Abstract:Gilbert Ryle's distinction between knowledge‐how and knowledge‐that faces a significant challenge: accounting for the unity of knowledge. Jason Stanley, an ‘intellectualist’ opponent of Ryle's, brings out this problem by arguing that Ryleans must treat ‘know’ as an ambiguous word and must distinguish knowledge proper from knowledge‐how, which is ‘knowledge’ only so‐called. I develop the challenge and show that underlying Ryle's distinction is a unified vision of knowledge as ‘a capacity to get things right’, c… Show more
“…This analysis resonates in an interesting way with a recent interpretation of Ryle's work on knowledge(Kremer, 2017). Kremer argues that for Ryle, human beings have a capacity for knowledge which is the capacity to get things right (an analysis covering both practical and theoretical knowledge).…”
In recent years, the philosophy and psychology of reasoning have made a ‘social turn’: in both disciplines it is now common to reject the traditional picture of reasoning as a solitary intellectual exercise in favour of the idea that reasoning is a social activity driven by social aims. According to the most prominent social account, Mercier and Sperber’s interactionist theory, this implies that reasoning is not a normative activity. As they argue, in producing reasons we are not trying to ‘get things right’; instead our aims are to justify ourselves and persuade others to accept our views. I will argue that even if interactionism has played a crucial role in bringing about the ‘social turn’ in our thinking about reasoning, it does not convince in its claim that reasoning is not a normative activity. Moreover, I argue that it is in fact perfectly possible to understand reasoning as a social tool that is also aimed at getting things right. I will propose that Gilbert Ryle’s conceptualization of reasoning as ‘didactic discourse’ offers one possible way to understand reasoning as both social and normative activity, and that as such his ideas could be of great value for the social turn in our thinking about reasoning.
“…This analysis resonates in an interesting way with a recent interpretation of Ryle's work on knowledge(Kremer, 2017). Kremer argues that for Ryle, human beings have a capacity for knowledge which is the capacity to get things right (an analysis covering both practical and theoretical knowledge).…”
In recent years, the philosophy and psychology of reasoning have made a ‘social turn’: in both disciplines it is now common to reject the traditional picture of reasoning as a solitary intellectual exercise in favour of the idea that reasoning is a social activity driven by social aims. According to the most prominent social account, Mercier and Sperber’s interactionist theory, this implies that reasoning is not a normative activity. As they argue, in producing reasons we are not trying to ‘get things right’; instead our aims are to justify ourselves and persuade others to accept our views. I will argue that even if interactionism has played a crucial role in bringing about the ‘social turn’ in our thinking about reasoning, it does not convince in its claim that reasoning is not a normative activity. Moreover, I argue that it is in fact perfectly possible to understand reasoning as a social tool that is also aimed at getting things right. I will propose that Gilbert Ryle’s conceptualization of reasoning as ‘didactic discourse’ offers one possible way to understand reasoning as both social and normative activity, and that as such his ideas could be of great value for the social turn in our thinking about reasoning.
“…Alternative unified accounts are possible, however. Ryle (according to Kremer, 2017a) held that knowledge—whether knowledge‐how or knowledge‐that—is a ‘capacity to get things right’. But from an intellectualist viewpoint, appealing to capacities, abilities, competences or other kinds of dispositional states—whether to explain skill, know‐how or knowledge tout court —must be a non‐starter.…”
Section: Knowledge and The Aims Of Educationmentioning
Education aims not only at transmitting knowledge of facts, but also at the inculcation of abilities and propensities. We hope that students acquire not merely the ability to, e.g. think critically, but the propensity or habit of doing so—that critical thinking will be something they do do, not something they merely can do; that they will become, not merely capable of inquiry, but inquisitive; and so on. If education aims at more than the transmission of propositional knowledge, are these other aims non‐cognitive, or non‐epistemic? This essay aims to make progress on this question by critically examining Rylean conceptions of skill and habit, thereby making room for a neglected category, intelligent habit.
“…Not only does the expression on both readings pick out an intentional attitude that is a two‐place relation between an individual and some other entity (either a proposition or an activity), anti‐intellectualists also see close connections between these relations. For example, Kremer (, p. 30) argues that Ryle should be interpreted as treating both knowing how and knowing that as ‘ a capacity to get things right ’ (original emphasis). And Löwenstein () defends a view on which propositional knowledge about an activity is a necessary condition for having know‐how about that activity: Knowing how to do something requires an understanding of how to do so, propositional knowledge about doing so, and the actual ability to do so, but none of these are individually sufficient for know‐how (2017, p. 2).Given such close connections between the supposed meanings of ‘knows how’, there is a strong prima facie case to treat the expression as polysemous – a view that Abbott (, p. 7), Kremer (, pp.…”
In arguing against a supposed ambiguity, philosophers often rely on the zeugma test. In an application of the zeugma test, a supposedly ambiguous expression is placed in a sentence in which several of its supposed meanings are forced together. If the resulting sentence sounds zeugmatic, that is taken as evidence for ambiguity; if it does not sound zeugmatic, that is taken as evidence against ambiguity. The aim of this article is to show that arguments based on the second direction of the test are misguided: ambiguous expressions, and in particular philosophically contested ones, do not reliably lead to zeugmaticity, so an absence of zeugmaticity provides no meaningful evidence for an absence of ambiguity.
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