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Embodied savoir-faire: knowledge-how requires motor representations

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Abstract

I argue that the intellectualist account of knowledge-how, according to which agents have the knowledge-how to \(\upvarphi \) in virtue of standing in an appropriate relation to a proposition, is only half right. On the composition view defended here, knowledge-how at least typically requires both propositional knowledge and motor representations. Motor representations are not mere dispositions to behavior (so the older dispositionalist view isn’t even half right) because they have representational content, and they play a central role in realizing the intelligence in knowledge-how. But since motor representations are not propositional, propositional knowledge is not sufficient for knowledge-how.

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Notes

  1. In this paper, I use ‘intellectualism’ to refer to the family of views that maintain that knowledge-how supervenes on the agent’s standing in a relation to a proposition. Bengson and Moffett (2012b) defend a nonpropositional account of the nature of knowledge-how; they are nevertheless targeted by my arguments since they maintain that an agent counts as possessing the knowledge-how to \(\upvarphi \) in virtue of possessing appropriate propositional attitudes.

  2. It is this fact that distinguishes the composition view from what Pavese (unpublished) calls the ‘mixed view’, on which knowledge how is partly propositional and partly non-propositional. The mixed view does not require that the intelligence in virtue of which knowledge-how qualifies as knowledge is partly due to the non-propositional elements of know how.

  3. Stanley and Williamson maintain that the regress argument fails because there are things we can do without knowing how to do them; they give digestion as an example. It is therefore false that the intellectualist is committed to thinking that the agent must know how to contemplate a proposition (see also Snowdon 2012). As Noë (2005) points out, however, digestion is not the kind of thing that agents do intentionally or intelligently. Further, it is far from clear that unintelligent mechanisms can be sufficiently responsive to subtleties of context to do the work Stanley and Williamson require of them; see Fridland (2013).

  4. Devitt (2011) and Brown (2013) argues persuasively that formal syntax and semantics does little to advance our understanding of the debate. Devitt argues that Stanley and Williamson’s semantics entails the falsity of a great deal of work in psychology and ethology, but that we have better reason to be confident of these claims than of the semantics. Brown’s argument is slightly different: she agrees with Stanley and Williamson that disquotation allows us to infer from the truth conditions of sentences attributing knowledge how to the nature of knowledge how, but maintains that it is an open question whether the correct analysis of the truth conditions of such sentences needs to be informed by cognitive science and metaphysics. It is a partly empirical question whether “knowing how” refers to standing in relation to a proposition. This is not a question we can settle by linguistic analysis alone. Because I am convinced by these claims, I will not discuss arguments from semantics any further.

  5. For effective criticism of the idea of a distinctive practical mode of presentation as the idea is developed by Stanley and Williamson (2001), and Stanley (2011), see Rosefeldt (2004) and Noë (2005). As Rosefedlt argues, for all that Stanley and Williamson show, talk about a practical mode of presentation is simply disguised talk about abilities. Pavese (unpublished) has done a great deal to dissipate the air of mystery surrounding talk of a practical mode of presentation. For her, practical modes of presentation are Fregean senses, and far from being mysterious we actually encounter examples of such practical modes of presentation in computer programs.

  6. I will discuss the scope of the composition view—whether it applies to all instances of knowledge-how, or only some of them—at the end of this section. For the moment, I ignore the question and speak for ease of exposition as though the composition view applies to all instances of knowledge-how.

  7. We should follow Stanley and Fridland in identifying intelligence with propositional structure only if this kind of flexibility requires it; see Mandelbaum (2015) and Levy (2015) for an examination of this question.

  8. A referee for this journal objects that even if motor representations are not propositional, they might be conceptual and this fact might be cited in defense of intellectualism, because this conceptual content might constitute the practical mode of presentation appealed to by (some) intellectualists. On what I take to be the standard view, motor representations are not conceptual. Carruthers (2006, p. 284) points out that there is additional reason to think that the representations of skilled action cannot be conceptual: they have a fineness of grain that outruns our concepts. The suggestion that motor representations’ possessing conceptual content could aid the intellectualist is an interesting one, but defending it would take a great deal of work: as well as showing that motor representations are conceptual, the intellectualist would have to develop an account of how this conceptual content could constitute a practical mode of presentation. Existing work defending the idea of the mode of presentation has done a great deal to render its existence less mysterious but has not begun the task of showing how such a mode could be constituted by motor representations with conceptual content.

  9. A referee for this journal raises the interesting possibility that the differences in formats might be a difference in kinds of propositional formats, rather than a difference between propositional and non-propositional representations. While I don’t think we can rule this possibility out, it seems unlikely because the performance profiles on the tasks seem to reflect affordances and movement possibilities of the body. It would be mysterious why biomechanical accessibility, for instance, would affect cognition were the underlying processes propositional in character.

  10. I thank a referee for this journal for forcing this issue to my attention.

  11. That said, because motor representations are embodied representations, they do have a tighter connection to capacities than does propositional knowledge. As we have already noted, motor representations degrade over time once bodily capacity is lost. Our intuitions here may mislead us: it is a discovery that, say, sufferers from amyotrophic lateral sceloris have deficits when it comes to judging hand position. Typical subjects have not suffered this kind of deficit, and do not realize how the loss of bodily capacity may impact representational capacities, so our intuitions with regard to these cases are not reliable.

  12. Perhaps it is better to say that to the extent to which we are disposed to judge that Irina lacks the knowledge-how, it is her false propositional beliefs that explain our intuitions. Matters are complicated by the availability to her of genuine propositional knowledge via demonstratives (“here’s how I do it”). Given the availability of such demonstrative-utilizing propositional knowledge, we may judge that Irina does have the requisite knowledge-how (with Brogaard 2012).

  13. It might be suggested that the account offered here itself suggests a kind of pernicious dualism, of a sort that Stanley has been concerned to overcome: not (quite) the dualism of mind and body, but the related dualism of intelligence and mere bodily activity. As Stanley and Krakauer (2013) point out, the propositional account entails that “there is in fact no difference between practical and theoretical tasks with respect to the kind of knowledge” (p. 9), whereas it seems that an account that makes motor representations central does entail such a difference. In fact, whether there is such a difference in kind is on my view an open empirical question: it depends on whether motor representations are deeply implicated in what we customarily refer to as intellectual activity. Proponents of embodied cognition may insist that motor representations play a role in all complex cognitive activity and they may be right in so doing. If they are, then the gap between practical and theoretical can be closed, not by intellectualizing the practical but by bringing the theoretical down to earth.

  14. This paper has been greatly improved thanks to extensive and penetrating comments by three anonymous referees for this journal.

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Levy, N. Embodied savoir-faire: knowledge-how requires motor representations. Synthese 194, 511–530 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0956-1

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