Knowing how to

2. Knowledge-how-to and knowledge-that

Something that Ryle certainly wanted to resist was the view that knowing how to is a subspecies of knowing that. On the face of it a number of subsequent writers appear to have accepted his position (although not necessarily his reasons for it), in that they have employed a contrast between knowledge-that and knowledge-how-to in argument, or in their delineation of a doctrine. Perhaps the best-known case is David Lewis’ response to an argument in the philosophy of mind purporting to establish the irreducible existence of phenomenal qualia (Lewis 1983; 1990) (see QUALIA). The tentative formulation ‘on the face of it’ is appropriate here because in some of these cases, and certainly in that of Lewis, a sympathetic reading might take the essential contrast to be between knowing that and possessing an ability, references to knowing how to being marginal and dispensible.

Be that as it may, it has been forcefully argued that Ryle was wrong regarding this central point, and that knowing how to is in fact a type of knowing that, along with knowing where to, knowing when to and several similar expressions. That this is so is one of the results of Brown (1970), and the principal theme of Stanley and Williamson (2001: 429). Both papers make use of work in theoretical linguistics, a fact which brings one immediate benefit: it becomes clear just what the object of the investigation is, namely the syntax and semantics of the English expression ‘knows how to. . . ’. (It is another question whether anything of philosophical importance is lost when the question gains this particular focus.) We now follow in outline the central part of the exposition of Stanley and Williamson (2001), considering first the syntactic question.