(Anti)-Anti-Intellectualism and the Sufficiency Thesis

Philosophical Psychology, 2019

Intellectualism is the claim that practical knowledge or ‘know-how’ is a kind of propositional knowledge. The debate over intellectualism has appealed to two different kinds of evidence, semantic and scientific. This paper concerns the relationship between intellectualist arguments based on truth-conditional semantics of practical knowledge ascriptions and anti-intellectualist arguments based on cognitive science and propositional representation. The first half of the paper argues that the anti-intellectualist argument from cognitive science rests on a naturalistic approach to metaphysics: Its proponents assume that findings from cognitive science provide evidence about the nature of mental states. We demonstrate that this fact has been overlooked in the ensuing debate, resulting in inconsistency and confusion. Defenders of the semantic approach to intellectualism engage with the argument from cognitive science in a way that implicitly endorses this naturalistic metaphysics, and they even rely on it to claim that cognitive science supports intellectualism. In the course of their arguments, however, they also reject that scientific findings can have metaphysical import. We argue that this situation is preventing productive debate about intellectualism, which would benefit from both sides being more transparent about their metaphilosophical assumptions.

We consider a range of cases—both hypothetical and actual—in which agents apparently know how to φ but fail to believe that the way in which they in fact φ is a way for them to φ. These “no-belief” cases present a prima facie problem for Intellectualism about knowledge-how. The problem is this: if knowledge-that entails belief, and if knowing how to φ just is knowing that some w is a way for one to φ, then an agent cannot both know how to φ and fail to believe that w, the way that she φs, is a way for her to φ. We discuss a variety of ways in which Intellectualists might respond to this challenge and argue that, ultimately, this debate converges with another, seemingly distinct debate in contemporary epistemology: how to attribute belief in cases of conflict between an agent’s avowals and her behavior. No-belief cases, we argue, reveal how Intellectualism depends on the plausibility of positing something like “implicit beliefs”—which conflict with an agent’s avowed beliefs—in many cases of apparent knowledge-how. While there may be good reason to posit implicit beliefs elsewhere, we suggest that there are at least some grounds for thinking that these reasons fail to carry over to no-belief cases, thus applying new pressure to Intellectualism.

Logos & Episteme: An International Journal of Epistemology, 2018

In this paper I defend a unified approach to knowledge and understanding. Both are achievements due to cognitive abilities or skills. The difference between them is a difference of aspects. Knowledge emphasizes the successful aspect of an achievement and the exclusion of epistemic luck, whereas understanding emphasizes the agent's contribution in bringing about an achievement through the exercise of one's cognitive skills. Knowledge and understanding cannot be separated. I argue against the claim that understanding is distinct from knowledge because the former is compatible with environmental luck. Achievements rule out environmental luck because abilities can be exercised only in their proper environment. I also reject the intellectualist claim that understanding requires the ability to explain what one intends to understand. The understanding of an item is reflected in our ability to solve cognitive tasks using that item. The more tasks one can deal with by using an item, the deeper is one's understanding of that item. Being able to explain why a claim holds is not necessary for possessing understanding, even though it may be necessary for accomplishing some very specific tasks. Neither understanding nor knowledge require any kind of second-order cognition by default.

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(Forthcoming in Synthese). 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. 1

2007

Analyses of the ordinary concept of intelligence are few and far between in philosophical literature. Such analyses as there have been in recent years are heavily influenced by Ryle’s suggestion that to act intelligently is to act well or competently in a particular domain. Here I show that there are serious problems with Ryle’s account and try to offer a more adequate analysis. I argue that to be intelligent is to have an aptitude for theory-intensive activities. I go on to explain why I think the ordinary concept of intelligence is a useful one for those professionally involved in the practice of education.

We argue against both intellectualist and anti-intellectualist approaches to knowledge-how. Whereas intellectualist approaches are right in denying that knowledge-how can be convincingly demarcated from knowledge-that by its supposed non-propositional nature (as is assumed by the anti-intellectualists), they fail to provide positive accounts of the obvious phenomenological and empirical peculiarities that make knowledge-how distinct from knowledge-that. In contrast to the intellectualist position, we provide a minimal notion of conceptuality as an alternative demarcation criterion. We suggest that conceptuality gives a sound basis for a theory of knowledge-how which is empirically fruitful and suitable for further empirical research. We give support to this suggestion by showing that, by means of an adequate notion of conceptuality, five central peculiarities of knowledge-how as compared to knowledge-that can be accounted for. These peculiarities are its context-bound, impenetrable and implicit nature, as well as the automatic and continuous forms of processing that are connected to it.

Synthese, 2013

A central argument against Ryle’s (The concept of mind, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1949) distinction between propositional and non propositional knowledge has relied on linguistic evidence. Stanley and Williamson (J Philos 98:411–444, 2001) have claimed that knowing-how ascriptions do not differ in any relevant syntactic or semantic respect from ascriptions of propositional knowledge, concluding thereby that knowing-how ascriptions attribute propositional knowledge, or a kind thereof. In this paper I examine the cross-linguistic basis of this argument. I focus on the linguistic analysis of practical knowledge ascriptions in Modern Greek, although the issues raised are not restricted to one language. It is relatively straightforward to show that none of the three types of practical knowledge ascriptions in Modern Greek is an embedded question configuration, and hence Stanley and Williamson original claim is confined to certain languages only. This is not the end of the matter, however, since Stanley (Nous 45:207–238, 2011) argues that the equivalents of ‘knowing-how’ ascriptions in certain languages should be semantically analyzed as embedded questions despite their syntactic form. I argue that this fallback position faces a host of empirical and theoretical problems, in view of which it cannot bear the weight Stanley puts on it, supporting a conclusion about the kind of knowledge thereby attributed.

Philosophy Compass, 2016

The prequel to this paper has discussed the relation between knowledge and skill and introduced the topic of the relationship between skill and know how. This sequel continues the discussion. First, I survey the recent debate on intellectualism about knowing how (§1-3). Then, I tackle the question as to whether intellectualism (and anti-intellectualism) about skill and intellectualism (and anti-intellectualism) about know how fall or stand together (§4-5).

Intellectualism is the philosophical view that thinking involves the activity of reason-giving. In this paper I argue that the intellectualist point of view is incompatible with any form of empiricism. First, I show that Traditional Empiricism collapses because it brings together two conflicting theses: the intellectualist thesis according to which the normative properties of thoughts depend (rest) upon the activity of reason-giving, and the intuitive empiricist thesis according to which the normative properties of empirical thoughts derive from perceptual experience. Second, I argue that McDowell’s Minimal Empiricism collapses as well because of his attempt to make sense of an over-intellectualized and contradictory variety ofempiricism: one that preserves both an intellectualist approach to thought and a conceptual but passive approach to perceptual experience.

Erkenntnis, 2022

Mainstream philosophy has seen a recent flowering in discussions of intellectualism which revisits Gilbert Ryle’s famous distinction between ‘knowing how’ and ‘knowing that’, and challenges his argument that the former cannot be reduced to the latter. These debates so far appear not to have engaged with pragmatist philosophy in any substantial way, which is curious as the relation between theory and practice is one of pragmatism’s main themes. Accordingly, this paper examines the contemporary debate in the light of Charles Peirce’s habit-based epistemology. We argue both that knowing-that can be understood as a particularly sophisticated form of knowing-how, and that all bodily competencies—if sufficiently deliberately developed—can be analysed as instantiating propositional structure broadly conceived. In this way, intellectualism and anti-intellectualism are seen to be not opposed, and both true, although Peirce’s original naturalistic account of propositional structure does lead him to reject what we shall call ‘linguistic intellectualism’.

Journal of the American Philosophical Association, 2017

ABSTRACT:This paper examines intellectualism in the theory of action. Philosophers use ‘intellectualism’ variously, but few question its application to views on which knowledge of facts—expressible in that-clauses—is basic for understanding other kinds of knowledge, reasons for action, and practical reasoning. More broadly, for intellectualists, theoretical knowledge is more basic than practical knowledge; action, at least if rational, is knowledge-guided, and just as beliefs based on reasoning constitute knowledge only if its essential premises constitute knowledge, actions based on practical reasoning are rational only if any essential premise in it is known. Two major intellectualist claims are that practical knowledge, as knowing how, is reducible to propositional knowledge, a kind of knowing that, and that reasons for action must be (propositionally) known by the agent. This paper critically explores both claims by offering a broad though partial conception of practical knowled...

Reductive intellectualists (e.) hold that knowledge-how is a kind of knowledge-that. If this thesis is correct, then we should expect the defeasibility conditions for knowledge-how and knowledge-that to be uniform—viz., that the mechanisms of epistemic defeat which undermine propositional knowledge will be equally capable of imperilling knowledge-how. The goal of this paper is twofold: first, against intellectualism, we will show that knowledge-how is in fact resilient to being undermined by the very kinds of traditional (propositional) epistemic defeaters which clearly defeat the items of propositional knowledge which intellectualists identify with knowledge-how. Second, we aim to fill an important lacuna in the contemporary debate, which is to develop an alternative way in which epistemic defeat for knowledge-how could be modelled within an anti-intellectualist framework.

In the last decade, some viable materialist accounts of how to overcome Frank Jackson's powerful Knowledge Argument has been elaborated into such an extent that even Jackson himself has changed sides and joined its critics. In order to rehabilitate its force and importance, George Graham and Terence Horgan have redefined the original argument and exploited it against theories that reply to Knowledge Argument with a mode of presentation replies (using Michael Tye's representational theory of mind as an example). The message of this paper is that Graham and Horgan do not succeed in their task, since their view of Tye's theory is inadequate and because the intuitive thrust of their argument is derived from Joseph Levine's explanatory gap-argument that Tye has already successfully met.

Intelligence and National Security, 2013

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