Nonfactual Know-How and the Boundaries of Semantics

Abstract

Know-how and expressivism are usually regarded as disjoint topics, belonging to distant areas of philosophy. This paper argues that, despite obvious differences, the two debates have important similarities. In particular, semantic and conceptual tools developed by expressivists can be exported to the know-how debate. On the one hand, some of the expressivists' semantic resources can be used to deflect Stanley and Williamson's influential argument for factualism about know-how: the claim that knowing how to do something consists in knowing a fact. On the other, expressivism provides the resources to formulate a nonfactualist account of know-how. On this account, know-how has a kind of nonpropositional content and plays the role of guiding performance of action, rather than recording information from the environment.

Expressivism by Force

“…That is a way of getting at the expressivist idea, voiced in the quotes above, that normative talk is di↵erent from ordinary 'descriptive' assertion. To spell out this thought in detail, we would want to postulate the relevant component of the conversational state tracking "to be done-ness"-perhaps Portnerian To-Do Lists are what is needed; perhaps the plans of Lewis [1979b]; perhaps the hyperplans of Gibbard [2003] (explored in Yalcin [2012a]; see also Pérez-Carballo and Santorio [2016]); perhaps all of the above; perhaps something else-and articulate how sentences of the target class serve to change that feature of conversational states.…”

“…Expressivists do better to take the other path, and start with the idea that normative discourse is distinctive in respect of its dynamic e↵ect on the state of the conversation (Yalcin [2012a,b]; cf. Lewis [1979a,b], Veltman [1996], Ninan [2005], Stalnaker [2014], Pérez-Carballo and Santorio [2016], Starr [2016], Willer [forthcoming]). This approach is not in principle subject to special worries about compositionality.…”

A Capacity to Get Things Right: Gilbert Ryle on Knowledge

“…These words, not repeated in The Concept of Mind, can be misleading; as I will argue, the relationship between the two forms of knowledge is best seen as one of interdependence. Roberts 2009, Douskos 2010, Stout 2010, Ginzburg 2011, Michaelis 2011, Farkas 2016, and Sartorio 2016 Christos Douskos similarly responds to Stanley's claim that Ryleans 'must argue for a very strong ambiguity thesis', arguing that 'what seems to be the case is that verbs such as "ksero" or "savoir" do have a core meaning, common to all constructions in which they occur, which is further specified by their syntactic environment (and perhaps other factors as well)'. Douskos concludes: 'if something along these lines is correct, the anti-Intellectualist can accommodate the cross linguistic variety of knowledge ascriptions in a scheme which is both theoretically elegant and empirically sound'.…”

“…But a number of recent papers by both linguists and philosophers cast into doubt the mandatoriness of the syntax and semantics on which Stanley (and Williamson)'s argument relies. In addition to Abbott , see for example Roberts , Douskos , Stout , Ginzburg , Michaelis , Farkas , and Sartorio .…”

Joint know-how

“…For recent discussion of this and related proposals, seeSetiya (2012),Fridland (2013Fridland ( , 2014,Carter and Pritchard (2015),Santorio (2016) andPavese (2015Pavese ( , 2017.Joint know-how 3343…”