Evidence for anti-intellectualism about know-how from a sentence recognition task

An emerging trend in cognitive science is to explore central epistemological questions using psychological methods. Early work in this growing area of research has revealed that epistemologists\u27 theories of knowledge diverge in various ways from the ways in which ordinary people think of knowledge. Reflecting the practices of epistemology as a whole, the vast majority of these studies have focused on the concept of propositional knowledge, or knowledge-that. Many philosophers, however, have argued that knowing how to do something is importantly different from knowing that something is the case. Hence, in this paper we turn our attention to people\u27s concept of knowledge-how. We present data from two experiments that employed a sentence recognition task as an implicit measure of conceptual activation. The data from this implicit measure suggest that, contrary to prominent intellectualist theories of knowhow, according to which know-how is a species of propositional knowledge, people\u27s concept of know-how more closely aligns with anti-intellectualism, the view that knowing how to perform some task consists in having the appropriate skills or abilities

Knowing-How and the Deduction Theorem

In his seminal address delivered in 1945 to the Royal Society Gilbert Ryle considers a special case of knowing-how, viz., knowing how to reason according to logical rules. He argues that knowing how to use logical rules cannot be reduced to a propositional knowledge. We evaluate this argument in the context of two different types of formal systems capable to represent knowledge and support logical reasoning: Hilbert-style systems, which mainly rely on axioms, and Gentzen-style systems, which mainly rely on rules. We build a canonical syntactic translation between appropriate classes of such systems and demonstrate the crucial role of Deduction Theorem in this construction. This analysis suggests that one's knowledge of axioms and one's knowledge of rules under appropriate conditions are also mutually translatable. However our further analysis shows that the epistemic status of logical knowing-how ultimately depends on one's conception of logical consequence: if one construes the logical consequence after Tarski in model-theoretic terms then the reduction of knowing-how to knowing-that is in a certain sense possible but if one thinks about the logical consequence after Prawitz in proof-theoretic terms then the logical knowledge-how gets an independent status. Finally we extend our analysis to the case of extra-logical knowledge-how representable with Gentzen-style formal systems, which admit constructive meaning explanations. For this end we build a typed sequential calculus and prove for it a ``constructive'' Deduction Theorem interpretable in extra-logical terms. We conclude with a number of open questions, which concern translations between knowledge-how and knowledge-that in this more general semantic setting

Knowing-How and the Deduction Theorem

In his seminal address delivered in 1945 to the Royal Society Gilbert Ryle considers a special case of knowing-how, viz., knowing how to reason according to logical rules. He argues that knowing how to use logical rules cannot be reduced to a propositional knowledge. We evaluate this argument in the context of two different types of formal systems capable to represent knowledge and support logical reasoning: Hilbert-style systems, which mainly rely on axioms, and Gentzen-style systems, which mainly rely on rules. We build a canonical syntactic translation between appropriate classes of such systems and demonstrate the crucial role of Deduction Theorem in this construction. This analysis suggests that one's knowledge of axioms and one's knowledge of rules under appropriate conditions are also mutually translatable. However our further analysis shows that the epistemic status of logical knowing-how ultimately depends on one's conception of logical consequence: if one construes the logical consequence after Tarski in model-theoretic terms then the reduction of knowing-how to knowing-that is in a certain sense possible but if one thinks about the logical consequence after Prawitz in proof-theoretic terms then the logical knowledge-how gets an independent status. Finally we extend our analysis to the case of extra-logical knowledge-how representable with Gentzen-style formal systems, which admit constructive meaning explanations. For this end we build a typed sequential calculus and prove for it a ``constructive'' Deduction Theorem interpretable in extra-logical terms. We conclude with a number of open questions, which concern translations between knowledge-how and knowledge-that in this more general semantic setting

¿Quién sabe cómo? Reexaminando las atribuciones de know-how en contexto

The debate between intellectualists and anti-intellectualists about knowhow rages on. Kevin Wallbridge (2021) has argued that certain patterns of know-how attribution can be explained by a contextualist intellectualist theory (subject-specific intellectualism). In this paper, I examine Wallbridge’s proposal and argue that anti-intellectualists can also explain the data by appealing to the role of context in the attribution of ability.La disputa entre intelectualistas y antiintelectualistas acerca del saber cómo o know-how prosigue. Kevin Wallbridge (2021) ha argumentado que ciertos patrones de atribución de know-how pueden ser explicados por una teoría intelectualista contextualista (el intelectualismo de sujeto-específico). En este ensayo, examino la propuesta de Wallbridge y argumento que los antiintelectualistas también pueden explicar esos datos apelando al rol del contexto para la atribución de habilidades

Truth-conditional variability of color ascriptions: empirical results concerning the polysemy hypothesis

Recent experimental work has shown that the truth-value judgments of color predications, i.e. utterances of the form “the leaves on my tree are green” or “these walls are brown,” are influenced by slight changes in the context of utterance (Hansen and Chemla 2013, Ziółkowski, 2021). Most explanations of this phenomenon focus on the semantics of color adjectives. However, it is not clear if these explanations do justice to the nuances of the empirical data on context-sensitivity of color predications (Ziółkowski, 2021). In contrast to the adjectival explanations, Agustin Vicente (2015) has recently proposed that the context-sensitivity of color predications can be explained by invoking the polysemy of the noun. In this paper, we present the results of three studies designed to empirically test this hypothesis: a traditional survey experiment (Study 1), an exploratory correlational study inspired by the semantic integration paradigm (Study 2a), and a follow-up experiment (Study 2b) that was designed to mitigate possible shortcomings of Study 2a. The results of our studies present preliminary evidence against Vicente’s theory

Savoir et savoir-faire : La connaissance pratique entre intellectualisme et anti-intellectualisme

A PhD thesis about knowing how. I adopt an hybrid position between intellectualism and anti-intellectualism