Abilities and Know-How Attributions
Ephraim Glick
University of St Andrews
DRAFT VERSION – Please only cite the final version forthcoming in J. Brown and M.
Gerken, eds., New Essays on Knowledge Ascriptions, OUP
Abstract
Anti-Intellectualists about know-how, following Ryle (1949), hold that knowing how to
do something is simply having the ability to do it. With qualifications, I defend this
traditional view. The central motivation is drawn from observations about what is
involved in learning to do something. Two sorts of ability are distinguished and the
thesis is defended against putative counterexamples.
Keywords
Gilbert Ryle, know-how, knowledge, learning, learning-how, learning-to, ability,
Intellectualism
Word Count
9,990 (body of text only, excluding bibliography, title, etc.)
Many of the qualities of mind that we care about in ourselves and in others are
qualities manifested by what we do and how we do it. When someone performs some
physical or mental act, there are several expressions of approbation we might use: the
individual is able to perform that act, or the individual knows various facts about
performing that act. We also sometimes say that someone knows how to perform the act.
How does this third sort of property relate to the other two?
There are two common answers to the question I posed. Intellectualists answer
that know-how is not ability, but is just knowledge of propositions. Anti-Intellectualists,
following Ryle (1949), answer that know-how is (or at least entails) ability and is not just
knowledge of propositions. With qualifications, I hold the traditional view that knowhow is just ability. Most of my positive efforts will be devoted to establishing the more
modest (but still controversial) claim that know-how entails ability. The latter is
interesting in its own right, but is also significant given that its rejection seems to be the
most prevalent reason for rejecting the stronger claim. However, in the course of the
discussion I also aim to show that the stronger claim is much more defensible than is
sometimes supposed. I will only briefly address the relationship between know-how and
knowledge of facts.1 Before spelling out the motivation for the view, I want to make the
issues a bit more precise.
1
Kinds of know-how
Not all ‘knows how’ attributions are meant to be in the scope of the theses under
debate here. Neither Gilbert Ryle nor any other Anti-Intellectualist I am aware of would
deny that ‘Alice knows how Trotsky died’ seems to be propositional knowledge of an
ordinary sort (Rumfitt 2003). So the focus should at least be restricted to ‘knows how to’
attributions, as in ‘S knows how to swim’.
But our focus should be restricted even more. Sentences of the form ‘S knows how
to φ’ themselves have multiple uses, some of which are clearly not germane. For
instance, such a sentence can have a deontic use that conveys something like ‘S knows
which way he ought to φ’. Such a use is possible in a context in which what is under
discussion is explicitly what one ought to do:
(1)
B: Are you sure you understand which way you’re supposed to swim in the
race tomorrow? It’s the most important race of the year.
A: Don’t worry, I know how to swim: do the crawl with the special new kick
technique you instructed me on.2
The debate concerns a more common use of the locution, the use that would occur
in a typical assertion of ‘S knows how to swim’. But note also that even among nondeontic uses of such sentences, there might be important distinctions to be drawn.
Compare, for instance, Alice and Bert: Alice is a world-class swimmer, but is a terrible
swim instructor, and in fact has radically false views about how to swim well. Most of her
claims about swimming technique are false. Still, in this case we could clearly describe
Alice by saying that she ‘knows how to swim’. Bert, in contrast, is extremely
uncoordinated and weak, and has never managed to keep afloat for more than a few
seconds. But through careful study of expert swimmers, he has become a world authority
on swimming technique. He regularly teaches athletes how to swim at Olympic levels. I
think that at least in some contexts, one could truly describe Bert by saying that he
1 For relevant discussion, see (Glick, forthcoming). 2 In the same spirit, D.G. Brown offers “The janitor knows how to arrange the tables” (1970: 228), and
S&W offer “Hannah knows how to ride a bicycle in New York City (namely carefully)” (2001: 425, fn. 23).
The latter agree that the deontic interpretation is not the one of interest to Anti-Intellectualists. ‘knows how to swim well’.3 But it is not at all obvious that Alice and Bert have the same
kind of know-how. Nor is it at all obvious that there is a single interpretation of ‘knows
how to swim’ that applies to both Alice and Bert.
It is important to note that saying that Alice and Bert have different kinds of
know-how does not require saying that they are correctly described by different semantic
interpretations of ‘knows how to swim’. To see what I have in mind by saying that there
are multiple kinds of know-how, compare the claim that there are two kinds of memory,
working memory and long-term memory, or the claim that there are two kinds of pain,
emotional and bodily. Neither of the latter two claims requires positing an ambiguity or
polysemy in ‘memory’ or ‘pain’, regardless of whether such a hypothesis would be
plausible. There is simply a theoretically significant division within the extension of an
ordinary expression. Furthermore, neither claim requires taking ‘memory’ or ‘pain’ to be
a disjunctive term like ‘jade’ – there is nothing strange or defective in a term’s extension
admitting of further noteworthy division, as even natural kind terms have this feature.
For instance, some water is composed of oxygen and deuterium, an isotope of hydrogen,
and is not safe for human consumption, but this does not show that ‘water’ is not a
natural kind term. ‘Water’ picks out a kind that is natural in important respects, despite
not carving the world at the smallest joints one could find. (A joint between the hand
and the rest of the body does not preclude joints within the hand.)
One might think that talk of kinds of F not only fails to require an ambiguity in ‘F’,
but in fact cannot be taken to correspond to an ambiguity. For instance, one might think
that if ‘F’ is ambiguous between picking out F1 and F2, we cannot use it in both ways at
once, so when we say ‘kinds of F’, we mean either kinds of F1 or kinds of F2. In that case,
talk of ‘kinds of F’ could not possibly capture the distinction between F1 and F2, but
only distinctions within F1 or within F2. However, I think in ordinary talk there are not
such rigid requirements. While ‘fan’ is ambiguous, someone might say: There are two
kinds of fan – devices for air circulation and people who admire or follow something. In
what follows, by ‘kind of know-how’ I speak in the looser way, allowing but not requiring
an ambiguity or polysemy corresponding to the distinction in question.
It would be interesting if a different semantic interpretation of ‘knows how to
swim’ applied to Alice as compared to Bert, but even if there is no such distinction in
the semantics of ‘knows how to swim’, Alice’s know-how might still be of a different
kind than Bert’s. Here it might be worried that kinds are cheap: Alice has know-how of
the kind know-how possessed by Alice, Bert has know-how of the kind know-how possessed by
Bert, so Alice and Bert possess different kinds of know-how. But it would be perverse to
3 This knowledge cannot simply be taken as deontic. Bert might believe that one should not swim under
any circumstances, taking himself to be corrupting his students.
take claims about kinds of know-how in this way. It is easy to understand what one has
in mind by claims about different kinds of memory or kinds of pain. I intend my claims
about kinds of know-how to be taken in the same way. Besides, we can state the theses
that will be at the center of our discussion in a way that neutralizes the worry about
kinds being cheap. Where ‘φ’ picks out any intelligent action:
(2)
a.
Each kind of knowledge how to φ is a kind of knowledge-that.
b.
No kind of knowledge how to φ is the ability to φ.
I will be denying (2b), and this will amount not simply to asserting the existence of
multiple kinds of know-how, but to a characterization of a certain kind of know-how.
I restrict attention to certain kinds of actions to do justice to the original
motivations for Anti-Intellectualism expressed by Ryle (1949), who tied the notion of
know-how closely to the notion of “intelligent action” (26). He wrote, “The wellregulated clock keeps good time and the well-drilled circus seal performs its tricks
flawlessly, yet we do not call them ‘intelligent’. We reserve this title for persons
responsible for their performances” (1949: 28). Providing an example of someone
responsible for his performance, Ryle notes that an excellent clown “trips and tumbles
just as clumsy people do, except that he trips and tumbles on purpose and after much
rehearsal and at the golden moment and where the children can see him and so as not to
hurt himself” (33). The clown’s act is admirable not simply for the characteristics it
shares with genuine trips and tumbles, but for characteristics that reflect its being an
intelligent action. In contrast, clearly involuntary behaviors like reflexes are not going to
count as manifestations of know-how or as intelligent actions in Ryle’s sense, nor I think
will simple behaviors that, while performed intentionally, are not manifestations of any
sort of cognitive achievement. I take it, for instance, that Ryle would not have counted
the basic action of blinking as a performance of an intelligent action. So in identifying
know-how with ability, since Ryle clearly meant to be considering only intelligent
actions he cannot have thought that one manifests an ability of the relevant sort when
one sneezes or blinks. It seems reasonable to follow him in this – if some know-how is
ability, it is ability of a particular kind, ability that reflects a cognitive achievement of
some sort and can be manifested in an agent’s intentional behavior.
Now how do the theses in (2) relate to the positions explicitly endorsed in the
literature? Do Intellectualists hold the universally quantified thesis (2a), or a weaker
existentially quantified claim? Jason Stanley and Timothy Williamson (hereafter, S&W)
clearly hope to establish the strong claim (2001: 444). Jaako Hintikka, by contrast,
claims that there are two uses of know-how attributions, one of which, “the skill sense”,
cannot be analyzed as knowledge-that (1975: 14). It is not clear, then, whether Hintikka
would really have much disagreement with an Anti-Intellectualist.
The Anti-Intellectualists who say something about the distinction between (2a)
and the weaker existential claim take their goal to be refuting the stronger universal
thesis. For instance, see Sgaravatti and Zardini (2008) and Lihoreau (2008). I suspect
that other anti-Intellectualists would similarly be satisfied with establishing that some
know-how is not a kind of knowledge-that, at least so long as the kind of know-how in
question was the kind present in standard examples used to motivate antiIntellectualism.
Similar remarks apply to the quantified thesis (2b). While Intellectualism might be
taken to consist primarily of (2a), Intellectualists also standardly reject an entailment
between know-how and ability.4 Anti-Intellectualism might similarly be taken to be the
negation of (2a), but Anti-Intellectualists also standardly reject (2b), claiming that some
know-how is simply ability.5 The latter is the claim that I will defend in what follows,
interpreting ‘some know-how’ in terms of kinds of know-how.
I will begin motivating my view by making some observations about attributions of
learning. One sort of learning requires the acquisition of ability, and this suggests that
there is a sort of knowledge that requires possession of ability.
2
Learning to
In English, we sometimes say that someone has “learned how” to do something.
But we also say things like (3):
(3)
Alice learned to swim.
There are two uses of sentences like this, a standard one that the reader is likely to fix on
immediately and a slightly unusual deontic reading. To bring out the deontic reading,
suppose that Alice knows she needs to stay fit, and asks her doctor what the healthiest
forms of exercise are. The doctor tells Alice that she ought to swim to stay fit. Here we
might say ‘Alice learned to swim to stay fit’. The deontic reading is easier to hear under
negation: Suppose the doctor tells Alice that given her history of knee problems, skiing
is far too dangerous for her, and she should not use it as a form of exercise. We might
say here ‘Alice learned not to ski’.
It should be obvious that there is a distinction between deontic learning-to and the
4 See, e.g., S&W (2001), Snowdon (2003), and Ginet (1975). 5 See Ryle (1949) as well as Noë (2005) and Rosefeldt (2004). learning we would normally have in mind when uttering (3). But if further illustration is
needed, suppose that Alice has never skied, and that she learns from her doctor not to
ski. Without causing Alice to lose anything she just learned, Bert might bring Alice to
the slopes and force her to learn to ski. Similarly, perhaps someone could learn to ski and
learn not to ski simultaneously — imagine Alice on the beginner’s slope struggling with
her technique while simultaneously being convinced by her doctor by phone that she is
taking excessive risks with her health.
Now recall Bert, who is as well informed as can be on the subject of swimming, but
is not much of an athlete. If Bert has never been able to do so much as tread water, then
no matter how vast his knowledge about swimming, he has never learned to swim.
Similarly, consider Carol, who is an expert on the physics and biomechanics of skiing,
but studies the sport mainly because it terrifies her. She knows a lot about how to ski,
but she has never got up the nerve to try it herself. Then she has not yet learned to ski,
and perhaps never will. More generally, if S has never been able to φ, then S has never
learned to φ. Hence the oddity of ‘Carol learned to ski, but was never able to do it.’
So there is a kind of learning that requires the acquisition of an appropriate ability.
Now, learning is to acquiring as knowing is to having, so someone who has learned to
swim and retained what she thereby acquired possesses a kind of knowledge. At least, it
is reasonable to take this to be so barring some argument that nothing deserving the
name ‘knowledge’ could have the properties corresponding to those of learning-to. But I
am not sure why could the latter would be true. Learning that p, learning French, and
learning the state capitols have corresponding states in knowing that p, knowing French,
and knowing the state capitols, and similarly for other ‘learns’ locutions. In each case,
the knowledge is what one would possess if one retained what one acquired in the
relevant process or event of learning. Even if the process or event of learning to do
something has fairly distinctive properties, so long as one can retain what one acquires in
learning to do something, I see no reason to expect the pattern of learning-knowing
correspondence to break down.
If the correspondence did break down, we would already have made the
noteworthy discovery that there is a kind of learning that requires acquiring ability,
which presumably would be welcomed by the Anti-Intellectualist. (Why would a
distinctive kind of learning be any less interesting than a distinctive kind of
knowing?) But moreover, no one should dispute that there is a state of having what
one acquires in virtue of learning to do something. Even if we don’t explicitly call this
‘knowledge’, we could refer to it as ‘schmowledge’. Then we would be claiming that
“schmowledge” requires ability, since learning to do something requires the acquisition
of ability. Whether the Intellectualist saves the substance of his view is not settled by his
maintaining proprietary use of ‘knowledge’. He would have to show that the distinctive
properties of “schmowledge” are not simply evidence against his theoretical claims about
knowledge, but rather show that “schmowledge” cannot be a kind of knowledge. In lieu
of such a demonstration, the reasonable thing is to retain the view that where there is
learning, there is coming to know. So in what follows I will call the state of having what
one acquires in virtue of learning to do something ‘practical knowledge’.
3
Knowing how to
So, on the grounds that there is a sort of learning that requires the acquisition of
ability, we have concluded that there is a sort of knowing that requires the possession of
ability – practical knowing. This is not yet to make any assumption about how practical
knowledge is commonly attributed in English. To explore this question, we can ask how
we describe someone who has learned to swim and retained what she thereby acquired.
Given the ‘learns’ + infinitive construction, we should expect the relevant kind of
knowledge to be attributed with a ‘knows’ + infinitive construction. There is, in fact, an
English construction of the right form:
(4)
Alice knows to swim.
However, (4) can only be used in a way corresponding to the deontic use of ‘learns to’.
Suppose again that Alice knows she needs to stay fit, and asks her doctor what the
healthiest forms of exercise are. The doctor tells Alice that she ought to swim to stay fit.
If the doctor speaks truly and knowledgeably and Alice believes him, she will likely come
to know that she ought to swim to stay fit. In this scenario, we might describe her with
(4).
Note in contrast that while Alice has been a perfectly competent skier for years,
she believes her doctor’s claim that she ought not ski under any circumstances, and
hence it is not true that she knows to ski. Why can we not truly describe Alice with
‘knows to ski’? There is a linguistic job to be done, and it seems unnecessarily wordy to
have to say ‘Alice has learned to ski and has not lost what she thereby acquired’. I don’t
have an explanation of why ‘knows to ski’ cannot carry out this linguistic job, but it
seems to be an accident of English6 and I think we should expect some other locution to
6 Ian Rumfitt (2003) notes that in languages including French and Russian, there are non-deontic readings
of sentences composed of a learning verb plus an infinitive, and these do have companion constructions of a
knowledge verb plus an infinitive. Together with the English ‘learns to’ construction, I think this provides
strong support for the thought that it is merely accidental that ‘knows to’ is restricted in English.
pick up the slack. It would be a mystery if English included no concise locution for doing
the relevant work. So which locution does play the role of the missing use of ‘knows to’?
We might expect it to be recognizably similar in appearance, so it is worth examining
nearby ‘knows’-attributions. There are several candidates. There is the linguistic form in
which the infinitive is replaced by a gerund like ‘swimming’ that seems to denote an
activity. Then there are linguistic forms in which the complement of ‘knows’ is not just
the infinitive, but a wh-complementizer plus an infinitive, as in ‘knows where to swim’,
‘knows why to swim’, and ‘knows how to swim’.
‘Alice knows swimming’ is no doubt a slightly unusual sentence, but it is perfectly
grammatical. This sort of sentence may be familiar from a 1989-1990 advertising
campaign starring multi-talented athlete Bo Jackson: “Bo knows baseball. Bo knows
football. …” It does not seem likely to me that these sentences play the role of
attributing practical knowledge, but I am unsure exactly what kind of knowledge they do
attribute. The construction’s form suggests acquaintance knowledge, although ordinary
knowledge of facts seems to be sufficient — we might describe our well informed but
uncoordinated Bert by saying ‘Bert sure knows swimming’. But then, perhaps one is
acquainted with an activity whenever one knows facts about it.
As for the knowledge-wh locutions, most of them seem like poor candidates to be
our companion to ‘learns to swim’, for they would introduce irrelevant elements to the
attributed knowledge. For instance, saying ‘Bert knows when to swim’ places emphasis
on the question of what the times are at which to swim, and this is not similarly in focus
when we say ‘Bert has learned to swim’. ‘Bert knows where / why to swim’ have the same
problem, since the standard use of ‘learns to swim’ seems to have no special connection
to places to swim or reasons to swim.
As the reader has no doubt anticipated, I think ‘knows how to swim’ is a good
candidate for the locution that has absorbed the missing reading of ‘knows to swim’.
Since learning to swim already feels more conceptually connected to ways of swimming
than to times to swim, places, or reasons, ‘how’ feels less like it would be intruding on
the intended message of the knowledge attribution. And indeed, it seems very natural to
describe someone who has learned to swim by saying that he or she now “knows how to
swim”. So taking the possession of practical knowledge to be conveyed by ‘knows how
to’ is a prima facie plausible hypothesis.
Let me summarize the discussion up to this point. There is a kind of learning that
requires the acquisition of ability, the kind of learning that takes place when someone
learns to swim. Where there is learning, there is coming to know. So there is a kind of
knowledge that requires the possession of ability, a kind of knowledge possessed by
anyone who has learned to swim and retained what she thereby acquired. This leads us
to expect there to be an ability-entailing use of ‘knows to swim’. For unknown reasons,
‘knows to swim’ has only a deontic, non-ability entailing use, and that leaves a linguistic
job still to be done. Plausibly, we must have some standard and succinct way of conveying
that someone possesses practical knowledge, and it is reasonable to expect this job of
talking about knowledge to be carried out by some ‘knows’ locution. The natural
hypothesis is that ‘knows how to swim’ does this job, and my suggestion is simply that
we accept this natural hypothesis.
A supporting observation is that since Bert cannot swim, having never learned to
do it despite all his studies, he can be appropriately described with ‘doesn’t know how to
swim’. For instance, if the rules of a cruise boat state “Only passengers who know how to
swim may participate in zodiac excursions”, Bert’s attempt to join the excursion could be
rightly met with objection. Or if Alice is deciding whether to go river rafting for her
birthday party, she might reasonably worry, “My friend Bert doesn’t know how to swim.
I wonder if he would be too nervous to come along.” Now, what goes for Bert goes for
anyone who lacks the same ability and learning-to; Bert is as familiar with swimming as
such a person could be. So generally, where c is a context in which what is relevant is
whether an individual b possesses what one acquires in virtue of learning to swim, if b
does not possess that in c, then ‘doesn’t know how to swim’ can be appropriately applied
to b in c. I.e., if b does not possess practical knowledge in c, ‘doesn’t know how to swim’
can be appropriately applied to b in c. This is exactly what we would expect if ‘knows
how to swim’ has a use on which it conveys that someone has practical knowledge.
In section 1 I noted that there are multiple sorts of know-how that might be
relevant in different contexts. We have now identified a particularly interesting sort of
know-how, the sort which ‘knows how to swim’ conveys possession of in contexts like c.
Practical knowledge is an excellent candidate for being that sort of know-how. Since
practical knowledge requires ability, it thus seems that there is an ability-requiring sort
of know-how. Before further defending this conclusion, I want to make several points of
clarification.
First, there is no contradiction between the claim that practical knowledge is a
kind of know-how and the earlier suggestion that in at least some contexts, one could
appropriately describe Bert by saying ‘he knows how to swim’. For I have been granting
from the outset that there are multiple kinds of know-how, and the possession of
different kinds may be relevant in different contexts. Being knowledgeable like Bert
gives one a sort of know-how, and in contexts in which that sort of know-how is relevant
(e.g. if we need someone to give a lecture about how to swim), it will be appropriate to
use ‘knows how to swim’ to convey that such know-how is possessed. But with any
individual like Bert, there will also be contexts in which it will be correct to apply ‘does
not know how to swim’, and indeed I think these would be the more standard contexts.
Second, I do not mean to endorse the claim that all uses of ‘knows how’ + infinitive
correspond to ‘learns’ + infinitive. Indeed, it seems clear that the former should have a
use corresponding to ‘learns how’ + infinitive. And while ‘S learned how to swim’ might
sometimes be used to convey the same thing as ‘S learned to swim’, the two sorts of
sentence are not always interchangeable. This is easily seen by noting that our
uncoordinated but well-informed Bert could, at least in some contexts, be described as
having learned how to swim, even though he has not learned to do it himself. Relatedly,
note that (5a) is markedly more acceptable than (5b):
(5)
a.
Bert hasn’t learned to swim yet, but he learned how to swim.
b.
Bert hasn’t learned how to swim yet, but he learned how to swim.
So it should be no surprise if we can cook up cases in which it seems right to say that an
individual has not acquired the ability to do something, but knows how to do it
nonetheless. All this illustrates is something that we have explicitly countenanced from
the outset — there is more than one sort of know-how.
Third, I deliberately write of “uses” of the expressions or sentences in question, of
“conveying” certain information, and of the expressions carrying out certain jobs. This is
intended to leave open the question of whether, say, ‘S knows how to swim’ can have as
its semantic content the proposition that S has practical knowledge of swimming. One
might have an alternative pragmatic account of how such a sentence manages to convey
the proposition. While filling in this aspect of the story would be of some interest, it
would go beyond what I consider the most interesting question: Do speakers regularly
use ‘S knows how to swim’ to convey that S has a piece of practical knowledge? My claim
is that the answer to the latter question is ‘yes’, and if that is right, then I feel entitled to
use ‘know-how’ with the vulgar and say that practical knowledge is a kind of know-how.
4
Defense and elaboration
Now that we have concluded that there is a non-deontic, ability-entailing kind of
know-how, some further explanation of this knowledge might be desired. Can we say a
bit more about its nature? The claim I want to defend is that practical knowledge really
just is ability of a certain sort, and thus that (2b) is false. I will not provide a knock-down
argument to bridge the gap between the claim that practical knowledge requires ability
and the claim that practical knowledge is a sort of ability, but I think the latter looks
fairly plausible given the former. I am also motivated by the thought that acquiring the
ability to swim seems sufficient for learning to swim. Practical knowledge is just the kind
of knowledge one acquires in virtue of learning to do something, so if acquiring ability is
both necessary and sufficient for learning-to, it seems that possessing ability should be
necessary and sufficient for practical knowledge – close enough for an identity claim.
I take the thesis that some know-how is ability to have been widely endorsed and
regarded as plausible following Ryle’s influential work. But the claim needs to be
clarified, and there are alleged counterexamples to the identity claim that must be
explained away. Even if the considerations adduced above do not convert those
antecedently hostile toward a Rylean view, I will be content to show that the nowstandard objections to it have little force.
4.1 Alleged counterexamples
Some alleged counterexamples to the identification of know-how with ability
challenge the sufficiency of ability for know-how, and others challenge the necessity of
ability. Let us begin with the former.
A novitiate trampolinist, for example, might at his first attempt succeed in
performing a difficult somersault, which although for an expert would be an
exercise of knowing how, is in his case, merely the result of luck or chance. Since
the novice actually performed the feat one can hardly deny that he was able to do
it (in the sense of possessing the physical power) but one should, I think, deny that
he knew how to perform it. (Carr 1981: 53)
Carr’s parenthetical note, “in the sense of possessing the physical power”, is
noteworthy. What does “physical power” mean here? I think Carr’s idea is that the
novice trampolinist is able to somersault just in case he has a physical constitution
sufficiently powerful to allow his somersaulting. In other words, it is possible that he
does the somersault and has a physical constitution with the same power as his actual
constitution.7 The judgment that the novice is able to do the trick certainly points to
one use of ‘able’. Jeremy Fantl suggests that this weak use of ‘able’ is the ordinary,
intuitive one (Fantl 2008: 457). But I think there is a more ordinary, intuitive use on
which the novice does not have the relevant ability. Suppose the novice trampolinist’s
new coach asks him which tricks he is already able to do. The correct answer would not
7 Perhaps this goes without saying, but ‘possible’ here is restricted to nomological possibility — everyone’s
constitution is logically compatible with somersaulting.
be a massive list including every trick he could pull off given some incredible stroke of
luck. The same is true about the question involving ‘can’: ‘What tricks can you already
do?’ Another illustration of the same point is that the novice and the expert, even if they
are equally strong and flexible, differ in their trampolining abilities. No matter the
novice’s luck, there are some tricks the expert has an ability to perform while the novice
does not. This restricted notion of ‘can’ or ‘able’ should be the one we use in the thesis
that practical knowledge is ability. If we do, then cases like Carr’s are not
counterexamples to the thesis. I will give a more positive characterization of the
restricted uses of ‘can’ and ‘able’ shortly.
A somewhat different example is this: John digests food, but it is not thereby true
that he knows how to digest food (S&W 415). This sort of example is not problematic
for thesis (2b), however, for two reasons. First, (2b) does not include a commitment to
thinking that for any verb phrase, an individual’s satisfying that verb phrase requires
there to be an ability that the individual manifests. For instance, perhaps Noë (279) is
right in suggesting that it is really John’s digestive system, not John himself, that has the
ability to digest. Digesting is not an activity that John himself partakes of, but is a
process that takes place within John. Second, as discussed in section 1, thesis (2b) only
concerns intelligent actions. Even if it is a person that has the ability to digest, digesting is
not an action that can be performed intentionally, nor is digesting the manifestation of
any cognitive achievement. As such, digesting is not an action of the right sort for the
ability to do it to be a candidate for practical knowledge.
At this point I want to turn to challenges to the necessity of ability for practical
knowledge. Examples that might be thought problematic include the following:
A ski instructor may know how to perform a certain complex stunt, without being
able to perform it herself. Similarly, a master pianist who loses both of her arms in
a tragic car accident still knows how to play the piano. But she has lost her ability
to do so. It follows that Ryle’s own positive account of knowledge-how is
demonstrably false. (S&W 2001: 416)
The first thing to note is that the most these examples show is that there is one kind of
know-how that can be possessed without the corresponding ability. But that is already a
component of the view defended above. So prima facie, the examples do not even
amount to an objection.
The examples would be more worrisome if it were clear that the sort of know-how
present in those cases is the very sort that Anti-Intellectualists want to highlight.
However, I do not think it is clear. Take the pianist. There seems to be a kind of know-
how that she cannot have after her accident: Suppose that after the pianist’s accident,
with her hands completely gone, I introduce you to her, saying “She knows how to play
the piano really well!” You would either be baffled or interpret my remark as some kind
of cruel joke, not a perfectly sensible report of her expertise. If there were not a natural
use of ‘knows how to’ on which it required ability, then the only natural way to take my
remark would make it wholly unsurprising.
A similar point applies to the ski instructor on one elaboration of the example. We
can imagine three kinds of cases. First, the ski instructor has never learned to do the
trick himself. Second, the ski instructor learned to do the trick, but has a temporary
handicap such as broken skis or even a broken leg. Third, the ski instructor learned to do
the trick, but now has a permanent impediment such as being very old and frail or having
lost his legs. None of these cases refutes my thesis, though I think they deserve different
responses.
Case three: Suppose we are in a retirement home, chatting with a 100-year old man
who is too weak to push his own wheelchair. The remark “He knows how to do amazing
ski tricks” is just like the above remark to the pianist. Similarly if we are chatting with an
accident victim who has lost both his legs. My opponent’s prediction is not borne out –
the attribution of know-how ought to be utterly unsurprising if there were no natural use
of ‘knows how to’ on which it required ability, and it is simply not the case that the only
natural way to take the remark makes it utterly unsurprising.
Case one is of a sort already discussed above in section 3. If the instructor never
learned to do the trick himself, then in fairly standard contexts, it will be accurate to say
that he does not know how to do it. After seeing the instructor perform one impressive
trick, a student might ask about another: “Do you know how to do a McTwist?” The
response ‘No’ would be accurate if the instructor had never learned to do a McTwist,
even if he could help someone else learn to do it. The point generalizes: If Bert has never
learned to swim, then when I invite him to go swimming he might say ‘I don’t know how
to swim’. If I later discover that Bert has extensive knowledge about swimming, this will
be irrelevant to whether I judge his utterance accurate.
Case two: Here it will be useful to bring in a greater range of examples for
comparison. Consider a woman who knows how to open her safe, but is too far away to
open it — she is traveling overseas, say. Or take a master chef who knows how to bake a
fantastic chocolate cake but has no flour. (These cases are from Snowdon (2003).) These
initially look like cases of know-how without ability, and they differ from S&W’s cases in
a notable way. It would be perfectly felicitous to say of the chef “He sure knows how to
bake a good cake!” When the chef’s flour runs out, there is no obvious use of the knowhow attribution on which it loses its plausibility.
I think the correct response to these cases is to observe that while we might in
some contexts judge that the individuals lack the relevant abilities, in other contexts
(probably most contexts) we might equally judge that they retain their abilities. When
the safe-owner’s friends call to ask “Are you able to open the safe at your house?”, or
more naturally, “Can you open the safe at your house?”, she could reply in either of two
ways: “Yes, of course, why would I own a safe that I wasn’t able to open?” or “No, I’m
thousands of miles away”. In evaluating the first response, relevant facts would be
whether the safe-owner has forgotten the combination, say, or whether the door of the
safe has been welded shut. For the second response, also relevant is whether the safeowner has the opportunity to open the safe.
Similarly, if a new acquaintance asks the chef “Can you make a good chocolate
cake?”, the appropriate answer is probably “Yes”. In other contexts, what is relevant
might include whether the chef has at his disposal everything he needs to make a cake,
but that is not always what is intended with a ‘can’ or ‘ability’ question. There is an old
distinction from J.L. Austin between ability-can and opportunity-can that captures the
phenomena here (1956: 230). Austin would explain in intuitive terms the two possible
responses in the safe-owner and chef cases by saying that one response takes the
question to be about what abilities the individual has, and the other takes the question to
be about what opportunities the individual has.
While I think there is a useful distinction here, the above way of putting it is
tendentious since it reserves the term ‘abilities’ for the use of ‘can’ which does not
require opportunity. The expression ‘is able to’ itself admits of the same two uses that
‘can’ does. In one sense, the chef without flour is not able to bake a cake, but in another
sense, he is able to bake a fantastic cake. It would be linguistically odd to talk about
opportunity-ability and ability-ability, but there is clearly a distinction to be made. I
suggest we state the distinction by saying that the flourless chef and traveling safe-owner
have “internal” abilities but lack the opportunities to exercise them.8
Once we see the distinction between internal ability and opportunity, it seems
extremely unlikely that anyone should have thought that know-how requires the
opportunity sort of ability. Rather, the natural thought is that there is a kind of knowhow that requires the internal sort of ability. But Snowdon’s examples are simply
examples of know-how without opportunity. They are cases in which the subjects retain
their abilities in the internal sense, and hence there is no problem for the claim that
there is a kind of know-how that requires ability in that sense.
With this observation behind us, we can reconsider cases like that of the pianist.
8 I borrow the term ‘internal’ from Lihoreau (2008), but with no suggestion that his notion is the one we
need here.
To the extent that in a certain context one thinks of a pianist’s hands merely as tools
that she uses to exercise her internal ability, an attribution of know-how will seem more
felicitous. S&W’s piano-player is just a marginal variant of the following sort of case:
Nina was born without hands, but thanks to the wonders of modern medicine and
technology, she has been supplied with mechanical hands that plug into sockets on the
ends of her wrists. Using these artificial hands, Nina has become quite proficient at
piano-playing. Unfortunately, Nina’s hands have recently been lost. Now in a sense, it is
still true that Nina can play piano. The world has simply taken away the opportunity for
her to exercise her ability. I suspect that those who judge that S&W’s pianist has knowhow without ability do so because they tacitly rely on a generous internal notion of
ability while taking ‘can’ and ‘able’ to require opportunity.
4.2 ‘Can’ and ‘able’
I now want to do a little to explain the semantics of ‘can’ and ‘able’. A widely
accepted linguistic framework tells us that such terms are highly context-sensitive, and
this helps us see how there could be more and less restricted uses of the terms.
To begin, I want to summarize some influential ideas due to Angelika Kratzer.9
The central proposal is to treat all modal expressions as quantifiers over sets of worlds.
Modal expressions differ on three axes — their (quantificational) force, modal base, and
ordering source. ‘Can’ and ‘must’ illustrate a difference in force. The former is used to
say that in some accessible worlds, something obtains, while the latter is used to say that
in all accessible worlds, something obtains. The notion of a modal base does the same
work as the logician’s accessibility relations. Different uses of modal expressions involve
different accessibility relations, i.e. the expressions quantify over different sets of worlds,
i.e. they have different modal bases. This is illustrated by (6), taken from Kratzer (1991:
646):
(6)
a.
Hydrangeas can grow here.
b.
Hydrangeas might be growing here.
(6a) would be used to describe a place whose soil and climate could sustain the growth of
Hydrangeas, whether or not they have ever grown there. (6b) would never be used to
describe a place known to be Hydrangea-free, even if the soil and climate are adequate.
Kratzer’s thought is that the modal in (6b) quantifies over the set of worlds compatible
9 See especially her (1981) and (1991).
with what is known (by some contextually relevant person or group, perhaps), while the
modal in (6a) quantifies over the set of worlds in which the relevant location matches the
actual world in features like soil quality and climate. Kratzer captures this difference by
saying that ‘can’ in (6a) has a circumstantial modal base (more on these below), while
‘might’ in (6b) has a epistemic modal base.
Let us focus on a typical use of (7) for a moment.
(7)
John can curl this dumbbell.
On Kratzer’s view, this means that in some worlds matching ours in relevant
circumstantial facts (such as the force of gravity, the mass of the dumbbell, and the
condition of John’s muscles), John curls the dumbbell. Note that the sentence also seems
equivalent to ‘John is able to curl this dumbbell’. Indeed, Kratzer treats ability-locutions
as just a sort of modal, discussing examples such as (8) (1981: 290).
(8)
Nobody is able to run from Andechs to Aufhausen in ten minutes.
The worlds relevant to the truth of (8) are those that match the actual world in facts
such as those concerning human physiology, the composition of the earth’s surface
between Andechs and Aufhausen, and the distance between the two villages — ‘able’ is a
modal with a circumstantial modal base. Kratzer observes that not only ‘able’, but many
modalities “expressed by the suffixes -ible or -able will likewise have a circumstantial
modal base” (1991: 647). This is clear in sentences like ‘Pears are edible’ and ‘This violin is
unplayable’, which clearly do not concern what is epistemically, metaphysically, or
nomologically possible. They concern what is compatible with, among other things,
human physical constitution or digestion and the constitution of pears or of the violin.
Now we should note that “The kind of facts we take into account for circumstantial
modality are a rather slippery matter” (Kratzer 1981: 302), determined in a complex way
by the context in which a modal expression is used. Kratzer provides a helpful
illustration in discussing (9) (1981: 304).
(9)
Ich kann nicht Posaune spielen.
I
can
not
trombone play.
She writes:
I may mean that I don’t know how to play the trombone. I am sure that there is
something in a person’s mind which becomes different when he or she starts
learning how to play the trombone. A programme is filled in. And it is in view of
this programme that it may be possible that I play the trombone.
On the other hand, she says, the sentence may be used in a slightly different way; If I
know how to play the trombone but have asthma, then I might use (9) to say “I am not
able to play the trombone.” A further sort of circumstance might interfere: “Imagine I
am travelling by sea. The ship sinks and so does my trombone. I manage to get to a
lonely island and sadly mumble [‘Ich kann nicht Posaune spielen’]. ... I could play
trombone in view of my head and my lungs, but the trombone is out of reach.”10
It is striking how similar Kratzer’s example is to some of the examples from the
philosophical literature on know-how. In addition to the ones cited earlier, there is Alva
Noë’s case of a pianist who no longer has access to a piano (2005). Has she lost her
ability to play? Is it still true that she can play? In cases like this, we use Kratzer’s
framework to account for the fact that ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ are both acceptable answers,
although in different contexts. ‘Mary can play piano’ is true iff there is a world in the
modal base for ‘can’ in the context such that Mary plays piano in that world. The modal
base will be different in different contexts depending on which circumstantial facts are
held fixed. We might hold fixed facts about Mary’s location and the distribution of
pianos in Mary’s part of the world, in which case our modal base would contain only
worlds where Mary did not have access to a piano and so does not play piano. Or we
might let Mary’s location or the distribution of pianos vary, while holding fixed certain
facts about Mary’s history and cognition, in which case our modal base could contain
worlds where Mary plays piano. The modal base we use in a context will depend on
whether we are considering what sort of opportunities Mary is afforded or merely what
sort of abilities in the internal sense Mary possesses.
I doubt that one could give a non-circular explanation of what circumstantial facts
are relevant to ability in the internal sense. We have a family of notions like ‘ability’,
‘capability’, ‘capacity’, and so on that all seem to target performance-related
achievements. Perhaps we could say that one’s skills or competences but not one’s
surroundings are held fixed throughout the modal base, but I suspect that ‘skill’ and
‘competence’ would have to be explained as sorts of abilities. Nevertheless, these two
terms might be promising glosses for internal ability, since they seem to screen off
considerations about opportunities in the right way. For instance, it would never be
acceptable to describe a chef without flour as having lost his skill or competence at
10 There appears to be some disagreement among German speakers as to the felicity of the sentence in this
scenario. The same point can be made using other examples, however, such as those discussed immediately
below.
baking. We even get plausible verdicts in cases like those of the pianists. Does the
pianist whose mechanical hands have been lost retain her piano playing skill? Yes. What
about the pianist whose hands have just been cut off in an accident? Your answer will
depend on the extent to which you view her situation as like the other pianist’s, a
situation in which the environment may or may not provide certain tools, the hands,
needed to exercise the skill.
Even if no more explicit account can be given of the distinction between internal
ability and opportunity, it is a distinction that we can get an intuitive grip on. While in
English ‘able’ and ‘can’ play multiple roles according to how different contexts provide
different modal bases, in other languages there are modals whose bases are always
restricted to internal or to other circumstances. Or more cautiously, they at least track
something like our distinction between opportunity and internal ability. We can see this
in some data from Kratzer, who reports that in German, Imstande sein, usually translated
as able, only concerns “strength of our body, character, or intellect” (1981: 304). One
would never use it to say that one was unable to play trombone due to one’s trombone
being at the bottom of the ocean. Citing work by Gustav Deggau, Kratzer also reports
that “a distinction between circumstances concerning mainly the outside world, the
body or the mind of a person, plays a role in the semantic development of können.” In
Old High German, it expressed only “intellectual capacities”, being later extended to
“express possibilities in view of the outside situation”, i.e. possibilities compatible with
certain non-internal circumstantial facts, and then later extended to encompass physical
capacities. For another example, Kratzer tells us that in Hungarian there is a
circumstantial reading of -hat / -het that concerns only “external” circumstances.
I do not know precisely what notion of internal and external Kratzer has in mind,
but her remarks do suggest that certain modals track something like our distinction
between internal ability and the opportunity to exercise such ability. If that is right, then
in some languages, competent use of certain ability-related modals requires speakers to
have a grip on our distinction. I think English speakers have a grip on the same
distinction, although it is less obvious because our modals ‘can’ and ‘able’ are flexible and
not dedicated to a particular restricted sort of modal base.
4.3 Practical knowledge and propositionality
At this point I want to discuss one positive argument for Intellectualism and explain
how it bears on the view defended so far. The argument appeals to the standard analysis
of knowledge-wh attributions, attributions in which the knowledge verb is
complemented by a clause headed by a question word, e.g. ‘Alice knows when Bill
exercises’, ‘Bill knows where to get a good pizza’. A simplistic way of thinking of the
argument is this: All know-how is knowledge-that because all other knowledge-wh is
knowledge-that. Knowing when Bill exercises is just knowing the answer to the question,
“When does Bill exercise?”, and knowing where to get a good pizza is just knowing the
answer to the question of where to get a good pizza. Knowing these answers is just
having knowledge-that, and there’s nothing different about knowledge-how. Something
like this argument can be found in papers by D.G. Brown (1970), Paul Snowdon (2003),
S&W (2001), and Stanley (forthcoming). But of course there must be more to the
argument than this. Neither Ryle nor any other Anti-Intellectualist ever claimed that
know-how was knowledge of the same kind as knowledge-when, knowledge-where-to,
etc., so how could pointing out that the latter are kinds of knowledge-that prove
anything?
The more substantive and explicit version of the argument, I take it, is this:11 If
some know-how is not knowledge-that, then some interpretation of ‘S knows how to φ’
must have a semantic analysis that is not analogous to the analyses of other knowledgewh attributions. But any such semantic analysis must be motivated by the semantics of
the relevant components of the sentence, ‘knows’ and the wh-complement. And
orthodox views in the linguistic literature take all wh-complements, infinitival or not, to
denote the same sort of thing (propositions or constructions out of propositions, e.g.
sets thereof). So in ‘S knows how to φ’, the complement ‘how to φ’ denotes the same
(proposition-based) sort of thing as does ‘where to get a good pizza’ in ‘S knows where to
get a good pizza’. But if ‘how to φ’ denotes the same (proposition-based) sort of thing as
does ‘where to buy a good pizza’, then ‘knows’ in ‘S knows how to φ’ expresses a relation
to the same sort of thing that it does in ‘S knows where to get a good pizza’ —
something proposition-based. Hence know-how is just knowledge of the same sort as
other knowledge-wh. Because the latter relates subjects to something like propositions
or sets of propositions, know-how also relates subjects to propositions or sets of
propositions.
This conclusion might be posed as an objection to the view I defended above,
since ordinary knowledge-that about swimming does not require an ability to swim. How
then could ‘knows how to swim’ possibly be a good candidate for conveying the missing
reading of ‘knows to swim’? To begin with a reminder, I am leaving open the exact
relationship between the semantic content of the relevant use of ‘S knows how to swim’
and the proposition p about practical knowledge that it is used to communicate. So the
challenge would have to be something like this: the only semantic content expressed by
11 For an even more explicit version of the argument, together with a catalog of possible responses to it,
see (Glick 2009).
‘S knows how to swim’ is a claim about S possessing propositional knowledge. But then
whatever the relationship is meant to be between the sentence and p, it is a mystery why
the sentence is suited to play the communicative role I suggest it plays.
This worry, a bit vague though it may be, can be met head on. Let us accept the
Intellectualist’s linguistic argument for the sake of discussion. We can then argue that
the prediction about the semantic content of ‘S knows how to swim’ actually adds to the
case for thinking the sentence is an appropriate one to adopt the role of conveying p.
As S&W explain, the infinitival clauses in sentences like ‘Bill knows how to swim’
have two distinctive features. First, they contain no overt subject. Second, they contain
no tense. S&W offer tools to accommodate both features. First, they cite the common
view in linguistics that there is a silent subject, PRO, present in the clauses in question.
PRO, like a pronoun, picks up its semantic value from the subject of the matrix clause,
e.g. ‘Bill’ in ‘Bill knows how to swim’. PRO explains the intuitive sense that in sentences
like ‘Bill wants to go to the party’, it is Bill himself that must go to the party for Bill’s
desire to be satisfied — the sentence is better represented as [Billi wants PROi to go to
the party].12
Second, S&W explain that infinitival constructions should be understood in terms
of some sort of modality. On the relevant reading, “a use of ‘to F’ expresses something
like ‘can F’ ” (S&W 2001: 424). This interpretation is prominent in non-attitudinal
contexts like the following:
(10) a.
b.
One way to travel is by taking a bus.
I need something to stir the soup with.
These sentences intuitively express something like ‘One way one can travel is by taking a
bus’ and ‘I need something that I can stir this soup with’. S&W (2001: 425) give an
example in a knowledge-wh attribution:
(11)
John knows where to find an Italian newspaper.
On a standard use, this would seem to mean that John knows that he can find an Italian
newspaper at such-and-such place, not that he ought to do so.
Putting these two tools for interpreting infinitivals together, standard linguistic
observations tell us that on at least one interpretation, ‘S knows how to φ’ is true iff S
12 In other constructions, PRO sometimes seems to have an ‘arbitrary’ reading like the pronoun ‘one’, but I
will follow S&W in assuming that sentences relevant to the present debate involve the anaphoric
interpretation of PRO.
knows something of this sort: S can φ in way w. Interestingly, this result is not what
S&W go on to endorse. Instead, they make two notable moves without comment. First,
they suspend the use of ‘can’, despite having just noted in the passage quoted above that
infinitives admit of a ‘can’ reading. Instead of ‘can’, they turn to ‘could’ (2001: 425).
Second, they then quickly suspend the use of ‘could’. Instead of ‘S could φ in way w’,
they begin exclusively using ‘w is a way for S to φ’. But they give no argument in support
of this substitution.
The substitution is both unmotivated and unhelpful to the Intellectualist’s cause.
For in the literature, including the source S&W cite when switching to their preferred
gloss, the infinitival modality is glossed with ‘can’ or ‘could’: To know how to V is “to
know of some course of action only that it is a way of V-ing, that is to say a way in which
one can V, or in which it is possible to V. It is to know of it only that by doing that thing
one can V” (1970: 240, emphasis is Brown’s). And S&W’s gloss contains, rather than
explains, the infinitival modality. Furthermore, ‘for S to φ’ is itself accounted for by
some linguists in terms of ‘can’ or ‘could’!13 So the standard views in linguistics that S&W
appeal to predict that ‘S knows how to φ’ has an interpretation on which it means that S
knows something like that he can φ in way w, and hence entails that S can φ in way w, and
hence entails that S can φ.
So far from providing an argument that ‘knows how to’ is ill-suited to convey that
an individual has retained what one acquires in learning to do something, the semantics
appealed to by Intellectualists helps illustrate the opposite. The infinitival modality
present in ‘how to φ’ functions much as does the explicit modal ‘can’, providing a natural
way for speakers to accomplish part of what must be accomplished by a natural
companion of ‘learns to’ – requiring that the attributee can φ. This fits well with the case
laid out in section 3 for thinking that ‘knows how to’ is a good candidate for a locution
that does the linguistic job of the missing reading of ‘know to’.
5
Summary
I have argued that some observations about ‘learns to’ suggest that there is a non-
deontic, ability-entailing kind of knowledge. This practical sort of knowledge is the kind
of knowledge possessed by one who has learned to do something and retained what one
thereby acquired. We would expect this kind of knowledge to be expressed by ‘knows
to’, but the latter only has an unrelated deontic reading. Plausibly, the linguistic job is
13 See Hackl and Nissenbaum (2003).
carried out by some alternative means, and looking at nearby locutions immediately calls
attention to ‘knows how to’. On some uses, I suggest, ‘knows how to’ conveys that an
individual possesses the sort of knowledge we are after. Is there anything to this kind of
knowledge besides ability? I defended a negative answer to this question by showing that
alleged counterexamples to the sufficiency and necessity of ability for such knowledge
can be avoided by distinguishing opportunity uses of ‘able’ and ‘can’ from internal uses. I
then used a widely accepted linguistic framework to illuminate those uses. 14
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