s desiderata for a theory of knowledge-how? In response to the first issue, it’s plausible to think that Answer 3 could be given either a propositional attitude interpretation, on which Answer

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3 would be a version of intellectualism, or – importantly – an ability interpretation, on which Answer 3 is a version of anti-intellectualism. That Answer 3 should be given an ability-based interpretation, for one thing, gains support from recent work on objectual understanding in mainstream epistemology. A standard line, advanced by Kvanvig (2003), Grimm (2014), Riggs (2009b), Gordon (2014), Carter and Gordon (2014) and Hills (2009) is that for an agent and a body of information φ, for S’s understanding φ is essentially constituted by S’s grasping of relevant coherence- or explanatorymaking relations between the relevant propositions constituting φ. Notice that on this model of objectual understanding in mainstream epistemology, while what is grasped when one bears the objectual understanding attitude is relations between propositions, one actually counts as understanding the subject matter in virtue of possessing a certain ability. The literature on objectual understanding in epistemology thus motivates the suggestion that Answer 3 could very plausibly be characterized along anti-intellectualist lines, and in a way that would (via the invoking of objectualism) handle (i)–(iii) as well as the proposal Bengson and Moffett offer, provided at least that the kind of antiintellectualist objectualism shown to be a live option here could accommodate (iii) – the idea that knowing how to do something constitutes a kind of cognitive achievement, or success through ability.50 We think it can and shall consider this point in further detail in a later chapter on knowledge-how and cognitive achievement.

Objectualist intellectualism: Further issues Perhaps a deeper strand of objection to Bengson and Moffett’s intellectualist objectualism is that the distinction between a grounding claim and a nature claim, at least as this proposal relies on it, is a distinction without a difference. Consider the relationship between (i) what it is in virtue of which a thing is the thing it is and (ii) the nature of a thing. Let us take (i) as picking up a grounding claim and (ii) as picking up a nature claim. Arguably, the nature of a thing explains the thing. But note that both grounding and explanation are asymmetric dependence relations. If x grounds y, then y depends on x but x doesn’t depend on y. Explanation is likewise an asymmetric

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dependence relation; if x explains y, then an account of y depends on x but an account of x doesn’t depend on y. Let us see how grounding and explanation work together in a simple example. What grounds the fact that a porcelain cup is fragile? Its micro-physical structure. What explains the fact that porcelain cups are fragile? Its micro-physical structure. Grounding facts and explanations often track one another. In the case of knowledge-how, Bengson and Moffett aim to distinguish between facts about what grounds knowledge-how and facts about the nature of knowledgehow. As they have it, what grounds knowledge-how is a relation to propositional attitudes. But the nature of knowledge-how is an objectual knowledge relation to a way of acting. It becomes unclear on further consideration whether this objectual intellectualist view is coherent. For on the proposal being advanced, what explains one’s possession of knowledge-how is that one stands in an objectual knowledge relation to a way of acting. This may involve some propositional attitudes. But suppose we fix those propositional attitudes and vary the objectual knowledge relation to a way of acting. Then, on their view, in the case in which one lacks the objectual knowledge relation to a way of acting one does not know how to φ. So, knowing how is not depend on some propositional attitudes. On our view, the objectualist part of Bengson and Moffett’s view is unproblematic; it’s the intellectualism that runs in to trouble.

2.4 Hetherington’s reductivism We want to conclude the chapter by considering an interesting way in which the conceptual geography we’ve been working with can be expanded. For just as there is space for multiple kinds of intellectualism, there is also a way to envision altogether a different kind of ‘reductivism’ about the relationship between knowledge-how and knowledge-that. Stephen Hetherington has in recent work (e.g. 2011; 2012) defended such a position which he calls practicalism. This is the view that knowing that p always involves knowing one or more aspects or constituents of how it is that p.

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To sharpen this idea, consider the following example Hetherington offers: Your knowing that you are in a particular room = Your knowing how to believe accurately that you are in the room, and/or your knowing how to process the relevant data accurately (such as visual data), and/or your knowing how to describe the situation accurately, and/ or your knowing how to use relevant concepts accurately, and/ or your knowing how to answer questions accurately about the situation, and/or your knowing how to reason accurately about the situation (such as how to link your belief, about being in the particular room, accurately with other beliefs), etc. (2012, 42) If, as Hetherington puts it, knowing that something is so just is a certain kind or kinds of know-how, then we’ve arrived at a position that looks like the mirror-opposite of Stanley’s position – namely, a view that reverses the order of reduction between knowledge-that and knowledge-how. It is debatable, however, whether we should think of Hetherington’s practicalism as a theory of knowledgehow per se, or alternatively, as a theory of knowledge-that. Compare: We think of Stanley’s thesis that knowledge-how is a kind of knowledge that as, principally, an analysis of knowledgehow, rather than as an analysis of knowledge-that. And this is so even though Stanley regards knowledge-how to be a species of knowledge-that. This point aside, Hetherington’s is a very interesting position and one that forces among other things a new perspective on the question of whether propositional knowledge might come in degrees. As a matter of clarification, we do not take challenges of reductivism considered thus far to be interpreted as challenges to Hetherington’s particular variety of reductivism. And the reason for this is straightforward: we’re not purporting to provide (or for that matter to assess the material adequacy of) particular substantive accounts of knowledge-that. On the matter of what knowledgethat involves, we’re very happy to remain neutral on (most of) the controversial question that divide mainstream epistemologists51, and so we take no stance on the matter of whether knowledge-that

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always involves knowing one or more aspects or constituents of how it is that p.

2.5 Conclusion Let us take stock. As we’ve seen in this section, the broadly nonlinguistic strategies we’ve considered in this section as support for the intellectualist thesis have each come up short. In this section we presented the powerful linguistic argument for intellectualism. As we noted, a complete evaluation of the intellectualist argument depends on the strength of parallel between cases of knowledge-wh with the case of knowledge-how to. We return to this crucial issue in Chapter 5: ‘Knowledge-how and Testimony.’

2.6 Further reading ●●

Bengson, J. and Moffett, M. A. (2011b). Nonpropositional intellectualism. In Bengson, J. and Moffett, M. A., editors, Knowing How: Essays on Knowledge, Mind, and Action, pages 161–211. Oxford: Oxford University Press

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Bengson, J., Moffett, M. and Wright, J. (2009). The folk on knowing how. Philosophical Studies, 142(3):387–401

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Carter, J. A. and Czarnecki, B. (2016). (anti)-anti-intellectualism and the sufficiency thesis. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, pages 1–24

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Heim, I. and Kratzer, A. (1998). Semantics in Generative Grammar. London: Blackwell

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Stanley, J. and Williamson, T. (2001). Knowing how. The Journal of Philosophy, 98(8):411–44

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Stanley, J. and Krakauer, J. W. (2013). Motor skill depends on knowledge of facts. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 7:1–11

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2.7  Study questions 1 Stanley thinks that knowledge-how ascriptions contain

embedded questions. How is this observation relevant to Stanley’s conclusion that knowledge-how is a kind of knowledge-that? 2 Why do Bengson and Moffett think the case of Pat, the ski

instructor, counts against anti-intellectualism? 3 What is the ‘one-φs-reply’ to the ski instructor case? 4 Explain the salchow case. Is this case meant to challenge the

necessity or sufficiency of ability possession for know-how? Does the case succeed as a counterexample against antiintellectualism? 5 What is ‘objectualism’? 6 Explain Stanley and Krakauer’s diagnosis of the case of HM.

Do you agree with it?

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3 Knowledge-how and epistemic luck

3.1 Introduction

A

ccording to Jason Stanley, ‘If knowing-how is a species of knowing-that, the properties of knowing-that should be properties of knowing-how.’1 This is surely right. The properties of knowingthat which have been especially well studied are epistemological properties. Among contemporary epistemologists it is a platitude that, in a suitably specified sense, knowledge-that excludes luck. The standard way to capture this idea is that a belief that qualifies as knowledge couldn’t easily have been false, given how it was formed. This guiding idea has motivated many epistemologists to defend a safety condition on knowledge, according to which known beliefs must be such that they are true in most nearby worlds where we hold fixed the relevant conditions for the formation of the belief in the actual world.2 To illustrate this idea, suppose you believe that ‘The Knicks are up by five points’ by reading a tea leaf, and your belief happens to be true. Your belief is unsafe, despite being true, because in many worlds very similar to this one where you form a belief about the score of the Knicks game by reading a tea leaf, your belief is false. Surely, as this line of thinking goes, you don’t know that the Knicks are up by five – it’s just a matter of luck that your belief is true. If knowledge-how turns out to be compatible with the kind(s) of epistemic luck which are widely taken to be incompatible with knowledge-that, then this will be bad news for intellectualism.3

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Critics of intellectualism who press this line have defended versions of what we can call, for convenience, the template argument from epistemic luck. Template Argument from Epistemic Luck 1 Knowing-how is a species of knowing-that only if the

properties of knowing-that are properties of knowing-how.4 [Premise] 2 The properties of knowing-that are properties of knowing-how

only if epistemic luck equally undermines both. [Premise] 3 Knowledge-how is compatible with epistemic luck to a

greater extent than knowledge-that. [Premise] 4 Therefore, knowing-that is not susceptible to being

undermined to the same extent as knowing-how. [from 3] 5 Therefore, the properties of knowing-that are not the

properties of knowing-how. [from 2,4] 6 Therefore, knowing-how is not a species of knowing-that.

[from 1,5] The key premise of the template argument is (3) – the claim that knowledge-how is compatible with epistemic luck to a greater extent than knowledge-that. In the recent literature, (3) has been defended in different ways by anti-intellectualists. Here is the plan for the chapter. Section 3.2 refines the widely shared insight that knowledge-that is incompatible with epistemic luck. Section 3.3 presents and evaluates arguments from Poston (2009) and Cath (2011) to the effect that knowledge-how is compatible with intervening epistemic luck which is incompatible with knowledge-that. Section 3.4 surveys Stanley’s (2011) response to these arguments, and Section 3.5 considers two counterreplies: one on behalf of Poston and Cath, and another, on behalf of Carter and Pritchard (2015c) which appeals to a different kind of epistemic luck – environmental epistemic luck (roughly, epistemic luck that boils down to being in a bad environment) – in the service of defending premise (3) in the template argument. Section 3.6 summarizes the key conclusions drawn.

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3.2  Propositional knowledge and epistemic luck Propositional knowledge excludes luck. If one knows that there’s a better than even chance at winning this hand of poker, then one cannot simply be right by luck. One must have calculated the chances and correctly saw the chances are in one’s favour. Duncan Pritchard (2007) explains that this anti-luck intuition is so strong that it is used to evaluate epistemological theories. He writes: ‘We evaluate theories of knowledge in terms of whether they are able to accommodate this claim. If they can’t – that is, if they allow lucky knowledge – then this is taken to be a decisive ground for rejecting the view.’5 But care is needed here. Not all kinds of luck are incompatible with propositional knowledge. In order to articulate the platitude that knowledge excludes luck, we’ll need to distinguish between benign and malignant epistemic luck. Benign luck is compatible with knowledge whereas malignant luck is not. Benign luck divides into content epistemic luck and evidential epistemic luck. Take, first, content epistemic luck. Improbable events occur all the time. Suppose, for instance, that your friend wins the Florida lottery. Your friend is incredibly lucky having won a lottery in which millions of tickets were sold. And so there’s a sense in which the claim ‘your friend won the lottery’ is luckily true. What is lucky here is that the proposition is true. But, of course, you know that your friend won. There’s nothing strange about knowing that an improbable event occurred. So propositional knowledge is compatible with content epistemic luck. The same goes for evidential epistemic luck. Suppose that, by dumb luck, you stumble upon a key piece of evidence (say, a bloody glove) which clearly demonstrates that a suspect is guilty. Obviously, it’s a matter of luck that you possess the evidence you do. In multiple simulations of the same circumstances, you would not possess that key piece of evidence. But even so, that is not a barrier to your knowing that the suspect is guilty. Just as knowledge-that can unproblematically depend on content epistemic luck, so it can depend unproblematically on evidential epistemic luck.

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So when is knowledge incompatible with luck? The task of answering this question satisfactorily remains a live research programme, but the dominant line in the recent literature is that one fails to know that a claim is true if one’s belief could easily have been incorrect given the conditions of its formation.6 Duncan Pritchard (2005) calls luck of this sort veritic epistemic luck, which is articulated in a possible-worlds framework in the following way: Veritic Epistemic Luck: For all agents S and propositions p, the truth of S’s belief that p is veritically lucky if and only if S’s belief that p is true in the actual world α but false in nearly all nearby possible worlds in which S forms the belief in the same manner as in α. To illustrate, consider again the tea leaf case. You believe that the Knicks are up by five points on the basis of reading a tea leaf. As it turns out in the actual world, your belief is true. But in many nonactual worlds similar to the actual world, this belief is false. So this analysis implies that you don’t know. Just what we’d expect. By contrast, in the evidential epistemic luck case involving the bloody glove, you are lucky to possess that key piece of evidence. There are many nearby worlds where you never acquire it. But your correct belief that the suspect is guilty is not veritically lucky. In nearby worlds where you form a belief about the suspect’s guilt in the same fashion as you do in the actual world – namely, on the basis of bloody glove in hand – your belief that the suspect is guilty is correct. Again, the key piece of evidence gives you knowledge, and this account accommodates that result. The notion of veritic epistemic luck is meant to capture all and only propositional knowledge-undermining epistemic luck: if S knows that p, then the correctness of S’s belief that p is not veritically lucky. Put more plainly: if you know that something is the case, you couldn’t easily have been wrong, given the way you formed the belief.7 It is widely accepted now that there are two kinds of knowledgeundermining luck, what Pritchard calls intervening and environmental epistemic luck. This distinction – which will be important in what follows – corresponds with the kind of epistemic luck at play in

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the two most famous kinds of Gettier cases. A Gettier case is a scenario in which a person has a justified true belief that is not knowledge. Gettier cases are so named after Ed Gettier’s (1963) famous paper. Consider the following two Gettier cases: Gettier Case 1: Ed looks into the pasture and sees what appears clearly to be a sheep; he forms the belief ‘There is a sheep in the field.’ Unbeknownst to Ed, what he sees is actually a sheepshaped rock. But, fortunately, there really is a sheep hiding in the field, behind the rock.8 Gettier Case 2: Ed looks into the pasture and sees what appears clearly to be a herd of sheep; he points to one and forms the belief ‘There is a sheep in the field.’ Unlike in Case 1, what Ed sees actually is a sheep, not a rock. As it happens, though, the genuine sheep Ed points to is surrounded by sheep-shaped rocks, any of which he would have mistaken as a sheep.9 In each case, Ed believes falsely in nearby worlds where we hold fixed the relevant way he forms the belief in the actual world. Accordingly, in both cases the correctness of Ed’s belief is veritically lucky – and so neither Case 1 nor Case 2 is a case of knowledge. But, of course, something structurally different is going on in each case. In Case 1, there is a clear disconnect between the source of justification for the target belief and what explains its correctness – a disconnect regained just by chance10 – namely, that there happened to be genuine sheep hiding behind the rock. Pritchard refers to the variety of veritic luck that undermines knowledge in cases like Case 1 ‘intervening’ because, paraphrasing Peter Unger (1968, 159), luck seems here to come ‘betwixt the man and the fact’; after all, that Ed’s perceptual faculties indicated to him that a certain thing was a sheep had little to nothing to do with the correctness of the belief Ed forms. In Case 2, the kind of disconnect we find in Case 1 is not present. In fact, in Case 2, nothing ostensibly goes wrong at all. Ed deploys an ordinarily reliable faculty of perception and looks directly at a genuine sheep in broad daylight. That Ed’s perceptual faculties indicate to him that there is a sheep has plenty to do with

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his generation of a correct belief. But, while there is no disconnect between the source of the justification and the truth of the target belief that is just by chance regained (as in Case 1), Ed nonetheless ends up with a veritically lucky belief. What accounts for why Ed’s belief is veritically lucky in Case 1 is just that he is in an epistemically inhospitable environment, one where the presence of sheep-shaped rocks (e.g. sheep facades) is abundant. His ordinarily reliable sheepspotting abilities, though they (fortunately) generated a true belief on this occasion, could easily have led him astray, and so his belief could easily have been false. Putting this all together: the slogan that propositional knowledge excludes luck is one which must be unpacked carefully. Knowledgethat is compatible with content and evidential luck, but not with veritic luck – namely, the kind of luck in play when one’s belief could easily have been incorrect given the conditions of its formation. Furthermore, the two most famous kinds of Gettier cases (as noted in Case 1 and Case 2) correspond with two strands of knowledge-undermining (veritic) epistemic luck: intervening (Gettier Case 1) and environmental (Gettier Case 2). This is a distinction which will be important in what follows, as we consider ways in which anti-intellectualists have claimed that certain kinds of epistemic luck incompatible with knowledge-that are compatible with knowledge-how.

3.3  The argument from intervening epistemic luck Stanley and Williamson’s classic paper (2001, 435) explicitly considers the question of whether Gettier cases exist for knowledge-how. They realize that if there are no such cases, then intellectualism is false. That is, if there is something about practical knowledge that cannot be undermined by luck in the same way that propositional knowledge can, then practical knowledge is fundamentally different from propositional knowledge. While Stanley’s more recent thinking on this issue is more sophisticated (in ways we’ll explore later in this chapter), Stanley and Williamson (2001) respond to the worry straightforwardly: by

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attempting to show that, as a matter of fact, Gettier cases can be constructed for knowledge-how. They offer the following case and corresponding diagnosis: flight simulator:

Bob wants to learn how to fly in a flight simulator. He is instructed by Henry. Unknown to Bob, Henry is a malicious imposter who has inserted a randomizing device in the simulator’s controls and intends to give all kinds of incorrect advice. Fortunately, by sheer chance the randomizing device causes exactly the same results in the simulator as would have occurred without it, and by incompetence Henry gives exactly the same advice as a proper instructor would have done. Bob passes the course with flying colours. He has still not flown a real plane. Bob has a justified true belief about how to fly. But there is a good sense in which he does not know how to fly.11 Three initial things will be helpful to note about this case. First – and in line with the distinction drawn in the previous section – the kind of luck that features in flight simulator is intervening, rather than environmental. After all, it’s not as though Bob is relying on the information provided by normally functioning simulator controls even though he very easily might have relied on information provided by defectively functioning simulator controls. Bob is, rather, relying on the information provided by defective simulator controls, where that information, randomly generated, just happens to be correct. A second key point to note – one not made explicit by Stanley and Williamson – is that, just as Ed fails to know that there is a sheep in the field in Gettier Case 1 by looking at a sheep-shaped rock that just happens to have a genuine sheep hiding behind it, so Bob also fails to have propositional knowledge of the information fed to him by the malfunctioning simulator controls which only by luck are generating accurate information. Third, given that the kind of intervening luck at play in flight simulator is clearly incompatible with knowledge-that (as per the intuition in Gettier Case 1), then – as the intellectualist’s line goes – it should also be incompatible with knowledge-how. After all, the intellectualist tells us that the properties of knowing-that are

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properties of knowing-how, and this is so only if the former and the latter are susceptible to being undermined by epistemic luck to the same extent. Accordingly, it would be bad news for the intellectualist if flight simulator, a case where intervening luck undermines Bob’s would-be propositional knowledge about the way to fly the plane, were a case where knowledge-how were nonetheless present. Of course, Stanley and Williamson deny that knowledge-how is present, remarking that ‘there is a good sense in which he does not know how to fly’. Poston (2009) has challenged Stanley and Williamson’s diagnosis of this case. He writes: There is a good sense in which Bob does know how to fly. Bob’s attempts to fly would be no less successful than the attempts of others that underwent a regular flight course. If Bob took the controls of the plane he would perform adequately … Bob’s explanations of what to do in certain counterfactual situations would appear just as adequate as his peers trained at a normal facility.12 If Poston’s intuition about this case is correct that in flight simulator Bob knows how to fly, then this would effectively secure premise (3) of the template argument from epistemic luck. After all, given that the intervening luck undermines Bob’s would-be corresponding propositional knowledge of the way for him to fly, if Bob knows how to fly a plane in this situation, then knowledge-how is thereby compatible with a species of epistemic luck which is incompatible with knowledge-that. Poston relies on more than just intuition, though.13 He suggests that, in principle, no case is going to have the kind of features it would need to have to be a bona fide Gettier case for knowledge-how. There are two premises to this argument. (P1) Gettier cases for know-how, if they exist, require that the subject intelligently and successfully φ, where φ ranges over actions. (P2) If one can intelligently and successfully φ, then one knows how to φ 14

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As Poston remarks, ‘The argument comes down to the plausibility of the second premise.’15 Is the second premise true? On behalf of the premise, Poston remarks: It explains why we attribute know-how to successful displays of skill. When an individual skillfully wins several games of tournament quality chess it is safe to conclude to that the individual knows how to play chess. This judgment is not sensitive to learning that, for instance, the individual gained the skill by luck. If the individual learned by a mischievous grandmaster or a poorly designed computer program, then regardless of the high probability of failure given the actual training method the individual learned something and it is hard to see what the individual learned if not how to play chess.16 We’ll engage with this point in more detail in the next section when examining Stanley’s response to Poston’s argument. However, it is important to keep in mind that regardless of whether Poston’s more general argument is plausible, it remains that if flight simulator is a case where knowledge-how is present, then, given that intervening luck clearly undermines the corresponding item of knowledge-that in this case, this is already enough to secure (3) of the template argument from epistemic luck. However, the prospects for defending (3) of the template argument (via demonstrating knowledge-how to be compatible with intervening epistemic luck) do not stand or fall with what can be shown with flight simulator. Like Poston, Yuri Cath (2011) thinks there are cases where one knows how to do something, even though (due to intervening epistemic luck) one doesn’t know the way for one to do the thing in question. Cath offers the following case to make this point: Charlie wants to learn how to change a light bulb, but he knows almost nothing about light fixtures or bulbs. So he consults The Idiot’s Guide to Everyday Jobs. Inside, Charlie finds an accurate set of instructions describing a light fixture and bulb, and the way to change a bulb. Charlie grasps these instructions perfectly. And there is a way, call it w1 such that Charlie now lucky light bulb

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believes that w1 is a way for him to change a light bulb, namely, the way described in the book. However, unbeknownst to Charlie, he is extremely lucky to have read these instructions. For the disgruntled author of The Idiot’s Guide filled her book with misleading instructions. Under every entry she misdescribed the objects involved in that job, and described a series of actions that would not constitute a way to do the job at all. However, at the printers, a computer error caused the text under the entry for ‘Changing a Light Bulb’ in just one copy of the book, to be randomly replaced by new text. By incredible coincidence, this new text provided the clear and accurate set of instructions that Charlie would later consult.17 Cath’s diagnosis of lucky light bulb is that (i) Charlie knows how to change a light bulb, but (ii) Charlie does not know that w1 is a way for him to change a light bulb. Cath thus takes the moral of this case to be that knowledge-how comes apart from knowledge-that, and as he notes: Given the obvious similarities between the flight simulator and lucky light bulb cases, one might reasonably expect that our verdicts about whether Bob knows how to fly and whether Charlie knows how to change a light bulb should be the same.18 It would fly in the face of mainstream epistemology to deny (ii). This is – like Gettier Case 1 discussed above – a case where intervening veritic luck undermines the would-be propositional knowledge. Put another way, deny Cath’s claim (ii) on pain of denying the classic Gettier intuition in cases of intervening epistemic luck. So what about (i)? Does Charlie know how to change a light bulb? Three points will be helpful to note here. First, Cath is surely right that, given the structural similarities between flight simulator and lucky light bulb cases, what goes for the former plausibly also goes for the latter. Secondly, regardless of whether Poston and Cath are right that the intuition that the protagonists possess know-how in the respective cases, their intuition is at least as strong as Stanley and Williamson’s intuition in the other direction. Thirdly, it’s not hard to see how, from flight simulator and lucky light bulb, we could generate a

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kind of cookbook recipe for constructing similar kinds of cases, each where (i) a person S has a justified belief that some way, w, is a way for S to do something, φ, (ii) S fails to have propositional knowledge that w is the way for S to φ because S’s belief is undermined by intervening epistemic luck; and yet (iii) intuitively, S knows how to φ.19

3.4  Stanley’s replies If Poston and Cath are right, then it looks like premise (3) of the template argument from epistemic luck goes through. Recall this premise states: (3) Knowledge-how is compatible with epistemic luck to a greater extent than knowledge-that. Unsurprisingly, Stanley thinks that neither Poston’s nor Cath’s arguments give us good reason to accept (3). Let’s take Stanley’s replies in turn.

3.4.1  First reply Stanley does not engage with Poston’s diagnosis of flight simulator. Though, to reiterate, if Poston’s diagnosis of that case is correct, then that’s enough to secure (3). Poston’s general argument to the effect that there will not in principle be Gettier cases for know-how would not be needed. Nonetheless, Stanley focuses entirely on the general argument. Recall that the first premise of that argument stated that Gettier cases for know-how, if they exist, require that the subject intelligently and successfully φ, where φ ranges over actions. The second premise stated that: if one can intelligently and successfully φ, then one knows how to φ.20 Stanley raises two objections to Poston’s second premise. The first objection is that the premise begs the question, and the second objection is that, even if the premise did not beg the question, the premise can be shown to be false by appealing to Bengson and

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Moffett’s salchow case, which was discussed in some depth in Chapter 2. What’s question-begging about Poston’s claim that if one can intelligently and successfully φ, then one knows how to φ? According to Stanley: exploiting (P2) as a premise seems rather unfair in an argument against the view that there are Gettier cases for knowing how. As Poston himself recognizes, the intelligence condition and the success condition ‘are analogous to the justified belief condition and the truth condition in Gettier cases of knowledge-that.’ So appealing to (P2) in an argument that one can possess knowledgehow just in virtue of these conditions begs the question.21 We’ll canvass some counterreplies on behalf of Poston (and Cath) in the next section. But first, let’s get the rest of Stanley’s reply on the table. Along with the question-begging charge vis-à-vis Poston’s (P2), Stanley suggests that an argument is needed for (P2) and surmises that any such argument would be based on appeal to intuitions about cases – but, he argues ‘… it is simply false that each instance of (P2) is intuitively true.’ The case he has in mind to make this point is a familiar one from the previous chapter. Here again is salchow: salchow.

Irina, who is a novice figure skater, decides to try a complex jump called the salchow. When one performs a salchow, one takes off from the back inside edge of one skate and lands on the back outside edge of the opposite skate after one or more rotations in the air. Irina, however, is seriously mistaken about how to perform a salchow. She believes incorrectly that the way to perform a salchow is to take off from the front outside edge of one skate, jump in the air, spin, and land on the front inside edge of the other skate. However, Irina has a severe neurological abnormality that makes her act in ways that differ dramatically from how she actually thinks she is acting. So despite the fact that she is seriously mistaken about how to perform a salchow, whenever she actually attempts to do a salchow (in accordance with her misconceptions), the abnormality causes Irina to unknowingly perform the correct

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sequence of moves, and so she ends up successfully performing a salchow. Although what she is doing and what she thinks she is doing come apart, she fails to notice the mismatch. Stanley (2011a, 178) points out that, with reference to an experimental study conducted by Bengson, Moffett and Wright (2009), only 12 per cent of 138 subjects tested regarded Irina as knowing how to do a salchow, while 86 per cent regarded her as able to do a salchow. With reference to this point, Stanley makes the following move against Poston’s (P2): In one sense of ‘intelligent’, Irina’s act of doing the Salchow is intelligent. It was the result of a conscious decision. So in one sense of ‘intelligent’, Irina can intelligently and successfully do the Salchow. However, if ordinary reactions about cases are granted evidential weight, one must concede that Irina does not know how to do the Salchow. Therefore, Poston’s (P2) is false.22

3.4.2  Second reply Although Poston and Cath are in alignment in thinking that the alleged compatibility of intervening luck with knowledge-how gives us a reason to reject intellectualism, Stanley’s reply to Cath takes a very different shape. Stanley’s rebuttal to Cath’s rationale for appealing to lucky light bulb is to claim that this rationale overgeneralizes, in such a way that it applies to many cases of knowledge-wh. To make this point about overgeneralization, Stanley envisions the following sort of case: Charlie wants to learn where to purchase light bulbs, but he knows almost nothing about stores in his city of Syracuse. To remedy this situation Charlie consults The Idiot’s Guide to Stores in Syracuse. Inside, he finds an accurate description of directions to a store at which one can buy light bulbs. Charlie grasps these directions perfectly. And so there is a place, call it ‘p’, such that Charlie now believes that p is a place he can buy light bulbs, namely the place described in the book. However, unbeknownst to Charlie, he is extremely lucky to have lucky light bulb ii

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read these instructions, for the disgruntled author of The Idiot’s Guide filled her book with misleading instructions. Under every entry she intentionally misdescribed the stores, and described a series of directions that would lead to parking lots and residential homes. However, at the printers, a computer error caused the text under the entry for ‘Purchasing Light Bulbs’, in just one copy of the book, to be randomly replaced by new text. By incredible coincidence, this new text provided the clear and accurate set of instructions that Charlie would later consult.23 Stanley claims that (i) Charlie believes, but doesn’t know, that p is a place he can buy light bulbs; however, (ii) ‘the intuition that Charlie knows where to buy light bulbs is as strong in this case as is the intuition that Charlie knows how to change light bulbs in The Lucky Light Bulb.’24 In short, Stanley’s reasoning here runs as follows: moving to the verdict that Charlie has know-how in lucky light bulb on the basis of the intuition he does is a move that, in order to be a principled one, should also be made in the lucky light bulb ii, from the equally strong intuition that Charlie has knowledge-wh in the latter case to the verdict that he does. But this move from intuition to verdict in lucky light bulb ii is a bad one, given that as Stanley tells us, Charlie lacks knowledge-wh in lucky light bulb ii; accordingly, the move from the (what he takes to be equally strong) intuition that Charlie has know-how in the lucky light bulb to the verdict that Charlie has know-how in the lucky light bulb is going to be unprincipled.

3.5  Rejoinders to Stanley Has Stanley succeeded in diffusing Cath’s and Poston’s arguments to the effect that knowledge-how is compatible with epistemic luck to a greater extent than knowledge-that? Let’s now investigate.

3.5.1  In defence of (P2) First, regardless of whether Stanley is right that Poston’s premise (P2) begs the question in the context in which it is being put forward,

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it remains that if there is good reason to accept this premise, then this is surely a problem for the intellectualist. Stanley, as we saw, thinks that premise (P2) is false because he thinks that salchow is a counterexample to (P2). And this is because he thinks that Irina’s salchow is both (contra P2) (i) something Irina intelligently and successfully does, but which (ii) Irina doesn’t know how to do – where the latter point (ii) receives support from both intuition and Bengson, Moffett and Wright’s experimental data. The fact that folk are disinclined to attribute know-how to Irina, is arguably a misdirection. That Irina fails to know how to do a salchow seems obvious enough.25 What is however not obvious at all is that Irina intelligently performs the salchow. Even though whenever she actually attempts to do a salchow (in accordance with her misconceptions), the abnormality causes Irina to unknowingly perform the correct sequence of moves, Irina is – it must be stressed – seriously mistaken about how to perform a salchow. Put another way, in this case where her successful performance persists despite her confusion, the doxastic dimension of Irina’s performance is plausibly disintegrated from the manual dimension of her performance in a way that speaks against attributing to Irina an intelligent action. Here a quick revisiting of the analogy to the reliabilist literature discussed in Chapter 2 will be helpful. Consider Plantinga’s (1993a) famous brain lesion case, in which we are to imagine that an individual (call him Al) has a strange brain lesion that reliably causes him to believe that he has a brain lesion, though Al has no other item of evidence that supports this conclusion. It’s not clear that Al’s appraisal of his own brain lesion is an intelligent appraisal. A more apt description here is that Al compulsively makes the particular appraisal he does because of something external to his agency – the brain lesion. Plausibly, what goes for Al goes for Irina. After all, Al’s abnormality (i.e. the lesion) compels him to make a particular appraisal of his brain’s condition (where the appraisal has nothing at all to do with Al’s background beliefs), and on this basis it seems implausible to regard the appraisal as an intelligent one. The sole source of the belief after all is the lesion. But this same point can be made with respect to Irina: Irina’s neurological abnormality causes her to perform a particular

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sequence of moves despite what she believes should be done.26 So, contrary to Stanley’s claim, this is not a case of intelligent action. If this verdict is correct, then Poston’s (P2) retains its force.

3.5.2  In defence of Lucky Light Bulb What about Stanley’s overgeneralization argument against Cath’s appeal to lucky light bulb? There are two key substantive and interesting claims in the overgeneralization argument which Stanley is relying on. The first claim is that the intuition that Charlie has knowledge-wh in lucky light bulb ii really is, as Stanley says, just as strong as the intuition that Charlie has know-how in the original lucky light bulb case. The second interesting claim is that Charlie does not have knowledge-wh – namely, that he does not know where to buy a light bulb. Denying the second key claim, that Charlie does not have knowledge-wh, is a move that would incur some serious cost. Consider that, given that intervening epistemic luck (which is present in lucky light bulb ii) is incompatible with propositional knowledge, one can deny that Charlie lacks knowledge-wh in lucky light bulb ii only if prepared to deny also that knowledge-wh is a kind of propositional knowledge. But denying this would involve taking on Stanley’s detailed linguistic arguments (e.g. 2011) in favour of this claim. And this would be tantamount to challenging the foundational work on the semantics of embedded questions which Stanley employs in claiming that one has knowledge-wh only if one knows some proposition that is the answer to a contextually relevant question.27 This route thus does not look promising, and so plausibly, we should grant with Stanley that Charlie lacks knowledge-wh in lucky light bulb ii. What about the first claim – namely, that the intuition that Charlie has knowledge-wh in lucky light bulb ii is just as strong as the intuition is that Charlie has know-how in the original lucky light bulb case. This is a puzzling claim. We suspect the intuition here is not equal, that it is stronger that Charlie has know-how in the lucky light bulb case than that he knows-where in lucky light bulb ii. One way to make this point is by adverting to a disanalogy regarding

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respective willingness to retract. Suppose you claim that Charlie has knowledge-how in the first case, and that he has knowledge-wh in the second case (despite the presence of intervening luck in both cases). Now imagine that you are challenged by someone who makes explicit the relevant intervening luck in each case: having made this explicit the challenger says ‘Charlie didn’t really know(how/where), did he?’ We’d likely retract in the knowledge-wh case pretty quickly, in this context, after it’s made salient that Charlie (in lucky light bulb ii) is reading a guide with random information that happens to be right. However, it seems we’d be much more hesitant to retract the know-how ascription in lucky light bulb – even when the intervening luck is made salient by the challenger. To appreciate this point, compare lucky light bulb with flight simulator. It seems (intuitively) that Bob really knows how to fly, even when all details of the case are brought to light, even though – were we to run a knowledge-wh variant of flight simulator – the airing of the details of the case inclines one to retract a previous claim to the effect that Bob knows where to (say) move certain controllers when flying. Of course, we already know that this point isn’t likely to sway Stanley, given that flight simulator has already been diagnosed by Stanley and Williamson (2001, 206), as pace Poston (2009), a case where Bob is claimed to not know how to fly. In sum, then, it looks as though Stanley’s overgeneralization strategy, as put forward in reply to Cath’s argument, boils down to a gambit point familiar from Poston’s discussion of the flight simulator case. The gambit point is whether, intuitively, cases like flight simulator and lucky light bulb – cases, where intervening epistemic luck undermines knowledge-that – also are cases where we should regard knowledge-how as undermined. One option here is to seek additional experimental data, though such data are limited in cases of knowledge-how and epistemic luck. Carter, Pritchard, and Shepherd (2017) present a recent experimental study which reports a positive correlation between self-reported philosophical expertise and attributions of knowledge-how and knowledge-that which run contrary to reductive intellectualism. Those with no self-reported philosophical training didn’t respond to the presence of epistemic luck (in comparison with control cases with no luck present) in a way that suggests that they hold that it undermines

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knowledge-how or even knowledge-that. Things were very different in the case of those individuals with self-reported philosophical training. Such individuals attribute knowledge-that and knowledgehow in a way that runs contrary to what we should expect if reductive intellectualism is correct. What was found, in summary, is that those with self-reported philosophical training are much more inclined than folk are to think that propositional knowledge is incompatible with epistemic luck, whereas by contrast knowledge-how is compatible with it. A different strategy is to attempt to appeal to a different kind of propositional-knowledge-undermining epistemic luck in order to defend the claim that knowledge-how is compatible with epistemic luck to a greater extent than knowledge-that. This will be the topic of the next section.

3.6  Environmental epistemic luck Recall, from Section 3.2, that there are two principal strands of veritic epistemic luck, intervening and environmental, both of which undermine propositional knowledge. Section 3.3 focused on whether knowledge-how is compatible with intervening luck, the kind of luck featured in Gettier Case 1. We now turn to whether environmental luck is compatible with knowledge-how. Let’s recall Gettier Case 2 which illustrates this kind of veritic luck. Gettier Case 2: Ed looks into the pasture and sees what appears clearly to be a herd of sheep; he points to one and forms the belief ‘There is a sheep in the field.’ Unlike in Case 1, what Ed sees actually is a sheep, not a rock. As it happens, though, the genuine sheep Ed points to is surrounded by sheep-shaped rocks, any of which he would have mistaken as a sheep. Gettier Case 2 is a variant of the famous barn facade case.28 In this case veritic epistemic luck undermines the safety of Ed’s belief that there is a sheep in the field, even though Ed is not looking at a fake sheep, but at the genuine article. What accounts for why Ed could so easily have believed incorrectly is that he is in an epistemically

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inhospitable environment, one with fakes around. In many close nearby worlds, Ed points to a fake sheep, rather than the real sheep, and his belief is false. Carter and Pritchard (2015c) have, like Poston and Cath, attempted to support (3) of the template argument from epistemic luck, the premise stating that knowledge-how is compatible with epistemic luck to a greater extent than knowledge-that. However, Carter and Pritchard regard environmental, rather than intervening, epistemic luck as more effective in making this case. To bring this point into sharp relief, Carter and Pritchard have run a variation on Cath’s Lucky Light Bulb case, so that the details to the original case are amended as follows: So rather than Charlie gaining his instructions on how to change a bulb from a fake guide, albeit by chance getting the correct information, suppose that the guide itself is entirely reliable and authoritative, but that Charlie could so very easily have opted for a fake guide instead. Imagine, say, that Charlie has a shelf-full of guides before him, all but one of which is fake, and that had he opted for one of the fake guides he would have ended up with incorrect information about how to change a bulb. Does Charlie know how to change a light bulb in this case?29 Carter and Pritchard argue that, once the example is redescribed so that it is specifically environmental epistemic luck involved, the judgement that Charlie knows how to change a light bulb becomes comparatively stronger than it does in the original case. They remark that, after all, in the environmental luck twist on the case, Charlie gains his correct information about how to do this task from a genuine authoritative source, unlike in the case that Cath describes. Accordingly, the intuition that Charlie has knowledgehow in this case ought to be more compelling than it is in the lucky light bulb case. In response to this line of argument, one can easily anticipate Stanley’s countermove, which would be to simply recast (modulo the relevant refinements) the overgeneralization argument which Stanley previously levelled against Cath’s diagnosis of lucky light bulb against Carter and Pritchard’s diagnosis of the environmental luck twist on

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the case. Such a strategy would rely on the premise that the intuition that Charlie has knowledge-wh in a corresponding case would be just as strong as the intuition that Charlie has know-how in Carter and Pritchard’s version of the case. And then, as the anticipated line would go, since it would be a mistake to say that Charlie has knowledge-wh (in such a case), it would likewise be a mistake to attribute to Charlie know-how in Carter and Pritchard’s environmental-twist on the Lucky Light Bulb case. However, Carter and Pritchard argue that this reimagined overgeneralization strategy would not be effective in the case of environmental luck. In order to make this point, Carter and Pritchard (2015c, 449) simply construct a version of Stanley’s lucky light bulb ii case, where the luck is environmental rather than intervening. They write: All we need to do is tweak lucky light bulb ii along the same lines that we tweaked Cath’s lucky light bulb to make it a case of environmental epistemic luck. That is, we adapt the example so that Charlie is now finding out where to purchase light bulbs by reading a guide that is entirely accurate, but we stipulate that he could so very easily have picked up one of the many fake guides available to him.30 Carter and Pritchard maintain that it is far from obvious that knowledge-where is compatible with environmental epistemic luck in their twist on lucky light bulb ii, especially when compared with knowledge-how. In order to appreciate this, they suggest applying the ‘past-self test’. They write: If Charlie were to subsequently discover that environmental epistemic luck was involved in him gaining the right directions to the light bulb store, would he still regard his past self as knowing where to go? We think this is not at all clear. At the very least, it seems right to say that Charlie will be much less inclined to judge that his previous self had knowledge-where than before. In contrast, we noted above that there seems no temptation at all for Charlie to regard his past self as lacking knowledge-how in the corresponding case.31

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As we saw in the previous section, the overgeneralization strategy faced some problems as deployed originally against Cath, and it looks as though such a strategy would be even less promising when the details of the case are amended so that it’s environmental epistemic luck rather than intervening epistemic luck that’s at issue.

3.7  Concluding remarks The arguments from Poston, Cath, and Carter and Pritchard – each of which has attempted to demonstrate that knowledge-how is compatible with epistemic luck to a greater extent than knowledgethat – pose a problem for reductive intellectualists accounts which want to maintain that the properties of knowledge-that are properties of knowledge-how.32 The arguments canvassed here offer reasons to think that premise (3) in the template argument can be defended by appealing to either intervening or environmental epistemic luck. We’ve also seen that the strongest responses on behalf of the intellectualist to the arguments canvassed for premise (3) don’t appear to be decisive ones. The upshot here is that knowledge-how looks (in various ways) more resilient to being undermined by the presence of epistemic luck than knowledge-that, and this is not something a proponent of reductive intellectualism has very promising resources for explaining away. There is, however, one further retreat left for the intellectualist, though the retreat is a substantial one. We want to engage with this last move in closing. The frame of reference for this last move is Cath’s shift in thinking since his (2011) paper. Whereas Cath originally regarded the kind of cases which support premise (3) in the template argument from epistemic luck to support the conclusion that intellectualism is false, he has in more recent work (e.g. (2015)) suggested it is possible to draw a very different conclusion from such cases, one that is compatible with the truth of (at least one kind of) intellectualism. The kind of intellectualism Cath has in mind is revisionary as opposed to orthodox. As Cath puts it: Orthodox and revisionary intellectualists both claim that knowledge how is a kind of knowledge-that. However, revisionary intellectualists also claim – and orthodox intellectualists deny – that

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accepting the truth of intellectualism requires us to substantially revise or rethink our set of orthodox assumptions about the nature of knowledge-that.33 Cath’s new line maintains (contra Stanley) that the subjects in apparent Gettier-style counterexamples possess knowledge-how. However, on the basis of granting this, Cath now recommends (rather than the falsity of intellectualism) the revisionary intellectualist conclusion, according to which we: deny that these cases are counterexamples by rejecting the orthodox assumption that knowledge-that is always incompatible with Gettier-style luck.34 This is a radical retreat. It requires that we give up the platitude that propositional knowledge is incompatible with Gettier-style luck. This is not to say that platitudes in epistemology should not be revised if faced with enough pressure. However, at the end of the day, the anti-luck platitude has been much more widespread in the theory of knowledge than has been the truth of intellectualism (itself only a relatively recently popular view). And thus it seems quick indeed to regard evidence against a more controversial view as best interpreted as evidence, instead, against one of epistemology’s bedrock platitudes. Put another way, sometimes the simplest explanation is the best. In subsequent chapters, we will canvass arguments which continue to put pressure on the thought that the epistemic properties of knowledge-that are the properties of knowledge-how. The more ways in which we see how knowledge-that and knowledge-how come apart, the more radical a retreat to revisionary intellectualism is going to be.

3.8 Further reading ●●

Carter, J. A. and Pritchard, D. (2015c). Knowledge-how and epistemic luck. Noûs, 49(3):440–53.

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Cath, Y. (2011). Knowing how without knowing that. In Bengson, J. and Moffett, M. A., editors, Knowing How: Essays on Knowledge, Mind, and Action, pages 113–35. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Cath, Y. (2015). Revisionary intellectualism and Gettier. Philosophical Studies, 172(1):7–27

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Poston, T. (2009). Know how to be Gettiered? Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 79(3):743–7.

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Stanley, J. (2011a). Know How. Oxford: Oxford University Press (Chapter 8).

3.9  Study questions 1 What is the difference between intervening and

environmental epistemic luck? 2 What is Poston’s argument against the possibility of Gettier

cases for knowledge-how? 3 How do Poston and Stanley differ in their diagnosis of the

flight simulator case? 4 Explain Cath’s Lucky Light Bulb case and Stanley’s

overgeneralization argument in response to this case. 5 In what way does Carter and Pritchard’s twist on Cath’s Lucky

Light Bulb case differ from the original version? 6 How does Cath’s ‘revisionary intellectualism’ differ from the

kind of intellectualism defended by Stanley?

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4 Knowledge-how and cognitive achievement

4.1 Introduction

I

f knowledge-how is a kind of knowledge-that, then the properties of knowledge-that are the properties of knowledge-how. In the previous chapter, we saw that knowledge-how is less susceptible to being undermined by the presence of epistemic luck than is knowledgethat. That knowledge-how and knowledge-that come apart in this way is evidence against intellectualism. This chapter investigates a different strand of epistemological evidence against intellectualism, the key ideas of which have been developed in recent work on virtue epistemology, the branch of epistemology that analyses knowledge in terms of intellectual virtues – roughly, character traits or faculties that are truth-conducive. The line of argument canvassed in this chapter is, put simply, that knowledge-how has a certain essential property, the property of being an achievement, which knowledge-that lacks. To a first approximation, an achievement is a success that is primarily creditable to the exercise of an agent’s ability or virtue. The strategy we pursue will be to suggest that, problematically for the intellectualist, knowledge-how comes apart (in both directions) from the relevant corresponding item of knowledgethat as identified by the intellectualist in just the same kinds of cases where knowledge-that comes apart from cognitive achievement. In a bit more detail, we will examine putative cases in which a subject has propositional knowledge without a corresponding

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cognitive achievement and cases in which a subject secures cognitive achievement without propositional knowledge. Then we look at how this pattern carries over to knowledge-how. The upshot is that reflection on cognitive achievement and its relation to knowledgehow supports the view that knowledge-how is not a species of propositional knowledge. Here is the plan. Section 4.2 outlines the rationale for regarding knowledge-that as essentially involving cognitive achievement, which is a view advanced by what are called ‘robust’ virtue epistemologists – namely, those who attempt to analyse propositional knowledge entirely in terms of a truth condition and a virtue condition.1 Section 4.3 details two key lines of argument which show, contra robust virtue epistemology, that knowledge-that and cognitive achievement come apart in both directions. First, we consider an argument, put forward by Jennifer Lackey (2007b), which challenges the claim that cognitive achievement is necessary for knowledge-that. Second, we consider an argument, put forward by Kallestrup and Pritchard (2014), according to which cognitive achievement is not sufficient for knowledge-that. To the extent that these criticisms of the view that cognitive achievement is an essential component of knowledge-that are apt, a theoretical constraint materializes for the intellectualist about knowledge-how. In particular, the intellectualist is committed to predicting that knowledgehow should line up with knowledge-that rather than with cognitive achievement in these kinds of cases which show knowledge-that and cognitive achievement to come apart. Section 4.4 considers a recent argument to the effect that the intellectualist’s prediction fails here, and that in Lackey’s and Kallestrup and Pritchard’s cases, respectively, knowledge-how lines up with cognitive achievement rather than with knowledge-that. Section 4.5 considers objections to the line of argument advanced in Section 4.4 and outlines some replies.

4.2  Propositional knowledge as cognitive achievement: The case for Robust virtue epistemology understands propositional knowledge as a kind of cognitive achievement.2 To appreciate this view, it will be

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helpful to get clear first about the structure of achievements, and how achievements relate to success and ability. Ernest Sosa (2009b) and John Greco (2010) maintain that any performance with an aim can be evaluated along three dimensions: (1) whether it is successful, (2) whether it is skilful and (3) whether the success is because of the skill. If the success is because of the skill, the performance is not merely successful, but also, an achievement. Is the performance successful vis-à-vis its aim?

No

Yes Is the performance skilful?

No Yes Is the performance successful because skilful? No

Yes achievement

For example, on this picture, the success of bowling a strike fails to qualify as an achievement if the strike is a result of, say, throwing the ball in a random way, with one’s eyes closed. Crucially, though, bowling skilfully and rolling a strike isn’t in itself enough to guarantee that the strike is an achievement. Suppose, for example, that you release the ball with perfect form – in a manner that would normally suffice for a sure strike – but (due to the pins being arranged in a faulty manner), on this occasion only five pins fall down initially, leaving four standing, and one pin wobbling back and forth. Bad luck! But suppose then that, by a further stroke of good luck, the wobbling pin then (via the domino effect) causes the other four to fall in just the right way, for a strike. In this case, we have a success (the strike) and the relevant ability is on display – namely, the ball was thrown in a very competent way that would ordinarily issue a strike – but (given the sheer luck that the wobbly pin knocked down the remaining four via the domino effect) the strike is not because of the ability, but is rather it is due to a very unlikely chain of events. With reference to this way of thinking about performances and achievements, we can now appreciate the robust virtue

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epistemologist’s claim that propositional knowledge is a kind of cognitive achievement. Start with the idea, as Ernest Sosa (2009a, 5) puts it, that beliefs are ‘a certain kind of epistemic performance’.3 A belief is successful or accurate only if it is true. So, a particular belief token will constitute an achievement just when having that true belief is because of the agent’s cognitive abilities. According to robust virtue epistemologists, a belief amounts to knowledge just if it is true because of an agent’s cognitive abilities. Robust virtue epistemology offers an elegant account of propositional knowledge. (RVE-Know) S knows that p if and only if the truth of S’s belief that p is on account of her intellectual abilities or virtues. It also has promising resources for resolving three key problems which have plagued other broadly reliabilist approaches to theorizing about knowledge. Reliabilism analyses knowledge as reliably produced true belief.4 Firstly, because strange and fleeting processes are not cognitive abilities which are grounded in the agent’s cognitive character, virtue-theoretic approaches to knowledge neatly sidestep Plantinga’s (1993a) brain lesion and Lehrer’s (1990) TrueTemp counterexamples to standard process reliabilism.5 Secondly, robust virtue epistemology has promising resources for dealing with at least some kinds of Gettier cases. Consider, again, Gettier Case 1 from the previous chapter. As this case went, Ed looks into the pasture and sees what appears to be a sheep; he forms the belief ‘There is a sheep in the field.’ Unbeknownst to Ed, what he sees is actually a sheep-shaped rock. But, fortunately, there really is a sheep hiding in the field, behind the rock. Here Ed forms his belief in a competent way and his belief is successful (true), however his belief is not successful because of Ed’s cognitive abilities. Thus, his belief is not knowledge. This is the right result.6 Thirdly, robust virtue epistemology offers promising resources for accounting for why propositional knowledge should be more valuable than mere true belief, a topic that we take up in more detail in Chapter 8. In short, just as achievements (successes because of ability) are prized to a greater extent than lucky successes, so beliefs

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which constitute cognitive achievements have a value not shared equally by successes which are not because of ability. Thus, (RVE-Know) is a simple account of knowledge that explains a wide variety of cases, and improves upon a rival account. The merits of this account of knowledge provides a significant reason for it.

4.3  Propositional knowledge as cognitive achievement: The case against Despite the elegance of the proposal that propositional knowledge consists in cognitive achievement, propositional knowledge and cognitive achievement have been argued to come apart in both directions (Pritchard 2012b). Some have argued that there are cases of propositional knowledge without cognitive achievement, and others have argued that there are cases of cognitive achievements that do not involve knowledge. In this section, we’ll consider first an argument, due to Lackey (2007b), to the effect cognitive achievement is not necessary for propositional knowledge; next, we’ll consider an objection, due to Kallestrup and Pritchard (2014), that cognitive achievement is not sufficient for propositional knowledge.

4.3.1  Knowledge without achievement Consider Jennifer Lackey’s case. Having just arrived at the train station in Chicago, Morris wishes to obtain directions to the Sears Tower. He looks around, approaches the first adult passer-by that he sees, and asks how to get to his desired destination. The passer-by, who happens to be a Chicago resident who knows the city extraordinarily well, provides Morris with impeccable directions to the Sears Tower by telling him that it is located two blocks east of the train station. Morris unhesitatingly forms the corresponding true belief.7 chicago visitor

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This case poses a dilemma to the robust virtue epistemologist. The dilemma, in short, is that a proponent of robust virtue epistemology must either deny that Morris attains propositional knowledge in chicago visitor or grant that he does but then explain how the item of knowledge Morris acquires is a genuine cognitive achievement, a success primarily creditable to his abilities. Neither option is very attractive because each generates an undesirable consequence. Option

Problem

OPTION 1: Deny Morris has knowledge OPTION 2: Defend Morris’s knowledge as an achievement

Testimonial scepticism Knowledge explosion

Consider firstly, the option that Morris doesn’t have propositional knowledge. As Lackey (2007b, 352) notes, ‘it is nearly universally accepted that a situation such as Morris’s not only can but often does result in testimonial knowledge’. In addition to the near universal intuition that situations similar to Morris’s result in knowledge, if it is argued that Morris lacks knowledge, then scepticism is true for a vast majority of beliefs we hold on the word of others. This is a bad result. What about the other option, that Morris’s new knowledge is a cognitive achievement? This option is plausible only insofar as Morris’s cognitive success, namely, his true belief about the location of the Sears Tower, is attributable to his own cognitive abilities. But, on this point, Lackey writes: Are Morris’s reliable cognitive faculties the most salient part of the cause explaining why he truly believes that the Sears Tower is two blocks east?8 Not at all. Indeed, what explains why Morris got things right has nearly nothing of epistemic interest to do with him and nearly everything of epistemic interest to do with the passer-by. In particular, it is the passerby’s experience with and knowledge of the city of Chicago that explains why Morris ended up with a true belief rather than a false belief. Lackey’s point is straightforward. It is the informant’s, rather than Morris’s, cognitive abilities that are salient in explaining why Morris’s belief is correct. Compare: in the bowling case from Section 4.2, it was

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the lucky domino effect, rather than the bowler’s skill, that saliently explains the strike. Indeed, in both the bowling case and the Sears Tower case what is doing the explanatory heavy lifting is something external to the agent’s own agency. This point has been made also in recent work by Kallestrup and Pritchard (2013a, 265), who note – in commenting on a variant of this case – that ‘her cognitive success is to a large degree due to factors outwith her cognitive agency, such as the cognitive powers of her informant and the epistemically favourable nature of the environment’.9 It’s for this reason that it is hard to see how these successes constitute achievements. If they did, then a proponent of robust virtue epistemology will have to rule-in a very wide class of cases of true belief as knowledge, including cases (e.g. including standard Gettier cases10), resulting in a kind of implausible ‘knowledge explosion’.

4.3.2  Achievement without knowledge Just as Lackey’s counterexample reveals a problem for the view that cognitive achievement is necessary for knowledge, Kallestrup and Pritchard have challenged the connection between knowledge-that and achievement in the other direction, by adverting to what they call negative epistemic dependence. Negative epistemic dependence features in cases when an agent manifests a high level of cognitive agency (i.e. of a level that would ordinarily easily suffice for knowledge), but where the cognitive success does not amount to propositional knowledge because of factors external to the agent’s cognitive agency.11 In a series of recent papers, Kallestrup and Pritchard have relied on an ‘epistemic twin earth’ thought experiment in order to illustrate negative epistemic dependence.12 The language of ‘twin earth’ comes from a thought experiment by Hilary Putnam (1975) to demonstrate that there is a dimension of word-meaning that is not ‘in the head’. Kallestrup and Pritchard’s use of a twin-earth case, to be clear, is aimed at illustrating a thesis about knowledge, not about meaning. The case goes as follows: Suppose Kira is on Earth, and her internal duplicate, Kira*, is on a special kind of ‘Epistemic Twin Earth’. The epistemic twin earth

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only difference between Kira and Kira*’s circumstances concerns their respective modal environments. While there are close possible worlds where Kira* forms a false belief that p on the same basis as in the actual world, there is no close possible world where Kira forms a false belief that p on the same basis as in the actual world.13 Kallestrup and Pritchard appeal to this kind of case to illustrate a situation where Kira and Kira*’s true beliefs, formed on earth and twin earth respectively, are equally attributable to their exercise of cognitive agency, despite the difference in their susceptibility to knowledge-undermining epistemic luck. The crux of the idea is the following: the fact that Kira*’s modal environment undermines Kira*’s, but not Kira’s, knowledge of the target proposition does not itself seem to matter for the purposes of assessing the degree of epistemic agency exhibited by Kira and Kira* in forming the target belief. If this is right, then we’ve got a case where manifestations of cognitive agency that would ordinarily suffice for knowledge-that nonetheless (as in the case of Kira*) fail to do so, thanks to factors that are entirely external to Kira*’s cognitive agency. Countenancing negative epistemic dependence is tantamount to rejecting the sufficiency of cognitive achievement (true belief primarily creditable to the agent’s cognitive ability) for knowledgethat. In response to the foregoing case, what are the options for the robust virtue epistemologist here? They don’t look promising, as each carries an undesirable consequence: Option

Problem

OPTION 1: Grant Kira* has knowledge OPTION 2: Deny Kira*’s true belief is an achievement

Reject anti-luck platitude Achievement Scepticism

One option for the robust virtue epistemologist is to simply bite the bullet and say that, since Kira and Kira* exercise the same level of epistemic agency in their respective (correct) belief formations, then since Kira knows that p, so does Kira*. The problem with this route is that attributing knowledge to Kira* flies in the face of the Gettier

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intuition because Kira*’s belief is veritically lucky. More specifically, this option requires rejecting the anti-luck platitude articulated in Chapter 3. This is not an attractive move. But, Kallestrup and Pritchard argue, neither is the other option. The other option is that Kira* lacks knowledge while Kira has knowledge even though both exhibit the same level of epistemic agency in forming the target beliefs. The putative difference is that Kira*’s true belief is not on account of her ability, even though Kira’s true belief is because of her ability. Kallestrup and Pritchard suggest that this is implausible because the both exhibit the same level of agency, by stipulation.14 Furthermore, a consequence of denying Kira* a cognitive achievement is that we’d have to also deny achievements in a range of structurally similar cases – namely, to deny that any success susceptible to environmental epistemic luck is an achievement, even when nothing goes ostensibly wrong. Attributing achievement in such a restricted fashion is tantamount to denying that many successes which plausibly count as achievements are in fact achievements.

4.3.3  The upshot Putting this all together: simple testimony cases seem to show that one can have knowledge-that without cognitive achievement, and negative epistemic dependence case seem to show that one can have cognitive achievement without knowledge-that. To the extent that these examples are successful, it looks very much as though cognitive achievement and knowledge that come apart in both directions.15

4.4  The anti-intellectualist argument from cognitive achievement Lackey’s and Kallestrup and Pritchard’s arguments reveal that propositional knowledge and cognitive achievement appear to come apart from one another. In recent work, Carter and Pritchard (2015d) argue that knowledge-how lines up with cognitive achievement

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rather than with knowledge-that in versions of the friendly testimony and epistemic twin-earth cases they propose. If knowledge-how in fact lines up with cognitive achievement rather than with knowledgethat in such cases, then two important conclusions can be drawn, one negative, the other positive. The negative conclusion is that intellectualism, which predicts that knowledge-how will not come apart from knowledge-that in these cases, is mistaken. The corresponding positive conclusion is that we will have gained some evidence for thinking that an important difference between knowledge-how and knowledge-that is that the former, but not the latter, is or involves a kind of cognitive achievement. Carter and Pritchard’s argument comes in two key steps. The first part of the argument is to show that knowledge-how lines up with cognitive achievement rather than with knowledge-that in a friendly testimony case. The second part of the argument is to show that knowledge-how lines up with cognitive achievement rather than with knowledge-that in an epistemic twin-earth case.

4.4.1  Step 1 Let’s consider the first step of the argument. The line here is that, just as there is no barrier to Morris (in Lackey’s case) attaining testimonial knowledge-that by trusting a reliable informant in an epistemically friendly environment, likewise, there is no barrier to one attaining the kind of knowledge-that which (according to intellectualists) is to be identified with knowledge-how. Suppose, for example, that rather than asking directions to the Sears Tower, Morris (who has lived a sheltered life) asks how to do the Macarena. Morris’s informant tells Morris all 16 steps of the Macarena, in order. Let M be the proposition that the way to do the Macarena is to follow the above instructions (call this way w). Morris, with an excellent memory, and no reason to doubt his informant, plausibly knows M and so knows that w is the way to do the Macarena. Suppose though that Morris has moderate proprioceptive dysfunction and so has difficulty executing planned movements. What Morris plausibly acquires via testimony here is knowledge-that, but not knowledge-how. Morris, after all, despite his propositional knowledge of a way to do the

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Table 4.1:  The Way to Do the Macarena INSTRUCTION Beat 1 Beat 2 Beat 3 Beat 4 Beat 5 Beat 6 Beat 7 ... Beat 16

R arm straight out, in front of you, palm down. L arm straight out, in front of you, palm down. R arm straight out, in front of you, palm up. L arm straight out, in front of you, palm up. R hand grasps inside of the L arm, at the elbow. L hand grasps inside of the R arm, at the elbow. R hand behind R back of neck. … Clap and turn 90 degree to the right!

exercise, is utterly unable to actually do the dance. But even more, let’s suppose that (having followed way w, which Morris now knows is the way to do the Macarena) he actually does move his body in the right way. Even if this were so, given Morris’s proprioceptive dysfunction, his moving correctly – even if he intends to move in accordance with the instructions which he knows to be accurate – is plausibly not going to qualify as knowledge-how. To appreciate this point, just modify the case slightly so that while Morris knows that w is true (via testimony) and plans to execute movements in accordance with w, suppose that what causes Morris to actually move in way w is a brain lesion. Just as we don’t credit Irina with know-how in salchow (from Chapter 2) simply because she follows the correct sequence of movements, neither should we attribute know-how to Morris in such circumstances. As Carter and Pritchard put it, this is plausibly because know-how demands ‘not merely the ability to produce a certain outcome, but rather a particular kind of epistemic relation that the agent exhibits with respect to that outcome’.16 To the extent that this diagnosis of the case is right, we can see how testimony cases in friendly environments reveal knowledge-how to (like cognitive achievement) come apart from knowledge-that.17

4.4.2  Step 2 What about the other direction? This is a bit more complicated. In order to show how knowledge-how, like cognitive achievement,

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comes apart from knowledge-that in an epistemic twin-earth case, Carter and Pritchard add an epistemic twin-earth gloss on salchow. Here’s the original case again. salchow.

Irina, who is a novice figure skater, decides to try a complex jump called the salchow. When one performs a salchow, one takes off from the back inside edge of one skate and lands on the back outside edge of the opposite skate after one or more rotations in the air. Irina, however, is seriously mistaken about how to perform a salchow. She believes incorrectly that the way to perform a salchow is to take off from the front outside edge of one skate, jump in the air, spin and land on the front inside edge of the other skate. However, Irina has a severe neurological abnormality that makes her act in ways that differ dramatically from how she actually thinks she is acting. So despite the fact that she is seriously mistaken about how to perform a salchow, whenever she actually attempts to do a salchow (in accordance with her misconceptions), the abnormality causes Irina to unknowingly perform the correct sequence of moves, and so she ends up successfully performing a salchow. Although what she is doing and what she thinks she is doing come apart, she fails to notice the mismatch. Carter and Pritchard change the case in the following ways. Sally and her internal duplicate, Sally*, each truly believe that a particular way, w, is the way in which to successfully perform a salchow at time t. The only difference between Sally’s and Sally*’s circumstances concerns their modal environment. For Sally* (but not for Sally), there is a close possible world where way w – namely, taking off from the back inside edge of one skate – will cause a fracture in the ice, preventing a proper landing on the back outside edge of the other skate (and thus preventing a successful completion of the salchow).18 With these details in place, Carter and Pritchard (2015d) diagnose the case as follows. Given that Sally and Sally* both believe that way w is a way for each to successfully perform a salchow at t, one clear upshot of this difference in Sally and Sally*’s respective modal environments is that only Sally counts as knowing that way w will successfully lead to a salchow at t, but Sally* does not know this. This is because, for Sally*, way w could very easily not have led to

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a successful salchow. After all, performing the first element of w, for Sally*, could easily cause the ice to break, thereby thwarting the salchow. But the same is not true of Sally. This is just a particular instance of the more general point – outlined in Section 4.2 – that a true belief which is common to duplicate subjects on earth and twin earth can nonetheless differ in terms of whether it is subject to propositional knowledge-undermining epistemic luck. Carter and Pritchard suggest however that it looks … far less plausible that this fact about Sally’s and Sally*’s respective modal environments would undermine either of their knowledge how to do a salchow. After all, on twin earth, Sally* takes off from the back inside edge of one skate and lands on the back outside edge of the opposite skate after a rotation – which is exactly the way for Sally* to successfully complete the salchow on twin earth. Indeed, in terms of their manifestations of agency, Sally and Sally* are identical, in virtue of being duplicate subjects in identical local and global environments. Accordingly, it’s hard to see why Sally*’s success on twin-earth would be any less creditable to her agency than Sally’s identical success on earth.19 Carter and Pritchard clarify this point by remarking further that It is worth emphasizing at this point that we are not relying on the simple observation that Sally* successfully lands the salchow and reasoning from this that she, ipso facto, must count as knowing how to do the salchow. Such a diagnosis, after all, would presuppose an anti-intellectualist account of knowledge how (and, in particular, that ability is sufficient for knowledge how). Rather, we are appealing to the (non-question-begging) observation that, plausibly, it would seem counterintuitive to attribute know how to Sally, but not to Sally*. With this datum in hand, we point out that if the intellectualist is right, then we must (implausibly) judge Sally, though not Sally*, as knowing-how to do the jump.20 From this diagnosis of the case – according to which Sally* knows how to do a salchow but doesn’t know that w is a way for her to do the salchow – knowledge-how will (again, like we saw that cognitive

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achievement did) come apart from (the relevant corresponding token of) knowledge-that. The options for the intellectualist here are familiar and not particularly promising: Option

Problem

OPTION 1: Grant Sally* has knowledge-that OPTION 2: Deny Sally* knows how to do a salchow

Reject anti-luck platitude Know-how scepticism

Obviously, granting that Sally* knows that w is a way for her to do a salchow is tantamount to countenancing unsafe (i.e. veritically lucky) belief as propositional knowledge. But also problematic here for the intellectualist is the other option, according to which the intellectualist tells us that since Sally* doesn’t know that w is a way for her to do a salchow (given the presence of environmental luck) then neither does she know how to do one. But this verdict is at best a confusing one. After all, both the doxastic and manual dimensions of Sally and Sally*’s performance are identical in that, by construction, they believe the same things and exercise the same abilities in isomorphic ways. And, Sally paradigmatically does know how to do a salchow. Thus, denying that Sally* does goes against our inclination to attribute know-how to Sally*.21 Even more, though, a kind of sceptical consequence emerges from denying that Sally* knows how to do a salchow. Consider that, if Sally* doesn’t know how to do a salchow, then neither do a wide range of other individuals who have correct beliefs about how to perform certain actions and whose correct beliefs guide their successes in a way that is unimpeachable.

4.5  Objections and replies Let’s take stock. Section 4.3 offered some reasons for thinking that propositional knowledge and cognitive achievement come apart in both directions. Section 4.4 offered reasons for thinking that knowledge-how comes apart from propositional knowledge in the very same types of cases where cognitive achievement came apart from propositional knowledge.

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If this is right, then a negative and a positive conclusion can be drawn. The negative conclusion is that intellectualism is in trouble. Intellectualism implies that knowledge-how will not come apart from the relevant corresponding item of knowledge-that. But this is not the only conclusion that can be drawn from the cases canvassed in Section 4.4. Given that the argument was that knowledge-how not only came apart from knowledge-that in friendly testimony and negative epistemic dependence (i.e. epistemic twin earth) cases – but moreover, that knowledge-how lined up with cognitive achievement in such cases, we have some evidence that a mark of knowledge-how not shared by knowledgethat is that the latter essentially involves cognitive achievement, or a kind of success because of ability – though we’ll continue to refine this idea. The aim of this section will be to outline and reply to some objections to both the negative argument and the positive arguments.

4.5.1  Objections to the negative argument What’s crucial to the negative argument is that knowledge-how pulls apart from the relevant items of knowledge-that. If this claim is true, that’s enough to count against the truth of intellectualism. The matter of whether knowledge-how lines up with cognitive achievement rather than knowledge-that in these cases is relevant only to the positive leg of the argument.

Practical modes of presentation Let’s now examine more carefully the claim that knowledge-how comes apart from the items of knowledge-that which intellectualists identify with knowledge-how in the cases described in Section 4.4, beginning with the testimony case. One strategy of response to the argument canvassed makes use of practical modes of presentation – specifically, by claiming that the kind of knowledge-that which constitutes know-how is knowledge that hosted under a practical mode of presentation which itself entails certain dispositions.

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Stanley and Williamson describe practical modes of presentation as follows: Thinking of a person as oneself entails being disposed to behave in certain ways, or form certain beliefs, given relevant input from that person. Similarly, thinking of a place as here entails being disposed to behave in certain ways, or form certain beliefs, given relevant input from that place. Analogously, thinking of a way under a practical mode of presentation undoubtedly entails the possession of certain complex dispositions. It is for this reason that there are intricate connections between knowing-how and dispositional states.22 As a point of clarification: intellectualists as such aren’t committed to the view that knowing-how is knowing-that under a practical mode of presentation. Embracing practical modes of presentation is optional for intellectualists. It has nonetheless been a popular optional strategy (e.g. Stanley and Williamson (2001) and Stanley (2011a)). This has especially been so in response to stock objections that, in a range of cases, knowing-that is not sufficient for knowinghow.23 A common criticism of intellectualists who appeal at crucial junctures to practical modes of presentation is that the very notion of a practical mode of presentation is mysterious or elusive.24 But let’s work with the basic idea for now and ask whether it helps the intellectualist in the case of Morris and the Macarena. Superficially speaking, an appeal to practical modes of presentations looks as though it might indeed help by offering an avenue for the intellectualist to diagnose the Macarena case in the following way, by: (i) Granting that Morris (given his proprioceptive dysfunction)

doesn’t know how to do the Macarena; while also (ii) Denying that Morris knows that w is the way for him to do

the Macarena under a practical mode of presentation. While (i) was never really at issue – of course Morris doesn’t know how to do the Macarena via testimony – it looked like trouble for

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the intellectualist that he nonetheless did know of way, w, that w is the way for him to do so. Enter here the intellectualist equipped with practical modes of presentation. The line would be that Morris fails to know how to do the Macarena under a practical mode of presentation, given his proprioception dysfunction, and even though he receives the testimony from a reliable source under epistemically friendly conditions (e.g. no defeaters). But then, if Morris doesn’t know that w is the way for him to do the Macarena in the sense that is identifiable with knowledge-how, then – as the intellectualist will tell us – the case is not a counterexample to intellectualism. Morris neither knows how to do the Macarena nor does he possess the kind of propositional knowledge which is to be identified with knowledge-how. There are, we want to now suggest, several problems with this response. Firstly, as we spell out in the next chapter, it is a hallmark of propositional knowledge that it can be transmitted via testimony. If such knowledge is not transferrable in environments that are maximally hospitable, then it looks like knowledge-how is significantly different from propositional knowledge. We press this objection in the following chapter. For now, let’s consider some other responses.

Finks But even if this general problem could somehow be resolved, another problem for the intellectualist who appeals to practical modes comes into view when we simply adjust the details of the Macarena case. Consider the following amended case featuring a finkish disposition. Finkish dispositions (e.g. Lewis 1997) are dispositions such that the conditions that would have to be met for an object’s acquiring the finkish disposition might be the very same as the stimulus conditions for that disposition.25 Morris* is like Morris, however, his proprioceptive dysfunction is finkish.26 It is triggered only when he begins to perform the action in question. Let t1 be the time that Morris* receives (from a reliable source) the testimony that w is the way to the Macarena. Morris*’s finkish proprioceptive dysfunction (and so, his disposition to confuse his execution of finkish proprioceptive dysfunction

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planned movements) is dormant so that Morris is, qua recipient of the testimony presented to him, like a perfectly normal individual at t1. However, the act of trying to do the Macarena at t2 triggers his proprioceptive dysfunction. Though Morris* does not know how to do the Macarena any more than Morris with persistent (non-finkish) proprioceptive dysfunction does, Morris* (unlike Morris) plausibly does know at t1 that w is the way for him to do the Macarena, under a practical mode of presentation. Here is, after all, at t1 receiving the testimony in a way that is akin to a perfectly normally functioning individual. Of course, once Morris*’s trying to perform the action at t2 triggers his finkish proprioceptive dysfunction, Morris no longer knows that that w is a way for him to do the Macarena under a practical mode of presentation. But the crucial point is that he does know this albeit temporarily under a practical mode at t1.

Littlejohn’s argument Let’s set this case aside until the next chapter and consider the intellectualist’s prospects for blocking the other leg of the negative argument – namely, by arguing that, contrary to what was suggested in Section 4, the epistemic twin earth gloss on the salchow case does not feature knowledge-how without the corresponding item of knowledge-that. Given that maintaining that Sally* knows that w is the way for her to do a salchow runs contrary to the platitude that knowledge must be safe (i.e. not veritically lucky), we won’t consider this escape route for the intellectualist. The much more salient escape route in the case would be to defend (contra Carter and Pritchard) the following diagnosis, which involves: (i) Granting that Sally* (given the presence of environmental

luck) doesn’t know that w is a way for her to do a salchow (ii) Denying that Sally knows how to do a salchow

While the intuition that we should credit Sally* with know-how in this case is strong, the rationale Carter and Pritchard offer is that

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Sally (who is unimpeachable) and Sally* by construction manifest doxastic and manual agency in a way that is isomorphic. The intellectualist critic, however, might object that this is a theory-laden reading of the situation. After all, if it is the case that the presence of environmental luck for Sally* is a difference maker with respect to whether we should attribute Sally*’s success to her agency, then perhaps Sally’s success is attributable to her abilities in a way that Sally*’s is not. And if this is right, this would speak against the kind of rationale Carter and Pritchard appeal to in their diagnosis of the case. Here is the crux of the issue: Carter and Pritchard’s diagnosis of the case seems to take for granted a certain position about the relationship between the presence of environmental luck and the attributability of a success to a subject’s ability which Clayton Littlejohn (2014) calls compatibilism. Compatibilism: the accuracy of a subject’s α-performance in an environmental luck case might be attributable to the subject’s relevant α-ability.27 If compatibilism is false, Carter and Pritchard’s diagnosis of the case of Sally* doesn’t go through. Littlejohn’s argument is that compatibilism is false, and incompatibilism is true: Incompatibilism: the accuracy of a subject’s α-performance in an environmental luck case is not attributable to the subject’s relevant α-ability.28 If incompatibilism is true, then this would undercut Carter and Pritchard’s rationale for why Sally* should be attributed knowledgehow, given that their rationale takes compatibilism for granted. And if that’s right, then knowledge-how doesn’t come apart from knowledge-that in the case in question because Sally* neither knows that w is a way for her to do a salchow nor does she know how to do a salchow. And so here is the situation for the intellectualist: evidence for incompatibilism is at the same time evidence which counts against a way of reading the case of Sally and Sally* according to which

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knowledge-how comes apart from the relevant corresponding knowledge-that. Are there any good reasons to be an incompatibilist? Littlejohn offers the following incompatibilist argument: 1 Success is properly attributable to ability only when the

subject has been afforded the right kind of opportunity for exercising the ability and the subject’s exercise of the ability results in success. 2 In environmental luck cases, the subject has not been

afforded the right kind of opportunity for exercising the relevant ability. 3 Success is not properly attributable to ability in cases of

environmental luck.29 The key premise of Littlejohn’s argument for incompatibilism is (2). He offers the case of Jane to illustrate the reasoning for (2): jane:

Jane is a distant relative from a distant land. She writes to say that she’s coming for a visit. You tell her that you’ll pick her up at the airport. You don’t know what she looks like and she doesn’t know what you look like. You write her name on a card and stand outside of the arrivals gate holding it high. A woman sees the card, reads it, says ‘Hi, I’m Jane’, and you drive her home. You didn’t realize it, but there were dozens of cards there that read ‘Jane’. Owing to the lighting and the accidental placement of very tall people, she fixated on your card first, read the card, and judged (correctly) that you were her ride.30 Littlejohn observes that (i) had it not been for the other cards, then the card that Jane needed would have had a distinctive look. But, given that there were other cards, it did not. Thus, he reasons, (ii) Jane wasn’t sensitive to anything that would have clued her in that, were she to have looked at any of the other cards she could have easily seen, it would have been the wrong card. He writes: ‘By writing her name on the card, you tried to give her the opportunity to identify you by sight and to tell you apart from the other strangers that she shouldn’t take rides from. You tried, but failed in that regard. You got

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lucky in that she found you even though she was not afforded the right opportunity.’31 Littlejohn, to reiterate, takes jane to support (2) in the incompatibilist argument, namely, the premise that in environmental luck cases, the subject has not been afforded the right kind of opportunity for exercising the relevant ability. His own diagnosis of the case, in this context, is as follows: I think that it is clear that this case is not a case of success that is attributable to Jane’s abilities. I also think that it is clear that the reason that this is not such a case is not that Jane lacked some general ability, such as the ability to read cards and determine whether the name on the card was ‘Jane’. If, as it seems, this case is another case of environmental luck, one that is analogous to Barney, the compatibilist treatment of that case is problematic. What’s missing from Jane, I submit, is that she lacked the opportunity she needed to classify the card she saw as the card with her name on it on the basis of how the card looks precisely because that card did not have a distinctive look that she was sensitive to. Had all the other cards read ‘Jill’, however, we would attribute success to her abilities and credit her with knowledge precisely because she had the general ability and she exercised it under appropriate circumstances.32 If Littlejohn’s assessment of the case is right, then he’s aware that the same point applies mutatis mutandis to other environmental luck cases, such as the barn facade case and (importantly for the present purposes) to the case of Sally and Sally* in Section 4. We can, however, imagine a variation on Littlejohn’s case of Jane which pulls in the other direction. What is the relevant reference class with reference to which sensitivity to the card’s distinctive look matters for the purpose of whether we can attribute Jane’s success to her abilities? Perhaps it’s narrower than Littlejohn is taking for granted in making his assessment about what Jane lacks. Consider the following: jane and blane:

Jane and Blane are distant relatives from a distant land. They write to say that they’re coming for a visit. You tell them

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that you’ll pick them up at the airport. You don’t know what they look like and they don’t know what you look like. You write their names on a card – [JANE AND BLANE] – and stand outside of the arrivals gate holding it high. Jane and Blane see the card, read it, and both say ‘Hi, I’m Jane/Blane and this is Blane/Jane’, and you drive them home. Here are two further facts about this situation. Firstly, you didn’t realize it, but there were dozens of cards there that read ‘Jane and Blane’. Owing to the lighting and the accidental placement of very tall people, they fixated on your card first, read the card, and judged (correctly) that you were their ride. Secondly, while Jane’s visual faculties and reading comprehension are unimpeachable, Blane’s are not. Blane has an astigmatic left eye coupled with a rare form of dyslexia. The astigmatic left eye causes some of the letters to appear to him in a different order than what was presented. But then, due to the dyslexia, the order of the letters on the card, as they appear to him, just happens to revert back to [JANE AND BLANE]. A proponent of compatibilism could suggest, with reference to this case, that Blane lacked the opportunity he needed to classify the card on the basis of how the card looks precisely because that card did not have a distinctive look that he was sensitive to. Though Blane identifies this card correctly, had the card read something different within a certain range of combinatory possibilities, the dyslexia + astigmatism combination would have continued to make it appear to him (incorrectly) that it said [JANE AND BLANE]. By comparison with Blane, however, it seems Jane did not lack such an opportunity to classify the card on the basis of how the card looks precisely because for Jane the card did have a distinctive look that she was sensitive to, in a way that Blane clearly was not. (For, if the letters on the card were arranged differently, Jane – but not Blane – would have noticed.) Putting this all together: if Littlejohn is right that incompatibilism is true, then this would undermine the kind of support Carter and Pritchard take for thinking that the case of Sally and Sally* is one where know-how is present while the corresponding knowledgethat is lacking. Littlejohn’s rationale for incompatibilism, however, is grounded in his thinking that, in environmental luck cases, the subject

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has not been afforded the right kind of opportunity for exercising the relevant ability. But this claim gains support from a certain way of reading cases like jane, where the notion of sensitivity is playing an important role. The case of jane and blane shows how there is another equally intuitive way to read the case, one on which, with reference to sensitivity, we are not inclined to deny that subject has been afforded the right kind of opportunity for exercising the relevant ability. Given the intuitiveness (which Littlejohn grants) of the compatibilist reading of environmental luck cases (like Sally and Sally*), it seems we’d need a more compelling argument than what Littlejohn has given us for thinking incompatibilism is true. And accordingly, we’d need further argument for incompatibilism, for undercutting the argument considered in Section 4 for thinking that know-how (like cognitive achievement) comes apart from the corresponding item of knowledge-that in cases like that of Sally and Sally*.

4.5.2  Objections to the positive argument If the negative argument, according to which knowledge-how and the relevant corresponding items of knowledge-that comes apart in same cases that (in Section 3) it was argued that knowledge-that comes apart from cognitive achievement, that’s bad news for intellectualism, which predicts that knowledge-how never comes apart from the relevant corresponding items of knowledge-that. But if know-how really does come apart from propositional knowledge in the same kinds of cases where cognitive achievement came apart from knowledge-that, what we find is knowledgehow is positively lining up with cognitive achievement rather than knowledge-that. This is defeasible evidence for a view according to which knowledge-how, but not knowledge-that, is always a kind of achievement, or success because of ability. One very natural objection to this positive claim is that this idea glosses over an important distinction between two kinds of potential achievements, that of: (i) exercising one’s knowledge-how, and that of (ii) being in a state of knowledge-how.

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Take, for example, Sally* (from Section 4). The case in question focuses on Sally*’s successful performance of the salchow, and how it is attributable to her abilities. The relevant success here seemed to be her moving in the right way, the way to move when doing a salchow (as opposed to, say, a toe loop or lutz). But if Sally* is an individual to whom we’d attribute know-how in virtue of her performance, she surely does not lose this know-how when she is sitting on an airplane, without the opportunity to do a salchow.33 To the extent that we take seriously the idea that the cases from Section 4 are defeasible evidence for the view that knowledge-how, rather than knowledge-that, positively involves achievement of some kind, we need to be able to make sense of the idea of just what the achievement is, when Sally is sitting on the airplane, away from the ice rink. In particular, let’s consider what the success component here is, when Sally* is merely in the state of knowing how to do a salchow, but not positively performing one. The success is not doing a salchow. After all, Sally* is sitting down. One very natural way of thinking of the success component (as is germane to regarding being in a state of knowing-how is an achievement) is counterfactually: after all, even though Sally* can’t do a salchow on the plane, she’s praiseworthy in a way the ice-skating novice sitting next to her on the plane is not. For Sally* would be able to do a salchow reliably, given the normal circumstances, though the person sitting next to her could not. Carter and Pritchard (2015d) have offered such a counterfactual rationale, and their frame of reference case is a case of famous chef who lost his arms, raised by Paul Snowdon (2004), originally as a counterexample to radical anti-intellectualism, according to which know-how just is ability possession. Snowdon poses the question of whether the chef – after the arm-losing accident – knows how to make his signature dish. Snowdon suggests yes, despite the chef’s being unable to do so, and that thus, anti-intellectualism is false. Carter and Pritchard suggest in passing that, even though Snowdon’s chef doesn’t have the ability to make his signature dish, he still knows how to do so – namely, is in a state of knowing how to do so34 – because in ‘the closest worlds in which Snowdon’s chef successfully makes the dish – for example, worlds where his arms

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are reattached – we credit the success to his impressive ability, and not to luck’.35 Compare, for instance, Snowdon’s chef with an unskilled, equally armless chef. The closest worlds in which this latter chef successfully makes the dish – for example, worlds where his arms are reattached – are worlds where credit the success to luck rather than to any ability this chef has. This rationale extends to Sally*, when she is sitting in the airplane. Even when she is not exercising her knowledge-how (as when she performs the salchow) she is in a state of knowing-how to do so, and being in this state can be understood as an achievement given that the closest worlds in which Sally performs the salchow – for example, worlds where she is in a normal ice rink and not on a plane – we credit the success (contra Littlejohn) to her impressive ability, and not to luck. To the extent that this is right, the evidence which the cases in Section 4 marshal in support of the view that knowledge-how (unlike knowledge-that) involves achievement is not undermined by the thought that only by exercising knowledge-how is one a candidate for achievement.

4.6  Concluding remarks This chapter has drawn from the conceptual resources of recent virtue epistemology to canvass an overarching argument against intellectualism. Section 3 argued that – and contrary to robust virtue epistemology – friendly testimony and epistemic twin-earth cases suffice to show that knowledge-that and cognitive achievement come apart, in both directions. Building from the rationale in Section 3, Section 4 put forwarded an argument for thinking that knowledgehow comes apart from (the relevant corresponding item of) knowledge-that in the same kinds of cases in which knowledge-that came apart from cognitive achievement. From these cases, a negative and a positive conclusion were drawn. The negative conclusion is that intellectualism – which must predict that knowledge-how does not come apart from the relevant corresponding item of knowledge that in these or any other cases – is false. The positive (albeit, more

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tentative) conclusion, is that the fact that knowledge-how lines up with cognitive achievement in just the kinds of cases which show cognitive achievement to come apart with knowledge-that, is some defeasible evidence that knowledge-how (unlike knowledgethat) positively involves a kind of cognitive achievement. Section 5 Considered objections to both the negative and positive legs of this argument and showed them to be lacking. While this chapter has not attempted to give a definitive positive proposal for knowledgehow, it has however, suggested that any positive account must not only not regard knowledge-how as a kind of knowledge-that, but even more, that an ex ante constraint on such an account is that it be compatible with the thought that knowledge-how is a kind of achievement.

4.7 Further reading ●●

Carter, J. A. and Pritchard, D. (2015b). Knowledge-how and cognitive achievement. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 91(1):181–99

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Greco, J. (2010). Achieving Knowledge: A Virtue-Theoretic Account of Epistemic Normativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

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Lackey, J. (2007b). Why we don’t deserve credit for everything we know. Synthese, 158(3):345–61

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Littlejohn, C. (2014). Fake barns and false dilemmas. Episteme, 11(4):369–89

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Pritchard, D. (2012a). Anti-luck virtue epistemology. Journal of Philosophy, 109(3):247–79

4.8  Study questions 1 What is ‘robust’ virtue epistemology? 2 How do robust virtue epistemologists respond to traditional

Gettier cases involving intervening epistemic luck?

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3 How is Lackey’s argument from testimony meant to show

that propositional knowledge does not essentially involve cognitive achievement? 4 What is Littlejohn’s case of Jane supposed to illustrate

about the relationship between propositional knowledge, achievement and environmental luck? 5 Why do Carter and Pritchard think that knowledge-how lines

up with cognitive achievement rather than with propositional knowledge in friendly testimonial cases?

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5 Knowledge-how and testimony

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e know much by way of testimony. We know the day and time of the next faculty meeting by being told when it is. We know the President is in New York by hearing someone say that he is. We know that William the Conqueror won the Battle of Hastings in 1066 by a teacher’s assertion. Knowledge is routinely transferred through simple speech acts. In the previous chapter, we saw that the simple transfer of knowledge via testimony in chicago visitor posed a serious problem to robust virtue epistemology.1 The transfer of knowledge via testimony is so ubiquitous that any adequate theory of knowledge must accommodate this fact. The main question we investigate in this chapter is the nature of the kind of knowledge that is routinely transferred by testimony. In the above cases, the kind of knowledge that is transferred by testimony is propositional knowledge. It is the knowledge of some fact. We will argue that there is a difference in the transfer of knowledge between propositional knowledge and knowledge-how. In short, propositional knowledge is routinely transferred via simple speech acts, but knowledge-how is not so transferred. This difference in ease of knowledge transfer points to a crucial difference between the relevant states of knowledge. Propositional knowledge has a different functional profile from practical knowledge. As we saw in Chapter 3, the template argument from epistemic luck implied that knowledge-how is different from knowledge-that.

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So here too we have a general argument that knowledge-how is distinct from knowledge-that. 1 If knowledge-how is a species of knowledge-that then the

properties of knowledge-how and knowledge-that are the same. 2 The properties of knowledge-how are distinct from the

properties of knowledge-that. 3 So, knowledge-how is not a species of knowledge-that.

Our plan is to first discuss the nature of knowledge-how and the intellectualist account of such knowledge. We then turn to the issue of how knowledge is transferred by testimony. In this section we present the main argument that there is a crucial difference in the way that propositional and practical knowledge are transferred by testimony. In the last section we focus on a potential reply to this argument, which will also aid the reader in understanding a contemporary sophisticated version of intellectualism.2

5.1 Intellectualism As we noted in Chapter 2, a prominent defence of intellectualism comes from the study of the syntax and semantics of embedded questions.3 Contemporary intellectualists argue that because a construction like ‘John knows how to ride a bike’ contains an embedded question ‘how to ride a bike?’ one should look to the semantics of embedded questions for determining the nature of states of knowing-how. If it turns out that the most plausible linguistic theories of sentences of the form ‘S knows how to φ’ states that such sentences are true only if S knows that w is a way to φ then there is a plausible linguistic argument for intellectualism. This is an interesting and novel approach to understanding the nature of knowledge-how, but, as we’ve argued in previous chapters, there are properties of knowledge-how and knowledge-that which suggest that knowledge-how is different in kind from knowledge-that. In this chapter we continue this theme: propositional knowledge permits

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easy knowledge transfer but practical knowledge does not. Practical knowledge has a different causal profile than propositional knowledge. Thus, the argument of this chapter provides further grounds for thinking that practical knowledge is not propositional knowledge.

5.1.1  Kinds of knowledge how-to As we’ve stressed, the intellectualist claims that knowledge-how is a species of knowledge-that. Knowledge-how, like knowledge-that, is a relation between a subject and a true proposition. Given intellectualism, practical knowledge is a particular kind of propositional knowledge. The intellectualist account concerns knowledge how-to. We will refer to this as infinitival knowledge-how (IK, for short) because expression of infinitival know-how requires a tenseless infinitival clause. We express the thought that ‘John has practical knowledge concerning bike riding’ by using a tenseless infinitival clause ‘to ride a bike’ and say ‘John knows how to ride a bike.’ (IK) contrasts from knowledge-how which takes a finite clause. We refer to this kind of knowledge-how as non-infinitival knowledge-how (NIK, for short). Consider ‘Smith knows how Nixon intended to cover up Watergate.’ Smith knows how Nixon intended to keep Watergate secret in virtue of knowing that Nixon aimed to do thus and so. This receives support from natural judgement as well as support from the syntax and semantics of embedded questions. Smith has this NIK in virtue of knowing the correct answer to the question ‘how did Nixon intend to cover up Watergate?’ It is common in the literature on knowledge-how that NIK is propositional.4 Stanley and Williamson write, ‘An embedded question in a tensed clause, such as (5a) Hannah knows how Bill rides a bicycle seems clearly to attribute propositional knowledge to Hannah.’5 Michael Devitt expresses a reservation about this, but his case is not convincing. He considers a case in which Hannah knows how Bill rides a bicycle but exhibits this knowledge ‘by simply imitating Bill riding a bicycle’.6 However, imitation is a way of demonstrating

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and in virtue of demonstrating a way Hannah has a demonstrative concept. Consequently, Hannah knows that this is the way Bill rides a bike. A general theory of propositional content needs to allow for demonstrative concepts and so there is not a genuine challenge here to the propositional nature of NIK. Intellectualism concerns IK, but not all cases of IK are the same. Consider Sam who, when he is about to meet the president, is given strict instructions about how to conduct himself. Then (1ʹ) Sam knows how to behave before the president, is true. But (1) expresses the proposition that (1ʹ) Sam knows how one ought to behave before the president. (1‘) is clearly propositional and not of issue in the debate over intellectualism. Stanley and Williamson concur. They write of the following sentences ‘Hannah knows how she ought to ride a bicycle’ and ‘Hannah knows how one ought to ride a bicycle’ that ‘[both] quite obviously seem to attribute some kind of propositional knowledge to Hannah, so they are not the interpretations underlying the thesis that knowledge-how is not a species of knowledgethat’.7 This deontic knowledge does not involve the relevant ability or disposition. Hannah may know how one ought to ride, without knowing how to ride. So, the kind of knowledge that concerns the intellectualist debate is non-deontic infinitival knowledge-how. The phrase ‘non-deontic knowledge-how’ is tiresome to repeat and so we will call this knowledge practical knowledge. Attributing practical knowledge to a subject is the standard way of indicating that a subject has the ability to perform a certain action.8 It is controversial whether knowledge-how entails ability.9 But it is not disputed that the normal use of sentences attributing practical knowledge indicates that someone has an ability. We routinely indicate that John is able to ride a bike by saying that ‘John knows

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how to ride a bike.’ The argument we give does not assume that knowledge-how entails ability. It only assumes that knowledge-how implies a complex disposition whether or not the person is able to manifest that disposition. This assumption is uncontroversial. Both Stanley (2011) and Stanley and Williamson (2001) maintain that knowledge-how requires thinking of a way to do something under a practical mode of presentation which entails the possession of a complex disposition.10

5.1.2  Intellectualism about practical knowledge The specific intellectualist account we focus on comes from Stanley and Williamson’s 2001 paper ‘Knowing How’ and Stanley’s more recent 2011 book Know How.11 The official intellectualist account of practical knowledge is this: (INT) A subject S knows how to φ if and only if there is some contextually relevant way w such that S stands in the knowledgethat relation to the proposition that w is a way for S to φ, and S entertains this proposition under a practical mode of presentation.12 In the following we argue that reflection on the transfer of knowledge shows that practical knowledge has a distinctive causal profile from both knowledge-that and knowledge-wh. That is, we argue for the following thesis. (†) Both knowledge-that and knowledge-wh are easily transferred by testimony but practical knowledge is not easily transferred by testimony. The truth of (†) provides good evidence that practical knowledge is not propositional knowledge. A straightforward explanation of the difference in casual profiles is that practical knowledge is objectual knowledge relating a subject to a way of acting whereas propositional knowledge relates a subject to a proposition.13 What is objectual knowledge? It is a factive cognitive grasp of a nonpropositional structure. In this case of practical knowledge, it is a cognitive grasp of non-propositional ways of acting.

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As several philosophers have noted, (INT) is compatible with a substantive difference between propositional knowledge and practical knowledge. Alva Noe states that Stanley and Williamson’s intellectualism ‘doesn’t eliminate the distinction [between knowledge how-to and knowledge-that], or give anyone committed to it a reason to give it up; it merely relocates it’.14 Moreover, Ephraim Glick observes that the linguistic defence of intellectualism just yields a weak form of intellectualism according to which ‘know-how is knowledge that has a proposition as a relatum’.15 Yet Stanley and Williamson resist this. They explain, If the special subclass of knowing-that which we call ‘knowinghow’ is too dissimilar from other kinds of knowing-that, then one might suspect that we have just recreated the traditional distinction between knowing-how and knowing-that, but in other terms. So it must be that, on our analysis, knowing-how possesses the characteristic features of other kinds of knowingthat.16 Stanley and Williamson’s remarks suggest that if (INT) is compatible with (†), then intellectualism just recreates the distinction between propositional knowledge and practical knowledge. Our argument for (†) is a double-edged sword: either (INT) is false or it recreates the old distinction between know-that and know-how. What is novel and probative about our argument for (†) is that it rests on strong linguistic intuitions about knowledge-wh. We show that reflection on knowledge-wh supports a metaphysical difference between propositional knowledge and practical knowledge.

5.2 Knowledge transfer We begin with a generic, non-controversial account of testimonial knowledge that will aid the overall argument that propositional knowledge, but not practical knowledge, permits easy knowledge transfer. We then turn to the failure of practical knowledge to easily transfer by testimony.

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5.2.1  Testimony and knowledge The epistemological study of testimony is relatively recent. C. A. J. Coady’s (1992) book Testimony was the first major philosophical treatment of testimony.17 He introduces many of the terms that are used in the resulting debate. A crucial epistemological question about testimony is whether the content of testimony can be known simply on the basis of testimony. That is, can a person come to know p based only on the fact that a reliable speaker S told her p? Those who answer affirmatively are known as anti-reductionists, and those who answer negatively are known as reductionists. Anti-reductionists hold that testimony is a unique source of knowledge. It is on par with other sources of knowledge such as intuition, perception, and reasoning. Reductionists, in contrast, argue that testimony is not a unique source of knowledge. A person knows on the basis of testimony only if the testimony is reduced to other sources of knowledge. What this means is that the claim that is testified to comes to known only if it is adequately supported by other non-testimonial sources of knowledge. If, for instance, one held that inference to the best explanation was a source of knowledge, then a possible reductionist position is that one knows by testimony that p only if the best explanation for the fact that one was told p is that p is true. This debate is fascinating but it would take us too far afield from our current purposes to discuss it any further.18 Let us look at a general account of testimonial knowledge that is acceptable to both reductionists and anti-reductionists. Sanford Goldberg provides such an account, which we will assume is correct for the purpose of the ensuing argument. His account is thus: A has testimonial knowledge-that p if and only if (A) A knows that p; (B) There is a speaker S whom A observed to offer testimony on occasion O, such that the proposition that p was understood by A to be presented-as-true in S’s testimony on O; and (C) A’s knowledge-that p depends for its status as knowledge on both (i) the reliability of S’s testimony on O, as well as (ii) A’s epistemic right to rely on that testimony.19

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In the following cases we assume that condition B is true, S’s testimony on occasion O is reliable, A has an epistemic right to rely on that testimony, and A retains the information that S communicates. We discuss two kinds of cases: cases in which knowledge is transmitted from speaker to hearer and cases in which it is not transmitted. In the cases in which knowledge is transmitted all of Goldberg’s conditions are met. In the cases in which knowledge is not transmitted, S does not have knowledge of the testified proposition. In these cases, (A) and (C) are not true, even though the other features of Goldberg’s account are present, viz., condition B is true, S’s testimony on occasion O is reliable, A has an epistemic right to rely on that testimony, and A retains the information that S communicates. Goldberg’s account of testimonial knowledge is straightforwardly extended to knowledge-wh; change the knowledge verb and replace ‘p’ with an embedded question. In the cases below we apply that account to knowledge-wh without comment.

5.2.2  The problem Consider the following two sentences. (2) Hannah knows how Obama will govern.20 (3) Hannah knows how to ride a bike. (2) attributes to Hannah non-infinitival knowledge-how. (3) attributes to Hannah practical knowledge. As we observed in the first section (2) implies that Hannah has propositional knowledge about how Obama will govern, whereas (3) naturally expresses the thought that Hannah has the ability to ride a bike.21 The difference between (2) and (3) can be seen in the following pairs of inferences, the first of which is good and the second is bad.

Good (4) Bill knows how Obama will govern. (5) Bill tells Hannah how Obama will govern. So, (6) Hannah knows how Obama will govern.

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Good invokes a routine way of coming to know on the basis of testimony. We may stipulate that Goldberg’s conditions on testimonial knowledge are satisfied. Condition (A) is satisfied because Hannah comes to know how Obama will govern. Condition (B) is satisfied because (5) is true and Hannah understands what Bill said as presented-as-true. Condition (C) is satisfied because Hannah’s knowledge depends on (i) the reliability of Bill’s testimony and (ii) Hannah’s epistemic right to rely on that testimony. Cases of NIK transfer from testimony are widespread. Hence, Good is a good inference. Compare Good with the following inference.

Bad (7) Bill knows how to ride a bike. (8) Bill tells Hannah how to ride a bike. So, (9) Hannah knows how to ride a bike. Bad is a bad inference. It is not a normal way of acquiring practical knowledge. We stipulate that nothing odd occurs when Bill tells Hannah how to ride a bike. As with Good, all the features of the testimonial act are present apart from the testimonial recipient acquiring knowledge. There is a reliable speaker, Bill, who Hannah observes to offer testimony on occasion O, such that the propositions expressed by Bill are understood by Hannah to be presented-as-true on occasion O. Hannah has an epistemic right to rely on that testimony. Moreover, Hannah understands and retains the information that Bill communicates. But Hannah does not come to know how to ride a bike merely on the basis of Bill’s testimony. While Hannah does not acquire practical knowledge on the basis of hearing and accepting what Bill says, it is plausible that Hannah thereby acquires deontic infinitival knowledge. That is, Hannah comes to know how one ought to ride a bike. But, as we explained above, deontic IK is not at issue in the debate over intellectualism. The difference between Good and Bad remains even if we suppose that in both cases Bill attempts to transfer the knowledge via demonstration. Suppose Bill tells Hannah how Obama will govern by elaborate pantomime. He moves this way and that, gestures thus

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and so, walks around the room in such a manner, and so on. Hannah understands what is communicated through this demonstration and retains it. Bill is reliable and Hannah has a right to reply on Bill’s testimony. Hannah comes to know how Obama will govern. But if Bill tells Hannah how to ride a bike by an elaborate demonstration, then Hannah won’t thereby come to know how to ride a bike. The transfer of practical knowledge does not work like that. It is a datum that Good is good and Bad is bad. The explanation for why Good is good is that propositional knowledge can be transferred by a speech act. It is a kind of cognitive success that can be transferred from person to person by a simple speech act. Bill knows how Obama will govern in virtue of knowing that Obama’s policies are thus and so and that given such and such opportunities, Obama will govern thusly. Bill is thus in a position to transfer this knowledge by speech. Bad, though, involves a kind of knowledge which is not easily transmitted by a speech act. The cognitive success in this case isn’t simply transferred by a telling. In virtue of knowing how to ride a bike, Bill has a grasped a skilled way of acting. While he tells Hannah that one rides a bike upright, moving forward, and properly balanced, he is unable to transfer this practical knowledge by a speech act. Bill cannot transfer this practical knowledge by a speech act because the transfer of this knowledge involves the acquisition of a skill.22 Transferring skill-based knowledge requires more than a speech act. Indeed, as Alva Noe says, ‘As a general rule, skills aren’t acquired all at once, in a fell swoop. They’re built up or acquired gradually.’23 The crucial difference between knowledge-that and non-deontic infinitival knowledge is that propositional knowledge can, as a general rule, be transferred in one fell swoop but practical knowledge cannot. We look at challenges to this claim below, but before that, let us examine some further supporting evidence. What we see in the following is even stronger evidence that practical knowledge stands apart from knowledge-wh. This is remarkable because Stanley’s main argument for (INT) proceeds on the basis of treating practical knowledge as an instance of knowledge-wh. If our argument in the following is correct, then knowledge-wh has the same causal profile with respect to knowledge transfer as does knowledgethat. Practical knowledge, though, has a distinctive causal profile.

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Before we proceed further, let us set to the side a potential objection to (†). The objection is that there are some cases in which practical knowledge is easily transferred. These are cases in which a subject has preexisting practical knowledge that is then applied to a new case. Consider the following example. John is an expert fisherman and, among other things, he knows how to tie many different knots. There is a specific knot he has heard about – the Bimini Twist – and he wants to learn how to tie this knot. He asks Sam and Sam tells him how to tie the Bimini Twist. It is plausible that John acquires some new practical knowledge from Sam’s testimony. John comes to know for the first time how to tie a Bimini Twist. This is not an objection to (†) because it is a case of a general skill being applied to a specific novel case. On our view what happens is this. John knows how to tie knots. He learns from Sam how one ought to tie the Bimini Twist, and given his general knot tying practical knowledge, he can successfully implement his new propositional knowledge of how one ought to tie the Bimini Twist. (†) is consistent with some atypical cases of non-deontic IK being transferred by testimony. The explanation of the knot tying example extends to these cases: a general skill is present that, given some new propositional knowledge, is applied to a new instance of the general skill. So, while the objection is right that sometimes practical knowledge is transferred by testimony, this is never the case of completely new practical knowledge. This is in contrast to propositional knowledge. One can come to know a completely new fact on the basis of testimony; one cannot come to know a completely new skill on the basis of testimony.24

5.2.3  Knowledge-wh and testimonial transfer The goodness of Good holds for other kinds of knowledge-wh. Consider the following instances of knowledge-wh that Stanley mentions. 1 (a) John knows whether Mary came to the party.

(b) John knows why Obama won. (c) Hannah knows what Obama will do in office. (d) Hannah knows who Obama is.

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(e) Hannah knows what she is pointing to. (f) Hannah knows how Obama will govern. (g) Hannah knows why to vote for Obama.25 Each of these kinds of knowledge-wh can be transferred by a single speech act. Hannah knows who Obama is. Hannah tells Bill who Obama is. Thus, Bill knows who Obama is. Or, Hannah knows what she is pointing to. Hannah tells Bill what she is pointing to. So, Bill knows what Hannah is pointing to. It is a remarkable feature of knowledge-wh that it, like knowledge-that, permits easy transfer by testimony. Practical knowledge does not. This difference in causal profiles is strong evidence that practical knowledge is not propositional knowledge. It might be countered that what explains the difficulty of transferring practical knowledge is that it is a particularly complex instance of propositional knowledge. Just as one cannot teach topology in one class, so too one cannot transfer practical knowledge concerning bike riding on the basis of a brief conversation. Let us put some flesh on this proposal. The thought predicts that we should find other instances of knowledge-wh or knowledge-that that are not easily transferred. Before we consider that directly, let us consider objectual knowledge. Objectual knowledge is the kind of knowledge present when we say ‘Terence Tao knows topology’. Tao’s knowledge of the mathematical field of topology is superior to that of most other mathematicians. Does a corresponding inference hold for objectual knowledge?

Questionable (10)  Tao knows topology. (11)  Tao tells Smith about topology. So, (12) Smith knows topology. Premise (11) is ambiguous between (11a) Tao tells Smith all about topology and (11b) Tao tells Smith something about topology.26 If (11) is understood as (11b) then the inference is not good but need not concern us because objectual knowledge requires the communication of core truths. Smith cannot come to know topology on the basis of being told merely that topology concerns the mathematical study of space. So the inference that concerns us is the following:

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Questionableʹ (10) Tao knows topology. (11a) Tao tells Smith all about topology. So, (12) Smith knows topology. The evaluation of this inference is not straightforward because Tao knows topology better than most. Tao is a world-renowned expert, a Fields Medalist. Tao knows because he has accumulated knowledge of many truths about topology but also has keen insight and skill. If Tao tells Smith all about topology then Smith will come to know topology, but Smith will not know as well as Tao. Once we control for this fact, the inference is good. Tao is able to transfer objectual knowledge via speech even if he cannot transfer the complete strength of this knowledge. Objectual knowledge is complex knowledge but here too it stands apart from pure practical knowledge. Consider the complex skill of a triple Axel.

Spurious (13) Smith knows how to perform a triple Axel. (14) Smith tells Jones how to perform a triple Axel. So, (15) Jones knows how to perform a triple Axel. Spurious is parallel to Questionable, but, whereas Tao telling Smith about topology can give Smith some knowledge of topology, Smith telling Jones how to perform a triple Axel does nothing to give Jones practical knowledge, that is non-deontic IK. Jones can, though, come to acquire deontic IK on this basis. When Smith tells Jones how to perform a triple Axel, Jones learns how one ought to perform the triple Axel. Smith’s new deontic IK, however, doesn’t give him the crucial practical knowledge. He needs something more than being told what to do. The same pattern holds for complex instances of propositional knowledge. Sam knows that all non-trivial zeros of the zeta function have as real part 1/2. Sam tells Jones this. Assuming that Jones understands what is said (he understands the concepts expressed)

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Jones comes to know this. So the difference in learning is not a result of complexity. A second line of response highlights the role of understanding and retaining what is communicated in testimony.27 In all of the cases I’ve assumed that the hearer accepts what is communicated by the testifier. But one might respond that in the failures of practical knowledge to transfer the hearer either does not understand what is communicated or does not retain this information. If, for instance, Hannah understands and retains what Bill communicated then, plausibly, Hannah understands how to ride a bike. And if she understands how to ride a bike then she knows how to ride a bike. Two points undermine this objection. First, corresponding to the distinction between deontic IK (knowing how one ought to φ) and non-deontic IK (knowing how to φ), there is a distinction between deontic understanding-how (understanding how one ought to φ) and non-deontic understanding-how (understanding how to φ). It is plausible that Hannah acquires deontic IK upon understanding and retaining Bill’s testimony about how to ride a bike. That is, Hannah learns from Bill how one ought to ride a bike. Mutatis mutandis, it is plausible that Hannah acquires deontic understanding-how; Hannah understands how one ought to ride a bike. The question is whether Hannah acquires non-deontic understanding-how and this is the same as the question whether she acquires practical knowledge. Second, given that deontic IK is easily transferred, it is implausible that the failure of non-deontic IK to transfer is attributable to a lack of grasping the content of what is communicated. If the objection is that there are practical concepts that Hannah lacks and so she doesn’t understand what is communicated then the objections faces two problems: first, it incorrectly predicts that Hannah does not acquire deontic IK; and second, it predicts that (†) is true because the crucial concepts involved in non-deontic IK cannot easily be transferred by testimony. Thus, this saves intellectualism only to recreate the old distinction between know-how and know-that at the level of concepts. A final line of resistance to our argument invokes practical modes of presentation. On Stanley’s account there is a ready explanation for the failure of practical knowledge to transfer via testimony. Practical knowledge requires that the subject entertain the proposition w is

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a way to φ under a practical mode of presentation. Bill knows how to ride a bike in virtue of knowing that w is a way to ride a bike, for some contextually relevant way w, and Bill mentally hosts w by a practical mode of presentation. The nature of a practical mode of presentation is unclear, but how it functions in Stanley’s account is not unclear.28 A practical mode of presentation is the component of the content of propositional knowledge that explains why one person can successfully act on some knowledge but another person cannot. Jill may know lots of truths about how to play a piano, but she might be unable to play because she does not entertain the relevant proposition under an appropriate practical mode of presentation. This also explains why Bad is bad. Practical modes of presentation cannot be transferred by speech acts. One must host the practical mode of presentation for oneself. Stanley observes that his more sophisticated account of a proposition involving practical modes of presentation ‘explains why learning a fact is not always something one can do by reading a book’.29 Stanley motivates the need for a practical mode of presentation by an in-depth development of de se knowledge. De se knowledge is the kind of knowledge present in infinitival constructions like ‘John expects to win the race.’ It is commonly assumed in the linguistics literature that such infinitival constructions involve an unpronounced pronoun PRO which is the subject of the embedded clause ‘to win the race’. For example, ‘John expects PRO to win the race.’ In this case John himself is the referent of PRO. Moreover, John must pick out himself using a de se thought. Consider, for instance, that John picks out some guy on video as a fast runner and he thinks that that guy will win the race. Yet unknown to John he himself is that guy. Then the sentence ‘John expects to win the race’ is false. So, if that sentence is true, then John has the de se thought that he himself will win. We bypass the details of the interpretation of PRO.30 The crucial points are that (1) the infinitive clauses in question attribute de se knowledge to the subjects by means of their unpronounced pronoun, (2) de se knowledge requires a special mode of presentation of the self to oneself, and (3) sentences attributing practical knowledge include an unpronounced pronoun. (1), (2), and (3) provide the ground for Stanley to maintain that practical knowledge is not transferable.

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If practical knowledge is a kind of de se knowledge and de se knowledge isn’t transferable by testimony, then practical knowledge isn’t transferable. So, Stanley’s approach has resources to resist the line we have been pushing. To be clear, Stanley’s response is that the difference in causal profile between practical knowledge and propositional knowledge is expected given that the former is a special kind of de se knowledge. Thus, on Stanley’s view the truth of (†) does not provide evidence that practical knowledge is non-propositional. In the next section, we evaluate whether this response succeeds.

5.3  De se knowledge 5.3.1  Stanley’s account Stanley’s account of a practical knowledge fits more generally within an account of knowledge de se. Practical knowledge, on his view, is first-person knowledge. ‘It is knowledge about oneself, or knowledge de se.’31 As noted above, the connection between practical knowledge and de se knowledge comes from the fact that there is an unpronounced pronoun PRO in infinitival constructions like ‘John expects PRO to win the race.’ If the referent of PRO involves de se knowledge, then, by parallel reasoning, one would expect that the referent of PRO in an infinitival construction as ‘John knows how PRO to ride a bike’ also to involve de se knowledge. Consequently, there is a strong linguistic connection between de se knowledge and practical knowledge. De se knowledge is not transferable via testimony. Suppose John has de se knowledge that he himself is seated. John cannot transfer this knowledge by testimony. John may tell you ‘I am seated’, and you will thereby acquire knowledge that John is seated. But the knowledge you acquire is not the knowledge John possesses. De se knowledge is only about oneself. If de se knowledge is propositional then we have a good case of propositional knowledge that is not transferable via testimony.32 We assume for the sake of argument that something like Stanley’s Fregean account of de se knowledge in his Chapter 3 ‘PRO and the Representation of First-Person Thought’

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is correct.33 On this account de se knowledge is propositional; the subject position of the proposition involves a special way of thinking about oneself. This special way – the de se way – is not behaviourally inert; it entails a complex disposition to act in certain ways towards oneself.34 Thus, Stanley provides us with a model of propositional knowledge that has the right kind of features for explaining why (†) is compatible with (INT). De se knowledge isn’t transferable by testimony because it involves an intimate way of thinking of oneself that entails a complex disposition.

5.3.2  Is practical knowledge de se knowledge? Three problems For our purposes we can ignore the linguistic details of Stanley’s account of de se knowledge. The question that concerns us is whether the properties of practical knowledge are properties of de se knowledge. We contend that there are three differences between de se knowledge and practical knowledge that undermine Stanley’s attempt to subsume practical knowledge under de se knowledge. First, de se knowledge is only contingently related to a complex disposition whereas practical knowledge is necessarily related to a complex disposition. Second, de se knowledge cannot be transferred via testimony whereas practical knowledge can be transferred (even though, it is not normally done so). Third, de se knowledge is necessarily individual knowledge whereas practical knowledge may be group knowledge.

De se knowledge, practical knowledge, and dispositions Let us examine the first difference between Stanley’s account of de se knowledge and practical knowledge. Stanley makes the following connections: (i) de se knowledge involves a special first-person way of thinking about oneself and (ii) this special first-person way of thinking about oneself requires a certain disposition which we may call the ‘first-person regarding disposition’. Concerning (ii) Stanley writes,

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To think of an object in the world as oneself is to possess certain dispositions involving that object in the world. If that object in the world is cold, one will clothe it; if it is wet one will dry it; etc. In general, one thinks of an object in the world as oneself if and only if one treats it in a first-person way.35 Is it true that the special first-person way of thinking constitutively involves a complex disposition to act in the ‘first-person way’ to oneself? We do not think so for the following reason. It is possible that an individual think of herself in the first-person way without taking this first-person way to be a source of reasons. Imagine a thoroughly convinced utilitarian that acts only if her action is optimific. She may have de se knowledge that she is cold and hungry but this does not dispose her at all to clothe or feed herself as such. Rather she has the disposition to clothe and feed a person only if she judges that act to be the best. This possibility shows that the connection between a first-person way of thinking and a first-person regarding disposition is contingent. In contrast, though, the connection between knowing how to ride a bike and having a certain complex bike riding disposition is not contingent. Whether or not a person has the ability to ride (perhaps all the bikes are annihilated), anyone who knows how to ride has a complex disposition regarding bike riding.

The impossibility of shared de se knowledge The second difference between de se knowledge and practical knowledge lies in the fact that it is metaphysically impossible to transfer de se knowledge. De se knowledge is not simply difficult to transfer by testimony because it involves a complex disposition whose acquisition normally requires practice. Rather it falls out of the nature of de se knowledge that it cannot be shared. A subject has de se knowledge only if it is about that very subject. A distinct subject cannot have another subject’s de se knowledge. In contrast, practical knowledge can be shared. Two people can have the same practical knowledge. We know how to determine whether two formula of firstorder predicate logic are equivalent. We can teach this to my students so that they too know how to do this. While it requires practice on their part, once they acquire this skill we have the same practical

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knowledge. It ought not fall out of the account of practical knowledge that it is metaphysically impossible to share practical knowledge.

The possibility of group know-how The third difference between de se knowledge and practical knowledge concerns the metaphysics of knowledge. De se knowledge is a kind of knowledge that only involves a single subject; it cannot be had by a plural subject. Two distinct individuals cannot both host a single first-person way of thinking. It is perfectly sensible to say ‘John has de se knowledge that he is married.’ Yet it does not make sense to say that ‘John and Jane have de se knowledge that they are married.’ Each may know in the de se way that he/she is married, but there is no plural de se way of knowing. That there isn’t this way falls out of the nature of de se knowledge. In contrast, practical knowledge can have plural subjects. The New York Giants know how to win football games. Fred and Kelly know how to throw a good party. The Ivy League colleges know how to educate their students. In these cases each member of the group knows something that contributes to unique group knowledge. For example, Fred knows something about hosting a good party and Kelly knows the rest. If each organized a party on their own it would be mundane. But together they host an extraordinary soirée. That is why Fred and Kelly know how to throw a party without each individual possessing this practical knowledge. Examples of practical knowledge had by plural subjects are easily multiplied. Indeed, Alexander Bird considers the following sentence a common example of de-personalized knowledge: ‘North Korea knows how to make an atomic bomb.’36 Bird argues that there is group knowledge, including group know-how, that is not irreducible to the members of the group. Why is it common to attribute know-how to groups? It appears to reside in the fact that groups have complex dispositions, among which are dispositions to achieve certain goals. The Giants are disposed to win a football game, Fred and Kelly (together) have a complex disposition to throw a good party, and The Ivy League colleges have the disposition to educate their students. Groups achieve ends that are not achieved by their members.37 When the Giants defeat the Broncos, Eli Manning doesn’t defeat the Broncos. The Giants may win in spite of Eli. What

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is probative here is the fact that groups exhibit goal directed complex dispositions in virtue of which we attribute practical knowledge. If these attributions are true, practical knowledge cannot be de se knowledge. Given the widespread use and naturalness of such attributions together with the fact that groups have goal directed dispositions, an account of practical knowledge should not rule out that such attributions are true.

5.3.3 Summary We have examined three reasons for thinking that practical knowledge is different than de se knowledge. Thus, Stanley’s attempt to explain how (†) is compatible with (INT) doesn’t succeed. We are left with the original cases as examples in which practical knowledge has a distinct causal profile from both knowledge-that and knowledge-wh. Consequently, there is a firm basis for thinking that practical knowledge is non-propositional.

5.4  Concluding remarks We have defended the claim that the properties of knowledge-how are different from the properties of knowledge-that by examining the connection with knowledge transfer. This chapter gives us further reason to endorse the distinctness of knowledge-how. Knowledgehow involves a factive cognitive relation that cannot simply be transferred by communication. It is a unique kind of practical success.

5.5 Further reading ●●

Goldman, A. and Blanchard, T. (2016). Social epistemology. In Zalta, E. N., editor, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Summer 2016 edition

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Hawley, K. (2010). Testimony and knowing how. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 41:397–404

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Hills, A. (2009). Moral testimony and moral epistemology. Ethics, 120:94–127

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Lackey, J. (2008a). Learning from Words: Testimony as a Source of Knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press

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Poston, T. (2016). Know how to transmit knowledge? Noûs, 50(4):865–78

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Stanley, J. (2011b). Knowing (how). Noûs, 45(2):207–38

5.6  Study questions 1 What is the difference between infinitival and non-infinitival

know-how? 2 What is the difference between deontic and non-deontic

know-how? 3 How do reductionists about testimonial knowledge differ from

non-reductionists? 4 What is de se knowledge? 5 What is a practical mode of presentation, and can a practical

mode of presentation be transferred by a speech act? Explain.

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6 Knowledge-how and knowledge of language

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very person knows a language. While this knowledge is so ubiquitous it passes by without much notice, it is nonetheless an astonishing accomplishment. Each competent speaker can utter a complex, structured sequence of sounds or written signs without explicit deliberation. Yet only a few competent speakers know rules that govern these sequences. A central task for the philosophy of language is to explain what linguistic competence consist in. The classic Lockean theory of linguistic competence is one of translation. Persons have thoughts, and then they learn how to translate thought into language. The Lockean theory takes for granted a person’s competence to think. On this view, natural languages are expressions of an inner language of thought. The Lockean view suggests that that people have an innate knowledge of the inner language. This knowledge includes knowledge of meaning as well as knowledge of well-structured thoughts, that is knowledge of grammar. The goal of this chapter is to explore the nature of knowledge of language and its connection with the nature of knowledge-how. After an initial section that identifies the phenomenon of linguistic competence, we take up the question whether the ability to speak and understand a natural language is properly thought of as a kind of knowledge. Then we analyse some arguments for thinking that if linguistic competence is knowledge, it is propositional knowledge. Finally, we examine arguments that linguistic competence is not propositional knowledge but practical knowledge.

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Our overall conclusion in this chapter is that linguistic competence is a kind of knowledge and that propositional knowledge is a crucial part of this knowledge, but knowledge of language is not identified with propositional knowledge. Linguistic competence requires a cognitive grasp of a non-propositional structure, namely, a language. Thus, linguistic competence provides further grounds for our antiintellectualist view of knowledge-how.

6.1  What is linguistic competence? A speaker of a language is competent to use that language. What is the nature of this competence? Several years ago, Ted was visiting Kusadasi, Turkey looking for a Hereke rug, an elaborate handwoven rug made from fine silk with a typical count of 500 stitches per square inch. The guide drove him to a factory in the countryside where hereke carpets were made. He was treated to Turkish coffee, Turkish delights, and a lovely tour of the facility with a fine explanation of the various stages of carpet design. The factory’s tour guide spoke perfectly clear, understandable English and yet whenever anyone asked the guide a question the manager would step up and answer the question. When the tour was finished, the manager asked the group to congratulate the guide for the excellent tour. The manager then explained that the guide had memorized the entire spoken content of the tour and doesn’t understand a word of English. The tour guide is an example of the distinction between the ability to use a language and the ability to understand a language. The guide merely uses English by parroting back words without grasping what she is doing by uttering those words language. To be sure, the guide knows that by uttering some sounds she provides some information to people but she lacks an appreciation for how the particular sounds she recites contributes to the goal of providing information. This is in marked contrast to a natural speaker who understands a language. Every natural speaker knows how her words contribute to the goal of providing information. The distinction between mere ability and competence can be unpacked by examining what a person with competence can do that a person with just mere ability cannot do.1

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Barry Smith offers several examples of linguistic competence.2 First, consider the following sentences. (1) John is easy to please. (2) John is eager to please. (1) and (2) are nearly identical, save for the difference that (1) contains ‘easy’ whereas (2) contains ‘eager’. Yet natural speakers of English will accept (1’) It is easy to please John as an acceptable rearrangement of (1). Yet no natural speaker will accept (2’) It is eager to please John as an acceptable restatement of (2). What explains this fact about native speakers of English? Part of the explanation must appeal to a speaker’s knowledge that (1) and (2) have different underlying structure. This explains native speakers know that (1ʹ) is an acceptable restatement of (1) whereas (2ʹ) is just ungrammatical. This knowledge is part of linguistic competence. There are numerous examples of linguistic competence that a theory of competence should explain. Consider the fact that simple inductive projections from certain pairs of sentences would be entirely misleading about the meaning other sentences and yet children are able to effortlessly see the differences between such sentences. For example, the following pair of sentences (3) John ate an apple. and (4) John ate. is treated differently than this pair. (5) John is too clever to catch Peter. (6) John is too clever to catch.

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If linguistic competence were gained by the use of straight-rule induction on (3) and (4), one would expect that (6) would mean that John, himself, is too clever to catch any person. But, in fact, (6) means something entirely different, namely that John is too clever for anyone to catch him. How is it that children are able to pick up on these differences? What do they know that enables them to realize that the shift in meaning from (5) to (6) is completely different than the shift from (3) to (4)? A theory of linguistic competence must answer these questions. There are other examples of inductive projections that are misleading. Simple word inversions turn declarative statements into questions. For instance,   (7) Peter is asleep. can be turned into a question by moving the second word of the sentence:   (8) Is Peter asleep? But no child will attempt to move the second word of the following sentence in an effort to turn it into a question.   (9) The man is laughing. (10)* Man the is laughing? Children hit on the fact that it’s not simply the second word of a sentence that is relevant, but that it is the verb ‘is’ that is the relevant item to invert. But then as in (7) and (8) if the child generalized on the first occurrence of ‘is’ we’d expect the following: (11) The man who is laughing is silly. (12)* Is the man who laughing is silly?3 What we see in these cases is that children appear to come equipped with an ability to pick up on relevant semantic structure that is not available by projection from the linguistic data. In (9) they know that ‘the man’ is the subject of the sentence and ‘is’ the main verb, and thus they know that by simple word inversion they can form

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a question. Moreover, this knowledge extends to more complex structures as in (11). Facts like these lead linguistics and philosophers to try to account for our natural ability to understand language. B. F. Skinner proposed in the 1950s that our ability to learn a language was based on simple empiricist principles, namely, the principle that basic knowledge comes from observation and the inferential principle that this knowledge is extended by straight-rule induction.4 For an empiricist, like Skinner, there is no source of knowledge apart from observation. Observation can be extended by repeated exposure to the same stimuli. For example, if you see 98 black ravens and no ravens of a different colour, then you can ‘project’ this pattern to all cases and thus come to have reason to accept that all ravens are black. This projection of the observed pattern to all cases is called ‘straight-rule’ (or, enumerative) induction because it extends the observed pattern in a simple (straight) way to the unobserved cases. Skinner applies this empiricist methodology to learning a language. A child is first exposed to many instances of linguistically correct formula and then, using straight-rule induction, extrapolated these data to form new sentences. Over time, Skinner reasoned, the child would come to master the rules for generating language. Noam Chomsky’s 1959 review of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior shattered Skinner’s empiricist account of language learning.5 Chomsky pointed out that a child’s data for language learning are too sparse to enable a reconstruction of the rules of a language. A child is not exposed to enough instances of linguistically correct expressions to be able to project the grammatical rules required for knowledge of a language. Chomsky’s ‘paucity of data’ argument shows that the child must come equipped with something innate that predisposes him to acquire a language. Chomsky theorized that children have an innate universal grammar that is able to generate one of several specific grammars given exposure to very limited data from some natural language.6 After Chomsky much attention has focused on the nature of this innate language learning device. Chomsky often refers to this as ‘knowledge of language’, but, as we will discuss in the next section, it is not uncontroversial whether this innate language learning device is aptly described as ‘knowledge of language’. It is clear, though, that simple straight-rule induction will

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not suffice to explain linguistic competence. We now turn to whether this competence is correctly thought of as knowledge.

6.2  Is linguistic competence knowledge? In this section we examine arguments from Michael Dummett and Richard Heck that linguistic competence is knowledge. As we saw in the previous section, linguistic competence is a complex ability that a speaker has which enables her to form grammatically correct sentences and to avoid certain kinds of ‘projectable’ errors. We begin with Michael Dummett’s influential argument that linguistic competence is knowledge and then we turn to Richard Heck’s argument that semantic competence is knowledge. We take these arguments to show that linguistic competence is knowledge and involves some propositional knowledge, but, crucially, these arguments leave the nature of knowledge of language is left open. That is, even though these arguments imply that linguistic competence requires propositional knowledge, the arguments to do not suggest that propositional knowledge exhausts linguistic competence.

6.2.1  Dummett’s arguments Dummett offers two arguments that linguistic competence is knowledge. The first argument reasons from the rational nature of linguistic acts.7 The second argument relies on an unappreciated distinction between linguistic competence and a purely practical ability. In the final subsection, we consider Dummett’s discussion of the idea that knowledge of language is a kind of implicit knowledge.

Dummett’s first argument A linguistic act is an assertion, an exclamation or a question. Linguistic acts are subject to certain norms. When a speaker says ‘The sky is blue’ on a patently glorious day we can wonder why she said something that is obvious to everyone. When an assertion appears to have no point, we can ask the speaker what her motive or

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intention was in making such an assertion. Robert Stalnaker argues that the goal of assertion is to eliminate possibilities that are live in the communicative context.8 If ‘the sky is blue’ is common ground between the speaker and the hearer, asserting it does not eliminate any live possibilities and so it is pointless. If the hearer recognizes that the speaker must have had a point, then she must find some other interpretation for the assertion than the patently obvious one. Perhaps the speaker thought that the conversation had become so absurd that only the most obvious assertion would bring the group back to reality. If such is the case, then the speaker’s utterance makes sense whether or not we agree that it was the best means to such an end. This feature of linguistic acts implies that linguistic acts are rational. Linguistic acts differ from other things a person may do which are not rational. A person may uncontrollably sneeze thereby interrupting an important conversation, yet we do not rightly ask for the person’s reason for the sneeze. The sneeze was not rational. It is not the kind of thing for which we ask a speaker’s motive or intention. The rational nature of linguistic acts permits us to ask about a speaker’s motive or intention in performing a given linguistic act. Dummett reasons that any intention or motive must be based on knowledge.9 Dummett explains that an intention or motive ‘cannot relate to anything the agent did not know about the character, significance, or likely effects of the action’.10 Let us think about this claim. Suppose you intend to call up an old friend, but you do not know his phone number. Even so, in virtue of intending to call you know a way to call, a way that is successful once you possess your friend’s phone number. The information you lack is the actual number to dial, but you know that you can reach a person on the phone by calling. Similarly, consider the assertion above that ‘The sky is blue’. In this case we imagined that the person’s motive was to bring conversation back to reality by uttering an obvious truth. The speaker’s motive required that she knew the meanings of the words she was uttering. Consider a different case of a person at the outset of learning a foreign language. This person cannot have certain intentions; such as the intention to bring a conversation back to reality when she doesn’t understand the conversation. Intentions require knowledge.

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Dummett supports the claim that ‘an intention or motive in performing an action is always based upon knowledge’ by considering the distinction between a mere practical ability and knowledge-how. The sense of ‘mere practical ability’ here is stipulative. Dummett explains that a person with a mere practical ability to φ lacks an adequate conception what she is doing when φ-ing. Suppose that a person, McEar, has the mere practical ability to wiggle his ears. McEar has never noticed that he has this ability. It turns out that whenever he chews gum, his ears wiggle. There is a sense in which McEar has the mere practical ability to wiggle his ears. As Dummett says, ‘A mere practical ability does not … provide sufficient grounding for a purpose or intention, because one may be able to do something without knowing how one does it.’11 In our case it is clear that that McEar cannot intend to wiggle his ears. If you promise to give McEar a large prize to wiggle his ears he cannot bring that about. Moreover, given his ignorance of his ability, he cannot intend to perform some action that results in ear wiggling. So, it is difficult to see how, apart from so relevant knowledge, McEar could have the relevant intention. Dummett’s analysis provides a simple argument that linguistic competence requires knowledge. The argument from the rationality of linguistic acts 1 Linguistic acts are intentional. 2 Intentional acts requires knowledge.

So, 3 Linguistic acts require knowledge.

This argument does not specify the kind of knowledge required for intentional acts. In the above examples we’ve seen that intentional acts require some propositional knowledge. To intend to wiggle his ears, McEar must know that there is some way that he can wiggle. To intend to communicate by uttering ‘The sky is blue’, the speaker must know that her words have a certain meaning. Yet in both cases there is also relevant knowledge-how. McEar must know how to wiggle. The speaker in the ridiculous conversation must know how to engage her interlocutors. Dummett’s argument provides grounds

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for thinking that a theory of linguistic competence must advert to a speaker’s knowledge and that this includes some propositional knowledge, but it does not provide grounds for distinguishing between an intellectualist or anti-intellectualist account of linguistic competence. The crucial question for such accounts is whether linguistic competence is a species of propositional knowledge. We can conclude from Dummett’s argument that knowledge (including propositional knowledge) is a necessary condition for linguistic competence. It does not yield the conclusion that knowledge is sufficient for linguistic competence. Consider the skill of riding a bike. Anyone who possesses this skill knows how to ride. Arguably, to know how to ride a bike requires that one has some relevant propositional knowledge about bike riding. One must know that the handle-bars control the direction of the bike and that the pedals turn the wheels. But it is clear that this propositional knowledge is not sufficient for the skill. One can know lots of facts about bikes and bike riding without knowing how to ride. The failure of sufficiency provides evidence that propositional knowledge is not explanatorily prior to the ability. The ability may explain the propositional knowledge. Dummett’s first argument does not show that either knowledge (in any form) or propositional knowledge is sufficient for linguistic competence. Let us turn to a second argument that Dummett offers concerning the relationship between knowledge and competence to see if it improves our argumentative position.

Dummett’s second argument Dummett’s second argument that linguistic competence is a kind of knowledge is intriguing for its suggestiveness. Dummett prefaces his discussion of knowledge of language by acknowledging that the distinction between ‘theoretical and practical knowledge (knowledgethat and knowledge-how) is far too crude to allow knowledge of a language to be located within it’.12 He proceeds to observe that some purely practical abilities – like the ability to swim – are ones in which it is possible to have an adequate conception of the ability even before one has the ability.13 One can know that this is a way to swim without knowing how to swim. Yet Dummett writes,

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By contrast, there is a clear sense in which it is only by learning a language that one can come by a knowledge of what it is to speak that language, just as it is only by learning how to play chess that one can come by a knowledge of what it is to play chess. Knowledge of a language is therefore not a pure example of a practical ability.14 The contrast Dummett draws between the ability to swim and the ability to speak a natural knowledge is pregnant. One can know that this is a way to swim without having the ability to swim. Yet no one can know that this is a way to comprehend a natural language without having the ability to use some natural language. This suggests that the connection between knowledge and linguistic competence is more intimate than is suggested by Dummett’s first argument, which only shows that knowledge is a necessary condition for linguistic competence. As we will see later in the chapter, use theorists of linguistic competence maintain that knowledge follows from linguistic competence but competence itself is not adequately described as knowledge. Dummett’s observation that the ability to understand a natural language does permit a distinction between having the ability and knowledge of the ability indicates that some knowledge constitutes linguistic competence. Let us attempt to formulate this argument more carefully. The argument from the failure of an independent perspective on linguistic competence 1 No one can have an adequate conception of linguistic

competence apart from having linguistic competence. 2 If no one can know what it is like to have an ability apart from

actually having that ability, then the ability is constituted by knowledge. So, 3 Knowledge constitutes linguistic competence.

Dummett does not argue for premise 2, but some such premise is needed to secure the desired conclusion. Is premise 2 true? Consider the phenomenological aspects of experience such as the icy feel of a cold winter’s night. For those of us who are blessed to live in a

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subtropical climate, the bitter chill of a winter’s night is unpleasant. Suppose someone has never experienced what it is like to face a stiff cold wind. She visits Calgary and suddenly become acquainted with this novel feel. Is it possible for her to have an adequate conception of what it is like to experience a cold north wind without having some relevant knowledge? It seems not. To be sure, she can lack adequate words to describe her experience, but in virtue of having the experience she has some such knowledge of it. She knows that this experience feels like this. She knows that this experience has this character. So, we may say that the ability to have certain kinds of phenomenal experiences constitutively involves some kind of knowledge. As with the first argument, this second argument does not tell us what kind of knowledge constitutes linguistic competence. It may be knowledge-how or it may be propositional knowledge. But like the case of knowledge of phenomenal feels its connection to abilities is tight. Dummett claims that a speaker’s linguistic competence ‘consists … in his knowing a theory of meaning for it’15 But he insists that this is a special kind of knowledge. He explains: It would be preposterous to be propelled by these considerations into attributing to speakers of a language an explicit knowledge of a theory of meaning for that language: obviously, they have no such knowledge. Knowing a language is a species of knowledge intermediate between pure practical knowledge and pure theoretical knowledge: it is a salient illustration of the crudity of the practical/theoretical dichotomy.16 Dummett earlier held that knowledge of language is a kind of implicit knowledge, a ‘knowledge which shows itself partly by manifestation of the practical ability, and partly by a readiness to acknowledge as correct a formulation of that which is known when it is presented.’17 Dummett now holds that this is mistaken because implicit knowledge does not explain linguistic competence.18 The core problem is that implicit knowledge is not represented and so cannot be a cause for the relevant ability. To explain linguistic competence one needs to find the relevant causes. The picture we get from Dummett is that linguistic competence is a special kind of knowledge that does not fit

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clearly into either the practical or theoretical distinction. We examine below several arguments to help us think more carefully about the nature of the knowledge that constitutes linguistic competence.

6.2.2  Heck’s argument Richard Heck argues that linguistic competence consists in semantic knowledge.19 Heck writes, ‘[A] competent human speaker’s understanding of her language consists, to a good first approximation, in her consciously knowing what utterances of sentences in that language do, or would, mean.’20 Heck’s central argument is that speech is a rational activity. This implies that the Quinean behaviourist conception of speech as a mere ability is incorrect. The picture we get from Heck reinforces the arguments we examined from Dummett.21 The view Heck offers is the cognitive conception of linguistic competence: ‘Understanding a language is … being able to determine what uttered sentences mean; better, it consists in the categorical ground of this ability, say, in tacit knowledge of semantic theory.’22 The main premise for this cognitive conception of linguistic competence is that speech is a rational activity. Speaking – uttering a specific sentence – is something that a person does. It is not something that happens to a person, like, having a coughing fit. It does not make sense to ask for a rational explanation for why one had the fit. A request for a casual explanation is sensible, but it will not be an explanation of something that the subject of the coughing fit did. Speaking, by contrast, does create the demand for rational explanation. When you utter the sentence ‘I have faith in you’ to your friend, it is important that you express the very thought that I have faith in my friend. The words you choose are intentional because you take them to express the appropriate thought.23 Heck claims that the rationality of speech underlies and is supported by conversational implicature. H. P. Grice observed that the sentences one utters may carry implicatures that are not part of the content of the specific sentences.24 Suppose a student needs to make a copy of some notes and she asks whether there is a copier in the philosophy department. If you say ‘Yes, there is’, you not only say that there is a

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copier, you implicate that the machine is in good working order. Heck argues that this phenomenon assumes that by uttering the sentence ‘Yes, there is a copier’ you do something. You use the utterance to say that there is a copier down the hall. Moreover, the student is entitled to assume that you wouldn’t have said that specific thing unless you believed that the copier was in good working order.25 The key point for Heck’s purposes is that implicature presumes that speech is rational. Heck’s point that speech is rational should be understood in the following way. When a person utters a sentence S the person acts on knowledge that S means that p. Heck is careful to observe that this knowledge need not be explicitly conscious. Much speech is non-reflective. When we talk with friends, we are not consciously deliberating about which words to use. As Heck observes, the phenomenon of non-explicit knowledge at work in rational action is widespread. When you go to the refrigerator and grab a beer, you are guided by your knowledge that there is beer in the fridge and your desire for a beer. Such knowledge is a crucial part of the rational explanation of your behaviour but it is not explicit. As we observed in Chapter 1, it is a caricature of the intellectualist view to suppose that acting on knowledge entails conscious deliberation. This non-explicit knowledge contrasts with someone who has the ability to swim. For some persons, the ability to swim is not rational in that one should not rightly hold a person to account for the moves they make in the water. When someone swims the crawl it needn’t be the case that they can explain what it is that they are doing; even though, in normal cases they can. They may not have conscious access to reasons for acting; in fact they may be employing routines in a basic way. Linguistic competence differs from the ability to swim in this respect. Even though swimming is intentional, it is not rational. In some cases (but not every case – think of Michael Phelps), it is not correct to hold a person to account for the moves they make while swimming. We get the following argument for the cognitive conception of linguistic competence. Heck’s argument 1 Speech is a rational activity.

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2 Every rational activity is guided by knowledge.

So, 3 Speech is guided by knowledge.

Heck then argues against the use theory of linguistic competence held by behaviourist like Skinner and Quine. Heck construes the use theory as the following: ‘understanding a language is simply a matter of being able to use it appropriately’.26 On a use theory, understanding the sentence ‘Snow is white’ amounts to being able to use it appropriately. Heck puts it this way: ‘semantic knowledge is not what constitutes understanding but something that flows from it’.27 The use theory of linguistic competence is not committed to denying that there is some categorical basis that explains the ability to use language. There must be something about the human mind that explains the ability to use language. The fact that the use theory is compatible with a categorical base that explains linguistic competence undermines one of Chomsky’s arguments against the use view. Chomsky argued that a native English speaker can suffer an injury that renders him unable to speak or understand English. The native speaker may suddenly recover this ability, and yet the native English speaker never had the ability to speak Cantonese. What explains this difference? Chomsky assumes that the use view of linguistic mastery should find the sudden recovery of an ability to speak English mysterious. But this implies that the use theory must deny that there’s some categorical basis that explains the ability to use a language. By contrast, the use view holds instead that the ability of use a language does not consist in one’s consciously knowing what its sentences mean. It is more like an ability to swim.28 The core of the use view of semantic competence is twofold: a negative claim and a positive claim. The negative claim is that linguistic competence is not a matter of antecedently having thoughts and then associating the thoughts with words. Use theorists find this picture puzzling because it presupposes semantic knowledge; one’s thoughts have content and then words and sentences acquire content by being used to express thoughts. The positive claim is that semantic competence consists in using sentences in appropriate settings. So, for instance, one understands the sentence that ‘it is raining’ just in case one tokens it in the presence of rain.

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Heck’s challenge to the use view is that speech is a rational form of action. A person utters a specific sentence, rather than another, because of her beliefs about what the sentence means. If the use theory were correct, then speech is an intentional activity but not a rational activity.29 Speech is thus more like swimming than playing chess.

6.3  Linguistic competence and the use theory of meaning We have seen above reasons for thinking that any adequate explanation of linguistic competence must appeal to propositional knowledge. A person who understands a language knows the grammatical rules for the language and knows that her terms mean such and such. In this section we explore an alternative conception of semantic competence in the use theory of meaning. A use theory of meaning has a negative and positive aspect. The negative aspect denies that meaning is an underived property of expression types. The positive aspect of the theory affirms that word-meaning is constituted by the way the expression type is used. Before we get into the details of the use theory, it is important to clarify the relationship between a theory of word-meaning and a theory of linguistic competence. A theory of linguistic competence addresses the question: what is it that a person has that enables them to understand a language? Theories of linguistic competence aim to specify the causal-cum-explanatory basis that enables a person to be linguistically competent. A fundamental divide between such theories is whether or not an adequate theory of linguistic competence must advert to underived semantic properties. Noam Chomksy’s famous theory of linguistic competence does posit basic semantic properties. These are internal symbols in the language of thought that mean such and such. As we will see, Paul Horwich’s theory does not. On Horwich’s view linguistic competence is a kind of knowledge-how, an ability to implicitly following meaning determining patterns of behaviour. The plan of this section is to layout these issues. We begin with a primer on the use theory of

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meaning, then we discuss the notion of implicit knowledge, next we explore the nature of the language faculty which is the causalcum-explanatory basis of linguistic competence, and finally we discuss some problems with the use theory of meaning.

6.3.1  A brief primer on the use theory of meaning The goal of a use theory of meaning is to specify the non-semantic properties of expression types in virtue of which they acquire specific semantic contents.30 For example, a use theory attempts to explain in non-semantic terms how the word ‘dog’ comes to mean DOG. At a more fundamental level, if there is a language of thought, then the goal of a use theory is to specify how the expressions in a language of thought come to have their specific meanings. The use theory begins with the idea that expression types do not have meanings intrinsically. The use theory continues to explain that an expression type gains its meaning by the way it is used. It is on account of the way ‘dog’ is used that that expression types acquires the power to refer to dogs. As natural as this thought may seem, there is a powerful objection to the use theory: a word has the use it does precisely because it means such and such. For instance, it is because ‘dog’ means dog that ‘dog’ is used in the presence of dogs. A large part of understanding the nature of the use theory goes into formulating it in response to this objection. Horwich formulates the core of the use theory of meaning as follows: The meaning of a word, w, is engendered by the non-semantic feature of w that explains w’s overall deployment. And this will be an acceptance-property of the following form: ‘that such-and-such w-sentences are regularly accepted in such-and-such circumstances’ is the idealized law governing w’s use is (by the relevant ‘experts’, given certain meanings attached to various other words).31 A key to understanding this view is what is it to accept a w-sentence in such and such circumstances. The use theory aims to offer a

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non-semantic theory of word-meaning and so an account of acceptance conditions cannot appeal to semantic notions. Consequently, it is not consistent with a use theory to hold the following: S accepts a w-sentence in circumstances c if and only if S believes that the w-sentence is true in c. This account of acceptance depends on a contentful mental state – namely, belief. A use theorist would then owe us a non-semantic account of the content of beliefs. Apart from an account of the content of belief, that view of acceptance conditions is a Lockean view of language learning. One’s words acquire the meanings they have because one learns to associate certain words with already contentful mental states. A use theory of meaning should not rely on any intensional notions and so an account of acceptance conditions should not appeal to notions such as belief, reference or intention.32 Horwich is concerned to rebut a widespread argument that acceptance is a semantic notion. That argument claims that to accept a sentence is to accept that the sentence is true. Consequently, a use theory cannot explain the semantic properties of words in terms of acceptance because to acceptance itself involves truth. Horwich argues, though, that the truth predicate can be eliminated. The meaning of the truth predicate is given by the T-schema (T) ‘p’ is true if and only if p.33 Thus to accept that a sentence s is true, is, on his view, just to accept s. Thus, the argument that acceptance is a semantic notion is undercut by a deflationist view of truth.34 Horwich then provides a positive consideration that acceptance is a non-semantic notion by specifying its functional role in terms of other physical, behavioural and semantic notions.35 He offers the following five principles that are aimed to offer a non-semantic functional characterization of acceptance. 1 For each observable fact O there is a sentence type ‘o’ such

that: O is instantiated in view of S if and only if S accepts ‘o’. 2 For each basic action type A there is a sentence type ‘a’ such

that: S does A if and only if S wants ‘a’. 3 The set of things S accepts conforms to principles of

consistency, simplicity and conservatism.

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4 S accepts ‘if p then q’ if and only if S is disposed to accept ‘q’

should he come to accept ‘p’. 5 If S wants ‘q’ and S accepts ‘if p then q’, then S wants ‘p’.36

Some such functional role needs to be defined because what one accepts will depend on what one observes and what one desires. In later work, Horwich characterizes acceptance by comparing it to Quine’s notion of ‘disposition to assent’ and Davidson’s notion of ‘holding true’ but without the commitment to behaviourism. The core notion of acceptance is ‘the psychological (but non-semantic) relation to a sentence that is manifested in our relying on it as a premise in theoretical and practical inference’.37 In later work, Horwich explains that an acceptance condition is a basic propensity to operate with words one way or another.38 It is a primitive fact that there are propensities to use certain word-types in such and such circumstances. It is important to note that Horwich is focused on the initial acquisition of word-meaning. It is certainly true that after a word has become established, it is no longer a primitive fact that that persons now use the word in certain ways. Rather on Horwich’s view, what is primitive is the basic propensities of initial word use.

6.3.2  Implicit knowledge As we just saw, Horwich explains word-meaning in terms of acceptance. The word ‘dog’ has its meaning because persons have a propensity to use ‘dog’ in such and such circumstances. In general a word w has its meaning in virtue of its use property – u(x). Yet in virtue of being linguistically competent one knows what one’s terms mean. But it is difficult to explain what it is to know the meaning of one’s terms without presupposing the very semantic knowledge at issue. On the one hand, it might seem that understanding of ‘dog’ involves knowing that ‘dog’ means DOG. But this knowledge is not sufficient because a person who speaks only German can know that ‘dog’ means DOG in virtue of knowing the convention to relate a word with its meaning by using quote marks and capitalization. Arguably, though, it is necessary to know that ‘dog’ means DOG to know the

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meaning of ‘dog’; but the necessity here is not one of explanatory priority. On the other hand, it may seem that understanding that ‘dog’ means DOG means knowing that ‘dog’ has some use property – u(x). But any such use property is subject to empirical confirmation or refutation and yet one who knows the meaning of ‘dog’ doesn’t require any confirmation from empirical study.39 Horwich is sensitive to this worry which he calls the ‘understanding constraint’. The constraint is that an adequate theory of word-meaning ‘must explain how facts about meaning can be known; for understanding a language involves knowing what its words mean’.40 Horwich’s reply to this dilemma is to deny the presupposition that knowledge of meaning is explicit knowledge. Horwich explains: No doubt we do ‘know’, in some sense, what our words mean. But there is no reason to presuppose … that this knowledge is explicit – that the propositions we know to be true are propositions that we articulate to ourselves either consciously or unconsciously. On the contrary, it is that very presupposition which is leading us into trouble. For the explicit knowledge that ‘dog’ means DOG is trivial and neither necessary nor sufficient for understanding. What we can and should suppose, rather, is that the knowledge … is implicit. … [T]he fact that the expert and hence communal deployment of ‘dog’ is the result of the word’s having use property ‘u(x)’, constitutes the fact that it means what it does – i.e., that it means DOG – in the communal language. If a community member’s deployment of the word results from the same property ‘u(x)’, then the meaning of ‘dog’ in his idiolect will be the same as its meaning in the communal language. He will then qualify as knowing implicitly what the word means, and thereby as understanding it. This explains why someone who works out explicitly (for the capitalizing convention) that ‘dog’ means DOG does not thereby understand it.41 The puzzle that Horwich is attempting to avoid is focused on explaining semantic knowledge without semantic notions. Horwich attempts to dissolve the puzzle by arguing the semantic knowledge that a person possesses is not knowledge that can be articulated. Rather ‘semantic knowledge’ is a complex ability

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that underwrites ‘implicit knowledge’. Horwich expands upon the distinction between explicit and implicit knowledge in later work. He explains: Our knowledge of how far it is to the sun, of where Buckingham Palace is to be found, and of which President of the United States preceded Bill Clinton, is explicit: we articulate these beliefs to ourselves; we formulate them in some language. But not everything one calls ‘knowledge’ has this character. For instance, someone who knows how to ride a bicycle knows, when it tilts to one side by a certain angle, how to turn the handle-bars and shift weight in order to avoid falling. But this knowledge does not appear to be articulated; the rider does not appear to think it to himself in some language. The situation, rather, is that, as a result of training and practice he becomes disposed to react to a large variety of tilts of the bicycle with a variety of appropriate twists of the handle-bars and shifts of weight. And we regard this as a kind of knowledge. But in order to distinguish it from the more standard kind – which is articulated in a language – we might call it ‘implicit knowledge’. This corresponds, of course, to the familiar distinction between ‘knowing that’ and ‘knowing how’.42 The implicit knowledge of word-meaning flows from the propen­ sities to use words in one way or another. The use theory of meaning eschews the idea that there is some mental state that guides a subject’s use of a term.43 Horwich says that this implicit knowledge is nothing more than the relevant propensity to use a word. He writes, ‘The state of understanding a word … is nothing more or less than the propensity to perform those actions [e.g., the characteristic responses to the appropriate rule].’44 An appropriate rule is the rule that instructs a person to write (e.g.) ‘4’ after ‘2’ when instructed to add 2. Or to say ‘red’ when asked about the colour of a red object in normal conditions. The picture Horwich offers then of word-meaning is thoroughly ability-based. It is not based on a guiding contentful mental state. Rather it is a propensity.

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6.3.3  The language faculty Let us look in a bit more detail about the nature of the language faculty. This will help us to think more deeply about Horwich’s idea that meaning can be explicated without semantic knowledge. For Horwich the semantic knowledge we take a person to have in virtue of understanding a language is a kind of knowledge-how. Horwich explains: So one might put the point by saying that certain special cases in which we ordinarily speak of ‘knowing that p’ really consist in knowing how to do something; and these cases might well be marked by calling them instances of ‘implicitly knowing that p’. An example is our so-called knowledge of the (syntactic) rules of grammar of our spoken language. We nonlinguists cannot say what they are. Nor could psychoanalysis bring them to consciousness. Rather, our knowledge of them is implicit – implicit in the fact that certain psycho-linguistic laws are what determine the sentence structures with which we are able to engage.45 The relevant structure of the language faculty that Horwich offers parallels Chomsky’s discussion of I-language. As Chomsky explains: Obviously every speaker of a language has mastered and internalized a generative grammar that expresses his knowledge of the language. This is not to say that he is aware of the rules of the grammar or even that he can become aware of them, or that his statements about his intuitive knowledge are necessarily accurate. Any interesting generative grammar will be dealing, for the most part, with mental processes that are far beyond the level or even potential consciousness.46 Horwich presents use with a model of the language faculty with the following features.47 1 Each person has a language faculty (FL) that constitutes the

primary causal-cum-explanatory basis of his linguistic activity.

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2 The possible states of FL – L1, L2, ..., Ln – are by definition

possible I-language. An I-language is a specific configuration of the internal properties of a person that are causally responsible for her linguistic activity. 3 Each state of FL – Li – is a computational procedure that

generates infinitely many I-expressions – E1, E2, …. 4 Each expression – Ei – is a pairing of a

phonetic and semantic object, which, through their respective interaction with the perceptual/articulatory system (P/A) and the conceptual/intentional system (C/I), determine an association of a sound with a thought.

5 These PHON-SEM pairs are constructed from lexical items,

LI(1), LI(2), .... 6 These lexical items are stored in a lexicon which is accessed

by computational procedures that form I-expressions. The language faculty has the following functional profile (see Figure 1).

FIGURE 1  The language faculty.

expressions, E

construction lists