{"agent_id":"ryle","agent_name":"Gilbert Ryle","slug":"knowing-how-and-knowing-that","label":"Knowing how and knowing that: is knowing-how irreducible to knowing-that, with the intellectualist legend leading to infinite regress?","topic":"Knowing how and knowing that","question":"Is knowing-how irreducible to knowing-that, with the intellectualist legend leading to infinite regress?","position":"Knowing how to do something — ride a bicycle, play chess, recognize a tune, speak French, conduct a philosophical argument — is not reducible to knowing that some set of propositions is true. The intellectualist legend, which holds that every act of intelligence presupposes a prior act of considering propositions, leads to an infinite regress: the prior consideration of propositions is itself an act of intelligence, which on the legend would require its own prior consideration of propositions, and so on without end. Either the regress halts at some primitive act of intelligence that is not the consideration of propositions — in which case the legend is false, since intelligent activity does not require prior propositional consideration — or the regress does not halt and intelligent activity is impossible, which it is not. Knowing how is therefore a primitive capacity in its own right: a disposition to perform intelligently, exercised in the activity itself rather than antecedent to it. The cyclist who knows how to ride does not consult propositions about cycling; her knowledge is in the riding. The argument generalizes to any intelligent capacity, including the capacity to follow a rule, to apply a concept, or to reason logically. Insofar as cognitive science treats intelligent activity as the consultation and application of internally- represented rules, Ryle's regress is the fundamental conceptual obstacle the project must address.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"Knowing how to do something — ride a bicycle, play chess, recognize a tune, speak French, conduct a philosophical argument — is not reducible to knowing that some set of propositions is true.","n":[]},{"t":"The intellectualist legend, which holds that every act of intelligence presupposes a prior act of considering propositions, leads to an infinite regress: the prior consideration of propositions is itself an act of intelligence, which on the legend would require its own prior consideration of propositions, and so on without end.","n":[]}],[{"t":"Either the regress halts at some primitive act of intelligence that is not the consideration of propositions — in which case the legend is false, since intelligent activity does not require prior propositional consideration — or the regress does not halt and intelligent activity is impossible, which it is not.","n":[]},{"t":"Knowing how is therefore a primitive capacity in its own right: a disposition to perform intelligently, exercised in the activity itself rather than antecedent to it.","n":[]}],[{"t":"The cyclist who knows how to ride does not consult propositions about cycling; her knowledge is in the riding.","n":[]},{"t":"The argument generalizes to any intelligent capacity, including the capacity to follow a rule, to apply a concept, or to reason logically.","n":[]},{"t":"Insofar as cognitive science treats intelligent activity as the consultation and application of internally- represented rules, Ryle's regress is the fundamental conceptual obstacle the project must address.","n":[1,2,3,4,5]}]],"texts":"The Concept of Mind (1949) Chapter 2 'Knowing How and Knowing That'; 'Knowing How and Knowing That' (Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 1945, in Collected Papers Vol 2); 'A Puzzling Element in the Notion of Thinking' (1958, in Collected Papers Vol 2); Dilemmas (1953) on the dilemma of free will and determinism. Reception: Jason Stanley and Timothy Williamson 'Knowing How' (Journal of Philosophy 2001) for the major contemporary attack on the distinction; Jason Stanley Know How (Oxford 2011); Hubert Dreyfus What Computers Can't Do (1972) and Mind Over Machine (1986, with Stuart Dreyfus) on embodied knowing-how; Jerry Fodor The Language of Thought (1975) Chapter 4 attempting to halt Ryle's regress through subpersonal computational mechanisms; Julia Tanney Rules, Reason, and Self-Knowledge (Harvard 2013) Chapter 12 'Ryle's Regress and the Philosophy of Cognitive Science' for the contemporary defense; Michael Polanyi The Tacit Dimension (1966) on tacit knowing as parallel project.","works":["The Concept of Mind (1949) Chapter 2 'Knowing How and Knowing That'","'Knowing How and Knowing That' (Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 1945, in Collected Papers Vol 2)","'A Puzzling Element in the Notion of Thinking' (1958, in Collected Papers Vol 2)","Dilemmas (1953) on the dilemma of free will and determinism"],"reception":"Jason Stanley and Timothy Williamson 'Knowing How' (Journal of Philosophy 2001) for the major contemporary attack on the distinction; Jason Stanley Know How (Oxford 2011); Hubert Dreyfus What Computers Can't Do (1972) and Mind Over Machine (1986, with Stuart Dreyfus) on embodied knowing-how; Jerry Fodor The Language of Thought (1975) Chapter 4 attempting to halt Ryle's regress through subpersonal computational mechanisms; Julia Tanney Rules, Reason, and Self-Knowledge (Harvard 2013) Chapter 12 'Ryle's Regress and the Philosophy of Cognitive Science' for the contemporary defense; Michael Polanyi The Tacit Dimension (1966) on tacit knowing as parallel project.","status":"The knowing-how/knowing-that distinction is among Ryle's most- cited contributions and shaped twentieth-century action theory and philosophy of mind. Stanley and Williamson's \"Knowing How\" (2001) reignited the debate by arguing knowing-how reduces to a species of knowing-that on a propositional analysis; the reduction has been widely contested by neo-Ryleans (Tanney, Dreyfus, Hetherington, Wallis) and defended by Stanley in Know How (2011). The regress argument also bears directly on cognitive science: Fodor's Language of Thought (1975) attempts to halt the regress by appeal to subpersonal computational mechanisms, an attempt Tanney's \"Ryle's Regress and the Philosophy of Cognitive Science\" (2011, Chapter 12 of Rules, Reason, and Self-Knowledge) argues fails for two reasons: the empirical-necessity move misunderstands the conceptual character of the original argument, and the reduction of second-order rules to causal processes shows we cannot consider intelligent activity by analogy with computers rather than that the regress is halted.","era":"1900-1976","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"The Concept of Mind","page":"pp. 80–81","canonical":"","quote":"To be intelligent is not merely to satisfy criteria, but to apply them; to regulate one's actions and not merely to be well-regulated. A person's performance is described as careful or skilful, if in his operations he is ready to detect and correct lapses, to repeat and improve upon successes, to profit from the examples of others and so forth.","label":"The Concept of Mind, pp. 80–81"},{"n":2,"work":"The Concept of Mind","page":"pp. 82–84","canonical":"","quote":"But what makes him consider the one maxim which is appropriate rather than any of the thousands which are not? Why does the hero not find himself calling to mind a cooking-recipe, or a rule of Formal Logic? Perhaps he does, but then his intellectual process is silly and not sensible. Intelligently reflecting how to act is, among other things, considering what is pertinent and disregarding what is inappropriate.","label":"The Concept of Mind, pp. 82–84"},{"n":3,"work":"Collected Papers Vol 2 - Collected Essays 1929-1968","page":"pp. 252–253","canonical":"","quote":"But worse than this, when we do, as often happens, go through the process of persuading ourselves to do things, this process is itself one which can be intelligently or stupidly executed. So, if the assumption were correct, it would be necessary for us to start one stage further back and to persuade ourselves with second-order arguments to employ first-order persuasions of a cogent and not of a silly type.","label":"Collected Papers Vol 2 - Collected Essays 1929-1968, pp. 252–253"},{"n":4,"work":"The Concept of Mind","page":"pp. 81–82","canonical":"","quote":"First, there are many classes of performances in which intelligence is displayed, but the rules or criteria of which are unformulated. The wit, when challenged to cite the maxims, or canons, by which he constructs and appreciates jokes, is unable to answer. He knows how to make good jokes and how to detect bad ones, but he cannot tell us or himself any THE CONCEPT OF MIND recipes for them.","label":"The Concept of Mind, pp. 81–82"},{"n":5,"work":"Collected Papers Vol 2 - Collected Essays 1929-1968","page":"pp. 248–249","canonical":"","quote":"Obviously there is no truth or set of truths of which we could say, 'If only the stupid player had been informed of them, he would be a clever player,' or 'When once he had been apprised of these truths he would play well.' We can imagine a clever player generously imparting to his stupid opponent so many rules, tactical maxims, 'wrinkles', etc.","label":"Collected Papers Vol 2 - Collected Essays 1929-1968, pp. 248–249"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"category-mistakes-and-the-ghost-in-the-machine","label":"Category mistakes and the Ghost in the Machine: is Cartesian dualism a substantive metaphysical doctrine, or a category mistake?"},{"slug":"mental-concepts-as-dispositional","label":"Mental concepts as dispositional: do mental terms specify conditional dispositions to behave, rather than name inner episodes?"},{"slug":"self-knowledge","label":"Self-knowledge: do we know our own minds through privileged inner perception, or through the same observational route by which we know others' minds?"},{"slug":"philosophical-method-as-elucidation","label":"Philosophical method as elucidation: is philosophy the dissolution of conceptual confusion through 'rectifying the logical geography,' rather than the construction of metaphysical theory?"}]}