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This chapter considers the argument for the Representational Thesis (RT) from the folk psychological view that a person competent in a language “knows” the language. Despite Chomsky’s objections, it is plausible to think that this knowledge is mere knowledge-how and not knowledge-that. In which case, the knowledge does not support RT.

Some of our actions manifest states or qualities of mind, such as intelligence and skill. But what are these states or qualities, and how are they manifested in action? We articulate and examine general intellectualist and anti-intellectualist answers to such questions. One aim is to illuminate some of the main issues and arguments in the contemporary debate over knowledge how. A second aim is to highlight the broader theoretical significance of knowledge how, which may serve as a hinge on which our general understanding of mind and action turns. The role of knowledge how in various debates in ethics, philosophy of action, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and cognitive science is also discussed.

In this chapter, I develop three different arguments against the thesis that knowledge how is a kind of knowledge that. Knowledge that is widely thought to be subject to an antiluck condition, a justified or warranted belief condition, and a belief condition. The arguments I give suggest that if either of these standard assumptions is correct, then knowledge how is not a kind of knowledge that. In closing, I identify a possible alternative to the standard Rylean and intellectualist accounts of knowledge how. This alternative view illustrates that even if the arguments given here succeed, it might still be reasonable to hold that knowing how to do something is a matter of standing in an intentional relation to a proposition other than the knowledge that relation.

I argue for a unified theory of knowledge how that is compatible with the reductionist variety of intellectualism: knowledge how is reducible to knowledge that. But, I argue, there are knowledge states that are not justification entailing and knowledge states that are not belief entailing. Both kinds of knowledge state require the possession of practical abilities. I conclude by arguing that the view defended naturally leads to a disjunctive conception of abilities as either essentially involving mental states or as not essentially involving mental states. Only the former kind of ability is a kind of knowledge state, that is, a knowledge how state.

The question of the grounds of knowledge how can be distinguished from the question of the nature of knowledge how. We defend an intellectualist answer to the former question and an objectualist (nonpropositionalist, nondispositionalist) answer to the latter question. The central idea is that to know how to A is to stand in an objectual understanding relation to a way of A-ing. We propose a theory of the relevant type of understanding in terms of conceptions of ways of acting, grounded in propositional attitudes. The resulting view—an objectualist intellectualism—preserves all three of the following attractive theses: (1) knowing how is not merely a kind of knowing that, (2) knowing how is practical (it bears a substantive connection to action), and (3) knowing how is a cognitive achievement (it is a form of practical knowledge).

In this chapter, I explore Miranda Fricker's notion of epistemic injustice as it applies to knowledge how. Epistemic injustice can involve unfairness in identifying people who possess knowledge. I discuss the various contexts in which we may seek people with knowledge how, distinguishing the apprentice, who wants to acquire knowledge how, from the client, who simply wants to get a job done. I then discuss how apprentices and clients can attempt to identify knowers-how and the ways in which epistemic injustice may arise in this process. I argue that, though there is plenty of scope for injustice in our dealings with other people, there is relatively little scope for distinctively epistemic injustice when we act as apprentices or as clients.

Ryle's paper ‘Knowing How and Knowing That’ (1945), like chapter 2 of The Concept of Mind (1949), is concerned with how “thinking affects the course of practice,” but the paper treats a more compendious category of practice than the chapter does, and Ryle's arguments are best understood when this is taken into account. I argue that Ryle's central claim in both places was that putting propositional knowledge into practice requires a sort of knowledge that could not itself be propositional. This claim is rejected by those of Ryle's opponents who maintain that propositional knowledge is ascribed whenever someone is said to know how to do something. I argue against their account of ‘know how to.’ And I explain why they might be seen as complicit in a sort of Cartesianism that it was the purpose of The Concept of Mind to trounce.

It is a truism that speakers of a language “know” the language. Many in philosophy and linguistics make a propositional assumption about this knowledge: it is knowledge that. Sometimes the knowledge is taken to be the sort expressed by general statements such as syntactic theories (grammars) and truth theories, sometimes the sort expressed by singular statements about particular linguistic facts that express the speaker's intuitions. The contrasting view that a speaker's linguistic knowledge is mere knowledge how has been famously rejected by Chomsky. Some have urged that the knowledge is something in between how and that, some sort of tacit knowledge. This chapter finds the philosophical arguments in favor of (explicit) propositional assumptions thin and unpersuasive whereas those against are powerful. The empirical evidence from psychology is decisive against them, given that linguistic competence is a skill and hence procedural knowledge. As a first approximation, linguistic competence consists in mere knowledge how.

The chapter is a critical and interpretative discussion of Ryle's views on knowing how, in particular as presented in his early paper ‘Knowing How and Knowing That.’ Some preliminary evidence is presented, intended to show that it is wrong to regard, as Ryle did, knowing how and knowing that as strongly contrastable. Ryle's own primary interest seems to be to show that the view he calls ‘intellectualism’ is wrong. It is argued that Ryle's explanation of intellectualism is inadequate and, by scrutinizing some of the examples that Ryle focuses on, that he fails to justify any conclusions about knowing how on the basis of rejecting intellectualism. Finally, a recent attempt by Wiggins to defend Ryle's view and some of his arguments is criticized. The conclusion is that the Rylean paradigm about knowing how lacks a defense.

I favor a version of intellectualism about knowing how. According to my version, which I call ‘The Answer Theory’, an agent knows how to G if and only if she knows a proposition that answers the question of how to G. But judgments about whether a proposition answers the question of how to G vary from context to context. (This contextual variation in judgments motivates semantic views that say that knows-how-to ascriptions are context sensitive, but they are also consistent with the invariantist semantic theory that I prefer.) Many objections to intellectualism, including Schiffer's, Koethe's, and Bengson and Moffett's objections to Stanley and Williamson's version of intellectualism, exploit this contextual variation in judgments. Once we recognize the role of contextual variation in these objections, it is easy to formulate effective replies to them and to analogous objections to the answer theory.

The topic is ancient Greek terms for knowing: three main verbs, three cognate nouns, how to translate them, and how to understand the relation between translation issues and philosophical interpretation. Central are the schemas devised by John Lyons, in Structural Semantics: An Analysis of Part of the Vocabulary of Plato (Oxford, 1961). So far as Plato is concerned I favour Lyons’ original book account, as against his subsequent accommodation to the Rylean distinctions which so dominated scholarly discussion in Barnes’ and my youth. Besides the extensive texts of Plato and Aristotle, there is a account of Simplicius disagreeing with Alexander about the four knowledge verbs in the first sentence of Aristotle’s Physics. I close by elucidating Heraclitus frag. 57.

What is it to understand why a moral proposition is true? Moral understanding, in this sense, differs from moral knowledge (both knowledge that p is true and knowledge why it is true). Moral understanding involves a number of related abilities and is more similar to ‘knowledge how’. Moral understanding is important, moreover, because it is a vital component of morally worthy action: doing the right thing on the basis of moral knowledge (even on the basis of knowledge why an action is right) is not sufficient for the action to have moral worth.

This chapter contends that neither the intellectualist nor the Rylean model provides an adequate semantic analysis of the two major complementation patterns attested for verbs of knowledge ascription, namely, the infinitival and wh-complement patterns. While the intellectualist model correctly assesses such verbs as expressing a relationship between a person and a proposition, neither the infinitival-complement construction nor the wh-complement construction actually denotes this relationship. I argue that the infinitival-complement construction denotes a relation between a person and a procedure, where propositional knowledge represents a precondition for performing the procedure, and that the wh-complement construction denotes a relation between a person and a ‘means’ variable in a presupposed open proposition—namely, the ability to identify that variable. We use the former pattern to attribute an ability of someone and the latter to attribute a skill. This analysis is based on an idea central to construction grammar: the array of semantic roles licensed by a verb may differ from that licensed by a construction with which that verb combines. Thus, grammatical constructions do not provide a transparent window onto the meanings of verbs like know, because constructions can, and frequently do, alter the combinatoric potential of verbs with which they combine.

Gilbert Ryle tried to carry his ‘anti-intellectualist’ crusade into the province of logic, long taken to be one of the opposition's strongholds. Throughout that crusade, Ryle rightly stressed the importance of our various cognitive skills—skills that cannot be reduced to, or codified as, knowledge of propositions. A good logician will possess many skills of this kind; indeed, what distinguishes a master of the subject is not so much his knowing many logical theorems—knowledge that, in Ryle's terms—as his knowing how to deploy them in solving problems. All the same, while Ryle could have contented himself with developing these points to amplify and support his claims about the importance and irreducibility of knowing how to, he went much further and offered an account of the nature of logic and its applicability. That account seems to me to be wrong in almost every particular, but elements of it continue to exert an influence. In this chapter, I aim to identify its most basic flaws and sketch a better treatment of the topic with a view to elucidating the way in which knowing how to and knowing that interact as we exercise our capacity for deductive argument.

It is argued that intellectualism is incompatible with the facts about complementation in a variety of languages. It is also argued that one of the main empirical bases for anti-intellectualism (the alleged existence of ability-denoting ‘how to’ clauses) does not survive close scrutiny. At the same time, the chapter demonstrates the need to have abilities in the ontology of abstract entities that serve as arguments of attitude predicates; exemplifies the existence of epistemically oriented attitude predicates that select for both facts and abilities; sketches an ontology formalized in type theory with records for events, propositions, questions, outcomes, and abilities; indicates how a single verb can select for factive, resolutive, and ability-denoting infinitives without assuming lexical ambiguity; and shows how a semantic account of resolutive complementation (interrogatives embedded by predicates such as know, learn, and understand) extends to ‘how to’ clauses without introducing any additional mechanisms.

Practical expertise may seem like routine activity in being direct and effortless, but this is misleading. In both the way it is developed and the way it is exercised, practical expertise requires many differences from routine, which are detailed.

Since the 1940s, Western epistemology has discussed Gilbert Ryle’s distinction between knowledge-that and knowledge-how. Ryle argued that intelligent actions – manifestations of knowledge-how – are not constituted as intelligent by the guiding intervention of knowledge-that: knowledge-how is not a kind of knowledge-that; we must understand knowledge-how in independent terms. Yet which independent terms are needed? In this chapter, we consider whether an understanding of intelligent action must include talk of knowledge-to. This is the knowledge to do this or that now, not then or in general. Our argument is refined and buttressed by consideration of a text in Chinese philosophy, the Lüshi Chunqiu. This 3rd century BCE text, a compendium on good government, focuses on different types of knowledge that an effective ruler or a capable official should possess. A significant number of those discussions concern examples of knowing-how being manifested in particular situations. The text is explicitly aware of the importance of timeliness and awareness of context in manifesting know-how. Some might say that these are merely manifestations of knowing-how. But we see these examples as revealing characteristics of know-how that Ryle did not anticipate. Might knowing-to be an essential and irreducible aspect of intelligent action?