Knowing How Journal of Philosophy 98.8 (2001)

Many philosophers believe that there is a fundamental distinction between knowing that something is the case and knowing how to do something. According to Gilbert Ryle, to whom the insight is credited, knowledge-how is an ability, which is in turn a complex of dispositions. Knowledge-that, on the other hand, is not an ability, or anything similar. Rather, knowledge-that is a relation between a thinker and a true proposition. Though few philosophers now share Ryle's general philosophical outlook, his view that knowledge-how is fundamentally different from knowledge-that is widely accepted, so much so that arguments for it are rarely presented, even in the works of those philosophers who crucially rely upon it. For example, Hilary Putnam (1996, p. xvi) characterizes the central moral of his work on meaning and understanding in the following terms: "...knowing the meaning of the word 'gold' or of the word 'elm' is not a matter of knowing that at all, but a matter of knowing how." Yet we are unaware of any passage in which Putnam argues for the distinction. Indeed, even Ryle's positive view that knowledge-how is an ability is widely assumed and crucially exploited in many areas of philosophy outside epistemology. For example, according to David Lewis, knowing what an experience is like amounts to being able to remember, imagine, and recognize the experience. Possession of such abilities, Lewis writes, "...isn't knowing that. It's knowing how." (1990, p. 516). Indeed, according to Lewis, "Know how is ability" (Ibid.). Similarly, in the philosophy of language, semantic competence is, according to Michael Devitt, "...an ability or a skill: a piece of knowledge-how not knowledge-that. In this paper, we contest the thesis that there is a fundamental distinction between knowledge-how and knowledge-that. We will argue that Ryle was wrong to deny that "knowledge-how cannot be defined in terms of knowledge that" (1971, p. 215). Knowledge-how is simply a species of knowledge-that. In the first section of the paper, we discuss Ryle's central argument against the thesis that knowledge-how is a species of knowledge-that, as well as Ryle's positive account of knowledge-how in terms of abilities. In the second section, we present and defend our positive account of