Abstract
In this paper I criticize the most significant recent examples of the practical knowledge analysis of knowledge-how in the philosophical literature: David Carr [1979, Mind, 88, 394–409; 1981a, American Philosophical Quarterly, 18, 53–61; 1981b, Journal of Philosophy of Education, 15(1), 87–96] and Stanley & Williamson [2001, Journal of Philosophy, 98(8), 411–444]. I stress the importance of know-how in our contemporary understanding of the mind, and offer the beginnings of a treatment of know-how capable of providing insight in to the use of know-how in contemporary cognitive science. Specifically, I claim that Carr’s necessary conditions for know-how fail to capture the distinction he himself draws between ability and knowing-how. Moreover, Carr ties knowing-how to conscious intent, and to an explicit knowledge of procedural rules. I argue that both moves are mistakes, which together render Carr’s theory an inadequate account both of common ascriptions of knowledge-how and of widely accepted ascriptions of knowledge-how within explanations in cognitive science. Finally, I note that Carr’s conditions fail to capture intuitions (heshares) regarding the ascription of know-how to persons lacking ability. I then consider the position advocated by Stanley & Williamson (2001), which seems avoid Carr’s commitments to conscious intent and explicit knowledge while still maintaining that “knowledge-how is simply a species of knowledge-that" (Stanley & Williamson, 2001, p. 411). I argue that Stanley and Williamson’s attempt to frame a reductionist view that avoids consciously occurrent beliefs during exercises of knowledge-how and explicit knowledge of procedural rules is both empirically implausible and explanatorily vacuous. In criticizing these theories I challenge the presuppositions of the most pervasive response to Ryle in the philosophic literature, what might be described as “the received view." I also establish several facts about knowing-how. First, neither conscious intent nor explicit representation (much less conscious representation) of procedural rules are necessary for knowing-how given the theory of cognition current in cognitive science. I argue that the discussed analyses fail to capture the necessary conditions for knowledge-how because know-how requires the instantiation of an ability and of the capacities necessary for exploiting an ability—not conscious awareness of purpose or explicit knowledge of rules. Second, one must understand knowledge-how as task-specific, i.e., as presupposing certain underlying conditions. Conceiving of know-how as task-specific allows one to understand ascriptions of know-how in the absence of ability as counterfactual ascriptions based upon underlying competence.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Anderson J.R., Kline P.J., Beasley C.M. (1979). A general learning theory andits application to schema abstraction. In: G.H. Bower (eds) The psychology of learning and motivation. NewYork, Academic Press
Annett J. (1995). On knowing how to do things: A theory of motor imagery. Cognitive Brain Research 3, 65–69
The American Psychiatric Association (1987). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders: Third edition-revised. Washington: American Psychiatric Association.
Armstrong D.M. (1968). A materialist theory of mind. London, Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd
Bargh J., Chartrand T. (1999). The unbearable automaticity of being. American Psychologist 54, 462–479
Baseler H.,Morland A., Wandell B. (1999). Topographic organization of human visual areas in the absence of input from primary cortex. Journal of Neuroscience 19, 2619–2627
Bayley P., Squire L. (2002). Medial temporal lobe amnesia: Gradual acquisition of factual information by nondeclarative memory. The Journal of Neuroscience 22(13): 5741–5748
Bechtel W., Abrahamsen A. (1991). Connectionism and the mind: An introduction to parallel processing in networks. Cambridge, Blackwell Press
Behrmann M., Marotta J., Gauthier I., Tarr M., McKeeff T. (2005). Behavioral change and its neural correlates invisual agnosia after expertise Training. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 17, 554–568
Berry D., Broadbent D. (1984). On the relationship between task performance and associated verbalizable knowledge. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology A: Human Experimental Psychology 36A(2): 209–231
Bliss, J., Ogborn, J. (1994). Force and motion from the beginning. Learning & Instruction, 4(1), 7–25 (tacit).
Brehmer, B.,Hagafors, R., & Johansson, R. (1980). Cognitive skills in judgment: subjects’ ability to use information about weights, function forms, and organizing principles. Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 26(3), 373–385 (Expert judgement).
Brown D. (1970). Knowing how and knowing that, what. In: Wood O.P., Pitcher G. (eds) Ryle. Garden City, Anchor Books
Bull R. (1979). Pupil dilation, sex of stimulus, and age and sex of observer. Perceptual and Motor Skills 49(1): 27–30
Carr D.(1979). The logic of knowing how and ability. Mind 88, 394–409
Carr D. (1981a). Knowledge in practice. American Philosophical Quarterly 18, 53–61
Carr D. (1981b). On mastering a skill. Journal of Philosophy of Education 15(1): 87–96
Cermak L.S., Lewis R., Butters N., Goodglass H.(1973). Role of verbal mediation in performance of motor tasks by Korsak offpatients. Perceptual and Motor Skills 37, 259–262
Chervinskaya K., Bekhterev V.(2000). Some methodological aspects of tacit knowledge elicitation. The Journal of Experimental & Theoretical Artificial Intelligence 12(1): 43–55
Cohen J.,Eichenbaum H., Deacedo B., Corkin S. (1985). Different memory systems underlying acquisition of procedural and declarative knowledge. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 444, 54–71
Cohen J.,Hunt C., Romine L., Wszalek T., Nash C.(1999). Hippocampal system and declarative (relational) memory: Summarizingthe data from functionalneuroimaging studies. Hippocampus 9, 83–99
Cohen J., Squire L. (1980). Preserved learning and retention of pattern–analyzing skill in amnesia: Dissociation of knowing how and knowing that. Science 210, 207–209
Cooke N. (1999). Knowledge elicitation. In: Durso F. (ed) Handbook of applied cognition. NewYork, NY John Wiley and Sons, pp. 479-509
Corkin S. (1968). Acquisition of motor skill after bilateral medial temporal–lobe excision. Neuro psychologia 6(3): 255–266
Cummins R.(1983). The nature of psychological explanation. Cambridge, MITPress
Dawes R., Faust D., Meehl P. (1989). Clinical versus actuarial judgment. Science 243(4899): 1668–1674
de Groot A., Gobet F. (1996). Perception and memory inchess. Heuristics of the professional eye. Assen, VanGorcum
Doya K. (2000). Complementary roles of basal Ganglia and cerebellum in learning and motor Control." Current Opinionin Neurobiology 10(6): 732–739
Ellis N. (2005). At the interface: Dynamic interactions of explicit and implicit language knowledge. Studies in second language acquisition 27(2): 305–352
Emery N., Clayton N. (2005). Animal cognition. In: Bolhuis J.J., Giraldeau L.-A. (eds) The behavior of animals: Mechanisms, function, and evolution. Malden, MA, Blackwell Publishing
Evans, J. (1988).The knowledge elicitation problem: A psychological perspective. Behavior and Information Technology,7(2), pp. 111–130.
Faust D. (1989). Data integration in legal evaluations: Can clinicians deliver on their premises?. Behavioral Sciences andthe Law 7(4): 469–483
Ford D., Bergen N., Sterman J. (1998). Expert knowledge elicitation to improve formal and mental models. System Dynamics Review 14(4): 309–340
Gabrieli J. (1998). Cognitive neuroscience of human memory. Annual Review of Psychology 49, 87–115
Gabrieli J., McGlinchey–Berroth R., Carrillo M., Gluck M.,Cermak L., Disterhoft J. (1995). Intact delay–eyeblink classical conditioning in amnesia. Behavioral Neuroscience 109(5): 819–827
Ganzach Y. (2001). Nonlinear model of clinical judgement: Communal nonlinearity and nonlinear accuracy. Psychological Science 12(5): 403–407
Geach P. (1957). Mental acts. NewYork, Humanities Press
Geach P. (1966). Dr. Kenny on practical inference. Analysis 26, 76–9
Gilbert D. (1989).Thinking lightly about others: Automatic components of the social inference process. In: Uleman J.S., Bargh J.A. (eds) Unintended thought. NewYork, Guilford Press, pp. 189-211
Goldman, A. (2002). Simulation theory and mental concepts. Advances in Consciousness Research, 45.
Gobet F., Simon H.A. (1996). The roles of recognition processes and look-ahead search in time-constrained expertproblem solving: Evidence from grand-master-level chess. PsychologicalScience 6, 381–381
Gobet F., Simon H.A. (1998). Expertchess memory:Revisitingthechunking hypothesis. Memory 7, 52–55
Grafton S.,Mazziotta J., Presty S., Friston K. (1992). Functional anatomy of human procedural learning determined with regional cerebral blood flow and PET. JournalofNeuroscience 12(7): 2542–2548
Griffen D. (1992). Animal minds. Chicago, University of Chicago Press
Hansell, M. (1972). Case building behavior of the caddis-fly larvae. (Lepidostoma Hirtum Journal of Zoology) 167, 179–192
Hansell M. (1984). Animal architecture and building behavior. London, Longman
Haugeland J. (1981). Semantic engines: An introduction to mind design. In: Haugeland J. (ed) Mind design. Cambridge, MIT/Bradford Books
Hill, K. (1984). Verbal reports of stimulus effects on learning: Introspection revisited. Journal of Research in Personality, 18(4), 480–490 (Intro).
Hintikka J. (1974). Practicalvs. theoretical reason—an ambiguous legacy. In: Korner S. (eds) Practical reason. New Haven, YaleUniversity Press
Hoffman, R., Shadbolt, N.,Burton, A., & Klein, G. (1995). Eliciting knowledge from experts: A methodological analysis. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 62(2), 129–158 (Expert).
Jacoby L., Witherspoon D. (1982). Remembering without awareness. Canadian Journal of Psychology 36(2): 300–324
Kahneman D., Tversky A. (1982). The simulation heuristic. In: Kahneman D., Slovic P., A. Tversky (eds) Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press
Katzoff C. (1984). Knowing How. The Southern Journal of Philosophy 22, 61–70
Kenny A.(1966). Practical inference. In Analysis 26, 65–75
Knowlton, B., & Squire, L. (1993). The learning of categories: Parallel memory systems for item memory and category–level knowledge. Science 262, 1747–1749 (Kh).
Knowlton, B., Squire, L., & Gluck, M.(1994). Probabilistic classification in amnesia. Learning and Memory,1, 106–120 (Kh).
Knowlton B.,Mangels J., Squire L.(1996). A neostriatal habit learning systemin humans. Science 273(5282): 1399–1402
Koethe J. (2002). Stanley and Williamson on knowing how. The Journal of Philosophy 99, 325–328
Lovett M.C., Anderson J.R. (2005) Thinking as a production system. In: Holyoak K., Morrison R. (eds)Cambridge handbook of thinking and reasoning. NY, Cambridge University Press.
Luce G., Segal J. (1966). Sleep. NewYork, Coward McCann
Mackie J.(1974). A reply to Jaakko Hintikka. In: Korner S. (eds) Practical reason. New Haven,Yale University Press
Mandler G. (1975). Consciousness, respectable, useful, and probably necessary. In: Solso R. (eds) Information processing and cognition: The Loyola syposium. Hillsdale, NJ, Earlbaum
Marr D. (1981). Vision. NewYork, Freeman and Company
Meehl P. (1954). Clinical vs statistical prediction: A theoretical analysis and are view of the evidence. Minneapolis, MN, University of Minnesota Press
Mogenson G., Jones D., Yim C. (1980). From motivation to Action—Functional interface between the limbic system and the motor system. Progress in Neurobiology 14(2–3): 69–97
Monchi O., Petrides M., Strafella P., Worsley K., Doyon J. (2006). Functional role of the basal ganglia in the planning and execution of action. Annals of Neurology 59(2): 257–264
Nisbett R., Wilson T. (1977). Telling more than wecan know: Verbal reports on mental processes. Psychological Review 84, 231–259
Pascual-Leone A., Grafman J., Hallett M. (1994). Modulation of cortical motor output maps during development of implicit and explicit learning. Science 263, 1287–1289
Pearson D., Laird J. (2005). Incremental learning of procedural planning knowledge in challenging environment. Computational Intelligence 21(4): 414–439
Perea M., Gotor A. (1997). Associative and semantic priming effects occur at very short stimulus–onset asynchronies in lexical decision and naming. Cognition 62, 223–240
Perea M., Rosa E.(2002). The effects of associative and semantic priming in the lexical decision task. Psychological Research 66, 180–194
Poldrack R., Clark J.,Paré–Blagoev E., Shohamy D., Moyano J.,Myers C., Gluck M. (2001). Interactive memory systems in the human brain. Nature 414, 546–550
Poldrack R., Sabb F.,Foerde K.,Tom S.,Asarnow R., Bookheimer S., Knowlton B. (2005). The neural correlates of motor skill automaticity. Journal of Neuroscience 25(22): 5356–5364
Quaney B., Rotella D., Peterson C., Cole K. (2003). Sensorimotor memory for fingertip forces: Evidence for a task-independent motor memory. Journal of Neuroscience 23(5): 1981–1986
Quinton A. (1970). Ryle on perception. In: Wood O.P., Pitcher G. (eds) Ryle. GardenCity, Anchor Books
Reber P., Squire L.(2005) Encapsulation of implicit and explicit memory in sequence learning. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 10(2): 248–263
Reber A. (1989). Implicit Learning and Tacit Knowledge. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 118(3): 219–235
Reber A., Lewis C. (1977). Implicit Learning: Ananalysis of the form and strucuture of a body of tacit knowledge. Cognition 5, 333–361
Rosenbloom P., Laird J., McDermott J., Newell A., Orciuch E. (1985). R1-Soar: An experiment in knowledge-intensive programming in a problem–solving architecture". IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence 7, 561–569
Rumelhart D. (1989). The architecture of the mind: a connectionist approach. In: Posner M. (eds) Foundations of cognitive science. Cambridge, MITPress
Ryle G. (1949). The concept of mind. NewYork, Barnesand Noble
Saxe R.(2005). Against simulation: Theargumentfromerror. TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences 9, 174–179
Schacter D.(1989).On the relation between memory and consciousness: Dissociable interactions and conscious experience. In: Roediger H., Craik I. (eds) Varieties of memory and consciousness: Essaysin honorof EndelTulving. Hillsdale, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates
Schmand B., Kop W., Kuipers T., Jacquoline B. (1992). Implicit learning in psychotic patients. Schizophrenia Research 7(1): 55–64
Schröder J.,Tittel A.,Stockert A., Karr M. (1996). Memory deficits in subsyndromes of chronic Schizophrenia. Schizophrenia Research 21(1): 19–26
Seger C. (1994). Implicit learning. Psychological Bulletin 115(2): 163–196
Smeets W., Marin O., Gonzalez A. (2000). Evolution of the basal ganglia: New perspectives through a comparative approach. Journal of Anatomy 196(Pt4): 501–17
Smith C.,Clark R., Manns J., Squire L.(2005). Acquisition of differential delay eyeblink classical conditioning is independent of awareness. Behavioral Neuroscience 119(1): 78–86
Squire L. (2004). memory systems of the brain: A brief history and current perspective. Neurobiology of Learning and Memory 82(3): 171–177
Stanley J., Williamson T. (2001). Knowing how. The Journal of Philosophy 98(8): 411–444
Sun R., Slusarz P., Terry C. (2005). The interaction of the explicit and the implicit in skill learning: Adual-process approach. Psychological Review 112(1): 159–192
Sternberg R., Horvath J. (1998). Cognitive conceptions of expertise and their relations to giftedness. In R. Friedman, & K. Rogers, (Eds.), Talent in context: Historical and social perspectives on giftedness (pp. 177–191).
Stich S., Nichols S. (1997). Cognitive penetrability, rationality, and restricted simulation. Mind & Language 12, 297–326
Stillings N.,Feinstein M.,Garfield J., Rissland E., Rosenbaum D.,Weisler S., Baker-Ward L. (1987). Cognitive science: An introduction. Cambridge, MITPress
Thalen E.(1995). Time-scale dynamics and the development of an embodied cognition. In: Port R., Van Gelder T. (eds) Mind as motion. Cambridge, MITPress
Tversky A., Kahneman D. (1973). Availability: A heuristic for judging frequency and probability. Cognitive Psychology 5, 207–232
Tversky A., Kahneman D. (1974). Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. Science 185, 1124–1131
Unger P.(1967). Experience and factual knowledge. The Journal of Philosophy 64, 152–73
van Grop W., Altshuler L.,Theberge D., Mintz J. (1999). Declarative and procedural memory in bipolar disorder. Biological Pyschiatry 46(4): 525–531
Vicari S., Bellucci S., Carlesimo G. (2001). Procedural learning deficit in children with Williams syndrome. Neuropsychologia 39(7): 665–677
Waters A., Gobet F., Leyden G. (2002). Visuo-spatial abilities inchess players. British Journal of Psychology 30, 303–311
Wells-Jensen S.,Wells-Jensen J., Belknap G. (2005). Changing the public’s attitude toward Braille: Agrass roots approach. Journal of Visual Impairment & Blindness 99, 133–140
Wiggins N., Hoffman P. (1968). Three models of clinical judgment. Journal of Abnormal Psychology 73(1): 70–77
Wilson T., Nisbett R. (1978). The accuracy of verbal reports about the effects of stimuli on evaluations and behavior. Social Psychology 41(2): 118–131
Yamadori A.,Yoshida T., Mori E. (1996). Neurological basis of skill learning. Cognitive Brain Research 5(1–2): 49–54
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Wallis, C. Consciousness, context, and know-how. Synthese 160, 123–153 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-006-9103-3
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-006-9103-3