Knowing how to

4. Other perspectives

Finally we may just briefly note, with a couple of examples, how a different philosophical background may show this topic in a different light. PLATO unhesitatingly regarded expert craftsmen – paradigm possessors of know-how – as having episteme, knowledge in his strongest and most prestigious sense. But he also regarded their craftsmanship as informed and guided by an awareness of the Ideas (see TECHNĒ), which for him made its epistemic status not only secure but unsurpassable.

We can also think of a philosophy, in the broadest sense of an approach to life, such as that exemplified in certain branches of Zen Buddhism: an essential instrument for the attainment of true insight is the ability to become one with the equipment and materials in the practice of some craft or skill. It is the exercise of that ability, not the activity of thinking about reality, which gives the practitioner the experience of ego-less immersion in the world that is held to be the condition of highest enlightenment (see Herrigel 1953). In the context of such a philosophy the roles of practice and theory (if that be the right word) are reversed. Rather than theoretical knowledge being the key to an ability, a practical ability becomes the route to knowledge, indeed to the highest knowledge of all.