[1]
Ryle, in his seminal approach, uses the term “knowing how” instead of “knowledge-how”. We don’t follow his usage because we think, contrary to Ryle, that know how-phrases ascribe genuine knowledge, i.e., knowledge of truths (see section 2).
[2]
In the same way, Adams (2009) argues for a knowledge-that/knowledge-how distinction on the grounds of empirical evidence that takes recourse to experimental findings showing that declarative and procedural memory can operate independently from each other. We think that such empirical phenomena constitute explananda of the searched-for distinction, but cannot provide decisive evidence for the existence of a fundamental difference between knowledge-how and knowledge-that.
[3]
Contrary to this, Noë (2005) argues that “Ryle’s distinction is not a thesis about the sentences used to attribute propositional and practical knowledge, respectively”. He claims that “Ryle was not an ordinary language philosopher”. How then, would Noë, for example, understand Ryle’s appeal to linguistic use in his deflationary account of the “will”?
[4]
Contrary to what Noë (2005) has claimed, Stanley thus does not attack Ryle’s identification of “knowledge how” with the possession of abilities tout court. What Stanley objects to is the supposed opposition between knowledge as the possession of abilities and propositional knowledge on which Noë, assuming that propositional knowledge necessarily entails understanding of propositions, insists. Even the earlier work (Stanley & Williamson 2001) tries to account for the dispositional nature of practical knowledge by introducing the concept of a “practical mode of thinking”. On the contrary, any unrestricted identification of knowledge-how with abilities confronts the problem of how to account for cases in which practical knowledge survives the loss of ability. The distinction between dispositions and their manifestation by means of executing mechanisms accounts for this problem.
[5]
Note that this does not necessarily mean that there is also no conceptual processing involved. As Stanley points out, declarative knowledge is sometimes defined as “knowledge that can be consciously and intentionally recollected”, as opposed to procedural knowledge, which is taken to be “knowledge expressed through experience-induced changes in performance” (Stanley 2011b, p. 154). This reading of the procedural-declarative distinction proposes to fix it by translating it into the “explicit” versus “implicit”-distinction, where it seems to exactly match the distinction of two pathways of processing that are exhibited in the Milner/Goodale-experiments. But it cannot be taken as grounding the theoretical versus practical knowledge distinction. We agree with Stanley, who claims that practical knowledge can have a propositional content that is able to be verbalized—the subject can be able to linguistically express what she knows. Stanley’s example is that of “physicians skilled at a procedure, who are also very good at describing to others how they do it”—they “possess explicit procedural knowledge” (2011, p. 159). Thus knowledge may be procedural in the sense of the above definition, and at the same time conscious and linguistically expressible.
[6]
A further type of practical knowledge that fulfills this criterion seems to be expert knowledge in areas that are not reducible to sensorimotor processing: e.g., chess or financial stock markets.
[7]
Several studies (e.g., Barch et al. 2001; Bechara et al. 2000; Halligan et al. 2004; Stuss & Alexander 2007) indicate that lesions of the prefrontal cortex can lead to a number of cognitive and affective problems, most notably working memory problems, deficits in executive functioning such as planning, goal selection, task monitoring, deficits in inhibiting thought and action impulses, problems in outcome anticipation, and risk-taking behavior.
[8]
Note that we have accepted Stanley’s thesis that all knowledge is propositional in that sense.
[9]
One example of a “rigid mechanism” is the behavior of ants responding to the presence of acidic byproducts from the decomposition of dead con-specifics: in tests they rigidly remove anything from the nest that is painted with oleic acid, even live con-specifics.
[10]
Cf. Newen & Bartels (2007), p. 293. That the auditory stimuli “What color?” or “What shape?” were really understood by Alex as asking for the respective category was tested by Pepperberg using additional auditory signals of the form “What’s same?” and “What’s different?” The correct response would be the label of the appropriate category, e.g., the mastery of categories could be verified in the sense that Alex successfully identified the essential functional role of category terms like “color” or “shape” as dividing the objects of the world into “sameness” equivalence classes.
[11]
Cf. Newen & Bartels (2007), p. 296. These conditions are only two of a total of four conditions. But only these two matter with respect to our discussion.