Knowledge and abilities: The need for a new understanding of knowing-how

Abstract

Stanley and Williamson (The Journal of Philosophy 98 (8), 411-444 2001) reject the fundamental distinction between what Ryle once called 'knowing-how' and 'knowing-that'. They claim that knowledge-how is just a species of knowledgethat, i.e. propositional knowledge, and try to establish their claim relying on the standard semantic analysis of 'knowing-how' sentences. We will undermine their strategy by arguing that 'knowing-how' phrases are under-determined such that there is not only one semantic analysis and by critically discussing and refuting the positive account of knowing-how they offer. Furthermore, we argue for an extension of the classical 'knowing-how'/'knowing-that'-dichotomy by presenting a new threefold framework: Using some core-examples of the recent debate, we will show that we can analyze knowledge situations that are not captured by the Rylean dichotomy and argue that, therefore, the latter has to be displaced by a more finegrained theory of knowledge-formats. We will distinguish three different formats of knowledge we can have of our actions, namely (1) propositional, (2) practical, and (3) image-like formats of knowledge. Furthermore, we will briefly analyze the underlying representations of each of these knowledge-formats.

Knowledge-How, Linguistic Intellectualism, and Ryle’s Return

“…Bengson et al 2009 have tried to support the rival claim that knowledge-how and ability are independent by engaging in a statistical study of people's intuitive verdicts about these and cognate cases. Bracketing how plausible experimental philosophy is in general, this study in particular is flawed in several respects, as shown by Jung & Newen 2010. 13 Compare Hawley (2003.…”

“…Even worse, entertaining some way w under a practical mode of presentation might come down to knowing how to instantiate it -Stanley & Williamson's account would then be circular (compare Koethe 2002). Alternatively, entertaining some way w under a practical mode of presentation might be having the ability to instantiate that way, contrary to their explicit denial of a connection between knowledge-how and ability (compare Rosefeldt 2004 andJung &Newen 2010).…”

“…Stanley & Williamson think that we ascribe knowledge-that to animals as happily as knowledge-how (2001, 438 f.). But I take it that most of us would credit, say, some dogs with knowledge how to catch a frisbee, but have trouble conceiving of those dogs as knowing that such-and-such is a way for them to catch a frisbee (compare Rosefeldt 2004, Noë 2005and Jung & Newen 2010. However, I will bracket animal cases in this context.…”

How to ascribe beliefs to animals

“…On our account, their behavioral pattern and the organizational structure of the informational process justifies the following belief ascription: Given the evidence of finding normal food in arm 2 in the morning , I will find chocolate in arm 7 at midday . Why is this not better described as procedural knowledge or knowing how , which—as many agree—we can account for without presupposing beliefs (Jung & Newen, 2010; Noë, 2005)? The answer is that it involves an informational state with a (partially) decoupled representation of the type of food that can be combined with representations carrying information about different day‐times and different locations.…”

Knowledge how, ability, and the type-token distinction

“…11 10 Hutto (2005) also notes that actions which exhibit knowledge how, in the form of a certain ability (or perhaps what might be thought of as a certain 'skill'), do not require this ability/skill to be infallible; rather, one must be able to engage in these actions reliably or competently (see also Jung & Newen, 2010).…”