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Subject-specific intellectualism: re-examining know how and ability

  • S.I.: Knowledge and Justification, New Perspectives
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Abstract

Intellectualists claim that knowing how to do something is a matter of knowing, for some w, that w is a way to do that thing. However, standard accounts fail to account for the way that knowing how sometimes seems to require ability (although at other times does not). I argue that the way to make sense of this situation is via a ‘subject-specific’ intellectualism according to which knowing how to do something is a matter of knowing that w is a way for some relevant person to do that thing, but who the relevant person is can change from context to context. If it is the utterer themselves, then knowing how will require ability, but otherwise it will not.

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Notes

  1. Although of course there are those who don’t quite fit into either category, such as the non-propositional intellectualism endorsed by Bengson and Moffett (2011) according to which know how requires objectual knowledge of a way to do something.

  2. Schaffer (2007) refers to this reductive account as the ‘received view’ about knowledge wh-, although Schaffer himself questions this reduction.

  3. And while knowing a given proposition may require knowing the answers to several such questions, it is fruitful for epistemologists to keep them separate, as I argue in Wallbridge (2016).

  4. The details of Stanley and Williamson’s argument need not concern us here, but it involves applying standard syntactic theory to show that knowledge-how claims contain embedded questions and phonologically null pronouns just like other cases of knowledge-wh.

  5. Endorsed by Vendler (1972), Stanley and Williamson (2001), Stanley (2011a, b), Brogaard (2009, 2011) and Braun (2011, 2012), among others.

  6. A weaker position is sometimes endorsed under the label of intellectualism, according to which know how is reducible to true justified belief (plus perhaps some other epistemic conditions), given that know how does not seem to be Gettierisable in the same way as propositional knowledge (see Poston 2009; Brogaard 2011). Zardini (2008) even claims that know how just involves true propositional belief, and Cath (2011) argues that know how doesn’t even require belief, but merely that a certain proposition seems true to you. (And I have already mentioned Bengson and Moffett’s non-propositional intellectualism.) Everything that I say here applies to these views as well.

  7. This ability account is often attributed to Ryle (e.g. by Stanley and Williamson 2001; Noë 2005), although Hornsby (2011) disputes this.

  8. Although Hetherington (2006) attempts to unify things another way, and instead of saying that knowledge-how is a species of knowledge that, claims that knowledge that is a species of knowledge-how.

  9. Although see Koethe (2002) for the objection that practical modes of presentation illicitly smuggles in the notion of knowing how.

  10. Stanley and Williamson (2001), p. 429.

  11. For instance, one answer to the question ‘How do you ride a bicycle?’ would be ‘You sit on it and push the pedals with your feet.’ But this answer is an inadequate guide to cycling.

  12. Intellectualists have often pointed to counterexamples to the claim that if you have an ability to do something then you know how to do it. For instance Carr (1981) gives the case of a novice trampolinist who, by accident, performs a difficult somersault. Although they have the ability to do this somersault (after all, they just did it) they do not know how to do it. (Carr 1979 similarly discusses a dancer who unwittingly performs Gray’s Elegy in semaphore and Hawley 2003 discusses a hiker mistaking falling snow for water and escapes an avalanche by making swimming motions.) However, Glick (2012) argues that this is not actually a case of ability, since it is a matter of luck that the novice got the trick.

  13. Noë (2005) distinguishes between having the ability to do something and being able to do it, where the former includes cases in which a subject has an ability although they are unable to exercise it. For instance, he makes the claim that an accomplished pianist who has lost her arms still knows how to play the piano, and does so in virtue of her ability to play. (Bengson et al. 2009, give an empirical response to Noë, showing that folk intuition is not on his side.).

  14. See Grice (1989), and for other key early approaches, Stalnaker (1970), and Searle (1979).

  15. See Recanati (2004).

  16. See Travis (1975) and Searle (1979).

  17. See DeRose (1992, 1999, 2009), Lewis (1996) and Cohen (2005).

  18. See Hawthorne (2004).

  19. A closely related idea is that the range of alternatives that need to be considered varies depending on the proposition known, and in particular that knowledge requires ruling out a range of situations in which this proposition is false. This, in short, is the ‘sensitivity condition’ which I defend in Wallbridge (2017, 2018b, forthcoming).

  20. See Hawthorne (2004), Stanley (2005), Fantl and McGrath (2009) and Weatherson (2012).

  21. Yet another related view is the kind of epistemic relativism defended by MacFarlane (2005, 2014) according to which the truth of a given (knowledge) claim depends not upon the context of attribution (as with contextualism), nor with the context of the subject (as with subject-sensitive invariantism), but rather with the context of the evaluator—hence, to put it crudely, S’s utterance can be ‘true for me’ but ‘false for you.’.

  22. It is also distinct from other contextualist approaches to knowledge-how in particular. Hawley (2003) and Williams (2008) develop accounts of knowledge-how on which what we count as knowing how to do depends on our counterfactual success in a way which depends on the context of what task we are engaged in, for instance in the UK knowing how to drive requires being able to drive stick (manual), whereas in the US it does not. Parent (2014) talks about context sensitivity of answers to embedded questions and hence of knowledge-wh, although he does not talk about knowledge-how.

  23. Although see Kompa (2002), Partee (2004) and Stainton (2010) for replies.

  24. Although in a different study, Phelan (2014) finds that stakes do not make a difference to the perceived quality of evidence.

  25. And any more modest effects might be explained as the result of performance errors owing to heuristic processing biases, as suggested by Nagel (2008) and Gerken (2017).

  26. Recall that for simplicity we are leaving aside considerations about P’s situation, such as whether they are tied up or drunk. The range of relevant situations may also vary contextually and may alter whether they are presently able to phi.

  27. Since, this could instead be put by noting that the contextually relevant situation is one in which she has had time to practise, and she knows of a way that she could perform the trick in that situation—see page 9.

  28. p. 397.

  29. I take it that the idea of ‘basing’ here is intuitive, but for clarification see Wallbridge (2018a).

  30. This is the case of Jimmy, a grade school student ‘getting some practise with his fractions.’ The results for this vignette suggested that Jimmy lacked knowledge-how unless both conditions were met (i.e. Jimmy had propositional knowledge of how to do fractions, as well as ‘always’ getting the right result in doing fractions rather than ‘always’ getting the wrong result). This difference from the other cases was not remarked upon by the authors, since it was still the case that there was an overall positive association between ability and know how, as well as between propositional knowledge and know how, in line with their hypothesis. (Although the difference was notably less marked than with the other two vignettes.)

    However, I suspect that the different results in this case stem from a difficulty in understanding the case: if one knows the simple mathematical procedure to follow, it is unclear how one could always get the wrong result, and likewise if one has an entirely mistaken idea of the procedure, it is unclear how one could always get the right result. Therefore the only versions of the case which really seem to make sense, and which can be relied upon to generate sensible results are the case in which Jimmy has both propositional knowledge and ability, and the case in which he has neither.

  31. Note that I have assumed here that a form of ‘semantic minimalism’ is true, according to which sentences have a basic meaning independent of any context. However, since I will ultimately endorse a pragmatic understanding of the phenomena at hand, my view is also consistent with the view that there is no role for pure semantic meaning devoid of context. See Recanati (2004) for an overview of contemporary theorising about the nature of the semantic/pragmatic distinction and the scope (or lack thereof) of literal meaning in natural language.

  32. An alternative, but less appealing, view is that that literal meaning is a very strong claim to the effect that a subject knows a way for themselves to phi under the circumstances (hence ability is assured) but the implied meaning of an utterance about know how manages to be a laxer claim about knowing a way for a contextually relevant subject to phi thanks to some metaphorical or otherwise extended implication of what is strictly said.

  33. One well-known pragmatic effect which may be involved in many of the cases that we have considered is Grice’s conversational maxim ‘be relevant.’ If one is looking for a ski instructor then the relevant thing is whether someone has some kind of propositional knowledge that could guide your practise. On the other hand, if you are looking for someone to replace a recently injured member of your ski-jump team, then the relevant thing is whether someone is able to perform stunts themselves. Knowledge-how claims in these contexts are therefore likely to be interpreted in different ways.

  34. As discussed in Sect. 4.

  35. Or even whether the relevant context is that of the subject, the attributor, or the evaluator of the knowledge claim.

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Wallbridge, K. Subject-specific intellectualism: re-examining know how and ability. Synthese 198 (Suppl 7), 1619–1638 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-01944-6

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