Knowledge-How, Abilities, and Questions

9 thoughts on “Knowledge-How, Abilities, and Questions”

1. The paper is packed with useful thinking. Thanks very much to the author for sharing it. I particularly admire the sustained development of the impulse to overcome what seems to be an impasse on the question of the fundamental character of knowing-how. (Hereafter I will simply address the author directly and informally!) And I also think that you are correct in holding that exercising one’s know-how typically involves learning some previously unknown specific truths bearing on the doing.

   Your proposed middle way between the intellectualist school and the anti-intellectualist school is to appeal to what you call the Interrogative Capacity view (ICV). Since this view makes basic appeal to a capacity or ability (the ability to answer a practical question on the fly) in giving an account of knowing-how it would seem to belong in the anti-intellectualist camp. But this view also counts as weakly intellectualist in that it identifies knowing-how to V with standing in relation to a set of propositions, viz., a set of good answers addressing the question of how to V in Fn. To put the general lesson very simply, your view is that knowing-how is as propositional as any other sort of knowledge and that it essentially involves an ability relating to the relevant propositions. Fair enough.

   Yet It seems to me that there is plenty of room for some further clarity as to what exactly the view comes to. (My comments will focus on the last few pages of §3 of the draft.)

   In your canonical formulation of the ICV, (several pages into §3) you identify knowing how to V in a contextually relevant class of situations {F1, F2, …} with the “capacity to generate fine-grained answers to the question ‘how to V in Fn’ in the process of acting”.

   I have two worries about this formulation of the ICV. First, arguably, one who does not know how to V but is confident and willing to experiment with methods may well have the capacity to, given enough time, figure out ways of V-ing across a range of situations. Your formulation seems blind to an important distinction here, and (arguably) gets this case wrong in attributing knowledge-how where there is initially merely some willingness and ability to figure it out. What do you say to this?

   My second worry needs more elaboration to motivate.

   To develop it: on the same page and shortly after introducing this canonical formulation, you are seeking to illustrate the philosophical virtues of the view. In the course of that you identify the question ‘how to V in Fn’ with the set of answers (where we are to view this set as that self-same set of propositions). I quote: “This view [the ICV] takes knowledge-how to be a relation to a question—the question ‘how to V?’—and understands that question as being identical to a set of possible answers.” Call this the equation thesis (ET), which you embrace in the course of explaining the strength of the ICV while arguing that it is compatible with a standard story in the formal semantics of embedded questions.

   Are you really committed to this thesis? If so, the canonical formulation you give of the ICV would be rendered unintelligible, assuming that we can substitute in co-referring expressions.

   To spell this out:

   The ET is the view that the question ‘how to V in Fn’ = the set of answers concerning how to V in Fn (i.e., the relevant set of true propositions).

   The ICV: Knowing how to V is the “capacity to generate fine-grained answers to the question ‘how to V in Fn’ in the process of acting”

   If we can substitute co-referring expressions, an alternative way to express the ICV is this:

   The ICV*: Knowing how to V is the “capacity to generate fine-grained answers to the set of answers concerning how to V in Fn in the process of acting”.

   But this latter (ICV*) is obviously nonsense since the idea of generating answers to the set of answers makes no sense. That seems to be a problem of some kind and this is the core of my second worry. So what do you say to that?

   On the next page (and a half) I find that things get a little more mysterious and very interesting! I am particularly interested in your discussion of directness and what follows. More precisely I would like to hear more about how “the process of doing and the process of answering are intertwined”. Your view seems to be that there are are, strictly, two processes going on when an agent Vs intentionally, drawing on her knowledge of how to V. Do I have that right? One process is that of doing (call that the intentional action proper) and the other is a process of learning. And then there are two achievements, if things go well: the relevant doing gets done and some previously unknown propositional truths enter the agent’s grasp.

   I find this interesting. But it seems to me that the explanation of knowledge-how that you give makes the relevant intentional action only accidentally connected to knowing-how, since you treat it as essentially a capacity to generate the knowledge of specifics. I think that, in the paradigm cases, one acts intentionally out of one’s knowledge-how (to V) and that this is revealing of the real nature of the phenomenon. There will ordinarily be some specific knowledge generated, but it seems mistaken to treat knowledge-how as properly constituted merely as a capacity for generating a grip on some specific previously unknown truths (answers) in attempting to answer a question. Yet that is just what the ICV does.

   In short, I think this over-intellectualizes the matter in treating answering on the fly by generating a grip on some propositions as central and acting intentionally to V out of one’s knowledge-how as a sort of parallel process. At the very least this is, in my view, a mistake of emphasis. I also think that you are mistaken in leaving no room for standing knowledge in your account. Surely at least some of what knowing-how to V is, is a standing rational power to enact an intentional effort to V at will in relevant conditions. This does not preclude generating some fresh knowledge. But that is not, though your formulation suggests it is, the central story.

   Thanks again! EPR (August 2016)

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   1. First of all, I want to thank all of the commentators for their really helpful comments. One of the big issues I’ve been facing in trying to give a novel view is to get clear on what one’s view actually is, and these comments have taught me a good deal about the view I’m trying to develop!

      I’m going to split my comments up by commentator, which should hopefully make navigating between threads of the conversation a little easier. There are a couple of overlaps, which I’ll try to make clear.

      Response to Evan Riley

      Evan raises three really interesting questions in his comments. I don’t have proper answers to any of these questions, but I’ll try to develop the problems, and point toward the shape of some answers.

      i) How can a view which identifies knowledge-how with the capacity to answer a question distinguish between someone who has standing know-how, and someone who is just really good at figuring things out?
      ii) Is it really true that a question is identical with a set of propositions? They do not seem to be intersubstitutable in extensional contexts.
      iii) Doesn’t thinking of the exercise of knowledge-how as involving dual processes of generating knowledge and acting on that knowledge over-intellectualise knowledge-how?

      Working it out

      Evan raises the issue of how the interrogative capacity view is to distinguish someone who knows how to V from someone who is quick at learning, but doesn’t know how to V. I agree with Evan that this is a hugely difficult issue for the kind of view that I’m trying to articulate. It is easy to set up cases in which someone who is ignorant about how to engage in some activity can work out how to do it via their general problem solving skills. Someone who has no idea how to fix a flat tyre on a bike might nonetheless fix one by exercising their general engineering know-how. We might think that such a person does have the relevant kind of capacity to answer the question ‘how to fix a bike tyre?’

      The way I’d like to describe these kinds of cases is this: the agent who has general learning capacities, exercises some very general piece of know-how on some rather specific problem, in so doing coming to know some specific way-proposition, and also (perhaps) coming gaining a capacity to work out how to solve this kind of problem in the future. In order to give this kind of description of the case, I’d need to have theoretical resources for distinguishing between exercising some general know-how in V-ing, and exercising specifically knowledge how to V. I have some half-baked ideas about how to do this, but I don’t have anything like a fully worked out story.

      In my defence, I think that standard Intellectualist accounts face a similar problem. Any activity will be associated with many way-propositions of different levels of generality, and plausibly only some of those way propositions will suffice for knowledge-how. Which? (see the Touch-typist example in Hornsby 2011) http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195389364.001.0001/acprof-9780195389364-chapter-3. I think that currently Intellectualists don’t have a worked-out story about this issue either. This doesn’t mean that my account is in the clear, just that lots of people in this debate face this kind of problem.

      (It’s also worth noting that Stanley and Williamson’s account of skill will face parallel worries, since their account looks like it predicts that someone who is good at working stuff out counts as being skilled at activities which she is in a position to quickly work out how to do.)

      Are questions sets of propositions?

      Evan notes that I endorse an equivalence thesis:

      ET: a question Wh-F? is identical to the set of propositions {p1, p2, … pn} which answer that question.

      (Or maybe, even better, I endorse the claim that the semantic value of an interrogative is just the relevant set of propositions, so that the set of propositions gives the meaning of an interrogative).

      (Note that it’s controversial exactly which propositions are included in set of answering propositions –- is it just true ones, are they complete or partial answers — but for the moment let’s put these issues to one side, and come back to this in Jay’s comments).

      Now, Evan points out that if ET is true, then the following pattern of substitution ought to be acceptable:

      1) Knowing how to V is the capacity to generate fine-grained answers to the question ‘how to V in Fn’ in the process of acting.
      2) Knowing how to V is the capacity to generate fine-grained answers to the set of answers concerning how to V in Fn in the process of acting.

      But, according to Evan, 2) is nonsense. Why is this? One diagnosis would be that the idea of standing in an abilitative relation to a proposition is flawed in principle. I don’t think that this diagnosis is right. Instead, I think that this phenomenon fits into a wider pattern of cases in which substituting an interrogative phrase with a set of propositions which purport to be its semantic value leads to nonsense.

      Notice that we can find similar cases for other verbs like ‘wonder’ that embed interrogative phrases:

      3) Paula wondered whether Dave Weir will win a Gold
      4) Paula wondered the set of propositions {Dave Weir will win a Gold; it is not the case that Dave Weir will win a Gold}

      (I’m assuming that whether p? denotes the set {p; not-p}, although we get the same weirdness if we assume that whether p? denotes {p}).

      Intuitively, we can wonder into questions, but not into propositions (except in the sense of ‘wonder’ where it means something like ‘marvel’). Should we conclude that questions are not identical to sets of propositions? That would be one way out. An alternative would be to take these failures to be examples of the general phenomenon of substitution problems (which should not be confused with Frege puzzles!) (I owe the idea that these kinds of cases might be examples of substitution puzzles to Luke Burke).

      Here’s an example of this kind of problem. It is popular to think that ‘that p’ denotes the proposition that p, and that propositional attitudes should be thought of as relations to propositions (and that propositional attitude ascriptions pick out these relations). However, there are many examples of sentences in which the substitution of ‘the proposition that p’ for ‘p’ yields a false or meaningless sentence (for examples, see Moltmann 2013: C4 §3.1 link).

      Consider:

      5) Dai hopes that Hannah Cockcroft wins a Gold in Rio
      6) Dai hopes the proposition that Hannah Cockcroft will win a Gold in Rio

      I don’t know what the solution to these kinds of substitution puzzles is, but I presume that the phenomenon is ultimately a rather general one. The point being that sometimes substituting a term for its semantic value doesn’t lead to an acceptable sentence. Any successful solution for ‘that’-clauses ought to be generalizable to ‘wh’-complements. Maybe, not very satisfying, but hopefully that points toward a possible answer (or at least a bigger and more interesting problem).

      Two processes or one?

      Evan worries that my account pulls knowledge-how apart from intentional action because it claims that knowing-how is a capacity to generate propositional knowledge, which makes it one step removed from intentional action. I’m not so sure about the worry about over-intellectualisation, but I agree that the kind of dual process picture which Evan describes (where working how to V, and V-ing are distinct processes) would cause problems for explaining directness. (incidentally, I think that Stanley and Williamson’s view of skill is a good example of something like this dual process view)

      However, what I was trying to go for with the quote from Ryle was the idea that one process can at the same time be a process of acting, and a process of learning a proposition. I guess I wanted to reject a dual process story, and endorse something like a dual aspect picture, where one process is at once acting, and generating knowledge. The idea is that we can see intentionally acting as being a process of answering a how to question, with the idea being that the upshot of that process is both an act, and knowledge of the relevant proposition. As Carlotta points out there’s a lot that’s mysterious about this picture, but this is the kind of account that I’m aiming for.

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2. In Knowledge-How, Abilities, and Questions, Joshua Habgood-Coote’s proposes an account of knowing-how which is intended to diffuse the tension between the Intellectualists and Anti-Intellectualists positions in the debate regarding what is required to know how to do something. Habgood-Coote’s view, which he calls the Interrogative Capacity view, claims:

   S knows how to V if and only if for some contextually relevant class of practical situations {F1, F2 …} S has the capacity to generate fine-grained answers to the question ‘how to V in Fn?’ in the process of acting.

   While this isn’t an entirely implausible view to hold, I argue that, as stated above, the Interrogative Capacity view is unsatisfactory.

   First, Habgood-Coote does not specify that in order for S to know how to V, S must be able to generate correct answers. That is, even if one satisfies all of the conditions for knowledge-how on the Interrogative Capacity view, we are not given reason to think that the answers S gives are true, or informative in a useful way. It seems plausible that someone can ask me how to make a souffle and I can give them fine-grained answers as I’m performing actions which I believe will make a soufflé, while having never made a soufflé before, never learned how to make a soufflé, and while actually failing to make a soufflé in response to the question. While I would satisfy Habgood-Coote’s conditions for knowledge how to make a soufflé, we wouldn’t want to say that I know how to make a soufflé in this case. Therefore, Habgood-Coote needs to add a truth condition to his account of knowledge-how.

   Assuming Habgood-Coote takes the advice above, a second and larger problem still remains for Habgood-Coote’s Interrogative Capacity view. Whereas Dickie and Stanley and Williamson’s accounts of knowledge-how identify capacity to V as an acquired skill to V, Habgood-Coote supposes his view benefits by removing this skill requirement. Habgood-Coote proposes that “the process of doing and answering are intertwined” (p. 13) and that we should take the relevant sense of ability to V to be the ability to V intentionally. However, by removing a skill requirement and instead requiring that the action is done intentionally, Habgood-Coote’s view allows for S to know how to V in situations which we normally wouldn’t attribute knowledge-how.

   For instance, suppose Greg, who has never bought a lottery ticket in his life, claims that he knows how to win the lottery. When asked how he knows this, Greg goes to the local party store and, while saying to his inquirer, “This is how you win the lottery,” Greg buys a lottery ticket with the intention of winning the lottery. Suppose he then wins the lottery. On the Interrogative Capacity view Greg does in fact know how to win the lottery. In the contextually relevant and practical situation of buying a lottery ticket from this particular party store, Greg not only has the capacity to generate answers to “How do you win the lottery?” but Greg actually exercises this capacity while performing the action. Furthermore, since Habgood-Coote’s account considers performing action V in the relevant class of practical situations to provide sufficiently fine-grained answers to the question ‘How to V?’, Greg’s act of winning the lottery must be sufficiently fine-grained and, therefore, Greg meets the knowledge-how requirements of the Interrogative Capacity view. Since we wouldn’t consider Greg to actually have knowledge of how to win the lottery in this case (supposing it was a fair lottery and Greg did not have any tricks up his sleeve), the Interrogative Capacity view seems to lack some type of requirement which ensures that we don’t consider people like Greg to know how to win the lottery. What is needed is some sort of condition which guarantees that the capacity is not only exercised once, but repeatedly and consistently in a non-random way. This is exactly what you would gain by adding a skill requirement, which Habgood-Coote wants to do away with.

   Lastly, even if Habgood-Coote made the adjustments I’ve suggested, his solution to the debate between Intellectualists and Anti-Intellectualists regarding knowledge-how would not ease the tension between the two sides. The importance and simplicity of the debate between Intellectualists and Anti-Intellectualists can be (perhaps overly) simplified when asking what it means to say that you “know how to swim.” Whereas Anti-Intellectualists claim the appropriate way to demonstrate this knowledge is by swimming, the Intellectualists claim the appropriate answer contains propositional content such as “kick your legs, move your arms like you’re crawling, and keep your head above water.” Though both sides of the debate contain more intricacies than I have just suggested, the tension between the two sides is clearly palpable. Although Habgood-Coote claims that his view diffuses this tension by combining the two views, I argue the tension remains.

   If we assume S can V in a contextually relevant class of practical situations, Habgood-Coote’s Interrogative Capacity view can essentially be understood to claim that S knows how to V if S can answer the question of ‘how to V?’ while Ving. On this account, knowing how to swim would require something like the ability to answer questions of ‘how to swim?’ while swimming. This account clearly combines both the Intellectualist propositional demands (by requiring that S can answer the question ‘how to V?’) with the Anti-Intellectualist abilitative demands (by requiring that S has a certain capacity). However, putting these two demands together does not diffuse the tension between them.

   To demonstrate how combining these conflicting accounts does not diffuse the tension between them, suppose I have decided that I should invest my money where it will result in the most money in the future. I could invest in option A which will result in big returns in 5 years but very little after that or I could invest in option B which will result in me having minimal returns for the first few years but will lead to larger returns in 20 years. There is clearly a tension between which option is best and this tension will be the result of how far in the future I should be concerned with the returns on my investment. However, to say that I should invest in both plan A and plan B does not diffuse the tension at all. True, it is one solution to the problem, but it doesn’t make it clearer how forward-looking I should be. Similarly, the Interrogative Capacity view may be a plausible view that incorporates important features from both the Intellectualist and Anti-Intellectualist camps, but this does not do anything to elucidate which option is superior nor does it relieve any tension between camps since they still are opposing positions. Therefore, while Habgood-Coote’s Interrogative Capacity view has problems which are curable, the view fails to resolve the disagreement between Intellectualists and Anti-Intellectualists about knowledge-how. Nonetheless, it remains possible that the Interrogative Capacity account of knowledge-how could still be useful and preferred to either of the current camps since it does incorporate important features of both.

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   1. Response to Jay Spitzley

      Jay raises three pressing worries for my picture:

      i) He recommends that I understand answers that figure in the interrogative capacity view to be true propositions,
      ii) He worries that divorcing know-how from skill means that the Interrogative Capacity view cannot explain the idea that knowledge-how requires reliability,
      iii) Finally, Jay questions whether we should think of the interrogative capacity view as being able to resolve the tension between Intellectualist and Anti-Intellectualist views.

      What’s an answer?

      Jay quite rightly observes that the Interrogative Capacity view is only plausible if it claims that knowledge-how requires a capacity to generate true answers to a question. There are cases where it is easy to generate false answers to a question. I have a capacity to generate false answers to the question how can one prove the four-colour theorem?, but this doesn’t mean that I know how to prove the four-colour theorem.

      I think that I was being a little sloppy on this point. My intention was to make sure that what I said was neutral between different accounts of the semantics of questions. There is a debate in the semantics literature about whether interrogative phrases denote true or merely possible answers, and whether those answers need be complete, or can be merely partial. My hope was to not make any commitments on this debate. However, when it comes to the idea that knowledge-how is a capacity to answer a question, I absolutely agree with Jay that we should focus in on true answers to a ‘how to’ question. I think that this is just a feature of the relevant kind of ability: one way to put the point is that in the relevant sense of being able to answer, ‘answer’ is a success-verb.

      Can we have Reliability without Skill?

      One salient difference between my view of knowledge-how and those offered by Dickie, and 2016 Stanley and Williamson, is that my view is neutral on the relation between know-how and skill. I think of this as a positive of the view, since I haven’t been convinced that skill is a necessary condition for knowledge-how. (My suspicion is that ‘knows how’ and ‘skill’ are both context-sensitive terms, and that in certain contexts they can be closely connected, but that in others they can come apart). Jay questions whether this feature of the view is a positive by contending that one cannot explain the idea that knowledge-how requires reliable success without a skill condition. To this end Jay appeals to a case in which an agent luckily generates an answer to the question of the question of how to win the lottery (buy this ticket, when this ticket happens to be the winning ticket), without knowing how to win the lottery.

      The important question is whether the kind of account I like can explain the idea that knowledge-how requires a reliable disposition to success. I think that it can. Note that in the official statement of the view I appealed to a contextually supplied set of practical situations, and claimed that knowing how requires being able to generate the answers to ‘how to’ questions about all of those situations. In cases in which this contextually supplied set is rather large, knowledge-how will require a reliable ability to generate situation-specific way-propositions. With this idea in place, I think that I can say that in the lottery case, the agent doesn’t have a suitably reliable capacity to generate propositional knowledge. My line is that I think that I can secure the relevant kind of reliability by appealing to a context-sensitive ability condition.

      Does the Interrogative Capacity view really resolve the tension?

      Finally, Jay questions whether my view really resolves the tension between Intellectualism and Anti-Intellectualism.

      I’m not sure I quite understand the worry here. I didn’t take my goal to be to argue that Intellectualism and Anti-Intellectualism are the same view (at least in their strong varieties they certainly are not). Rather the idea was that we could take a kind of compromise position which incorporates elements from both views (the respective weak conditions). One upshot from this compromise was to hopefully resolve the tension between the two central kinds of evidence in this debate, which on the face of it seem to point toward diametrically opposed accounts. Is there something more to this worry, Jay?

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      1. Joshua, I apologize for any confusion. If your goal was only to show that a compromise position which incorporates elements from both views is possible, then this is not worrisome for you.

         However, I was under the impression that you were claiming your view somehow eliminated the conflict between the two views. Though your view may demonstrate a possible compatibility regarding aspects of these two views, I was attempting to point out that the two views still take opposing stances and have conflicting demands. Therefore, while a certain compatibility may be operable, there remains an important and significant tension between the demands of these two views. If your view is supposed to entirely resolve this tension, then I would like to hear more about exactly how that works. Nonetheless, if you agree that this tension between the demands of these two views persists and you are instead only making the more modest claim that your view can operate in some kind of middle-ground between these positions, then I don’t think we are disagreeing about anything substantive. I hope this makes things clearer.

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         1. No worries Jay – this is a really helpful point about set up, and thanks for raising it!

            I think you’re right on – I’m only arguing for the possibility of a compromise position (the modest claim), not trying to argue that the tension between Intellectualism and Anti-Intellectualism goes away.

            Thanks again for the commentary!

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3. Thank you very much to the organizers of the Minds Online Conference for the invitation to comment and to Joshua for his essay.

   The essay starts off with a dilemma for existing views of know how. Joshua observes that anti-intellectualism, by identifying know how with an ability, fails to do justice to the way in which know how is ascribed (at least in English). Intellectualism, on the other hand, by identifying know how with propositional knowledge of an answer to the question “How to F”, does justice to the linguistics of know how ascriptions but fails to account for the distinctively ‘practical properties’ of know how — its being distinctively a kind of practical knowledge. Joshua thinks that, in order to account for such practical properties, intellectualists have to appeal to a ‘somewhat obscure’ notion of practical modes of presentation. That motivates Joshua to develop a third view — the interrogative capacity view — which is supposed to improve on both intellectualism and anti-intellectualism.

   My comments are structured in two parts. In the first part, I will take issue with Joshua’s claim that intellectualism cannot account for the distinctive practical properties of know how. In the second part, I will question Joshua’s claim that the view developed by him in this essay — the interrogative capacity view — can do better.

   1. Intellectualism and the practical properties of know how
   As pointed out by Joshua, intellectualists aim at explaining at least some of the practical properties of know how by appeal to practical modes of presentation. Now, it is true that many have complained that the notion of practical modes of presentation is obscure. But this charge of mysteriousness and obscurity to the notion of practical modes of presentation is no longer legitimate in the light of the recent debate. Although earlier version of intellectualism (Stanley & Williamson (2001); Stanley (2011)) have not told much about the nature of practical modes of presentation — and so maybe charges of mysteriousness were legitimate towards those versions of intellectualism — more recently a lot of work has been done by intellectualists to vindicate the distinctively practical aspect of know how and to clarify the notion of practical modes of presentation. In my own work, I develop a detailed view of practical modes of presentation (Pavese (2015b)). I propose we think of them along the lines of operational semantic values for programming languages. Thinking of practical senses along the lines of operational semantic values affords the intellectualist a response to the mysteriousness challenge and gives us independent reasons to think that things like practical modes of presentation do exist.

   Now, the view I have developed in “Practical Senses” and in another paper of mine (“Knowing a rule”, (2015a)) has all the resources to explain each of the three features which Joshua identifies with the ‘practicality’ of know how. According to Joshua, three features are distinctive and in need of explanation:

   i. Directness: knowing-how is exercised directly in intentional action, not via some intermediate act of mental contemplation;
   ii. Necessity: knowledge-how is a necessary condition for intentional action;
   iii. Flexibility: knowing-how involves an ability to react flexibly to a wide range of possible situations.

   Let us start with the last, flexibility. My understanding of practical senses along the models of programs can explain flexibility very naturally, for we have independent evidence that machines can be programmed to be flexible. As an illustrative example, think of the Mars rover, which has been programmed to autonomously deal with a great variety of unpredictable situations on Mars’ surfaces — the properties of which situations the programmers cannot predict in advance. The Mars rover does it by implementing a procedure that is computed on the basis of an updatable and ever-changing model of the environment (data). (As I explain in my essay, a program is the combination of a procedure and the data.) This program tells the Mars rover what to do when by means of algorithms on the basis of which the Mars rover can calculate novel responses to new circumstances as they come along. I would recommend looking at the behaviour of the Mars rover and at the program, as it is studied by Rutgers Phd Bethany Leffler’s dissertation http://www.research.rutgers.edu/~bleffler/thesis/dissertation.pdf).

   Now, my point is that the Mars rover can respond autonomously and flexibly to a wide range of possible situations. It genuinely can come up with new solutions to new tasks (navigating on never-met-before kinds of surfaces, for example). But it does it through the computation of a program. Note that the program does not need to anticipate all the novel situations the Mars rover can find itself in. Nonetheless it enables the Mars rover to calculate responses ‘on the fly’ on the basis of an ever-changing model of the environment.

   When I elaborated my view of practical senses, the flexibility problem struck me as serious and not sufficiently addressed. But it also struck me as a point in favour of my view of practical senses that it provided an explanation of the flexibility of know how for which we have independent evidence from computer science and robotics.

   Of course, there is more to be said about this and it is part of my current work to use my view of practical senses more explicitly to deal with flexibility from an intellectualist point of view. For example: one might object that it might be hard to envisage what program could explain more complex flexible behaviour, such as the flexibility of a Jazz composer, for example. But examples such as the Mars rover or Google cars suggest that this is an epistemic limit — having to do with the kind of programs we can now envisage given the advances and the degree of sophistication of programming techniques — rather than a principled problem with the proposal.

   What about Directness? In “Practical Senses,” I explain that operational semantic values are ability-entailing: if one grasps them, one is enabled with the ability to follow a certain rule/method. That is so because they are structured in such a way that each of their parts and their modes of combination are defined in terms of rules that the agent can follow. I also argue that the ability to perform a task and the ability to perform the task intentionally come apart. In “Knowing a rule”, I make the case that only knowledge of a proposition that has a practical sense as component can explain the ability to intentionally perform a task that goes together with knowing how. My argument hinges on consideration of cases where a subject can perform a task through a certain method, but because she has false beliefs about what task that method is for, the subject fails to bring the method to bear intentionally and relevantly. So while grasp of a practical sense enables one with the ability to perform an action, only a propositional attitude can explain the ability to intentionally perform an action. (Incidentally: the idea that Directness cannot be explained by intellectualism is encouraged by a view of propositional knowledge as divorced from action that it is quite far from how today many epistemologists and philosophers of mind think of it and that is, at any rate, not at all to be taken for granted. As Stalnaker (2012) puts it, knowledge is the ability to use information for the purpose of action. Any view of propositional knowledge as merely a contemplative attitude is doomed to miss out on the important role played by knowledge in guiding action.)

   That leads us to Necessity. According to Necessity, know how is necessary for intentional action. The alleged burden for intellectualism is to show that a propositional attitude such as propositional knowledge is also necessary for intentional action. As Joshua observes, know how goes together with the ability to intentionally F. But as I argue in (Pavese (2015a) and Pavese (201?)), the ability to intentionally F should not be taken as an unexplained primitive and is arguably best explained in terms of a propositional attitude of belief (and maybe knowledge. See Gibbons (2001)). That is in line with many prominent views of intentional action. For example, Goldman (1979) has elaborated a view on which a belief about how to perform an action is necessary for being able to perform it intentionally. And even action plan-based theories of intentional action impose a belief constraint on intentional action (See Bratman (1999)).

   Setiya (2011) has argued that belief is not necessary for intentional basic action. His main example is that of a subject previously injured in their hand who tries to clench their fist, but they are uncertain about whether they have healed. Setiya’s example is interesting but I think the debate here is still very much open. As Setiya acknowledges, his objection may be dealt with by appealing to degrees of belief: the subject would not clench their fist intentionally unless the subject has a non-zero degree of belief in their success. And as argued by Moss (2013), degrees of belief can be knowledge too. Even without appealing to degrees of belief, the claim that the subject clenches intentionally in the circumstance described is not at all uncontroversial. If intentionality goes together with planning, then one cannot possibly perform a basic task intentionality if one does not believe that one can perform it, for that basic task could not play the role that basic actions are supposed to play in the subject’s plans (for one cannot plan anything from an action that one does not believe one can perform).

   Much more could be said about this (I do discuss many related issues in my work). My point about Necessity is that the debate is wide open and it is not at all clear that intellectualism is losing it. So I think the Joshua is far too quick when claiming that Intellectualism cannot provide a satisfactory explanation for Necessity. And as I have explained, it is simply not true that Intellectualism cannot provide an explanation of Flexibility and Directness.

   II. The Interrogative Capacity View and The Practical Properties of Know how
   According to Joshua, the interrogative capacity view “is uniquely well placed to defuse the tension between semantic theory and the practicality of knowledge-how.” I worry Joshua has not done enough to support this claim. In fact, I think that in order for the kind of view that Joshua is defending to be able to capture the “practical aspects” of knowing how, it will also need to appeal to something like practical modes of presentation.

   According to the interrogative capacity view, knowing how to F is an ability to come to know situation-specific answers to questions “How to F?” [Brief parenthesis: At the beginning of the paper, Joshua tells us that know how is an ability to generate answers to questions “how to F?” But what does it mean to generate an answer to a question? Later, we are told more:

   However, there is an abilitative relation which does provide a plausible account of knowledge-how: the able-to-answer relation (where answering is understood as correctly answering). According to this view knowing how to V is standing in the able-to-answer relation to the question ‘how to V?’, where one exercises that ability by generating propositional knowledge which answers the question ‘how to V?’. Let’s call this view the Interrogative Capacity view of knowledge-how.

   This formulation of the view is a little problematic. As the author acknowledges later, answering is a speech act (p. 11). But it seems one may know how to do something without being able to perform any speech act. I recommend that Josh formulate his view from the very beginning in terms of ability to know — and so more explicitly along the lines of Stanley & Williamson’s view of skill.

   The natural question is: could one not be able to know situation-specific answers about how to F without necessarily being able to act on them — without being able to F? At p. 9, Joshua considers this objection to his view. He considers somebody who has read many ski books, and because of that is able to know answers to the questions of the form “How does one ski” in all sorts of different circumstances without nonetheless knowing how to ski.

   To this objection, Joshua concedes that for one to know how to F, it might not be enough that one be able to know situation-specific answers to questions “How to F.” One must in addition be able to know those answers on the fly. (Notice here the close resemblance between the cases that motivate Joshua’s appeal to the notion of “on the fly” and those that motivated the intellectualists’ appeal to practical modes of presentation.) But what does it mean to know those answers “on the fly”? Here I think Joshua has not told us enough and he has not convinced me that the notion of “on the fly” is in better standing than the notion of practical modes of presentation as employed by earlier version of intellectualism.

   Joshua imposes three conditions on what it takes for one to know an answer on the fly. The first is that the answers ought to be about situation-specific methods; the second is that they need to be about practical situations. Finally, we are told that there is something distinctive about the way such answers are generated (and, I guess, known).

   First off: What is a practical situation? What distinguishes a practical situation from a non-practical situation? Is a practical situation practical under a description but not under another? Joshua does not tell us much of anything here. He just invokes an intuitive understanding of practical situations. But if the notion of a practical situation is supposed to do theoretical work in explaining the metaphor “on the fly,” we should expect a much more worked out view of what a practical situation is. Secondly, how specific must a suitable-specific method be? Just saying that they ought to be situation-specific methods is not very explanatory. Finally, it seems to me that the interesting question is: how does one get to have the ability to come to know situation-specific answers to questions “How to F”? (I will return to this issue later.)

   Thirdly, Joshua’s account of the ‘distinctive way in which answers are to be generated and known’ is much less than ideally worked out. Joshua does not really give a general story here. He merely hints at one. He tells us (p. 10) that the answers may have to come about as one acts:

   Rather than the paradigm being generating an answer before action begins, I want to pick out a kind of answering which goes on throughout the process of acting. The kind of process I have in mind is one Ryle describes by saying that a skilled mountaineer walking in difficult conditions “is concomitantly walking and teaching himself how to walk,” (Ryle 2009: 30). Working out how to do something need not be something which one can only do in one’s head. It can involve working through the activity, picking up relevant propositional knowledge as one goes along and setting relevant feedback loops into action.

   And he draws some analogy with the case of math solving problem (p. 11):

   To get a grip on this idea, consider the way in which one might solve a difficult maths problem. Although sometimes it might be possible to just ‘see’ what the method for solving a problem is, the more usual way is to work out how to answer the problem as one goes along. Depending on the problem, one might either split it into sub-problems and work on them in turn, or one might just try out different techniques and see what sticks. I suggest that we should think of the problem-solving strategies involved both in cases in which one in which one works out how to solve the problem as one goes along as involving the exercise of the ability to generate knowledge of how to solve the problem.

   This paragraph is suggestive but falls well short of a fully worked out account of what it means to come to know an answer on the fly. So, it does look as if Joshua is invoking something at least as obscure as the notion of practical modes of presentation (probably more obscure, as “on the fly” is a metaphor). In fact, talking about the “distinctive” way in which answers come to be known sounds like a less explicit way to invoke practical modes of presentation, which on a Russellian construal are exactly that: ways in which propositions can be known.

   Joshua probably should invoke practical modes of presentation. Else, there is nothing in Joshua’s discussion that ensures that coming to know a situation specific answer in a practical situation will be ability-entailing in the way desired and promised by Directness. For could not one figure out situation-specific answers in the right practical situations, and also as the practical situation develops, thereby satisfying all of Joshua’s three conditions, without being able to act on those answers? I am quite worried that Joshua’s view cannot properly explain Directness unless it also appeals to practical modes of presentation.

   The final issue on which I want to draw attention is Joshua’s alleged explanation of flexibility. According to Joshua, the interrogative capacity view of know how is uniquely placed to account for flexibility — our ability to react flexibly to a wide range of possible situations. How does the interrogative capacity view account for flexibility? Well, we are told that if knowing how to F is a matter of being able to come to know situation-specific answers to the question “How to F,” then “we can explain the flexibility of knowledge-how by appealing to the fact that an interrogative capacity can produce different propositional knowledge for different situations” (pp. 13-14).

   Stanley and Williamson (2016) identify skill with a disposition to know and put forward the same explanation of flexibility that Joshua proposes. So the considerations that follow apply equally to Joshua’s view of know how and to Stanley and Williamson’s view of skill.

   I want to take issue with the claim that the interrogative capacity view or Stanley and Williamson’s view provide an explanation of the flexibility of know how/skill. One thing is for a view to predict flexibility; another is for that view to explain it. When it comes to flexibility, I take it that what is to be explained is our coming up with situation-specific solutions across a variety of different cases. Joshua wants to explain that in terms of our ability to come up with situation-specific solutions. But as an explanation, that leaves a lot to be wished for. For it simply traces our successes at being flexible across situations back to some mental property (an ability) of the subject of which we are told close to nothing. In other words, Joshua is explaining something (know how), in terms of something else (the ability to know situation-specific answers) of which we are not given any real explanation. Moreover, unless something more is said about what makes such an ability possible — about what grounds such an ability — it is not even clear we have not gotten into an explanatory circle. For on most theories of ability (see Manley and Wasserman (2008)), the ability itself will be thought of in terms of reliable successes (in this case, successes at coming up with flexible answers across possible and actual situations). A really explanatory view of flexibility would be one that explains what grounds such an ability and such flexibility — what makes such ability possible. That is the kind of explanation of flexibility I aim to give in my work.

   In my opinion, there is where the very interesting questions about know how and skill stand. But those are precisely the questions which views such as Joshua’s or such as Stanley and Williamson’s are not really equipped to answer. (I think these dispositionalist views like Joshua’s and Stanley and Williamson’s are not explanatory in other respects too but I will not go into that here. I discuss other issues with Stanley and Williamson’s dispositionalism in a blogpost about my work at https://politicalphilosopher.net/2016/04/15/featured-philosop-her-carlotta-pavese/ and in my forthcoming piece in Phil Compass (Pavese (2016).)

   Conclusions
   I argued that intellectualism, properly developed, has all the resources to account for the practical properties of know how. In contrast, it is less clear that Joshua’s interrogative capacity view provides a satisfactory explanation of those very same properties, unless he avails himself of practical modes of presentation. If so, Joshua’s main criticisms against intellectualism threaten to strike back hard at the heart of his proposal.

   
   References
   Bratman, Michael (1999). Faces of Intention: Selected Essays on Intention and Agency. Cambridge University Press.
   Gibbons J. (2001). Knowledge in action. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 62(3): 579-600.
   Goldman, Alvin I. (2015). Theory of human action. Princeton University Press.
   Glick, E. (2013). Practical Modes of Presentation. Nous, 49(3):1–22.
   Hawley, K. (2003). Success and Knowledge How. American Philosophical Quarterly, 40(1):19–31.
   Manley, D. and Wasserman, R. (2007). A gradable approach to dispositions. The Philosophical Quarterly, 57.226:68–75.
   Moss S. (2013). Epistemology formalized. Philosophical Review 122(1): 1-43.
   Pavese C. (2015a). Knowing a Rule. Philosophical Issues. A Supplement to Nous, 25(1): 165-188. DOI: 10.1111/phis.12045
   Pavese C. (2015b). Practical senses. Philosophers’ Imprint, 15(29): 1-25.
   Pavese, C. (2016), forthcoming. Skill in epistemology, part II: Skill and know how. Philosophy Compass.
   Pavese, C. (201?), forthcoming. Know how, intentions, and abilities, Synthese.
   Ryle, G. (1949). The Concept of Mind. Chicago University Press, Chicago
   Setiya K. (2011). Knowing how. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 112(3): 285-307.
   Stalnaker R. 2012. Intellectualism and The Objects of Knowledge. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 85(3): 753-761.
   Stanley J. (2011). Know How. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
   Stanley J, Williamson T. (2001). Knowing How. Journal of Philosophy 98 (8): 411-444.
   Stanley J, Williamson T. (2016). Skill. Nous Online first: pp. 1-14

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   1. Carlotta’s rich and challenging comments raise two kinds of issue. First off, she argues that some versions of Intellectualism are in a position to explain the practicality of knowledge-how. She then raises a series of important challenges for the Interrogative Capacity view. I’ll consider these two sets of issues in turn.

      Intellectualism and Practicality

      In the paper I claimed that the main challenge for Intellectualism was to account for the practicality of knowledge-how, which I split into three central properties (directness, necessity, and flexibility). Both Intellectualists and Anti-Intellectualists discuss these conditions, which makes them seem common ground in this debate, but I thought that it would be helpful to be a bit more explicit about what the rules of the game are.

      I claimed that Intellectualism faces a challenge in explaining these properties, since other kinds of propositional knowledge do not have these properties. I wasn’t super clear about this in the paper, but I didn’t take myself to show that Intellectualism couldn’t explain these properties, only that explaining these properties is a challenge for the view. I’m extremely happy to have a debate about whether Intellectualism can meet this challenge, and I don’t consider this debate by any means closed.

      In her comments Carlotta faces this challenge head on, explaining how her account of knowledge-how addresses these three conditions. I think that Carlotta’s spin on Intellectualism is probably best positioned to explain the practicality of knowledge-how, and she’s certainly been the most explicit about the challenge of explaining these properties. In particular, her account of practical senses looks to be extremely well-positioned to explain the flexibility which is associated with knowledge-how. Her view is extremely rich, and I I’d recommend that anyone who’s interested in this debate check out her papers, especially the super-interesting Practical Senses link.

      I’d be absolutely up for having a conversation below about Carlotta’s version of Intellectualism and whether it can explain the practicality of knowledge-how, but I won’t address these issues in this comment (it’s already pretty long!).

      Worries about the Interrogative capacity view.

      In the second part of her comments Carlotta raises a set of challenges for the supporter of the Interrogative capacity view. She contends that although Intellectualists need to appeal to Practical modes of presentation (PMPs), the interrogative Capacity view is going to have to end up appealing to a similarly obscure concept (if not PMPs themselves) if it is to explain the practicality of knowledge-how.

      Do we understand Interrogative Capacities?

      Carlotta identifies three elements in the Interrogative Capacity view which are less that fully developed:

      i. The notion of a practical situation
      ii. The fineness of grain of the propositions that are produced by the exercise of knowledge-how.
      iii. Answering ‘on the fly’.

      If these notions are just as obscure as PMPs, then presumably the Interrogative Capacity view is no better off than an Intellectualist account which appeals to PMPs.

      I don’t think that any of these notions are especially obscure, but I’ll say a little more about each of them to address the concern that they are.

      To start off, I must say that I don’t have a general story about what makes for a practical situation. One aspect of the Interrogative view which I perhaps underplay in the paper is that it is Contextualist, in the sense that the set of situations which figure in the way propositions is fixed by conversational context. This means that the general answer to the question ‘which kinds of situations are the practical ones?’ is ‘the contextually salient situations which are apt for V-ing’. That’s not a very informative answer, but it might be the best that I can do.

      As I noted in my response to Evan’s comments, way-propositions can come at various different levels of generality. Carlotta challenges me on this issue, asking how specific the way-propositions which are produced by the exercise of knowledge-how are. On a straight Intellectualist story, way-propositions will need to be somewhat general (at least if a piece of knowledge-how is identified with knowledge of just one proposition). By contrast, on the interrogative capacity view the way-propositions can be arbitrarily fine-grained, since a given way-propositions only needs to apply to one situation. So the answer is that way-propositions are arbitrarily fine-grained, describing a method that is sensitive to a particular array of action-related variables in a particular situation.

      Lastly, Carlotta challenges whether I give a clear notion of what it is to answer a question ‘on the fly’. I think that she’s absolutely right to push on this point: in the paper I definitely don’t say enough about this notion. However, I do think that there is an interesting phenomenon in this vicinity. Here are two routes to understanding the phenomenon I’m interested in:

      Consider cases of practical problem solving. This is the strategy I pursue in the paper by pointing toward the example of maths problems. There are myriad other examples of practical tasks which I think nicely characterise the kind of practical answering process that I’m interested in, and I think that thinking about those examples can help to illustrate the kind of phenomenon. For some especially well-observed description of working out how to do things on the fly, I’d point to Matthew Crawford’s descriptions of fixing engines in Shop Craft as Soulcraft (published in the UK as The Case for Working with your Hands). (There’s a taste of this here [link (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/magazine/24labor-t.html?_r=0)).
      Appeal to Partial Plans. A more systematic way into understanding the idea of answering ‘on the fly’ is to appeal to the connection between knowledge-how and intentions. I’m attracted to the idea that there is a close connection between the exercise of knowledge-how, and Bratman’s idea that Intentions should be understood as partial plans (Bratman 1976 http://philpapers.org/rec/BRAIPA). As I understand Bratman, his point is that an intention for the future fixes some features of an action-plan, whilst leaving other aspects of that plan open to be decided when the time of action comes. I think that it’s pretty plausible that this process of ‘filling-in’ a partially specified plan should be understood as working out how do the relevant activity on the fly. This connection needs more development, but it’s a gesture towards a more systematic account of what it is to answer a question ‘on the fly’.

      Do Interrogative Capacities require PMPs?

      The second part of Carlotta’s challenges concerns whether the Interrogative Capacity view is adequate without appealing to PMPs.

      One issue which Carlotta raises is whether the interrogative Capacity view can secure the relation between knowledge-how and the ability to act. One might think that it is possible to have an ability to generate propositional knowledge, without being able to act on that knowledge. I think that this worry is closely connected to Evan’s worry about the dual process picture of knowledge-how (one needs to think of acting and answering as seperable processes to think that the abilities can come apart). Because I take the activity of answering on the fly to be a single process of acting and answering, an ability to answer on the fly just is (a certain kind of) ability to act. One caveat is that ‘ability’ talk is highly context sensitive, and there will be cases in which an agent has an interrogative capacity, but cannot exercise it due to external conditions, so there will be a sense in which we can say that someone is unable, despite having an interrogative capacity.

      A second issue which Carlotta raises is whether the Interrogative Capacity view in fact explains flexibility, or merely predicts that knowledge-how involves flexibility. I think that Carlotta is absolutely right that just saying that knowledge-how is a capacity to generate flexible performances doesn’t explain how knowledge-how produces flexible performances. I think that Carlotta’s right to point out that an Interrogative Capacity basically builds in a capacity for flexibility, rather than explaining flexibility

      Carlotta also helpfully observes that an explanation of flexibility will plausibly come from an account of the grounds of Interrogative Capacity. (For the distinction between debates about the nature and grounds of knowledge-how see, the introduction to Bengson and Moffett 2011 link). I absolutely agree: although I have argued that knowledge-how is a kind of ability to generate knowledge, but I have left open the question of what grounds this kind of ability. Here I am tempted to be fairly permissive: perhaps knowledge-how is sometimes grounded in standing propositional knowledge, other times in certain kinds of ability (perhaps in the case of basic actions), and maybe other times in knowledge of the kinds of practical sense which Carlotta discusses.

      The background issue here is whether identifying knowledge-how with Interrogative Capacities explains the nature of knowledge-how, or just leads us in an explanatory circle. I don’t have a reductive account of the relevant kind of Interrogative capacity on hand (I don’t have the resources to reductively explain ‘on the fly’ for example), and I don’t think that identifying knowledge-how with an interrogative capacity explains how knowledge-how disposes us to flexible and intelligent acts. However, I don’t think that this is a fundamental problem for the account. I am attracted by the Williamsonian thought that we can make progress in understanding mental states by situating them within the mental economy, without reducing them to simpler mental states. So, although I agree that the Interrogative Capacity view offers a reductive account of knowledge-how, I don’t think that it’s uninformative: it situates knowledge-how in the mental economy, fixing its properties in place, whilst leaving open the important question of what the grounds of knowledge-how is.

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4. First of all, I want to thank all of the commentators for their really helpful comments. One of the big issues I’ve been facing in trying to give a novel view is to get clear on what one’s view actually is, and these comments have taught me a good deal about the view I’m trying to develop!

   I’m going to split my comments up by commentator, which should hopefully make navigating between threads of the conversation a little easier. There are a couple of overlaps, which I’ll try to make clear.

   Strong Response to Evan Riley

   Evan raises three really interesting questions in his comments. I don’t have proper answers to any of these questions, but I’ll try to develop the problems, and point toward the shape of some answers.

   i) How can a view which identifies knowledge-how with the capacity to answer a question distinguish between someone who has standing know-how, and someone who is just really good at figuring things out?
   ii) Is it really true that a question is identical with a set of propositions? They do not seem to be intersubstitutable in extensional contexts.
   iii) Doesn’t thinking of the exercise of knowledge-how as involving dual processes of generating knowledge and acting on that knowledge over-intellectualise knowledge-how?

   Strong Working it out

   Evan raises the issue of how the interrogative capacity view is to distinguish someone who knows how to V from someone who is quick at learning, but doesn’t know how to V. I agree with Evan that this is a hugely difficult issue for the kind of view that I’m trying to articulate. It is easy to set up cases in which someone who is ignorant about how to engage in some activity can work out how to do it via their general problem solving skills. Someone who has no idea how to fix a flat tyre on a bike might nonetheless fix one by exercising their general engineering know-how. We might think that such a person does have the relevant kind of capacity to answer the question ‘how to fix a bike tyre?’

   The way I’d like to describe these kinds of cases is this: the agent who has general learning capacities, exercises some very general piece of know-how on some rather specific problem, in so doing coming to know some specific way-proposition, and also (perhaps) coming gaining a capacity to work out how to solve this kind of problem in the future. In order to give this kind of description of the case, I’d need to have theoretical resources for distinguishing between exercising some general know-how in V-ing, and exercising specifically knowledge how to V. I have some half-baked ideas about how to do this, but I don’t have anything like a fully worked out story.

   In my defence, I think that standard Intellectualist accounts face a similar problem. Any activity will be associated with many way-propositions of different levels of generality, and plausibly only some of those way propositions will suffice for knowledge-how. Which? (see the Touch-typist example in Hornsby 2011) http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195389364.001.0001/acprof-9780195389364-chapter-3. I think that currently Intellectualists don’t have a worked-out story about this issue either. This doesn’t mean that my account is in the clear, just that lots of people in this debate face this kind of problem.

   (It’s also worth noting that Stanley and Williamson’s account of skill will face parallel worries, since their account looks like it predicts that someone who is good at working stuff out counts as being skilled at activities which she is in a position to quickly work out how to do.)

   Strong Are questions sets of propositions?

   Evan notes that I endorse an equivalence thesis:

   ET: a question Wh-F? is identical to the set of propositions {p1, p2, … pn} which answer that question.

   (Or maybe, even better, I endorse the claim that the semantic value of an interrogative is just the relevant set of propositions, so that the set of propositions gives the meaning of an interrogative).

   (Note that it’s controversial exactly which propositions are included in set of answering propositions –- is it just true ones, are they complete or partial answers — but for the moment let’s put these issues to one side, and come back to this in Jay’s comments).

   Now, Evan points out that if ET is true, then the following pattern of substitution ought to be acceptable:

   1) Knowing how to V is the capacity to generate fine-grained answers to the question ‘how to V in Fn’ in the process of acting.
   2) Knowing how to V is the capacity to generate fine-grained answers to the set of answers concerning how to V in Fn in the process of acting.

   But, according to Evan, 2) is nonsense. Why is this? One diagnosis would be that the idea of standing in an abilitative relation to a proposition is flawed in principle. I don’t think that this diagnosis is right. Instead, I think that this phenomenon fits into a wider pattern of cases in which substituting an interrogative phrase with a set of propositions which purport to be its semantic value leads to nonsense.

   Notice that we can find similar cases for other verbs like ‘wonder’ that embed interrogative phrases:

   3) Paula wondered whether Dave Weir will win a Gold
   4) Paula wondered the set of propositions {Dave Weir will win a Gold; it is not the case that Dave Weir will win a Gold}

   (I’m assuming that whether p? denotes the set {p; not-p}, although we get the same weirdness if we assume that whether p? denotes {p}).

   Intuitively, we can wonder into questions, but not into propositions (except in the sense of ‘wonder’ where it means something like ‘marvel’). Should we conclude that questions are not identical to sets of propositions? That would be one way out. An alternative would be to take these failures to be examples of the general phenomenon of substitution problems (which should not be confused with Frege puzzles!) (I owe the idea that these kinds of cases might be examples of substitution puzzles to Luke Burke).

   Here’s an example of this kind of problem. It is popular to think that ‘that p’ denotes the proposition that p, and that propositional attitudes should be thought of as relations to propositions (and that propositional attitude ascriptions pick out these relations). However, there are many examples of sentences in which the substitution of ‘the proposition that p’ for ‘p’ yields a false or meaningless sentence (for examples, see Moltmann 2013: C4 §3.1 http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199608744.001.0001/acprof-9780199608744-chapter-5).

   Consider:

   5) Dai hopes that Hannah Cockcroft wins a Gold in Rio
   6) Dai hopes the proposition that Hannah Cockcroft will win a Gold in Rio

   I don’t know what the solution to these kinds of substitution puzzles is, but I presume that the phenomenon is ultimately a rather general one. The point being that sometimes substituting a term for its semantic value doesn’t lead to an acceptable sentence. Any successful solution for ‘that’-clauses ought to be generalizable to ‘wh’-complements. Maybe, not very satisfying, but hopefully that points toward a possible answer (or at least a bigger and more interesting problem).

   Strong Two processes or one?

   Evan worries that my account pulls knowledge-how apart from intentional action because it claims that knowing-how is a capacity to generate propositional knowledge, which makes it one step removed from intentional action. I’m not so sure about the worry about over-intellectualisation, but I agree that the kind of dual process picture which Evan describes (where working how to V, and V-ing are distinct processes) would cause problems for explaining directness. (incidentally, I think that Stanley and Williamson’s view of skill is a good example of something like this dual process view)

   However, what I was trying to go for with the quote from Ryle was the idea that one process can at the same time be a process of acting, and a process of learning a proposition. I guess I wanted to reject a dual process story, and endorse something like a dual aspect picture, where one process is at once acting, and generating knowledge. The idea is that we can see intentionally acting as being a process of answering a how to question, with the idea being that the upshot of that process is both an act, and knowledge of the relevant proposition. As Carlotta points out there’s a lot that’s mysterious about this picture, but this is the kind of account that I’m aiming for.

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