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Intellectualizing know how

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Abstract

Following Gilbert Ryle’s arguments, many philosophers took it for granted that someone knows how to do something just in case they have the ability to do it. Within the last couple decades, new intellectualists have challenged this longstanding anti-intellectualist assumption. Their central contention is that mere abilities aren’t on the same rational, epistemic level as know how. My goal is to intellectualize know how without over-intellectualizing it. Intelligent behavior is characteristically flexible or responsive to novelty, and the distinctive feature of creatures who exhibit flexible behavior is their capacity to learn. As it turns out, Ryle already identified a core characteristic of learning shared widely across the animal kingdom from the lowly rat to the top athlete. Taking my cues from Ryle, I argue that know how is successful performance resulting from self-regulated abilities. To regulate an ability is to be disposed to adjust to error and respond to feedback. While regulating sophisticated human abilities often requires propositional knowledge, in many simpler cases it does not. I focus on the navigational know how of rats and honeybees. Although they possess know how, whether they possess propositional knowledge is at best an open question.

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Notes

  1. My aim is therefore distinct from the one adopted by Brownstein and Michaelson (2016). They identify counter-examples where one intuitively knows how to do something while lacking relevant beliefs about how to do it in order to put pressure on intellectualism. My goal is instead to respond to the pressure intellectualists have placed in opposite direction by describing a coherent and compelling anti-intellectualist account of know how which doesn’t fall prey to the intelligence problem.

  2. Describing self-regulation in terms of (a)–(c) is useful for introducing the concept and gaining an intuitive sense the ways in which is actually practiced. The core idea, however, may be captured in terms of a simpler iterative model: (1) perform (2) differentially respond to feedback (3) repeat (1)–(2) as necessary until performance lives up to governing standards. On this model, consolidation through practice will simply count as one way of responding to feedback. Someone who doesn’t practice a complex task, for example, will find that they repeatedly fail. If they are committed to acquiring the know how, they will (2) try out something new in order to achieve their goal, i.e., consolidation of lessons learned through practice.

  3. This may be a slight departure from Ryle’s own position since he in some places suggests that all knowledge must be acquired (see Kremer forthcoming). On this view, only abilities that have actually been acquired through self-regulation would count as know how.

  4. Carruthers points out that bees satisfy the two criteria that Jonathan Bennett lays out for non-linguistic animals to possess beliefs: they are capable of learning and their mental states are sensitive to evidence (Carruthers 2006, pp. 74–75). Recall that on the view defended here, any creature capable of self-regulation, a form of learning that essentially involves responsiveness to evidence, possesses know how. The criteria for having beliefs and having know how would seem to be roughly the same. If it could be further argued that many of these mental states must amount to knowledge, then Kremer and Löwenstein might have an alternative means of arguing that know how requires propositional knowledge even in the case of animal navigation. The problem, as I discuss subsequently, is that learning and sensitivity to evidence are also involved in map-like representational formats as well..

  5. I don’t take any stand on how to define iconic knowledge, but I take it for granted that some such conception is readily and unproblematically available. If we took inspiration from reliablist treatments of propositional knowledge, for example, we could simply define iconic knowledge as isomorphic representation resulting from reliable cognitive processes.

  6. Enactivists like Hutto and Satne (2017) nevertheless acknowledge that representations play some role in the cognitive lives of linguistic creatures.

  7. See Di Paolo and De Jaegher (2016) for one illustrative case of how the enactivist might tackle this problem. See also Di Paolo et al (2017, p. 102).

  8. Enactivists frequently gesture towards Ryle’s arguments against intellectualism and his positive treatment of know how to make sense of how one might possibly explain cognitive processes in non-representational terms (Hutto 2005; Verla et al.; Di Paolo et al 2017, p. 31). The intelligence problem for anti-intellectualism puts pressure on this move. Obviously, if know how requires or reduces to propositional knowledge, then enactivists can’t appeal to know how in order to explain intelligent performance without also appealing to representations. The enactivist, therefore, has a strong reason to hope that their view is compatible with mine as well. There is, however, a deep compatibility and even affinity between the self-regulation view of know how and recent enactive proposals. Di Paolo et al (2017) also stress the importance of norm-governed abilities, understood in terms of dynamic sensorimotor loops, and the agent’s capacity to self-regulate or, in their terms, for sensorimotor learning (see, especially, Di Paolo et al 2017, p. 104) and online control of the conditions or parameters of their coupling with the environment (Di Paolo et al 2017, p. 119).

  9. Radical enactivism is, however, incompatible with the claim that know how is intensional (Hutto and Myin 2017, pp. 93–114), but giving up this requirement for know how would likely lose its counter-intuitive force for someone who accepts enactivism about the mind. So, at least a modestly revised conception of know how would survive.

  10. See, for example, Clark (2008) for a compelling account of the ways in which intelligence consists in minimizing the role of internal cognitive processing loads.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Bryce Huebner, Joshua Habgood-Coote, David Löwenstein, Lillian Chang and three anonymous reviewers at Synthese for their comments and encouragement on this project.

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    Benjamin Elzinga

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Elzinga, B. Intellectualizing know how. Synthese 198, 1741–1760 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02160-6

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