Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy

Volume 75, 2018

Theories of Knowledge and Epistemology

How Groups Know How

The paper is devoted to the analysis of the ascriptions of practical knowledge to the groups of agents. The analysis is based on two very general theses: 1) the intellectualist thesis that practical knowledge (‘know how’) is a kind of propositional knowledge (‘know that’) or objectual knowledge (‘know NP’), and 2) the thesis which links an individual knowledge attributions to a group knowledge attributions: If ‘s knows that p’ has the property P, then ‘G knows that p’ has the property P. Subsequently, the three kinds of a group practical knowledge are examined: two summative (or deflationary), i.e. the distributed knowledge and common knowledge, and one non-summative (or inflationary), i.e. the collective group knowledge. This leads, prima facie, to some problems for the two main intellectualist approaches: i) it seems that groups does not have ‘the practical modes of presentation’ (see: Stanley & Williamson 2001, Stanley 2011), and ii) it seems that groups does not have the objectual knowledge (see: Bengson & Moffett 2007; 2011). I end with some remarks on the possible solutions to these problems.