Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

By claiming that knowledge-how —or practical knowledge— cannot be reduced to knowledge-that, Ryle (1945, 1949) tried to refute what he called “the intellectualist legend”, i.e. the idea that knowledge in general must always consist on intellectual representations. Although Ryle’s position became a sort of commonplace in epistemology, it has been occasionally criticised —e.g. Ginet (1975) or Chomsky (1988)—, and we are assisting now to an explicit revival of intellectualism —mostly due to Stanley and Williamson (2001) and Stanley (2011). In the light of this criticism, in this talk I revaluate Ryle’s original arguments and advance some more, in order to defend an anti-intellectualist and anti-representationalist account of knowledge-how. A study of the logic of knowledge-how attributions will reveal that, pace Stanley, it is not de se knowledge, nor knowledge about the activity in question, since knowledge-how is a non-intentional concept. It is my aim thus to challenge one of the most general assumptions of the debate: that knowledge-how genuine attributions are not attributions of abilities.