Abstract
Increasingly, epistemologists are discussing the conceptual relationships between knowledge-that and knowledge-how. This chapter argues that epistemology should also encompass a distinct concept of knowing-to. Only with the addition of knowing-to can knowledge-how ever be manifested in a particular action within a particular setting. Unlike the possibly longer-lasting knowledge-how, knowing-to is fleeting and contextual. It is inherent within what Gilbert Ryle called intelligent acting. In ordinary parlance, we talk freely of knowing-to; here, I begin investigating epistemologically this epistemic aspect of action.
I am grateful to audiences at the University of Sydney and UNSW, along with Waldemar Brys, Karyn L. Lai, and Shane Ryan especially, for helpful comments on drafts of this chapter. I also valued feedback on the chapter from a UNSW discussion group.
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Notes
- 1.
In arguing for this, my approach will be conceptual. Earlier (2015), Karyn L. Lai and I argued for the textual presence, within some classic Chinese philosophy, of some implicit reliance upon what, as I will explain here, is an extended or derivative form of knowing-to. This chapter will thus supplement that earlier comparative contribution conceptually, thereby strengthening this link between classic Chinese philosophy and contemporary Western epistemology. I will be exploring the very idea of knowing-to at all, by examining the idea of a primary or basic form of knowing-to. Note at the outset that this distinction, between derivative knowing-to and primary knowing-to, can arise even for a single (deliberate) bodily movement: the same movement might reflect both one’s knowing to do (some simple action) X and one’s failing to know to not do X relative to a ‘larger’ social setting, for example. Note also that the knowing-to that brings into existence some instance of doing X is distinct from any knowing-to that brings to an end that instance of doing X—perhaps knowing to stop doing X. This is a further action.
- 2.
Well, ‘almost not at all’. Hamblin (1987: 200) mentions it: ‘the para-imperative correlate of knowledge that is knowledge to’.
- 3.
On empirically describable details of knowing-to, see Mason and Spence (1999). On intimations of the idea of knowing-to within some ancient Chinese philosophy, see Hetherington and Lai (2015). For a further application of the idea, to self-knowledge’s ever being a moral virtue, see Hetherington (2016a: sec. 9).
- 4.
Ryle guided epistemologists towards using the term ‘intelligent action’ in this way.
- 5.
If you mistake the moment, by acting when your acting was not required (relative, for instance, to your aims as a batter at the time in question), then you did not know to act at that moment. You moved as if you did. And for you it was as if you did. But you did not.
- 6.
This is as good a place as any to clarify the scope of this chapter. As per my central example, my aim is to explicate the metaphysically most basic form of knowing-to. Compare my example of playing a particular cricket shot with knowing to bow at an apt moment in an apt circumstance, or even with knowing to play that same cricket shot at an apt moment in the game (‘apt’, given how one’s team is faring). The latter cases involve derivative instances of knowing-to, whereas I am discussing a primary or basic or atomistic sense of knowing-to. At the metaphysical base of any complex derivative instance of knowing-to is at least one instance of atomistic or primary knowing-to. The latter kind of knowing-to is my present explicandum. For simplicity, though, I will generally use the unqualified term ‘knowing-to’.
- 7.
Section 3 will describe a correlative confusion apparently underlying the objection.
- 8.
We might also describe it as your knowing—categorically—to do X55-since-C55, or -because-C55. We might also see the ‘fine-grained’ conditional knowing-to—knowing-to-do-X55-if-C55-arises—as partly externalist, in that you, as the agent, are highly unlikely ever to be able to describe C55 in its full specificity.
- 9.
It could also be due to your knowledge-how being less good than it might be. The next section will discuss this detail.
- 10.
The latter locution will serve as a way of parsing the former one.
- 11.
And we may reinforce this point by adverting again to the previous section’s distinction between conditional knowing-to and unconditional, or categorical, knowing-to. When two people have differing strengths of knowledge-how to do X, this could reflect the differing sizes of their respective ranges of instances of conditional knowing-to. I might know-to-do-X56-if-C56-arises, while you might not, even as in all other respects our respective cases of knowledge-how-to-play-a-cover-drive are the same. There could be many instances of knowing-to-do-Xi-if-Ci-arises that each of us has, for example, even as there are some that only one of us has.
- 12.
- 13.
- 14.
Stanley and Williamson (2001) reinvigorated this recent debate.
- 15.
I say ‘action-directed’ to distinguish knowledge-how from knowledge-that. The latter’s epistemic strength satisfies a truth-directed sense of ‘epistemic’.
- 16.
Respectively, possibilities (i) and (ii) are the analogues, for fallible knowing-how, of the following states of affairs for fallible knowledge-that: (i*) one’s belief is false; (ii*) one’s belief would have been true if present. On such possibilities within the concept of fallible knowledge, see Hetherington (2016b).
- 17.
And this could simply be a lack. It need not be due, for example, to an associated knowing-not-to.
- 18.
- 19.
This—we are also supposing—is enough if you are to play the shot intelligently: nothing extra, such as knowledge-to, is needed.
- 20.
- 21.
‘But is knowing to do X therefore knowing to do the first stage of doing X? And if so, is further knowing-to needed, in order to link the knowledge how to do X with doing the first stage of doing X? Is a regress thereby under way?’ No. The knowing to do X is the doing—not the knowing to do—the first stage of the doing X.
- 22.
I will mention only briefly an historical resonance. Recall Hume’s asking, when testing causal connectionism, whether he could find within himself an impression of what we could call a ‘causal moment’—a separate causal linking, leading from a cause to an effect. Can such an impression be found? No (said Hume): we have an impression of the first event, then one of the second; but there is no further impression of a causal linking between those two. Analogously, I see knowing-to as the causal linking of the knowing-how with the action manifesting that knowing-how. But the knowing-to is not thereby a separate event, for example, between the knowledge-how and the action manifesting the knowledge-how.
- 23.
Accordingly, knowing-to is not what Ryle (1971: 213) would call the ‘go-between application-process’ taking an agent from her knowing how to do X to her doing X (this activity thereby being intelligent). Knowing-to avoids being what Ryle (arguing against intellectualism) calls a combination—per impossibile—of ‘the allegedly incompatible properties of being kith to theory and kin to practice’ (ibid.).
- 24.
Compare this with an idea discarded by Setiya (2011: 176):
knowledge of an intention already amounts to knowledge of an action in progress, though perhaps at a very early stage.
Setiya’s focus, like that of many others writing about Anscombe’s Intention (1963), is on trying to understand how an agent knows what she is doing intelligently. But he regards such knowledge as also available for an agent in relation to ‘what she is going to do’ (2011: 136). So, he objects to that discarded idea, even as an account of the former knowledge, partly by noting that it does not account for the latter knowledge. Nevertheless, none of that knowledge would quite be knowing to do X here and now.
- 25.
Some might interpret 1 as reporting the person’s having propositional knowledge bearing in general upon relevant potential dangers and available means of protection, for example. But such an interpretation would be part of an intellectualist prediction—of what he would do, and of he is doing it while being guided by the knowledge-that about danger and protection. (Of course, there is propositional knowledge hovering nearby: someone might read ‘He knows to do X’ as shorthand for ‘He knows that he will have to do X if he is to do X*.’ This is not the sort of knowing-to that I am describing, though.)
- 26.
For further discussion of this picture, with an eye mainly upon associated linguistic data, see Glick (2012).
- 27.
Known necessary truths complicate this schema. We may set them aside because our present question concerns the analogous possibility for knowing to do X, and because no action of doing X will be a necessary action.
- 28.
But one qualification is needed here. I have stressed this chapter’s being focused on primary or basic or atomistic knowledge-to. But I also mentioned that, arising above that metaphysical base, we might speak of derivative instances of knowing-to, such as one’s knowing to bow in some apt social setting. I suggest (without having the space here to examine this further) that it is here, in these potentially more subtle and complicated circumstances, that fallibility might affix itself to a given instance of knowing-to.
- 29.
- 30.
Compare McDowell (2011: 142) on Anscombe on the knowledge present in an intentional action:
self-knowledge as a bodily agent is not just a matter of knowing which bodily movements are in general within one’s powers, for instance that the kind of joint a knee is allows a leg to be bent so as to take the foot to the rear but not to the front or the side. Self-knowledge as a bodily agent extends also, in normal waking life, to knowing which specific movements of those general kinds are possibilities for one here and now.
Even this remains knowledge-that, even if temporally and locationally specific in content.
- 31.
Ryle (1979: 67) could be thought to have been acquainted with it, when saying ‘that, with a reservation or two, all teaching is teaching-to and all learning is learning-to.’ However, these formulations of Ryle’s seem intended to denote general skills—cases of knowledge-how rather than knowledge-to. The latter lives and dies in a context, even a momentary one. Knowledge-how can do so, but need not.
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Hetherington, S. (2022). Knowing-To. In: Lai, K.L. (eds) Knowers and Knowledge in East-West Philosophy. Palgrave Studies in Comparative East-West Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79349-4_2
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