Knowing how to

1. Gilbert Ryle

It was Gilbert RYLE who first drew attention to the topic ‘Knowing how to’ in his works ‘Knowing How and Knowing That’ (1946) and The Concept of Mind (1949: Ch. 2), and almost all subsequent writing on the subject refers back to one or both of these two texts. But although Ryle started something, it has not proved at all clear what this was. The source of this lack of clarity is the fact that Ryle’s discussion of the supposed distinction is a detail in a much wider project, a project which was far more important to him than was this particular detail.

The wider project was the refutation of Cartesian dualism, which Ryle famously called the doctrine of the ‘ghost in the machine’ (see DESCARTES, R. §8; RYLE, G. §2) and which he characterized as holding that the mind was the locus of non-material events knowable in principle only to their owners. Although both his 1946 work and Chapter 2 of his 1949 book have the title ‘Knowing How and Knowing That’, their immediate subject matter is intelligence and intelligent behaviour. Ryle appears to have felt that he had to rebut the following style of argument, lest it be taken to give support to his belief in the Cartesian ‘ghost’:

So:

Ryle’s strategy in both books was to reject (2), denying that intelligent behaviour must be controlled by a process of considering propositions. When we call behaviour intelligent we are speaking of the manner of the behaviour itself, most importantly of its responsiveness to changes in the conditions under which it occurs. As a strategy for blocking the above argument this will seem quaint to many philosophers today; with various brands of materialist theory of thought at their disposal (see MATERIALISM IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND), most would be likely to reject (3), and to go on to consider (2) only if they had a specific interest in the concept of intelligence.

For such people, what Ryle has to say is certainly worthy of attention. But just what has this to do with knowing how and knowing that? No decisive answer is forthcoming. From the way in which knowing how (to) appears (see Ryle 1946; 1949), one might conjecture that he wanted to identify knowing how to A with having the capacity to do A intelligently. But in some passages (e.g. 1949: Ch. 2, §6) he uses ‘knows how to’ as to all intents and purposes synonymous with ‘can’ – a synonymy rejected by nearly all subsequent writers, most of whom also reject the weaker thesis that ‘can’ is entailed by ‘knows how to’. (A favourite example is that of the ageing expert, who still knows how to but no longer can, having lost the necessary physical powers – see Carr (1981) and Craig (1990: 157).) There are even hints (e.g. 1949: 28) that Ryle did not always distinguish between ‘knowing how to’ and ‘knowing how’, as in knowing how a certain tune goes.

In the case of knowing that, Ryle was perfectly aware that someone who knows very little may display great intelligence in their use of what little they do know, whilst someone very well informed may be stupid, unable to make anything out of the store of facts at their disposal. Here he showed no tendency whatsoever to equate knowledge and intelligence. But neither did he show any interest in the possibility of such a distinction in the case of knowing how to, although prima facie one might well think that it exists: someone might display great intelligence in a tentative and clumsily successful attempt to do something, precisely because they did not know how to do it. On the whole it seems likely that Ryle, concentrating as he was on questions about ‘the concepts of intelligence’, did not think very intensively about knowing that and knowing how, but slipped into using it as a title which confusingly mislocates his own emphasis.