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Practical Knowledge of Language

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Abstract

One of the main challenges in the philosophy of language is determining the form of knowledge of the rules of language. Michael Dummett has put forth the view that knowledge of the rules of language is a kind of implicit knowledge; some philosophers have mistakenly conceived of this type of knowledge as a kind of knowledge-that. In a recent paper in this journal, Patricia Hanna argues against Dummett’s knowledge-that view and proposes instead a knowledge-how view in which knowledge of the rules of language is a kind of practical knowledge, like an agent’s non-propositional knowledge of counting. In this paper I argue, first, that Hanna misunderstands Dummett’s conception of knowledge of linguistic rules, and, second, that Dummett’s considerations of practical knowledge of language pose a problem for Hanna’s knowledge-how view. At the end of the paper, I briefly sketch an account of practical knowledge of language that meets the requirements set by Dummett.

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Notes

  1. Recently Jason Stanley and Timothy Williamson (2001) argued against the distinction and proposed that all knowledge-how is a species of knowledge-that. Several critics have pointed out that their argument against the knowledge-that/knowledge-how distinction is a failure; see, esp., Rumfitt (2003) and Noë (2005). At any rate, let us grant Ryle’s distinction for the sake of this paper. We should note that to say knowledge-that and knowledge-how are distinct does not imply that they are exhaustive. Some regard knowledge by acquaintance as a basic kind of knowledge, and as we will see later, Dummett takes implicit knowledge as a distinctive kind of knowledge.

  2. Jenifer Hornsby (2005) also proposes that semantic knowledge is a kind of practical knowledge. But her subject matter is different from what is discussed in this paper because her conception of semantic knowledge does not amount to knowledge of semantic theories.

  3. Although Hanna does examine Dummett’s substantive construal of implicit knowledge in SSS (pp. 276–7), she does not notice that such knowledge falls into the Dummettian intermediate category. Hanna also fails to notice a formal condition of implicit knowledge: that the knowledge can neither be a kind of knowledge-that nor a kind of knowledge-how.

  4. The same argument is also proposed by Harman (1967: 76), Devitt and Sterelny (1999: 179), and Devitt (2006: 92). This line of thought is also used to argue for the indispensability of concepts like practice (Brandom 1994: 21–3), the Background (Searle 1983: Chapter 5), and knowledge-how (or the non-conceptual) (Noë 2005: 285–6).

  5. Hanna is not the only critic who misunderstands Dummett’s conception of knowledge of language. Michael Devitt also interprets Dummett as proposing the knowledge-that view. In several of his writings (e.g., Devitt 1997; Devitt and Sterelny 1999), Devitt ascribes the “propositional assumption” to Dummett, the assumption that propositional knowledge of language is the condition for linguistic competence. But, as Quassim Cassam has correctly pointed out in his review of the first edition of Devitt and Sterelny (1999), “Dummett’s assumption is quite different from the one attributed to him by Devitt and Sterelny, who entirely fail to grasp the significance of the fact that the ascribed knowledge is implicit” (Cassam 1989: 314).

  6. The term “the delivery problem” is used by Dummett only in conversation and first appears in philosophical literature in Higginbotham (1995: footnote 23). For a different, cognitivist formulation of the delivery problem, see Davies (2005: 29).

  7. John Searle also argues that unconscious tacit knowledge of rules, if it is a kind of genuine knowledge or mental states, must be in principle accessible to consciousness. See Searle (1992: Chapter 7; 1997).

  8. For more on the significance of malapropisms for semantics, see Davidson (1986); and see Tsai (2006) for discussion.

  9. What is the rationale for such an application? As mentioned above, Russell takes logical forms (e.g., what logical terms, such as “predicates”, “relations”, “or”, “not”, “all”, “some”, and so on, stand for) as objects of acquaintance (see Russell 1913/1984: Part I, Chapter 9). I think, and argue elsewhere (Tsai 2008, manuscript), that there is a close kinship between logical forms and rules of language (such as “S→NP VP”). What follows is that there is knowledge of rules of language by acquaintance. Here I shall leave aside the questions of the rationale and just consider the significance of distinguishing between knowledge of rules by acquaintance and knowledge of rules by description.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Science Council, Taiwan, under project number NSC-96-2411-H-031-022-MY3. I would like to thank Prof. Cheng-hung Lin and Hsiu-lin Ku for helpful discussions. I am also grateful to an anonymous referee for constructive comments that greatly improved the manuscript.

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Tsai, Ch. Practical Knowledge of Language. Philosophia 38, 331–341 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-009-9178-4

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