Abstract
This chapter presents two cross-linguistic studies of knowledge-how attributions that compare English and Japanese speakers. The first study investigates the felicity judgements of ordinary people about knowledge-how sentences, where we find a large difference in judgements about the sentences in which a person lacks an ability to perform a certain action but is nevertheless attributed the relevant knowledge of how to perform that action. The second study investigates the frequency of the natural occurrences of knowing-how constructions in English and Japanese through Google search and corpora, where we find virtually no natural occurrence of Japanese knowing-how constructions. These results suggest that the attribution of knowledge-how in Japanese is radically different from the English counterpart in that it neither requires nor is required by the relevant physical ability. We then explore the philosophical implications of these radical differences in the use of knowing-how constructions between English and Japanese speakers for the debate between intellectualism and anti-intellectualism. One such implication is that English “know how” sentences themselves may not delineate a philosophically significant category of knowledge.
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Notes
- 1.
For this reason, one may be inclined to use “practical knowledge attributions” rather than “knowledge-how attributions.” However, in what follows we will stick to “knowledge-how attributions” to refer to a variety of constructions in the world’s languages, not restricted to those involving an occurrence of expressions equivalent to “know” and “how,” insofar as they are roughly equivalent to “know how to φ” in English. We will return to the notion of practical knowledge in Sect. 5.
- 2.
We suppress some details that are not terribly important for present purposes. See Izumi et al. (2019) for further linguistic details of Japanese knowing-how sentences.
- 3.
Throughout this chapter, we use shitte-iru as the counterpart of English “know.” However, there is another, equally legitimate, candidate for a knowledge verb in Japanese, wakatte-iru. Mizumoto (2018) empirically investigated and compared shitte-iru and wakatte-iru as propositional knowledge verbs, and found epistemologically important radical differences between them. In Mizumoto et al. (2020), we also investigated knowledge-how using these two verbs in Japanese knowing-how constructions, but did not find a nearly sharp difference between them, at least in our surveys there.
- 4.
ka is a morpheme—labelled “Q” here—that obligatorily appears with a “wh”-word in embedded interrogatives and optionally in non-embedded interrogatives. It basically determines the scope of a “wh”-phrase.
- 5.
This pattern may be shared with the Niger-Congo language Defaka, which is described in Stanley’s survey of the world’s languages. On Stanley’s analysis, English “know how” introduces quantification over ways of doing something. Thus, Stanley might find the explicit use of “way” in (iv) amenable to his own analysis.
- 6.
There are also variants of each type of Japanese “know how” constructions; some other morphemes can appear within the constructions without causing a change in meaning. We shall see some such examples in Sect. 4, which are equally natural for native Japanese speakers (or at least for academics in Japan—for more on this qualification, see Sect. 4).
- 7.
For each study we further divided the participants into two groups, presenting the same sentences in the opposite orders, to see the possible order effect, of which we did not find any.
- 8.
Here we focus on these four sentences, but others included sentences for testing the implication of the opposite direction, whether ability implies knowledge-how, using sentences like “I can swim, though I don’t know how to swim.” We will report results of such sentences in Appendix 1. See Appendix 2 for the actual Japanese sentences and Appendix 3 for the full 16 sentences in the actual order.
- 9.
In fact, the original sentence used in the survey lacked the possessive “my.” Although the corresponding Japanese sentence does not have the equivalent possessive either (it is quite natural without a possessive), we conducted an additional survey to ensure that the lack of “my” did not affect the result. The new result was not significantly different from the original result, which is reported in footnote 14.
- 10.
The person could be unable to write the letters on a sheet of paper for some extraneous reason, but being able to “spell it correctly” seems independent from such extraneous factors.
- 11.
Besides, although the lack of background information may allow the participants to have different assumptions about the context, the difference of the default background assumptions (if there are any) may reflect the difference of the standard uses of the relevant expressions.
- 12.
The result of the additional survey on the swimming sentence (via Amazon M-Turk, N = 77, age M = 31.6, female = 57.1%), was 71.4%, as opposed to the original 76.0%. Here, the effect size is ω = 0.53 for Type-(i), ω = 0.60 for Type-(iv), still as large as before.
- 13.
The overall comparison (all four cases) between English data and Japanese Type-(i) and Type-(iv) data was also strongly significant, according to the logistic regression analysis (p = 0.000).
- 14.
The statistical power (1−β) for this sample size (N = 224) and effect size (V) 0.3, is 0.99.
- 15.
This remained the same even if we included data of sentences for the opposite implication (in total 8 cases) of Type-(i) and Type-(iv) cases (p = 0.053).
- 16.
Since all four types of Japanese knowledge-how attributions are interchangeable with one another in most circumstances, we see no particular reason to expect the Type-(ii) and Type-(iii) sentences to exhibit a different pattern either.
- 17.
In fact, our subsequent studies using vignettes with two-alternative forced choice between “knows” and “doesn’t know” options conceptually replicated the present result, which we cannot report and discuss in this chapter.
- 18.
Besides, the striking similarities with respect to the spelling and puzzle cases also speak against the effect of the demand characteristics, as well as the difference of the online/paper-and-pencil survey methods.
- 19.
For example, consider a Type-(i) sentence, which schematically looks something like “John how swim Q knows,” where Q is the Japanese question particle ka co-occurring with the preceding “wh”-word. Here, optionally the embedded verb can be followed by the complementizer (COMP) no before the question particle, ka: “John knows how swim COMP Q,” where the function of COMP seems to nominalise the preceding phrase.
- 20.
Moreover, the knowledge verb shitte-iru can take as its complement both an interrogative clause ending with Q and an accusative noun. The interrogative clause “how swim Q” can be followed by the accusative morpheme o and function as the direct object of shitte-iru. That is, each of the 17 target sentences has two possible forms: the knowledge verb either takes an interrogative clause or an accusative object. Therefore, overall we actually tested using Google 34 Japanese knowledge-how attributions containing “know how swim.” Table 4.1 ignores this detail and combines the results of both forms together.
- 21.
Though, as for the Japanese data, Japan is of course the best place for conducting the search, which is where the authors did the search.
- 22.
This is in fact a sum of results of the Japanese knowing how constructions with and without the particle “wo”, placed between the Japanese “how to swim” and the Japanese knowledge verb (shitte-iru). The same is true for the Japanese results of “know how to write” below.
- 23.
The number of the Japanese “knowing how to write” constructions is dominated by that of Type (iv) and others are almost ignorable, where 1,710,000 out of 1,711,144 (99.9%) are of Type (iv).
- 24.
- 25.
It is worth noting that these results were by no means obvious to the authors of this chapter. Japanese “know how to φ” are perfectly grammatical and may be used to translate English knowledge-how attributions, such as know how to swim. These findings suggest that, however, perhaps apart from academic contexts (translating literature, technical reports, etc.), the use of “know how” together with a physical activity verb is unnatural and rarely used among Japanese speakers, and it may not be a part of colloquial Japanese. Perhaps most uses of Japanese “know how to φ” had been a translation from English or other languages. And Japanese academics and non-academics alike became accustomed to them—no one finds the phrase unnatural, but Japanese speakers have no inclination to produce it spontaneously.
- 26.
- 27.
For example, Markie (2015) defends the view that, roughly, to know how to φ is to have an ability to φ in the relevant circumstances, and Glick (2012) claims that there is a kind of knowledge-how that is ability (see below). Findlan (2012) also claims that ability is necessary for knowledge-how. Note that, however, as Glick (2012: Sect. 4.2) discusses in detail, the modals can and able also have a variety of uses in different contexts, and as Markie (2015: 3203) reminds us, knowledge-how is relative to a circumstance.
- 28.
As already mentioned, Stanley also assumes that the modal force of the relevant knowledge-how attributions is dispositional or ability modal. This modality may be spelled out in terms of “counterfactual success” (Hawley 2003).
- 29.
One example Stanley discusses is Carl’s 8-year-old son who knows how to lift 200 lbs. off the floor, since he always watches Carl lift 200 lbs. off the floor during his training (Stanley 2011a: 127, which is originally from Ginet 1975: 8). Also, it has been noted that English “know how” sentences do not delineate a homogeneous category of knowledge (Annas 2012; Glick 2011; Wiggins 2012).
- 30.
Lack of occurrences may not necessarily mean that they are NOT instances of knowledge-how for Japanese. However, in Mizumoto et al. (2020), we found that the Japanese participants positively denied knowledge-how attribution to the agent who has the relevant ability, whereas the English participants did attribute knowledge-how to the same agent (the Karaoke cases).
- 31.
Or, following Stanley and Williamson (2001), one might refer to ways thought under a “practical mode of presentation.”
- 32.
Glick (2011: Sect. 3) raises a general scepticism about linguistic considerations in the study of knowledge-how (see below).
- 33.
- 34.
Also, their conception of knowledge-how is certainly compatible with various intelligence in cognitive science discussed in (Glick 2011: Sect. 1).
- 35.
Absence of knowledge-how does not mean that the action is a mere reflex, contrary to what some theorists seem to assume (cf. Stanley 2011a: 130). It is only that, for Japanese, skill does not require the status of knowledge. Besides, a skilled action no doubt involves relevant cognitive processes, but there is also good reason to think that the action is not guided by knowledge-how, at least for Japanese, which we cannot discuss here.
- 36.
As we did in Mizumoto et al. (2020).
- 37.
The other sentences presented to the participants describe an agent as having acquired knowledge-how by merely observing others. We focus on the sentences in (18) and (19) and their Japanese counterparts in this chapter.
- 38.
The overall comparison of English data and Japanese data (all four cases) was significant, according to the logistic regression analysis. (p = 0.0065)
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Leo Cheung and Justin Sytsma for kind and helpful comments.
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Appendices
Appendix 1: Supplementary Questions and Results
To examine the implication of the opposite direction, from the attribution of the relevant ability to the knowledge-how attribution, namely whether the presence of an ability is sufficient for the relevant knowledge-how, we also included in the 16 probe sentences the following sentences (for the Japanese participants, we used Type-(iv) translations of the sentences).
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e. I can swim. I don’t know how to swim, though.
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f. I can move my ears. I don’t know how to do it, though.
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g. I can spell “silhouette.” I don’t know how to spell it, though.
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h. I can solve that puzzle. I don’t know how to solve it, though.
Given the close connection between knowing how to spell a word and the ability to spell it, we may expect that having such an ability implies an instance of knowledge-how there; (g) and (h) are expected to sound odd, whether in English or Japanese. On the other hand, in the cases of swimming and ear-moving, since Japanese knowledge-how attributions of these activities are not associated with ability modality, the Japanese translations of (e) and (f) are predicted to be more acceptable than those of (g) and (h), whereas there is no reason to consider English speakers to react to (e–f) and (g–h) substantially differently.Footnote 37
The outcomes concerning (19)—the “supplementary results” about the knowledge-how implication of ability—were somewhat mixed. Even though the difference between the English and Japanese speakers in the swimming case was significant (p = 0.011, ω = 0.22),Footnote 38 the rate of infelicity judgements in the English ear-moving case was lower than expected; it was significantly lower (p = 0.0088, ω = 0.23) than that of the English spelling case, and its difference with that of the Japanese counterpart failed to be significant (p = 0.23, ω = 0.11). There was no significant difference in the spelling and the puzzle cases, as expected. See Fig. 4.2 below.
Infelicity judgements about ability lacking knowledge-how
Still, just as we predicted, the rates of “unnatural” judgements of Japanese participants with respect to the swimming and ear-moving cases were (strongly) significantly lower than that of the spelling case (the spelling case compared with the swimming case, p = 0.000039, ω = 0.34, with the ear case, p = 0.000009, ω = 0.37), while the puzzle case was again in between (though significantly different (p = 0.0010) from the spelling case, not from other two cases). The overall differences of the four Japanese cases were also significant (p = 0.000013, Cramer’s V = 0.27, df=1, where for df=1, an effect size is small when V = 0.1, medium when V = 0.3, and large when V = 0.5). On the other hand, the overall differences of the English cases were only weakly significant (p = 0.042, V = 0.17, df = 1).
A possible explanation for the lower rate of the ear-moving case in English is, if not a mere accident, that the activity in question is too simple to involve any discursive description of a way of doing it. That is, it may be reasonable to assume that there isn’t really anything to know about ear-moving. That may be why more participants found it natural to say about such a simple physical ability, “I can do it, but I don’t know how.”
Compared with the main results, the rates of the infelicity judgements in the supplementary results are generally high, where even the lowest rates in the Japanese data were around 60%. These rates suggest that the implication of knowledge-how from ability is also (relatively) acceptable to Japanese speakers. Ability may not be necessary, but sufficient, for knowledge-how, or at least ability may constitute good evidence for having such knowledge. But note that such results are also compatible with the results of Sect. 4. Once a knowledge-how locution is presented, the denial of knowledge-how attribution to the one who possesses the relevant ability sounds unnatural for the Japanese speakers, but that may not encourage them to positively attribute knowledge-how to such a person.
The clear difference (albeit a smaller effect size) within Japanese results (about the knowledge-how implication) between the swimming and ear-moving cases on the one hand and the spelling case on the other, further supports the independence of the physical ability from the Japanese knowledge-how attribution.
Appendix 2: Japanese Sentences Used for Felicity Judgement
Appendix 3: The Actual Sentences and Orders Presented to Participants
(Participants were divided into two groups, and one group were presented sentences in this order, and the other group in the opposite order.)
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1.
“Since I read a book on swimming, I know how to swim, though I can’t swim.”
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2.
“Since I read the solution I know how to solve that puzzle, though I can’t solve it by myself.”
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3.
“I know how to spell ‘silhouette’, though I can’t spell it correctly.”
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4.
“Since I heard from someone, I know how to move/wiggle my ears, though I still can’t move/wiggle them yet.”
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5.
“I can swim. I don’t know how to swim, though.”
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6.
“I can solve that puzzle. I don’t know how to solve it, though.”
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7.
“I can spell ‘silhouette’. I don’t know how to spell it, though.”
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8.
“I can move my ears. I don’t know how to do it, though.”
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9.
“I knew the number of my previous mobile phone, but I forgot it. So I don’t know it anymore.”
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10.
“Ann knows what she should do to buy the ticket.”
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11.
“Ann knows how she can buy the ticket.”
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12.
“Ann knows how she should buy the ticket.”
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13.
“I know very well how that person spells ‘silhouette’. So I know how to spell it.”
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14.
“I know very well how that person moves her ears. So I know how to do it.”
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15.
“I know very well how that person swims. So I know how to swim.”
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16.
“I know very well how that person solves the puzzle. So I know how to solve the puzzle.”
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Tsugita, S., Izumi, Y., Mizumoto, M. (2022). Knowledge-How Attribution in English and Japanese. In: Lai, K.L. (eds) Knowers and Knowledge in East-West Philosophy. Palgrave Studies in Comparative East-West Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79349-4_4
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