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Abstract

Knowing-how is currently a hot topic in epistemology. But what is the proper subject matter of a study of knowing-how and in what sense can such a study be regarded as epistemological? The aim of this paper is to answer such metaepistemological questions. This paper offers a metaepistemology of knowing-how, including considerations of the subject matter, task, and nature of the epistemology of knowing-how. I will achieve this aim, first, by distinguishing varieties of knowing-how and, second, by introducing and elaborating the concept of hybrid knowing-how, which entails a combination of a ground-level ability and a meta-level perspective on that ability. The stance I wish to advocate is that the epistemology of knowing-how is a normative discipline whose main task is to study the nature and value of human practical intelligence required to do things in a particular manner.

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Notes

  1. I consider this treatment of the term “knowing-how” to be Rylean in regard to the concern. That is, a study of knowing-how is intelligence-driven. Gilbert Ryle (1949) is not concerned with the linguistic analysis of the sentence of the form “S knows how to φ” (i.e., the syntax and semantics of the embedded how-questions) as Jason Stanley and Timothy Williamson (2001) conceive of it. Ryle’s concern can be seen in his characterization of his target: “the absurd assumption made by the intellectualist legend is this, that a performance of any sort inherits all its title to intelligence from some anterior internal operation of planning what to do” (Ryle 1949: 31); Ryle tries to prove that “‘Intelligent’ cannot be defined in terms of ‘intellectual’ or ‘knowing how’ in terms of ‘knowing that’” (Ryle 1949: 32). Jennifer Hornsby’s observation and comment on Ryle’s treatment of the term “knowing-how,” in my view, are the most telling: “Ryle gave the label ‘knowing how’ to a sort of knowledge that interested him—knowledge which disposes its possessors to intelligent performances, but is not knowledge of procedural facts. He spoke of such knowledge under the heads of ‘intelligent capacities’, ‘skills’, ‘competences’, and ‘aptitudes’. If ‘knowing how’ is taken to circumscribe knowledge attributed in a particular linguistic mode, then it does not pick out what interested Ryle. Ryle’s use of the label has certainly been unfortunate. But my suggestion is that there was something that Ryle was driving at despite the unfortunate way of putting it” (Hornsby 2005: 116).

  2. In my construal, the agent himself must consciously access his knowing-how P of φ when he performs φ. That is, I exclude the possibility of tacit (i.e., consciously inaccessible) propositional knowledge in the Chomskyan sense (cf. Chomsky 1986).

  3. See also Damschen (2009) who treats “knowledge-how” as an ambiguous term and distinguishes, following David Lewis (1988), dispositional knowledge-how, propositional knowledge-how, and a hybrid between dispositional and propositional knowledge-how. I will make a similar distinction (through Dummett’s criterion and formulation) below.

  4. Here is an example: “Raymond Blanc, the world’s greatest chef, knows how to make an excellent omelette. He loses his arms in a car accident, and is no longer able to make omelettes. However, he retains his knowledge how to make omelettes, and if you wish to learn how to make an omelette you should consult Blanc. He has, that is, not lost his knowledge, merely his capacity” (Snowdon 2003: 8). See also Stanley and Williamson (2001: 416).

  5. Here is an example: “A novitiate trampolinist…might at his first attempt succeed in performing a difficult somersault, which, although for an expert would be an exercise of knowing how, is in his case, merely the result of luck or chance. Since the novice actually performed the feat one can hardly deny that he was able to do it (in the sense of possessing the physical power) but one should, I think, deny that he knew how to perform it” (Carr 1981: 53). See also Snowdon (2003: 11).

  6. For example, consider these two passages: (1) “There are sets of skills, ways of dealing with things, ways of behaving, cultural practices, and general know-how of both biological and cultural sorts. These form what I am calling ‘the background’,…[which] does not consist in a set of propositional contents, but rather in presuppositions that are…preintentional or prepropositional (Searle 1992: 197). (2) “The folk say that a person competent in a language ‘knows’ the language. We have noted that the knowledge attributed might be of two very different sorts. It might be knowledge-that, propositional knowledge, or it might be knowledge-how, in the same family as skills, abilities, and capacities” (Devitt 2006: 89). We know what the authors mean by the terms “know-how” and “knowledge-how” without ambiguity. We can also see that people usually use the term “knowing-how” as a technical term; they are not concerned with the sentence form “S knows how to φ” and its syntax and semantics. So when Stanley and Williamson, based on their linguistic analysis of “S knows how to φ,” charge that many philosophers “embrace a false dichotomy between knowing-how and knowing-that” (2001: 444), they distort the intentions of others such as Searle and Devitt.

  7. Elsewhere (Tsai 2011), I have argued that their intellectualist claim that all knowing-how is knowing-that is incorrect because linguistic knowledge is a kind of knowing-how that is not and cannot be propositional in nature.

  8. Cf. Michael Devitt (2006: 45–52), where he provides a helpful distinction between two kinds of rules: represented rules and simply embodied rules. The former are rules that govern by being represented and applied, and the latter are rules that govern by simply being embodied without being represented. But how can we be sure that there is such a thing as merely embodied rules that govern the exercise of a capacity? Devitt’s argument for embodied rules is what is usually called the infinite regress argument: “if there is a rule that governs by being represented and applied, there has to be another rule that governs the application. That rule might also govern by being represented and applied but then its application has to be governed by a further rule; and so on. If this regress is to end and any rule is to govern by being represented, there must be some rules that govern without being represented, without being encoded” (Devitt 2006: 46). This kind of infinite regress argument is the traditional, but nonetheless strong, argument for the existence of capacities that are non-propositional or non-representational in nature. See also Ryle (1949: 30–1), where he argues for non-propositional capacities, and Searle (1983: 152–3), where he argues for the non-representational “background” (which is a set of capacities).

  9. For a three-level classification similar to Dummett’s, see Stephen Davies (2004).

  10. Jeremy Fantl (2008) also urges us to study knowing-how from a normative and high-grade perspective: “When it comes to knowledge-that, epistemologists should care most about the higher, more reflective grades—not the knowledge-that of animals and supermarket doors. Perhaps we should care most about the more reflective grades of know-how, as well”. Here, “reflective know-how” is defined as “know-how that requires ‘an epistemic perspective on one’s own body of knowledge’” (Fantl 2008: 16). Fantl’s idea, like mine, is inspired by Sosa’s bi-level virtue epistemology. He sees that there can be an analogous structure between knowing-that and knowing-how (i.e., the bi-level structure) and emphasizes that reflective knowledge is better than animal knowledge. However, Fantl neglects the fact that what he calls “animal knowing-how” (what I call “knowing-how A ”) has its own normative dimension, and he says little about why reflective knowing-how is epistemically better than animal knowing-how. In my Sosean framework, both animal and reflective knowing-how are normativity-involving, and the latter is more valuable than the former because it makes a performance fully apt.

  11. For a discussion of the nature of abilities and accompanying problems, see Maier (2010).

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Daisy Ku, Cheng-hung Lin, Norman Teng, Linton Wang, and the members of the Knowledge, Virtue, and Intuition Project at Soochow University, in particular Michael Mi, Hsiang-min Shen, and Zhi-hue Wang, for helpful discussions. I would also like to thank two anonymous referees for Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences for critical and constructive comments that significantly improved the manuscript. This work was supported by the National Science Council (NSC 98-2410-H-031-002-MY3 and NSC 99-2410-H-031-009-MY3) and in part by the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange (RG003-D-08).

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Tsai, Ch. The metaepistemology of knowing-how. Phenom Cogn Sci 10, 541–556 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-011-9208-0

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