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Philosophy and Phenomenological Research

Vol. LXXXV No. 3, November 2012

© 2012 Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, LLC

Replies to Dickie, Schroeder andStalnaker

JASON STANLEY

Rutgers University

Reply to Dickie

The central goal of Know How is to show that skilled action is action

guided by propositional knowledge. I argue that knowing how to do some-

thing is propositional knowledge. I then conclude from this premise, via

certain links between knowing how and skill, that skilled action is action

guided by propositional knowledge. In her impressive and challenging

reply, Dickie raises two objections against the view I defend.

Dickie’s first objection is that one can agree with a subsidiary thesis of

the book, that knowledge how is propositional knowledge, while neverthe-

less defending a resolutely anti-intellectualist position about skilled action.

Knowledge how is propositional knowledge, but it is propositional knowl-

edge in virtue of the agent’s possession of various skills. As Dickie suc-

cinctly summarizes the view, “knowledge how is an artifact of skill”. If so,

knowledge how may be propositional, but no intellectualist thesis about

skill follows. Finally, Dickie argues that the view she sketches provides a

better account of the acquisition of skill than the intellectualist picture of

skill defended in Know How.

Dickie’s second objection involves the distinction between conceptual

and non-conceptual content. As Dickie writes:

…the skilled φ-er’s sensitivity to which ways of φ-ing are reliable cannot

amount to propositional knowledge, for a mental state can count as propo-

sitional knowledge iff it is a conceptual mental state, and the skilled φ-er’s

sensitivity lacks the characteristic marks of the conceptual.

Dickie then proposes a reply to the challenge, but then argues that the

reply is not open to me. I take each of these two objections in turn.

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BOOK SYMPOSIUM 725

Dickie sketches a position according to which skills undergird proposi-

tional knowledge, but do not presuppose it. On the view she describes,

someone is skilled if and only if their intention leads them generally to reli-

able ways of acting. Crucially, however, the account of how an intention

leads to a reliable way of acting does not invoke knowledge. Dickie then

argues that possession of such skills result in the acquisition of a proposi-

tional knowledge state with the content of the account of knowledge how

given in Chapter 5 of Know How. So in skilled action, the agent manifests

knowledge how, which is a propositional knowledge state of the sort

described in Know How. But the propositional knowledge does not guide

the skilled action. Instead, the agent has the propositional knowledge in

virtue of having a skill.1

Dickie argues that the anti-intellectualist account of skill she proffers is

superior to the intellectualist alternative advanced in the book. The intellec-

tualist holds that skill acquisition presupposes acquisition of a propositional

knowledge state. The intellectualist therefore holds that the acquisition of

skill always occurs via the acquisition of the kind of justification that under-

lies acquisition of knowledge. But, as Dickie points out, there are “myriad

routes to acquisition of skill.” If intellectualism is correct, then all the routes

that lead to the acquisition of a skill must fit into some standard story of

the kind of justification that is required for propositional knowledge. Given

the diversity of ways in which skills can be acquired, Dickie is pessimistic

that all such ways of acquiring skill are amenable to such treatment.

On certain conceptions of propositional knowledge, Dickie’s objection is

powerful, and indeed devastating. For example, suppose one had a strongly

internalist conception of knowledge, according to which knowledge-level

justification for one’s belief that p requires access to a non-circular reason

to believe that p. This view of knowledge would be hard to reconcile with

the view that skill acquisition is always the result of knowledge acquisition.

There are certainly ways to acquire skills that do not involve the agent

having access to a non-circular reason to believe, of a way of doing some-

thing, that it is a way in which the agent could do it. That is to say, given a

strongly internalist conception of knowledge, the project of the book would

not be particularly plausible.

However, one of the main goals of the book is to use the topic of knowl-

edge how and skilled action to reject internalist conceptions of knowledge.

The argument in the book is that what prevents us from seeing that

1 The view Dickie sketches would be congenial to Ernest Sosa’s version of virtue episte-

mology (Sosa, 2007), according to which skills (or competences) provide a foundational-

ist way to halt the regress of justification (though it is worth emphasizing that the

competences that Sosa discusses are not in general competences to engage in intentional

action).

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726 JASON STANLEY

knowing how to do something is a kind of propositional knowledge is mis-

guided adherence to such conceptions. But once we abandon such over-

intellectualized conceptions of knowledge, I do not think there is a problem

accounting for the myriad ways in which skills are acquired. Dickie writes,

“…according to Stanley, the justification that secures the skilled practitio-

ners knowledge-that is just a special case of justification on the basis of evi-

dence.” This is allegedly problematic, because it is easy to envisage cases

of skill acquisition that do not fit this model. However, the claim that

skilled practitioners must have acquired propositional knowledge-how does

not commit one to evidentialism, at least in the technical sense employed in

Epistemology, where evidence is characterized in terms of mental states of

the speaker. Furthermore, even if one does accept evidentialism, there is no

obstacle to seeing different ways in which skills can be acquired as the

result of the acquisition of justification on the basis of evidence. Perhaps it

will help to go through some examples of skill acquisition, to see that there

is no problem accommodating an explanation of their acquisition in terms

of orthodox epistemology, of an externalist variety.

Consider the acquisition of a skill by “unreflective imitation”. Over time,

unreflective imitation can certainly provide one with bodily experiences that

a way of doing something is a reliable way of doing it, and hence lead to

knowledge how to do it. There are both analogies and disanalogies with

perceptual knowledge, i.e. the way in which (unreflective) perception of an

apple on the table leads to perceptual knowledge that the object on the table

is an apple. One analogy is that one kind of evidence is bodily evidence,

and the other perceptual evidence, i.e. both kinds of sensory evidence.

There are also of course disanalogies between acquiring knowledge how to

do something from bodily experience, and acquiring knowledge that (say)

the object on the table is an apple on the basis of visual experience. Here

are two disanalogies. First, the content of the state of knowing how to do

something is modal in character—to learn how to do something requires

learning, of a way of doing it, that it is a reliable way in which to do it.

This is rarely a piece of knowledge one can acquire from one single experi-

ence. It is more often the result of an inductive process, which we call, in

the practical domain, practicing. One purpose of practicing is to acquire

more and more evidence of an inductive sort that a certain way of doing

something is a reliable way of doing it. In contrast, one can learn that the

object on the table is an apple from a single visual experience. Secondly,

the content of visual experience is more accessible to consciousness than

the content of bodily experience. For example, it is easier to descriptively

characterize the the content of visual experience than the content of bodily

experience. But given the externalist picture I assume in the book, this does

not show that bodily experience cannot support a belief—what provides

epistemic support for a belief does not have to be accessible in order to be

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BOOK SYMPOSIUM 727

what makes that belief an instance of knowledge. So, these distinctions do

not entail that the two kinds of learning are distinct species.

Dickie is however correct that the intellectualist view has certain commit-

ments, which the anti-intellectualist view might not incur. Suppose, for

example, that the kind of justification one acquires for one’s belief that w is

a way in which one could φ is Gettiered - perhaps it is acquired through an

incompetent instruction manual, which by chance delivers the right instruc-

tions. If so, then the intellectualist view entails that one has not acquired the

skill to φ. It is not immediately obvious that the anti-intellectualist view of

skill Dickie describes shares this consequence. However, partly this is

because Dickie says nothing about what changes in an agent must occur in

order for that agent to acquire a skill. All she says is that the agent’s

intentions must be non-lucky selectors of reliable ways of φ-ing. Dickie’s

anti-intellectualist has no explanation at all for what makes it the case that

someone acquires a skill. In contrast, the intellectualist provides an account

of what changes in an agent must occur in order for that agent to acquire a

skill—the agent must come to have a propositional knowledge state, in

virtue of which she is skilled. Because the intellectualist provides an

account of what it is to acquire a skill, and the anti-intellectualist does not,

the intellectualist incurs commitments. But this should be seen as a virtue

of the account, rather than a deficiency.

Dickie’s second objection concerns conceptual and non-conceptual con-

tent. A skilled φ-er who employs a way w of φ-ing may fail to grasp a

“criterion of identity” for w. According to Dickie, this means that such an

agent lacks a conceptual representation of w, and hence cannot have a prop-

ositional attitude state of the form <w is a reliable way to φ>. Dickie’s

solution is to proffer an account of ways of thinking, modeled on the

neo-Fregean framework developed by Gareth Evans, which involves

non-conceptual representation relations as constituents of the contents of

propositional attitude states. She concludes by worrying that the account of

how propositional attitude states containing such contents are justified will

not fit into a standard epistemic picture, which she takes to be a worry for

the project of the book.

In the book, I dealt at length with the objection that knowing how to do

something involves non-conceptual content, and on those grounds cannot be

a propositional attitude state (Stanley, 2011, pp. 167–173). I explicitly

suggest allowing non-conceptual representations to figure in the contents of

propositional attitudes (see the discussion of Tyler Burge on de re belief on

pp. 169–70). But ultimately I endorse something very much like the

response that Dickie herself provides.

One reason so much of the book is devoted to an exposition of the neo-

Fregean framework in Evans (1982) is that there is intended to be a tight

analogy between perceptual demonstrative thought, on Evans’s framework,

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728 JASON STANLEY

and practical modes of presentation. Like Dickie, I interpret Evans’s neo-

Fregean framework as involving modes of presentation that are entertained

by a subject in virtue of that subject standing to an object in an information

link that provides non-conceptual perceptual information about that object,

with demonstrative thought about a perceptually present object being the

paradigm. A demonstrative thought involves having an information link to

an object that delivers non-conceptual perceptual information about that

object to the agent, on the basis of which the subject can locate the object

in public space. Analogously, if x knows how to φ, x must stand in an

information link to a way of φ-ing that delivers non-conceptual bodily

information. In order to know how to φ, the information provided by the

information link to the way of φ-ing must enable the agent to have counter-

factual success in φ-ing. The model for a practical mode of presentation

presented in Know How is precisely the neo-Fregean treatment of perceptual

demonstratives. As Dickie herself recognizes, this is the way out of the

conundrum she sketches (I prefer not to call such modes of presentation,

whether practical or perceptual, “non-conceptual”, but that is merely termi-

nological). Having a practical mode of presentation of a way of doing

something does not require having a criterion of identity for ways of doing

things.2

Dickie worries that if I take the solution she proffers (which is essentially

the route described in the book), then there will be epistemological prob-

lems. But I fail to see the worry. Dickie agrees that propositional attitude

states can have (what she calls) non-conceptual representation relations as

constituents. So surely she must think that some such states are knowledge

states. In my book, there is no commitment to any specific epistemological

story about knowledge states, only commitment to the claim that having a

skill presupposes having a knowledge state with this kind of content. Dickie

thinks that the contents of some propositional attitude states can contain

non-conceptual representation relations. She presumably also agrees that

some of these contents can be known. And that is all that is required for the

project of the book.

2 On Evans’s view, having a de re representation of an object requires (in his words) know-

ing what it is for certain kinds of propositions to be true. Burge (2010, pp. 196) inter-

prets Evans’s talk of “knowing what it is” for a type of proposition to be true to involve

a “relatively high level of understanding”. This is because Burge (rightly) interprets

ordinary attributions of knowledge-what to be propositional knowledge (Ibid.). On this

basis, he criticizes Evans for over-intellectualizing singular thought. But this is a misinter-

pretation of Evans. As Evans writes (1982, p. 116), “…the concept of knowing what it is

for it be true that p…is one of a capacity, and the proof of its being possessed at a given

time must surely reside in facts about what the subject can or cannot do at that time.”

Though Burge is right about ordinary attributions of knowing what, given Evans’s tech-

nical notion of knowing what, Evans does not over-intellectualize singular thought.

Evans’s actual position is not that distinct from Burge’s.

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BOOK SYMPOSIUM 729

Reply to Schroeder

According to Ryle (1949, p. 26), his intellectualist opponents “suppose that

the primary exercise of minds consists in finding the answers to questions

and that their other occupations are merely applications of considered truths

or even regrettable distractions from their consideration.” As Ryle points

out, for the intellectualist, intelligent action is the application of knowledge

of this sort. So in developing the intellectualist position, it is paramount to

begin with an account of what it is to know (and learn) the answer to a

question, i.e. an account of knowing (and learning) who, what, where, how,

and why.

Unfortunately, with a few notable exceptions, there has been very little

work in philosophy departments on the nature of states of learning-wh and

knowing-wh. The topic migrated to linguistics departments, where the topic

was discussed in the formal mode, as an account of the meaning of

sentences like “Hannah knows who was at the party”, or “Sarah learned

why the dentist showed up late for the appointment”. Given that linguistic

semanticists employ the truth-predicate in their analysis of the meanings of

these constructions, there is a relatively trivial way of going from work in

the formal mode to work in the material mode. Since meanings are truth-

conditions, we can conclude that knowing how to ride a bicycle is the state

expressed by a predicate like “knows how to ride a bicycle.”

An account of our judgments about knowing-wh cannot just be con-

ducted in the material mode. If a discourse suffers from context-sensitivity,

then one cannot move immediately from sentence meaning to truth-condi-

tions. Some of our judgments about knowing-wh might be due in part to

the sensitivity to context of sentences that ascribe such states. The fact that

our judgments sometimes are the result of shifting contents of ascriptions

rather than the result of shifting facts is often philosophically of the highest

importance.3 As I show in the book, ascriptions of knowledge-wh are also

context-sensitive in ways that can occlude debates about their nature (e.g.

Stanley (2011, pp. 60–68)).4 Given that ascriptions of knowledge-wh are

clearly context-sensitive, a thorough analysis of the topic requires an expla-

nation of which of our judgments about knowledge-wh reflect the nature of

the states, and which reflect the shifting contents of such ascriptions.

A systematic defense of intellectualism must therefore involve giving a

full semantics for attributions of knowledge-wh. Such an account will yield

3 See e.g. the debate between contextualists about knowledge ascriptions and interest-rela-

tive invariantists (e.g. Hawthorne (2004), Stanley (2005), DeRose (2009)), and similar

debates concerning vagueness (Graff Fara (2000, 2008)).4 The purpose of Boer and Lycan (1986) is in essence to show how many of the philo-

sophical uses of knowledge who are undermined by the fact that our judgments often are

the result of the context-sensitive nature of their ascriptions, rather than revelatory of a

single underlying state of an agent.

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730 JASON STANLEY

a story about the nature of states of knowing-wh (since giving a successful

semantics involves linking expressions to the things they denote), and it will

also include a description of the sensitivity of such ascriptions to the context

of use. But this is an on-going, difficult research project, and it was not

possible to provide definitive theories of these topics, consistent with my

other goals. I hoped only to say enough about knowledge-wh, and attribu-

tions thereof, to make it clear that one stands in the knowledge relation to a

question-denotation, in virtue of having propositional knowledge states. I

did not need to solve every extant problem in the theory of questions. As

Mark Schroeder demonstrates in “Showing how to derive knowing how”,

there are a number of open problems remaining. Nevertheless, as he cor-

rectly concludes, this does not impugn the project in the book.

An infinitival embedded question is a sentence containing an embedded

question with an infinitive. Ascriptions of knowing how are, at least in Eng-

lish, obviously infinitival embedded questions. Schroeder’s criticisms focus

on the book’s treatment of mention-some readings of questions, the readings

most naturally associated with infinitival embedded questions, as in Hint-

ikka’s classic example (1), the most natural reading of which is (2):

(1) John knows where to buy an Italian newspaper.

(2) There is some place p such that John knows that p is a place

where he can buy an Italian newspaper.

In my book, I gave a compositional semantics for ascriptions of infiniti-

val embedded questions, which gives them a different semantics than their

most intuitive gloss. On the account I gave, the truth-conditions of (1) are

as in (3):

(3) John knows that there is some place p where he can buy an Italian

newspaper.

In “Showing How to Derive Knowing How”, Schroeder shows that a

semantics of the sort I provide for mention-some readings, where the quan-

tifier occurs inside the knowledge-ascription (as in (3)), makes incorrect pre-

dictions. He then proposes a solution to the problem that perhaps requires

only slight modifications to the basic semantics for embedded questions I

use. So his contribution is a helpful suggestion to the project, rather than a

devastating criticism. Furthermore, I am sympathetic to his excellent points.

So I will use the reply to explain why I made the semantic decisions I did

in the book.

For the intellectualist, one knows how to do something in virtue of

knowing the answer to a question. One of my goals in the book was to

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BOOK SYMPOSIUM 731

show that the intellectualist view of knowing how fits smoothly into an

account of ascriptions of knowledge-wh. I thought it was important to

restrict myself to one of the orthodox frameworks for the semantics of

embedded questions. I did so to show that there are no novel problems

raised for the semantics of embedded questions by ascriptions of knowing

how. Of course, this does not entail that these frameworks are satisfactory

—in particular, it remains the case that there is no fully satisfactory account

of ‘mention-some’ readings of questions. But this has nothing specifically to

do with ascriptions of knowledge how.

There are three traditional frameworks for the semantics of knowledge-wh,

due to Hamblin, Kartunnen, and Groenendijk and Stokhof. I chose Groenendijk

and Stokhof’s framework (henceforth “G&S) for three reasons. First, as Sch-

roeder remarks, it is the most coarse-grained of the three frameworks. So, any

question denotation produced in G&S’s framework can be produced in the

other two frameworks (see Stanley (2011, 59–60)). Secondly, the most obvious

way to treat mention-some readings of questions in a Karttunen framework

faces problems (Ibid., pp. 116–7). Third, unlike Karttunen, who treats them as

contributing existential quantifiers to the compositional semantics, the way

G&S treat the question words, essentially as being lambda-abstracts, enables

one to account smoothly for languages in which knowledge how is expressed

with bare infinitives, i.e. without the accompanying question-word. In short,

the details of G&S’s compositional semantics lend themselves easily to an

embedded question semantics for knowing how ascriptions in languages like

French (Stanley (2011, pp. 138–9)).5

In Know How, I proposed a novel treatment for mention-some questions,

one not suggested in Groenendijk and Stokhof’s work, or indeed elsewhere

in the literature (Stanley, 2011, p. 117). The account I proposed gave an

interpretation like (3) to a sentence like (1). The main reason I chose to give

the semantic account I did was that I was swayed by certain narrow scope

readings of mention-some questions, as in the following examples (from

Stanley (2011, p. 120)):

(4) I know where to get a good Italian meal in this neighborhood.

Steve told me that there was some really good place on Second

Avenue. We will walk up and down until we find it.

(5) I know how to open the door. Hannah told me that there was some

way of doing it that involves using a credit card. We will figure it

out.

5 Groenendijk and Stokhof’s treatment of question-words as lambda-abstracts is not an out-

dated feature of their compositional semantics. George (2011) also follows Groenendijk

and Stokhof in treating question-words as lambda-abstracts.

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732 JASON STANLEY

If one employs a semantics that systematically associates readings like

(2) with sentences like (1)—i.e. a semantic theory that has the effect of

treating the existential quantifier as taking wide-scope over the question-

embedding verb—one will not be able capture these readings.

The account I proffer produces readings for mention-some readings of

questions in which the existential quantifier takes narrow scope with respect

to the embedding verb—’x knows where to φ’, on this account, means ‘x

knows there is a place at which x could φ’, rather than the more natural

‘there is a place such that x knows it is a place x could φ’. Schroeder

shows that this semantics generates unhappy predictions. For example, a

member of a bomb squad could know that there is a way to disarm a bomb

he is facing, without knowing how to disarm the bomb.

When I wrote the book I was familiar with the problem Schroeder raises,

because it had been brought to my attention by Josh Dever. I have a brief

discussion of it in the book, with a proposed solution (which I also owe to

discussion with Dever):

Suppose that I am facing two stores. I know that one of them sells Italian

newspapers, but I do not know which one. I do not know where to buy an

Italian newspaper. The solution to this problem for my analysis of

mention-some readings of questions is to make the domain property more

complicated—in this case, the property of being known to me as a place

to buy Italian newspapers. (Stanley, 2011, p. 117, footnote 3).

In the case of Schroeder’s version of the problem, the domain property

would be the property of being known to x as wire that would disarm the

bomb. So the member of the bomb squad would only know how to disarm

the bomb if she knows that there is a way that she knows would disarm the

bomb, which is a way in which she could disarm the bomb. This evades the

problem that Schroeder raises.

One might worry, however, that the domain property that is employed in

the solution to Schroeder’s problem is complicated and ad hoc. But it is

unclear to me that the kinds of domain properties here are any more ad hoc

than what is required in quite orthodox semantic theorizing elsewhere. For

example, in Kratzer’s well-known analysis of modals (Kratzer, 2012), she

appeals to what she calls a conversational background to resolve the

context-sensitivity involved with modals. Conversational backgrounds

are functions from possible worlds to sets of propositions. Differences in

contextually supplied conversational backgrounds account not only for dif-

ferences in ‘flavors’ of modality (i.e. differences between epistemic and

deontic modality), but also for differences in modal force, within a kind of

modality. Some of the explanatory power of Kratzer’s influential analysis of

modals is carried by judicious selection of conversational backgrounds.

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Such conversational backgrounds are often quite complex.6 Nevertheless,

perhaps the domain restrictions required for the semantics I proposed that

are required to deal with the Dever-Schroeder examples are more implausi-

ble than those found elsewhere in semantics. I certainly would be open to a

solution that did not require such fanciful domain restrictions.

Schroeder’s own solution to the problem is to alter the semantics as

follows:

All that we need to do, is to replace G&S’s functions from worlds to prop-

ositions with functions from worlds to sets of propositions. Intuitively, we

keep the idea that the members of these sets are the true answers to the

question at that world, but we simply relax the assumption that there needs

to be a unique true answer. For mention-all questions, we allow that the

answer is indeed unique, and hence that these sets are singletons whose

members are as described by G&S. But for mention-some questions, we

allow that there are multiple true answers. Finally, we say that the seman-

tic entry for ‘knows’ tells us to know Q at some world, you need to stand

in the propositional knowledge relation to one of the members of the value

of Q at that world.

This is a nice suggestion. As Schroeder notes, he does not composition-

ally implement the proposal. But something like Schroeder’s proposal has

been compositionally implemented in George (2011, Chapter 2). On

George’s theory, a mention-some reading of a question like “Where can I

buy an Italian newspaper?” denotes a set of singular propositions about

places to buy an Italian newspaper. Standing in the knowledge relation to

that set at a world requires knowing only one member of that set. This is a

compositional implementation of something very similar to Schroeder’s

proposal. From the perspective I took in the book, the problem with

George’s proposal is that it cannot capture the narrow-scope existential

readings in (4) and (5). But if one does not like the domain restrictions to

which I appealed, that might be a price one is willing to pay.7

The strategy I take in my book, as well as Schroeder’s proposed solution,

involve the hypothesis that each embedded question construction is ambiguous

between a mention-some and a mention-all reading. As George (2011, Chapter

6 As Stephanie Leary (p.c.) has pointed out to me, Kratzer’s account of subjective readings

of deontic modals will have to appeal to a conversational background that is a function

from possible worlds to sets of propositions that specify normative prescriptions that are

a function of what is believed by the agent. This is a somewhat gerryrigged conversa-

tional background, but one necessitated to get the right readings for the relevant modals.7 Since all Schroeder says is that a mention-some reading denotes a set of answers, it is

open to him to maintain that the narrow scope existential reading is one of the answers

in the denotation of a mention-some reading. But it is not clear how one would composi-

tionally implement a proposal that allows such latitude in the answer set. George’s pro-

posal, which is rigorously compositionally implemented, does not.

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6) points out, there is much such an approach does not explain. For example

(Ibid., p. 216), “…there are few cases where a single embedded question clearly

has access to both readings, and a number of cases where only one reading

appears to be present.” Simply making available two potential contents to an

embedded question fails to explain the peculiar distribution of their readings.

There are other problems besides. It is safe to say that a fully satisfactory

account of mention-some readings is still somewhat elusive. Ascriptions of

knowledge how, where the underlying modal is an existential “could” modal,

rather than a deontic universal modal, by far prefer the mention some reading.

Therefore, a fully satisfactory account of their semantics has not yet been given.

This has nothing specifically to do with knowledge how, but rather with the fact

that some problems in the theory of embedded questions have yet to be solved.8

Reply to Stalnaker

In “Intellectualism and the Objects of Knowledge”, Stalnaker argues for

two points, one somewhat congenial, and the other not. The first point is

that “intellectualism” is a misleading label for the position that I defend in

my book. The second point is that the neo-Fregean account of propositions

that I defend in the book is flawed. I will take each of these points in turn.

Stalnaker rightly notices that the defense I provide for the view that know-

ing how is a species of knowing that takes the form of an extended argument

that propositional knowledge should not be over-intellectualized. Much of the

book consists of an argument that the “traditional intellectualist conception is

a wrongheaded account of propositional knowledge.” As Stalnaker writes:

In some cases, knowledge may be manifested in the assertion and defense

of what one knows, but in general, propositional knowledge is the posses-

sion of information and the capacity to use that information to guide one’s

actions…The paradigm cases of knowing-how (according to Stanley’s

thesis) are also cases of the possession of information, and the capacity to

access it for the purpose of guiding one’s action. If we focus on knowl-

edge-how as a species of propositional knowledge, this will be a useful

corrective to the intellectualist conception of knowledge. The upshot of

Stanley’s thesis, I am suggesting, should be the rejection of the intellectu-

alist picture.

Although I do not say it as concisely or as well at Stalnaker does here,

this is exactly how I argue for one of the main theses of the book, that

knowing how is a kind of propositional knowledge.

Stalnaker also shares my interpretation of Ryle. Stalnaker writes:

8 Sgaravatti and Zardini (2008) argues that there are special problems raised in accounting

for ascriptions of knowledge how that are specific to knowledge how, and do not arise

with other knowledge-wh constructions.

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I am not going to try to defend Ryle, since he does implicitly accept the

intellectualist picture of knowledge-that, but I think the more general intel-

lectualist view that he was criticizing is a picture that Stanley should also

want to reject. (That is, I think Ryle was right to criticize the intellectualist

view of knowing-how. His mistake was to accept, or at least presuppose,

an intellectualist account of knowing-that.)

I start the book with Ryle because Ryle quite clearly makes the mistake

of arguing that knowledge how is not knowledge that, on the basis of false

views about knowing that (the views are false, because they over-intellectu-

alize knowing that). Much of the rest of the book takes the form of criticiz-

ing subsequent philosophers for making the same mistake as Ryle—

concluding that knowing how is not a kind of knowing that, because of the

mistake of over intellectualizing propositional knowledge. Stalnaker is also

right that I agree with Ryle that when people act, they are not obligated to

do some theoretical reasoning immediately beforehand. Where I disagree

with Ryle is on the significance of this point.

One of the main points in the book is that one shouldn’t over-intellectu-

alize propositional knowledge. Stalnaker is right that, were this a treatise

purely on propositional knowledge, the label “intellectualism” would be a

very poor choice for my view. However, the main conclusions of the book

concern knowledge how and skilled action. I argue that knowledge how is

knowledge that, and action is skilled by virtue of being guided by such

knowledge. I continue to think that “intellectualism” is an appropriate label

for these views, which are, after all, views about knowledge how and

skilled action. It is intellectualist to say that knowledge how is a kind of

knowledge that, and skilled action is action guided by such knowledge,

even if one simultaneously denies implausible (because over-intellectual-

ized) views about propositional knowledge. 9

But these are quibbles. Stalnaker and I are in full agreement that the

properties philosophers have appealed to in arguing that knowing how to do

something is not a kind of knowledge that are typically not properties that

9 There is clearly another sense of “intellectualist” used in Ryle’s work. In this sense, the

doctrine applies to those who think that intelligent behavior is the result of inner categori-

cal causes—see for example, Bengson and Moffett (2011) for insightful discussion. One

purpose of Know How is to divorce propositional knowledge from its associations with

inner categorical causes. That is, I try to explain that we have propositional knowledge

states, even if there are no corresponding inner categorical states. But I also take pains to

show that even if there are underlying categorical states that are identical to, or are

responsible for the possession of, propositional attitude states, Ryle’s arguments still do

not establish that knowing how is not a kind of knowing that. In other words, I argue

that whether or not intellectualism in this sense is true, Ryle’s arguments fail. So I do not

commit myself either way to endorsing or rejecting this sense of “intellectualism”. I argue

rather that the debate about inner categorical causes has no bearing on the relation

between knowing how and knowing that.

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an agent needs to have in order to know a truth. They are rather relics of a

pre-externalist, over-intellectualized conception of what it is know some-

thing (it is no accident that we are in agreement, since I acquired these

views in large part from him). The substantial point of disagreement

between Stalnaker and me concerns not the nature of knowing, nor what it

is to act upon knowledge, but rather the nature of the objects of knowledge,

i.e. propositions.

Stalnaker has a number of different objections to the neo-Fregean view

of propositions I defend in the book. Some of the objections rest on some-

what terminological issues, some on misinterpretations of the neo-Fregean

position, and some on substantive disagreements. It is worthwhile distin-

guishing among these different classes of objections.

Stalnaker writes:

…it is part of the idea of a proposition (an idea that was important to

Frege, and that is important to Stanley’s general thesis) that propositions,

or Thoughts, be characterizations that are intelligible independently of

thinkers that think the Thoughts, or speakers who assert them. It seems

particularly implausible to hold that a fact has as constituents, relations to

thinkers and speakers who think and talk about those facts.

According to the neo-Fregean account of propositions, propositions con-

tain ways of thinking of properties and objects. In this framework, at least

some ways of thinking involve relational properties between thinkers and

things about which the thinker is thinking. Stalnaker has two objections to

this framework. The first is that it violates the independence between propo-

sitions and thinkers that is part and parcel of the Fregean idea of a proposi-

tion as a mind-independent entity. The second is that it falls afoul of

various truisms about facts. I will take the second point first.

There is a sense of “fact” in which it is odd to take facts as containing ways

of thinking at all. In this sense of “fact”, true Fregean (and neo-Fregean) propo-

sitions are not plausibly construed as facts - the view that facts are true Fregean

propositions does not cohere well with a robust conception of fact, or truth-

maker. But historically, fact talk in the sense of truth-makers for sentences was

contrasted with proposition-talk. The view that facts are true propositions

emerged as a response to a theory of truth that did without propositions—that

identified the truth of a representational item with correspondence to a fact. The

view that facts are true propositions is part of a different theory of truth, one that

is probably best understood as doing without entities such as facts. Theorists

like Frege, who identify facts with true propositions, tend to do so because they

think of truth as a primitive property of thoughts, rather than something defin-

able in terms of correspondence to facts. Frege’s ontology has objects and func-

tions, ways of thinking, and combinations of ways of thinking into

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propositions. Because he rejected the correspondence theory of truth, he saw no

reason to postulate facts in addition to these entities. It is therefore no surprise

that Fregean propositions do not fit ordinary fact talk. I’m not sure that this is an

objection.

The first objection is more worrisome. It is certainly part of the Fre-

gean picture that most propositions are intelligible independently of

thinkers that think those thoughts. If the neo-Fregean conception of prop-

ositions is one according to which propositions in general are not intelli-

gible independently of thinkers who think those thoughts, it scarcely

deserves to be thought of a version of Fregeanism at all. However,

except for the case of “I” thoughts, it is not a consequence of the neo-

Fregean conception of propositions that their intelligibility depends on

thinkers who think those thoughts.

Consider the neo-Fregean account of propositions defended in Gareth

Evans (1985), which is the target of Stalnaker’s critique. On Evans’s

view, an indexical like “today” has, as its linguistic meaning, a two

place relation between persons and days, which we may call Rtoday. The

sense of an occurrence of “today” results from saturating the second

argument place of Rtoday by a day. To grasp that sense is to stand in

that relation to the day that is in the second argument place of Rtoday

(which on Evans’s view requires having certain dispositions towards the

day in question). So we can represent the sense of “Today is fine”, as

uttered on day d, as < kx(Rtoday(x,d), sense of “is fine”>. I fail to see

how this account results in a view of propositions according to which

their intelligibility depends on thinkers who think these thoughts. Anyone

can grasp this proposition, without having any attitudes towards thinkers.

All they need to do to grasp this proposition is to certain dispositions

towards the day d, and think of the property of being fine in the rele-

vant way.

Of course, Evans’s view of de se propositions is that they are propo-

sitions that can be only be grasped by the person about whom they con-

cern—only the agent can grasp her own first-personal thoughts. On

Evans’s view (Ibid., p. 315), the constant linguistic meaning of “I” is a

three-place relation R1(x,y,z), where “R1 is an as yet unspecified relation

which can only be satisfied by a a triple of S, S’, and t if S = S’” (the

reason Evans calls the relation R1 “as yet unspecified” is because giving

an account of this relation is a substantive philosophical task—giving an

account of R1 is tantamount to giving an explanation of what it is to

think of an object as oneself). The sense of ‘I’ on a particular occasion

of use is what results by saturating the second two argument places by a

person and a time. So the sense of my use of ‘I’ on May 25, 2012 at

11:12 a.m. EST is kxR1(x, Jason, May 25, 2012 at 11:12 a.m. EST). On

this view, like Frege’s, only I can grasp the thought I think when I

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think right now that I am tired. But it would be strange to declare (as

John Perry famously did) that this view of “I” thoughts is unFregean.

As Evans (1985, p. 312) writes:

Since it is an immediate consequence of what Frege said about ‘I’-thoughts

that they are not ‘generally accessible’, Perry appears to be arguing that a

Fregean approach to ‘I’-thoughts must be inadequate by citing a supposed

requirement upon Fregean thoughts—that they be generally accessible—

which Frege appears to have shown himself free of precisely in what he

says about ‘I’ thoughts.

I do not mean to deny that the Fregean (or neo-Fregean) account of the

de se is entirely unproblematic. The most serious worry is that on a Fregean

(or neo-Fregean) account of de se thoughts, it is impossible to attribute de

se thoughts to others—if you can’t think my de se thoughts, then how can

you attribute them to me? However, in the book, I attempt to solve this

remaining problem facing Fregean and neo-Fregean accounts of the de se

(Stanley, 2011, pp. 87–88). If I am right, the phenomenon of de se thought

poses for the Fregean no additional issues over and above the de re. It is

just another mode of presentation problem.

There is a third problem Stalnaker raises for the neo-Fregean. Stalna-

ker argues that Evans’s version of neo-Fregeanism results in “a theory in

which propositions are not true or false absolutely, but only true or false

relative to persons and times.” However, Stalnaker’s argument for this

conclusion rests on a misinterpretation of Evans’s views. According to

Stalnaker, “The sense of ‘I’, according to Evans, is a three place relation

between individuals S and S’ and a time t.” It is this premise that draws

Stalnaker to the conclusion that Evans’s view of sense requires relativism

about truth:

Assuming that Evansian modes of presentation are, in the general case,

relations between the thinkers and the referents of their thought, the result

would be that propositions in general are person and time dependent—a

very unFregean conclusion.

However, the assumption Stalnaker makes is incorrect. One of the

aims of “Understanding Demonstratives” is to explain how something

like Kaplan’s distinction between character and content can be drawn

within a Fregean framework. The three place relation Stalnaker misidenti-

fies with the sense of “I” is not, on Evans’s framework, the propositional

contribution of an occurrence of “I”. It is rather more akin to the char-

acter of “I”. The sense of an occurrence of “I” results from saturating

the second two places in the relation with the referent and the time of

thinking (this is why occurrences of indexicals such as “I” and “today”,

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BOOK SYMPOSIUM 739

for Evans, express object-dependent senses—if there is no referent, there

is no sense to be entertained).

For Evans, the sense of an occurrence of “I” at time t, when it denotes

an object o, is given by a one-place property R1(x,o,t), which can only be

satisfied by an object if it is identical to o. This property is of course not

the property of being identical to o at t, though it may be necessarily

co-extensive with it. This property is truth-conditionally relevant, because

the proposition expressed by “I am a professor of philosophy” and “Jason

Stanley is a professor of philosophy” may embed differently in proposi-

tional attitude contexts. The fact that the two propositions embed differently

is explained by the difference between the third-personal mode of presenta-

tion expressed by “Jason Stanley”, and the mode of presentation character-

ized by R1(x,o,t). First-personal senses on Evans’s view thus do have a

“role to play”.

Stalnaker is correct that there are various differences between his inter-

pretation of Frege, and the neo-Fregean position described by Evans. For

example, Stalnaker’s Frege lays heavy emphasis on the role of sense as

determining reference, where this is something like giving an indexical-free

descriptive identification of the reference. Neo-Fregeans uniformly reject

this as an interpretation of Frege, and it plays no role in their own theories.

As is clear from what I have written, I do not find Stalnaker’s criticisms

of the neo-Fregean conception of sense convincing. But of course there is

more to say. Stalnaker’s treatment of propositions as sets of possible worlds

has been highly influential, despite the manifest drawbacks of coarse-

grained treatments of propositions. One reason to be tempted by such an

approach is that providing an account of the kinematics of belief with

unstructured contents is considerably more straightforward than providing

such an account with structured contents. A second reason to be tempted by

Stalnaker’s approach is that it makes semantics more tractable. A structured

proposition approach, whether Fregean or Russellian, involves a two-step

procedure of assigning contents to sentences relative to contexts, and then

providing a truth-definition for these contents. An approach like Stalnaker’s

can define truth directly for sentences relative to contexts. The additional

layer of complexity needs to be justified. I have tried to justify the addi-

tional complexity by arguing that, for the Fregean, there is no special prob-

lem of the de se—the de se is just another mode of presentation problem. If

one already has different modes of presentation for the same object, it is no

surprise at all that there are first and third person modes of presentation of

the same object. Given that the Fregean approach predicts the existence of

de se contents, and furthermore on the right grounds—namely that there is

nothing particularly special about the first-person mode of presentation - it

is preferable to approaches that need dramatic revision to account for such

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contents. But this is not to deny the obvious, which is that there is much

left for future debate.

References

Bengson, John and Moffett, Marc (2011): “Two Conceptions of Mind and

Action”, in Knowing How: Essays on Knowledge, Mind, and Action

(Oxford: Oxford University Press): 3–55.

Burge, Tyler (2010): Origins of Objectivity (Oxford, Clarendon Press)

DeRose, Keith (2009): The Case for Contextualism (Oxford: Oxford

University Press).

Evans, Gareth (1982): Varieties of Reference (Oxford, Clarendon Press)

(1985): “Understanding Demonstratives”, in his Collected Papers

(Oxford: Clarendon Press): 291–321

George, Ben (2011): Question Embedding and the Semantics of Answers

(UCLA Dissertation)

Graff Fara, Delia (2000): “Shifting Sands: An Interest-Relative Theory of

Vagueness”, Philosophical Topics 28.1: 45–81.

(2008): “Profiling Interest Relativity”, Analysis 68.4: 326–335.

Hawthorne, John (2004): Knowledge and Lotteries (Oxford: Oxford

University Press)

Kratzer, Angelika (2012): “The Notional Category of Modality”, in

Angelika Kratzer, Modals and Conditionals (Oxford: Oxford University

Press): 27–69.

Ryle, Gilbert (1949): The Concept of Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press)

Sgaravatti, D. and Zardini, E. (2008): “Knowing How to Establish

Intellectualism”, Grazer Philosophische Studien 77.1: 217–61.

Sosa, Ernest (2007): A Virtue Epistemology: Apt Belief and Reflective

Knowledge, Volume 1 (Oxford, Clarendon Press).

Stanley, Jason (2005): Knowledge and Practical Interests (Oxford: Oxford

University Press)

(2011): Know How (Oxford: Oxford University Press)

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BOOK SYMPOSIUM 741