Making Sense of Knowing-How and Knowing-That

Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy, 2017

Contemporary discussions of knowledge how typically focus on the question whether or not knowing how to do ϕ consists in propositional knowledge, and divide the field between intellectualists (who think that it does) and anti-intellectualists (who think that it does not, and that it consists instead in the possession of the ability to ϕ). This way of framing the issue is said to derive from Gilbert Ryle. I argue that this is a misreading of Ryle, whose primary interest in discussing knowledge how was not epistemological but rather action-theoretical, whose argument against intellectualism has for this reason been misunderstood and underestimated (by Jason Stanley, among others), and whose positive view aims to chart a middle course between intellectualism and anti-intellectualism.

European Journal of Philosophy, 2016

Gilbert Ryle's distinction between knowledge-how and knowledge-that faces a significant challenge: accounting for the unity of knowledge. Jason Stanley, an 'intellectualist' opponent of Ryle's, brings out this problem by arguing that Ryleans must treat 'know' as an ambiguous word and must distinguish knowledge proper from knowledge-how, which is 'knowledge' only so-called. I develop the challenge and show that underlying Ryle's distinction is a unified vision of knowledge as 'a capacity to get things right', covering both knowledge-how and knowledge-that. I show how Ryle specifies the general notion into knowledge-how and knowledge-that and discuss the mutual interdependence exhibited by the two forms of knowledge. Ryle's positive view of knowledge, properly understood, emerges as an important, neglected, alternative which should be brought back into the ongoing conversation about practical and theoretical knowledge.

Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy, 2017

In the introduction to the special volume, Gilbert Ryle: Intelligence, Practice and Skill, Julia Tanney introduces the contributions of Michael Kremer, Stina Bäckström and Martin Gustafsson, and Will Small, each of which indicates concern about the appropriation of Ryle’s distinction between knowing-how and knowing-that in seminal work in contemporary epistemology. Expressing agreement with the authors that something has gone awry in these borrowings from Ryle, Tanney takes this criticism to a deeper level. She argues that the very notion of content-bearing, causally-efficacious mental states, let alone representational states of knowledge-that or knowledge-how, embodies the very presuppositions that Ryle calls into question in his rejection of classical theories of meaning and his related warning of the type-errors involved in conflating rational and mechanistic explanation. That these mental posits are presupposed, unchallenged, in today’s debates make his arguments against intell...

Gilbert Ryle paid close attention to the difference between "knowing that" and "knowing how" in his book "The Concept of Mind." In this study, I focus primarily on the definition of “knowing that”, with the remark that the two concepts of knowledge, in my view, form a strongly dual epistemic relationship. The curiosity of the chosen philosophical problem is given by the talk of lively philosophical-logical debates that emerged after Edmund L. Gettier's short article published in 1963. . (Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?) The "information theory" foundations of knowledge in my view - which have significant ontological implications - are as follows: - Information is not just a socio-cultural phenomenon, but primarily a physical quantity. - The static part of information can be characterized as the Shannon information quantity. - The dynamic of information is generated by the stability and complexity of the space-time structures. - Information is therefore an ’emergent’ quantity. - Information-performance (strength) as a physical quantity can be represented by in the human-social region also as a ‘multivector’ that has components of ‘real-knowledge’ and ‘emotional-impact’. - The knowledge is the ’time-invariant part’ of information-strength. - The ‘separation criteria’ between the ‘real-knowledge’ and the ‘emotional-impact’ can be the stability/instability of the information source, and the evaporation time of the emotional content.

Australasian Journal of Philosophy

A conspicuous oversight in recent debates about the vexed problem of the value of knowledge has been the value of knowledge-how. This would not be surprising if knowledge-how were, as Gilbert Ryle [1945; 1949] famously thought, fundamentally different from knowledge-that. However, reductive intellectualists [e.g., Stanley & Williamson 2001; Stanley 2011a; 2011b; Brogaard 2008; 2009; 2011] maintain that knowledge-how just is a kind of knowledge-that. Accordingly, reductive intellectualists must predict that the value problems facing propositional knowledge will equally apply to knowledge-how. We show, however, that this is not the case. Accordingly, we highlight a value-driven argument for thinking (contra reductive intellectualism) that knowledge-how and knowledge-that come apart.

Oxford Scholarship Online, 2017

I first argue why Stanley and Williamson fail to eliminate the distinction between knowledge-that and knowledge-how. Then I argue that knowledge-how consists in a special kind of ways of thinking of ways of engaging in actions. So the distinction between knowledge-that and knowledge-how is twofold: the objects of knowledge-that and knowledge-how are different; the ways in which we entertain the object of knowledge are also distinct when we have knowledge-that and knowledge-how. At the end, I consider two recent intellectualist efforts on knowledge-how and show why they fail.

2007

The paper gives an a priori argument for the view that knowledge is unanalysable. To establish this conclusion I argue that warrant, i.e. the property, whatever precisely it is, which makes the difference between knowledge and mere true belief, entails both truth and belief and thus does not exist as a property distinct from knowledge: all and only knowledge can turn a true belief into knowledge. The paper concludes that the project of trying to find a condition distinct from knowledge that is necessary and together with truth and belief sufficient for knowledge must be doomed to failure.

Philosophical Investigations, 2004

In a recent article, Jason Stanley and Timothy Williamson have argued that there is no fundamental distinction between what Gilbert Ryle famously called 'knowing how' and 'knowing that'. 1 The authors claim that Ryle's main argument in favour of the distinction is inconclusive and that knowledge-how is just another form of knowledge-that, i.e. an epistemic relation between an agent and a proposition. They also blame authors like Lewis, Putnam or Devitt for having uncritically exploited Ryle's distinction in areas outside epistemology such as the philosophy of mind and language. I think that both of these claims-the authors' criticism of Ryle's argument and their own account of knowledge-how-are wrong. My objection against Stanley's and Williamson's criticism of Ryle's argument is rather short. The authors claim that Ryle calls the thesis that knowledge-how is a species of knowledge-that 'the intellectualist legend'. Then they say that Ryle's argument against the intellectualist legend does not prove that there is a fundamental distinction between knowledge-how and knowledge-that. Ryle's argument is the following: According to the intellectualist legend, an operation is executed intelligently only if there is a prior theoretical operation which consists in contemplating a proposition. Since this second operation has to be performed intelligently itself, there would have to be a third operation of contemplating a proposition, and so on ad infinitum. Since nobody can perform infinitely many operations, no act could ever be performed intelligently, which is absurd. According to the authors, this argument cannot show that knowing how to perform an act intelligently is not a case of knowledge-that, because in order to do so it would have to employ the premise that one cannot know that p without contemplating the proposition that p.This premise is false, state the authors further, since we often know something without explicitly thinking about it.

Dialectic, 2021

The aim of this paper is to show that although there may be a correct definition of knowledge – that there is a correct definition of knowledge is, and need not be, asserted or denied for the purpose of the argument here – we could never know that we had the correct definition of knowledge. This is because in order to know that a definition of knowledge is correct we would have to already be in possession of a correct understanding of what knowledge is, otherwise we could not be in position to say that we know a definition of knowledge is correct.