Abstract
We consider a range of cases—both hypothetical and actual—in which agents apparently know how to \(\upvarphi \) but fail to believe that the way in which they in fact \(\upvarphi \) is a way for them to \(\upvarphi \). 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 \(\upvarphi \) just is knowing that some w is a way for one to \(\upvarphi \), then an agent cannot both know how to \(\upvarphi \) and fail to believe that w, the way that she \(\upvarphi \)s, is a way for her to \(\upvarphi \). 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.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Bengson et al. (2009).
We discuss what putative implicit beliefs are in Sect. 5.2. For discussion of apparent belief-behavior conflict, see Peacocke (1999, (2004), Rowbottom (2007), Zimmerman (2007), Egan (2008, (2011), Gendler (2008a, (2008b), Schwitzgebel (2010), Gertler (2011), Mandelbaum (2011, (2014), Brownstein and Madva (2012), and Madva (2012), forthcoming. Note that for reasons of exposition we distinguish an agent’s explicit avowals from her behavior, even though we recognize that an avowal is ultimately a form of verbal behavior.
A possible exception is found in the work of Hubert Dreyfus. He argues both that skilled action is a form of knowledge-how that is irreducible to propositional knowledge and that agents who are in the “flow” of action have no occurrent beliefs about what they are doing. We discuss Dreyfus’ arguments in Sect. 4.
We have largely followed Stanley and Williamson (2001)’s presentation of Ryle’s regress argument. For alternative interpretations of Ryle’s arguments, see Cath (2013) and Fridland (2013). For Anti-Intellectualism generally, see Hartland Swan (1956), Roland (1958), Koethe (2002), Schiffer (2002), Noë (2005), Cath (2011) (but see Cath 2015 and footnote 15), Fridland (2012, (2013), Setiya (2012).
Intellectualism is defended in Stanley and Williamson (2001), Snowdon (2003), Bengson and Moffett (2007), Brogaard (2008, (2009, (2011), and Stanley (2011a, (2011b). For arguments against the force of Ryle’s regress, see Stanley and Williamson (2001), Cath (2011), and Stanley (2011b). For critical responses, see Noë (2005) and Fridland (2013).
Two exceptions have arisen in the recent literature: Glick (2011) and Bengson and Moffett (2011). Glick casts what he calls “Weak Intellectualism” as a primarily linguistic thesis, in contrast to his “Strong Intellectualism,” which identifies knowledge-how with theoretical knowledge. Bengson and Moffett (2011), in contrast, propose that “[h]aving objectual knowledge of a way w of \(\upvarphi \)-ing while grasping a correct and complete conception of w is necessary and sufficient for knowing how to \(\upvarphi \)” (p. 187). We presume that“grasping a correct and complete conception of w” requires having the true belief that w is a way of \(\upvarphi \)-ing. Thus we take our arguments below to apply to Bengson and Moffett’s version of Intellectualism. In contrast, we shall have little to say about Glick’s preferred Weak Intellectualism, which is (by design) more akin to Anti-Intellectualism in the respects with which we are here concerned.
Neil Levy informs us that there are case reports of sleepwalkers eating non-food items, such as metal scouring sponges and cigarette butt smoothies. We do not speculate about what these sleepwalkers believe, or what they know how to do, but find these to be interesting questions for future research.
Wallis (2008) claims that Stanley and Williamson “themselves acknowledge that...second-order beliefs about what I would call the epistemic status (or neutrally, the reliability of) complex sets of dispositions are not sufficient for knowledge-how (Stanley and Williamson 2001, p. 416). But, they do assert the necessity of such beliefs” (p. 139). We cannot locate any such assertion in Stanley and Williamson (2001). That essay certainly contains a number of assertions to the effect that knowledge about what Wallis calls “sets of dispositions” (and what Stanley and Williamson call “ways”) is necessary for knowledge-how. But nowhere, to our knowledge, do Stanley and Williamson commit themselves to a particular picture of how knowledge and belief are related to each other.
In order to justify this transition, it seems to us that Cath (2011) must be tacitly assuming that knowledge that P entails belief that P. We cannot, however, find anywhere where Cath make this assumption explicit.
More recently, Cath (2015) has embraced a version of Intellectualism, which he calls “Revisionary Intellectualism.” Cath 2011 main objection to Intellectualism was that knowledge-how is irreducible to knowledge-that because there are cases in which knowledge-how, but not knowledge-that, is consistent with Gettier-style luck. Cath 2015 view is that “knowledge-how is a distinctively practical species of knowledge-that, where one of the properties that distinguishes it from other kinds of knowledge-that is this compatibility with Gettier-style luck” (9). We worry that any version of Intellectualism, revisionary or otherwise, that ascribes different properties to different “species” of knowledge, effectively becomes indistinguishable from Anti-Intellectualism. In Sect. 5.1, we discuss this worry at greater length, though not with respect to Cath’s newest view in particular. We would also note that Cath (2015) does not discuss in any detail how Revisionary Intellectualism can handle a case like The Non-Dogmatic Hallucinator, and Cath notes that cases like this are the “trickiest” for (even Revisionary) Intellectualists to handle.
Mann et al. 2013 recent work on cricketers suggests that the full explanation of these saccades may be somewhat more complicated. Truly elite cricketers, it seems, are capable of achieving a higher gaze velocity than even other highly skilled players. Under certain conditions, they may in fact be able to track the ball from start to finish. But even these truly elite players still consistently make anticipatory saccades in spite of this ability.
See Reed et al. (2010), discussed below. We also presume that most kids are taught to watch the ball until and through the point of contact, as we were.
One might worry that the way we have stated (i) and (ii) subtly departs from what Intellectualists are committed to, which might seem to be the weaker claim that batters must have a belief of the form, “\(w_{1}\) is a way for one to hit the ball.” Of course, one might perfectly rationally believe that \(w_{1}\) is a way for one to hit the ball while also believing that some other \(w_{2}\), which is incompatible with \(w_{1 }\), is also a way for one to hit the ball. Beliefs along these lines will only contradict each other when they are about how one and the same person hits the ball in a single instance, not when they are general beliefs about the variety of different ways in which one might hit a ball. While the concern is perfectly reasonable, it is clear that Intellectualists have always had in mind to defend the stronger claim that knowledge-how is knowledge of the way that one oneself \(\upvarphi \)s, not of the variety of ways in which one might, in general, \(\upvarphi \). Stanley and Williamson (2001), for instance, stress that the sense of “knowing how to \(\upvarphi \)” which interests them is a first-personal sense, involving knowledge of how one \(\upvarphi \)s oneself, not of how someone in general might \(\upvarphi \) (pp. 424–425). What’s more, Stanley and Williamson (2001) explicitly link the possession of knowledge-how, in the relevant sense, to the possession of certain (unspecified) complex dispositions (p. 429; see also Stanley 2011b, pp. 109–110). Such dispositions are, of necessity, indexical; that is, they are necessarily linked to the knower rather than some other agent. Far from being uncharitable to the Intellectualist, it is the very indexicality that the Intellectualist posits that our characterizations of (i) and (ii) are designed to capture. Thanks to Nicholas Shea for pushing us to clarify this point.
For ease of exposition we will stick with baseball from here on out when discussing the “watch the ball” example.
We think it likely that there may be yet more kinds of no-belief cases to be found in other areas of empirical psychology. For example, Marcel 2003 “vibro-tactile illusion,” which causes participants to feel as if there arm is in a location where it is not, presents a case in which agents apparently know how to move their arm from point A to point B yet explicitly disavow that the way that they have just moved their arm from A to B is a way for them to do so. Similarly, in Bechara et al. (2005) “Iowa Gambling Task,” most participants know how to pick cards from rewarding decks long before they report having any beliefs about the decks or preferences between them. Finally, cases in which members of socially stigmatized groups come to believe stereotypes about their own inability to \(\upvarphi \)—for example, women who doubt their ability to do philosophy—despite demonstrably knowing how to \(\upvarphi \), may provide another set of cases. We hope to investigate these cases in future research.
To be clear: while we suggested in Sect. 3 that it is plausible that the agents in Wallis’ cases have the relevant unconscious beliefs, we do not ultimately know what sleepwalkers and severe amnesiacs believe. If sleepwalkers and amnesiacs do in fact lack beliefs of any sort regarding, for example, where to find food, drive cars, or solve puzzles, then our argument and Wallis’ argument will effectively coincide. This should come as no surprise; our cases are purported no-belief cases, like Wallis’ own, and our argument proceeds on the basis of pointing out those cases. Our aim here is not to introduce such cases ex nihilo, but rather to refine the argument from such cases in a way that ought to prove more difficult for the Intellectualist to resist. This refinement involves both (i) shifting the sorts of no-belief cases under consideration to some which we hope will elicit clearer judgments than those which Wallis pointed to, and (ii) shifting our focus to what we ultimately take to be the crux of the issue, the question of when it is appropriate to attribute implicit, contradictory beliefs to an agent. We thank an anonymous reviewer for this journal for pushing us to clarify this point.
Steve Blass was a tremendously successful pitcher in Major League Baseball who suddenly and inexplicitly lost his ability to pitch. Physicians could find nothing physically wrong with Blass, and his troubles were thought to be due to “overthinking.” Dreyfus (2007a) discusses another baseball player—Chuck Knoblauch—in similar terms. While some research appears to support the idea that overthinking is the problem in cases like these (e.g., Flegal and Anderson 2008; Beilock and Gray 2012), the issue remains unsettled. For critical discussion, see Montero (2010) and Brownstein (2014).
Indeed, one could understand the history of social psychology as illuminating the many ways in which we fail to know what we are doing and why, notwithstanding how things appear to us.
We say “paradigm” here since, as Brogaard is herself well-aware, agents can plausibly know how to \(\upvarphi \) without themselves being able to \(\upvarphi \), at least in certain circumstances. So, for Brogaard, it would seem that a true attribution of knowledge-how to \(\upvarphi \) is sometimes to be grounded in a knowledge-ability state and sometimes in another sort of knowledge-state. See also Hawley (2003) for discussion of the counterfactual robustness of knowledge-how.
Parallel worries would afflict more standard Intellectualists were they to claim that the sorts of complex dispositions characteristic of practical modes of presentation either entail or are identical to ability-states. For discussion of this sort of concern, see Koethe (2002) and, more recently, Glick (2015).
On the nature of verbal disputes, see Chalmers (2011).
Brogaard is, however, the only philosopher we know of to have argued for the claim that knowledge doesn’t generally entail belief in the course of arguing for Intellectualism about knowledge-how.
See, for instance, Nagel (2013).
To be clear, these implicit beliefs in which we are interested are standing beliefs. That is, they are long-term, stable states of the agent rather than just fleeting implicit or unconscious states—though the existence of the latter sort of state is certainly a distinct possibility.
In fact, this second belief might only be represented indexically for the batter, along the lines of: I watch the ball this way or that is how I hit the ball. In both these instances, the relevant demonstratives should be understood as being anchored in something like the batter’s experience of batting, an experience which she might in fact be apt to misdescribe.
As noted in fn. 29 above, both Koethe (2002) and Glick (2015) have argued that, if the complex dispositions tied to practical modes of presentation cannot be sufficiently distinguished from ability, this aspect of Stanley and Williamson (2001) and Stanley (2011a) view threatens to efface the distinction between their particular version of Intellectualism and Anti-Intellectualism. We assume for present purposes that these can be sufficiently distinguished.
Williamson (2014) has recently argued that non-luminosity is a pervasive feature of our mental lives. If this is right, it might help Intellectualism to meet the first challenge, though it does not necessarily speak to the second.
On the “ten thousand hour rule,” see Ericsson et al. (1993). Of course, nothing in our argument depends on ten thousand hours being the right number.
The following description and critique of Spinozan Belief Fixation is adapted from Brownstein (2015).
References
Armstrong, D. M. (1969). Does knowledge entail belief? Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 70, 21–36.
Armstrong, D. M. (1973). Belief, truth and knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bahill, A., & LaRitz, T. (1984). Why can’t batters keep their eyes on the ball? A laboratory study of batters tracking a fastball shows the limitations of some hoary baseball axioms. American Scientist, 72(3), 249–253.
Bechara, A., Damasio, H., Tranel, D., & Damasio, A. (2005). The Iowa gambling task and the somatic marker hypothesis: Some questions and answers. Trends in Cognitive Science, 9(4), 159–162.
Beilock, S. (2010). Choke: What the secrets of the brain reveal about getting right when you have to. New York: Free Press.
Beilock, S., & Gray, R. (2012). From attentional control to attentional spillover: A skill-level investigation of attention, kinematic, and performance outcomes. Human Movement Science, 31, 1473–1499.
Bengson, J., & Moffett, M. (2007). Know-how and concept possession. Philosophical Studies, 136(1), 31–57.
Bengson, J., & Moffett, M. (2011). Nonpropositional intellectualism. In J. Bengson & M. Moffett (Eds.), Knowing-how: Essays on knowledge, mind, and action. New York: Oxford University Press.
Bengson, J., Moffett, M., & Wright, J. (2009). The folk on knowing how. Philosophical Studies, 142(3), 387–401.
Brogaard, B. (2008). Knowledge-The and propositional attitude ascriptions, in Lihoreau, F. (Ed.), Knowledge and Questions, Grazer Philosophische Studien 77, 147–190.
Brogaard, B. (2009). What Mary did yesterday: Reflections on knowledge- wh. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 78, 439–467.
Brogaard, B. (2011). Knowledge-how: A unified account. In J. Bengson & M. Moffett (Eds.), Knowing-how: Essays on knowledge, mind, and action. New York: Oxford University Press.
Brownstein, M. (2014). Rationalizing flow: Agency in skilled unreflective action. Philosophical Studies, 168(2), 545–568.
Brownstein, M. (2015). Implicit bias. In E. Zalta (Ed.), The stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (Spring 2015 Edition). http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/implicit-bias/.
Brownstein, M., & Madva, A. (2012). The normativity of automaticity. Mind and Language, 27(4), 410–434.
Buckwalter, W., Rose, D., & Turri, J. (2013). Belief through thick and thin. Noûs. doi:10.1111/nous.12048.
Burgess, A., & Plunkett, D. (2013a). Conceptual ethics I: Philosophy. Compass, 8(12), 1091–1101.
Burgess, A., & Plunkett, D. (2013b). Conceptual ethics II: Philosophy. Compass, 8(12), 1101–1110.
Cath, Y. (2011). Knowing how without knowing that. In J. Bengson & M. Moffett (Eds.), Knowing-how: Essays on knowledge, mind, and action. New York: Oxford University Press.
Cath, Y. (2013). Regarding a regress. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 94, 358–388.
Cath, Y. (2015). Revisionary intellectualism and Gettier. Philosophical Studies, 172, 7–27.
Chalmers, D. (2011). Verbal disputes. Philosophical Review, 120(4), 515–566.
Cohen, J. (1966). More about knowing and feeling sure. Analysis, 27, 11–16.
Dartnall, T. (1986). Radford revisited. The Philosophical Quarterly, 36, 395–398.
Dennett, D. (2014). Intuition pumps and other tools for thinking. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.
Dienes, Z., & McLeod, P. (1993). How to catch a cricket ball. Perception, 22, 1427–1439.
Dreyfus, H. (2002a). Intelligence without representation: The relevance of phenomenology to scientific explanation. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 1(4), 367–383.
Dreyfus, H. (2002b). Refocusing the question: Can there be skillful coping without propositional representations or brain representations? Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 1, 413–425.
Dreyfus, H. (2005). Overcoming the myth of the mental: How philosophers can profit from the phenomenology of everyday experience. Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 79(2), 43–49.
Dreyfus, H. (2007a). The return of the myth of the mental. Inquiry, 50(4), 352–365.
Dreyfus, H. (2007b). Response to McDowell. Inquiry, 50(4), 371–377.
Dreyfus, H., & Kelly, S. (2007). Heterophenomenology: Heavy-handed sleight-of-hand. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 6, 45–55.
Egan, A. (2008). Seeing and believing: Perception, belief formation and the divided mind. Philosophical Studies, 140(1), 47–63.
Egan, A. (2011). Comments on Gendler’s ‘The Epistemic Costs of Implicit Bias’. Philosophical Studies, 156, 65–79.
Epstein, D. (2013). The sports gene. New York: Penguin.
Ericsson, K. A., Krampe, R., & Tesch-Römer, C. (1993). The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance. Psychological Review, 100(3), 363–406.
Flegal, K., & Anderson, M. (2008). Overthinking skilled motor performance: Or why those who teach can’t do. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 15(5), 927–932.
Fridland, E. (2012). Knowing how: Problems and considerations. European Journal of Philosophy. doi:10.1111/ejop.12000.
Fridland, E. (2013). Problems with intellectualism. Philosophical Studies, 165(3), 879–891.
Gendler, T. (2007). Philosophical thought experiments, intuitions, and cognitive equilibrium. Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 31(1), 68–89.
Gendler, T. S. (2008a). Alief and belief. The Journal of Philosophy, 105(10), 634–663.
Gendler, T. S. (2008b). Alief in action (and reaction). Mind and Language, 23(5), 552–585.
Gertler, B. (2011). Self-knowledge and the transparency of belief. In A. Hatzimoysis (Ed.), Self-knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gibson, J. J. (1979). The ecological approach to visual perception. Boston: Houghton Lifflin.
Gilbert, D. T. (1991). How mental systems believe. American Psychologist, 46, 107–119.
Glick, E. (2011). Two methodologies for evaluating intellectualism. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 83(2), 398–434.
Glick, E. (2015). Practical modes of presentation. Noûs, 49(3), 538–559.
Hartland Swan, J. (1956). The logical status of ‘Knowing That’. Analysis, 16(5), 111–115.
Hawley, K. (2003). Success and knowledge-how. American Philosophical Quarterly, 40(1), 19–31.
Huddleston, A. (2012). Naughty beliefs. Philosophical Studies, 160(2), 209–222.
Huebner, B. (2009). Trouble with stereotypes for spinozan minds. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 39, 63–92.
Ichikawa, J., & Jarvis, B. (2009). Thought-experiment intuitions and truth in fiction. Philosophical Studies, 142(2), 221–246.
Ichikawa, J & Steup, M. (2014). The analysis of knowledge. In Zalta, E. (Ed.) The standford encyclopedia of philosophy. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2014/entries/knowledge-analysis/.
Jeannerod, M. (2006). Motor cognition: What actions tell to the self. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kelly, S. D. (2000). Grasping at straws: Motor intentionality and the cognitive science of skilled behavior. In M. Wrathall & J. Malpas (Eds.), Heidegger, coping, and cognitive science: Essays in honor of Hubert Dreyfus. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Kelly, S. D. (2002). Merleau-Ponty on the body. Ratio, 15(4), 376–391.
Koethe, J. (2002). Stanley and Williamson on knowing how. The Journal of Philosophy, 99(6), 325–328.
Land, M. F., & McLeod, P. (2000). From eye movements to actions: How batsmen hit the ball. Nature Neuroscience, 3(12), 1340–1345.
Levy, N. (2014). Neither fish nor fowl: Implicit attitudes as patchy endorsements. Noûs. doi:10.1111/nous.12074.
Lewis, D. (1982). Logic for equivocators. Noûs, 16(3), 431–441.
Luce, G., & Segal, J. (1966). Sleep. New York: Coward McCann.
Madva, A. (2012). The hidden mechanisms of prejudice: Implicit bias and interpersonal fluency. PhD Dissertation, Columbia University.
Madva, A. Forthcoming. Why implicit attitudes are (probably) not beliefs. Synthese.
Mandelbaum, E. (2011). The architecture of belief: An essay on the unbearable automaticity of believing. Doctoral Dissertation, University of North Carolina, Carolina.
Mandelbaum, E. (2014). Thinking is believing. Inquiry, 57(1), 55–96.
Mann, D. L., Ho, N. Y., De Souza, N. J., Watson, D. R., & Taylor, S. J. (2007). Is optimal vision required for the successful execution of an interceptive task? Human Movement Science, 26(3), 343–356.
Mann, D. L., Spratford, W., & Abernethy, B. (2013). The head tracks and gaze predicts: How the world’s best batters hit a ball. PloS one, 8(3), e58289.
Marcel, A. (2003). The sense of agency: Awareness and ownership of action. In J. Roessler & N. Eilan (Eds.), Agency and self-awareness. New York: Oxford University Press.
McLeod, P. (1987). Visual reaction time and high-speed ball games. Perception, 16(1), 49–59.
Montero, B. (2010). Does bodily awareness interfere with highly skilled movement? Inquiry, 53(2), 105–122.
Muller, H., & Bashour, B. (2011). Why alief is not a legitimate psychological category. Journal of Philosophical Research, 36, 371–389.
Myers-Schulz, B., & Schwitzgebel, E. (2013). Knowing that P without believing that P. Noûs, 47(2), 371–384.
Nagel, J. (2013). Knowledge as a mental state. In T. Gendler & J. Hawthorne (Eds.), Oxford studies in epistemology (Vol. 4). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Noë, A. (2005). Against intellectualism. Analysis, 65, 278–290.
Peacocke, C. (1999). Being known. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Peacocke, C. (2004). The realm of reason. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Plunkett, D., & Sundell, T. (2013). Disagreement and the semantics of normative and evaluative terms. Philosopher’s Imprint, 13(23), 1–37.
Poston, T. (2009). Know-how to be gettiered? Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 79, 743–747.
Radford, C. (1966). Knowledge—by examples. Analysis, 27, 1–11.
Reed, N., McLeod, P., & Dienes, Z. (2010). Implicit knowledge and motor skill: What people who know how to catch don’t know. Consciousness and Cognition, 19, 63–76.
Roland, J. (1958). On ‘Knowing How’ and ‘Knowing That’. The Philosophical Review, 67(3), 379–88.
Rose, D., & Schaffer, J. (2012). Knowledge entails dispositional belief. Philosophical Studies,. doi:10.1007/s11098-012-0052-z.
Rowbottom, D. (2007). ‘In-Between Believing’ and degrees of belief. Teorema, 26, 131–137.
Rumfitt, I. (2003). Savoir faire. The Journal of Philosophy, 100(3), 158–166.
Ryle, G. (1949). The concept of mind. London: Hutchinson.
Setiya, K. (2012). Knowing how. Proceedings of the Aristotelean Society, 112(3), 285–307.
Schacter, D. (1989). On the relation between memory and consciousness: Dissociable interactions and conscious experience. In H. Roediger & I. Craik (Eds.), Varieties of memory and consciousness: Essays in honor of endel tulving. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Schwitzgebel, E. (2010). Acting contrary to our professed beliefs, or the gulf between occurrent judgment and dispositional belief. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 91, 531–553.
Schwitzgebel, E. (2013). A dispositional approach to attitudes: Thinking outside of the belief box. In N. Nottelmann (Ed.), New essays on belief: Constitution. Palgrave MacMillan: Content and Structure.
Schiffer, S. (2002). Amazing knowledge. The Journal of Philosophy, 99(4), 200–202.
Sorensen, R. (1982). Knowing, believing, and guessing. Analysis, 42, 212–213.
Snowdon, P. (2003). Knowing how and knowing that: A distinction reconsidered. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 104, 1–29.
Stalnaker, R. (1984). Inquiry. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Stanley, J. (2011a). Knowing (How). Noûs, 45, 207–238.
Stanley, J. (2011b). Know how. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Stanley, J., & Williamson, T. (2001). Knowing how. The Journal of Philosophy, 98, 411–444.
Stich, S. (1978). Belief and subdoxastic states. Philosophy of Science, 45(4), 499–518.
Toribio, J. (2008). How do we know how. Philosophical Explorations, 11(1), 39–52.
Wallace, D. F. (2006). How tracy austin broke my heart. New York: Little, Brown, and Co.
Wallis, C. (2008). Consciousness, context, and know-how. Synthese, 160(1), 123–153.
Williamson, T. (2008). The philosophy of philosophy. New York: Wiley-Blackwell.
Williamson, T. (2014). Very improbable knowing. Erkenntnis, 79(5), 971–999.
Zimmerman, A. (2007). The nature of belief. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 14(11), 61–82.
Acknowledgments
For extremely helpful discussion and feedback on this paper, we thank Maria Alvarez, Bill Brewer, Ellen Fridland, Anneli Jefferson, Neil Levy, Alex Madva, Will McNeill, David Papineau, Matthew Parrot, Eric Schwitzgebel, Nicholas Shea, an anonymous reviewer for Synthese, and attendees of the 2014 Annual Meeting of the North Carolina Philosophical Society.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Author names are listed in alphabetical order. The authors (Michael Brownstein and Eliot Michaelson) contributed equally to this paper.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Brownstein, M., Michaelson, E. Doing without believing: Intellectualism, knowledge-how, and belief-attribution. Synthese 193, 2815–2836 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0888-9
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0888-9