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Technological Knowledge-That As Knowledge-How: a Comment

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Abstract

Norström has argued that contemporary epistemological debates about the conceptual relations between knowledge-that and knowledge-how need to be supplemented by a concept of technological knowledge—with this being a further kind of knowledge. But this paper argues that Norström has not shown why technological knowledge-that is so distinctive because Norström has not shown that such knowledge cannot be reduced conceptually to a form of knowledge-how. The paper thus applies practicalism (the conceptual reduction of knowledge-that in general to knowledge-how) to the case of technological knowledge-that. Indeed, the paper shows why Norström’s conception of technological knowledge unintentionally strengthens this proposed form of reduction.

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Notes

  1. “But belief is a state, not an action.” Although that is a traditional epistemological view, it can sensibly be questioned. Maybe there are belief states and actions of believing. In any event, we could extend the talk of knowledge-how’s representative manifestations or expressions, so as to cover states typically produced by or answerable to some or all of those actions. In so doing, we would be setting aside, as not being epistemologically vital for understanding the ontology of knowing, the difference between belief and believing. See Hetherington (2011b), similarly, on knowledge and knowing.

  2. That advice from Peirce (from his paper, ‘Some consequences of four incapacities’) is echoed, seemingly, by Wittgenstein’s (1958: para. 67) concept of family resemblance:

    Why do we call something a ‘number’? Well, perhaps because it has a—direct—relationship with several things that have hitherto been called number; and this can be said to give it an indirect relationship to other things we call the same name. And we extend our concept of number as in spinning a thread we twist fibre on fibre. And the strength of the thread does not reside in the fact that some one fibre runs through its whole length, but in the overlapping of many fibres.

    Wittgenstein then continues in this vein:

    But if someone wished to say: ‘There is something common to all these constructions—namely the disjunction of all their common properties’—I should reply: Now you are only playing with words. One might as well say: ‘Something runs through the whole thread—namely the continuous overlapping of those fibres.’

  3. The famed Gettier problem comes to us from Edmund Gettier (1963). For overviews of the ensuing epistemological debate, see Shope (1983) and Hetherington (2011c).

  4. I say “conception,” not “analysis,” in deference—which is itself current epistemological orthodoxy—to Williamson’s (2000: ch. 1) influential argument against our needing a conceptual analysis of knowledge at all as a response to Gettier’s challenge.

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Hetherington, S. Technological Knowledge-That As Knowledge-How: a Comment. Philos. Technol. 28, 567–572 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-014-0179-2

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