Ryle (1949), in his seminal work on knowledge-how, established a tradition of thinking that knowledge-how, as opposed to knowledge-that, is essentially characterized by its non-propositionality. That an action is intelligent, and thus embodies practical knowledge, comes not in virtue of its being “controlled by one’s apprehension of truths”, according to Ryle, but instead in virtue of its manifesting an ability or a disposition. Thus, Ryle’s notion of propositionality of knowledge is from the start coupled with a specific model of knowledge-application. Since this model cannot be true, practical knowledge cannot be employed by applying propositions. Indeed, if a person, in order to apply knowledge had first to “consider a proposition”, stored in his or her memory, this very act of considering a proposition would itself be an instance of practical knowledge and thus would be in need of a further act of considering a further proposition, and so on ad infinitum. Note that this means, at most, that practical knowledge cannot be manifested by virtue of this sort of application of propositions. But, as Fodor has remarked, “[if] the intellectualist says that, in tying one’s shoes, one rehearses shoe-tying instructions to oneself, then the intellectualist is wrong on a point of fact” (1968, p. 631). Thus, in order to avoid the whole debate turning out as a non-starter, we first have to disentangle the claim of propositionality of practical knowledge from the Rylean model of knowledge-application. But in what other sense, then, could practical knowledge be propositional?
The answer is that practical knowledge could be propositional in the sense that a person has practical knowledge by virtue of there being a rule that has a symbolic, language-like (“propositional”) representation, which is not accessible to consciousness, and which is not in need of being consciously “considered” in order to be applied in action. The knowledge embodied by this rule is instead applied in action by means of some kind of sub-personal processing of the representation. Fodor (1968) has defended such an intellectualist answer to Ryle’s challenge by suggesting that the non-conscious representation governing the application of practical knowledge embodies “tacit knowledge”; since such tacit knowledge is applied by means of automatic mechanisms (not by intentional acts), it cannot fall victim to Ryle’s regress argument.
If we ignore the vagueness of this reading with respect to the units of processing in which this symbolic representation should appear, the foregoing may be a good answer to the question of how practical knowledge could possibly be propositional knowledge. In the eyes of Stanley (2011b), a more general conclusion could be drawn. According to him, since this argument that knowledge-representations need some automatic mechanisms (and not something like “considering” a proposition) in order to be applied in action, is true irrespectively of the kind of knowledge involved, symbolically represented or not, all kinds of knowledge are completely on a par with respect to their representations—whatever they are—having to play some functional roles, mediated by an automatic mechanism, in order to be applied in action. Thus, Ryle’s analysis, according to which practical knowledge has a dispositional nature, can be accepted, but only at the price of accepting it for all sorts of knowledge. As such, not only can practical knowledge be propositional, but the whole distinction between propositional and non-propositional knowledge turns out to be irrelevant for characterizing sorts of knowledge, and a fortiori cannot be used to ground the distinction between practical and theoretical knowledge.
In other words, it is important to hold apart the thesis that knowledge is propositional in the sense of its being based on language-like representations, accessible to consciousness or not, from the empirically implausible Rylean model of knowledge application, which presupposes an act of “considering” a proposition. If we keep this distinction in mind, we find that propositionality per se does not provide a criterion for the theoretical versus practical knowledge distinction. Instead, all kinds of knowledge have to be “dispositional” in some sense, irrespective of their being based on symbolic, language-like representations or not.
Some anti-intellectualists, following Ryle, use the notion of “propositionality” of knowledge to refer to the fact that a person has conscious access to linguistic propositional representations (that is, that a person has sentences “in her mind”). Thus, for example, Michael Devitt, in a recent paper (Devitt 2011), argues that intuitively “to attribute any propositional attitudes to the ant [who has the skill of finding its way back to its nest by virtue of some neural processing] simply on the strength of that competence seems like soft-minded anthropomorphism” (Devitt 2011, p. 208). But the impression of anthropomorphism only occurs if we constrain the notion of a propositional attitude to refer to a conscious act by which a person relates to a linguistic propositional representation. The impression disappears as soon as we replace this interpretation of “propositional attitude” with a version in which the “proposition” is a rule, represented by symbolic encoding to which the ant is related by virtue of her neural mechanisms processing this encoding (or by virtue of her neural mechanisms being structured in such a way that they realize some implicit rule). That the ant “grasps a proposition” appears to be a strange description only under the presupposition that guidance by propositions implies the conscious possession of linguistic entities.
Moving from these “intuitive” considerations to arguments from the “science of knowledge-how” (cf. Devitt 2011, p. 207), Devitt identifies a “folk distinction between knowledge-that and knowledge-how” with the “psychological one between ‘declarative’ and ‘procedural’ knowledge” (2011, pp. 208-209). Now, declarative knowledge, according to Devitt, is characterized (according to what he sees as a consensus in psychology) by conscious representation of what is known (cf. Devitt 2011, p. 210). For example, a person has declarative knowledge of arithmetic rules only if she consciously represents those rules. Concerning procedural knowledge, Devitt refers to the distinction from computer science between “processing rules that govern by being represented and applied and those that govern by being simply embodied, without being represented” (2011, p. 210). Since there is, according to Devitt, no decisive empirical evidence to tell us whether skills involve representations of the governing rules or not, he takes the recent picture that psychology paints of procedural knowledge “as constituted somehow or other by embodied, probably unrepresented rules that are inaccessible to consciousness” (Devitt 2011, p. 213). Finally, he argues that empirical evidence from cognitive ethology confirms this distinction between declarative and procedural knowledge by indicating that the “surprisingly rich cognitive lives” of desert ants, western scrub jays, or bottle-nosed dolphins can be understood as based on forms of procedural knowledge (to be identified with the folk notion of “knowledge-how”), but not on declarative knowledge (“knowledge-that”).
Thus, surprisingly, the anti-intellectualist Devitt and the intellectualist Fodor would agree to subsuming sub-personal knowledge, whether represented in explicit or implicit form, under the heading of knowledge-how. But the first would classify it as non-propositional, the latter as propositional knowledge. The real dissent seems to be about the question whether representations being conscious (and being accessible in linguistic form) or non-conscious makes a relevant difference for sorts of knowledge. We think that conscious availability/unavailability expresses a relevant difference for sorts of knowledge, but a difference that can only be explained by recourse to some fundamental distinction between practical and theoretical knowledge. Phenomena indeed indicate that the boundary between practical and theoretical knowledge coincides pretty well with conscious availability/non-availability. But Devitt’s distinction just repeats this phenomenon, rather than explaining it.[2] What we look for is a deeper reaching distinction that would be able to explain phenomenal differences such as conscious availability/non-availability and, as a consequence, verbalizability/non-verbalizability. Thus, the propositionality criterion appears again unsuited for drawing an empirically-interesting distinction between practical and theoretical knowledge. As far as the intended distinction concerns the transfer of knowledge into action (this aspect is exactly that to which Ryle’s distinction refers), ways of representing knowledge seem to be “on a par” and thus insensitive with respect to the distinction.
According to Stanley, it is the semantic notion of propositionality, with respect to which all sorts of knowledge can be subsumed as “propositional” (knowledge-that), be they based on conscious or non-conscious representations, by explicitly represented or simply embodied rules. Thus, Stanley has argued that the way in which a piece of knowledge is implemented (or represented) has nothing to do with a distinction between two kinds of knowledge. Therefore, the distinction between “declarative” and “procedural” knowledge as it is widely used in psychology should not be misunderstood, according to him, as providing some ground for the knowledge-that versus knowledge-how distinction: “the latter is a putative distinction between two kinds of state, rather than a distinction between two ways of implementing a state” (cf. Stanley 2011b, p. 151). Paradigmatic examples of practical knowledge, in the sense of knowledge being manifested by intelligent conduct, could turn out to be represented in a language-like way (without any conscious mediating act of “considering a proposition”), whereas clear examples of theoretical knowledge could fail to have any language-like representational background.
Stanley’s semantic reading of propositionality is concerned with the reference of “know how”-phrases by which we ascribe knowledge-how to persons. According to our best available linguistic theories, as Stanley argues, know how-phrases have to be understood to refer to propositions. But this fact, in the first instance, does not include anything about the role those propositions play in the intelligent action of a person who knows the propositions. In particular, it does not follow that such a person possesses language-like symbolic representations that guide the person’s intelligent action, or that such a person “considers” the proposition in order to apply his knowledge in action. If the correct understanding of the semantics of knowledge-phrases, no matter whether it is theoretical or practical knowledge that is ascribed by them, is that they refer to propositions, then this propositional nature of knowledge, according to this reading, cannot be used to draw any distinction between theoretical and practical knowledge.
Now, someone could object that Ryle’s distinction is concerned with the nature of knowledge, e.g., how knowledge is represented in a person, but not with what is involved in knowledge ascriptions. Thus the semantic reading of propositionality would be irrelevant for the theoretical versus practical knowledge distinction. But note that Ryle’s analysis of practical knowledge actually starts by asking questions like: “When the person is described by one or other of the intelligence-epithets” (Ryle 1949, p. 28), what sort of knowledge is this description imputing to the person? That is, Ryle asks for the semantics of knowledge-ascriptions for typical cases of practical knowledge. Therefore, it is not at all clear that a semantic reading of propositionality is irrelevant for his analysis. On the contrary, the sense in which Ryle is concerned with the “nature” of knowledge is expressed, by him, by means of an analysis of the role that knowledge-phrases play in actual linguistic practice.[3]
It has now been shown that both possible readings of “propositionality”, that is, the representational and semantic readings, are relevant for Ryle’s proposed theoretical versus practical knowledge distinction, but neither is suited to grounding the distinction: Whether a piece of knowledge is a case of practical or of theoretical knowledge does not depend on whether it is supported by language-like structures or not; and, since all knowledge is semantically propositional (if Stanley is right) it does not depend on its semantic propositionality either.
Thus, it seems as if no criterion for the distinction between practical and theoretical knowledge could be available from the intellectualist point of view. But, we shall see that, from Stanley’s revised dispositional analysis of knowledge, rather surprisingly a new possible criterion emerges. Let us, therefore, follow the path of this analysis, which is intended by the author to show how, contrary to Ryle, the (semantic) propositional nature of knowledge is compatible with its dispositional nature.
According to Stanley (2011b), even if we accept Ryle’s general claim that knowledge has to be understood as dispositional,[4] “there still need to be automatic mechanisms that mediate between dispositions (and abilities) and the manifestation or execution of these dispositions and abilities” (Stanley 2011b, p. 26). What has to be true of theoretical knowledge, namely the existence of mechanisms that mediate the application of that knowledge, has to be also true of practical knowledge. The complex of dispositions on which the ability to catch the fly ball rests may be completely intact, even if the player sometimes does not succeed in catching the ball because he has become tired or has momentarily lost concentration. When that happens, his executing mechanisms can fail. As has often been identified in the debate on knowledge-how, having the right dispositions (and thus having the right sort of practical knowledge) does not always guarantee successful performance (cf. Snowdon 2004).
Even if, from the intellectualist point of view, all forms of knowledge—be they “practical” forms of knowledge or not—could be, and indeed have to be, analyzed with respect to their dispositional nature, the question seems, by the very phenomenology of practical knowledge, to be more urgent than for cases of theoretical knowledge: How can knowledge be dispositional and propositional at the same time? Stanley & Williamson (2001) have suggested that cases of practical knowledge can be captured by means of a “practical mode of thinking”, by which a person who has practical knowledge has access to propositional contents. If, for example, a person knows that a certain way of riding a bike is a way for her to ride a bike, then her thinking of that proposition is in a peculiar way self-directed, it is a “first-person-way” of thinking the proposition. Stanley (2011b) has developed this suggestion further into a dispositional theory of knowing a proposition.
Gareth Evans (1982), in his analysis of “demonstrative knowledge”, has provided a useful framework of first-person dispositions: My thinking is a demonstrative belief about a perceptually-presented object if I will be disposed to have changes in that object affect my belief (Stanley 2011b, p. 110). Thus, my thinking of an object in the world as “myself” involves a permanent disposition to let my thoughts and actions be determined by my own bodily perceptions. Now this schema seems to fit the practical way of thinking that occurs when it comes to propositions like “This way of riding a bike is a way to ride a bike for me”: A person manifests knowledge of this proposition by, while riding a bike, manifesting the disposition to react to certain kinesthetic sensations mediated by her own bodily movements by means of adequate motor commands.
We accept this as an adequate way of describing the phenomenological peculiarity of “practical ways of thinking” a proposition. Indeed, when described in this way, practical knowledge can be propositional and dispositional at the same time. But this analysis does not tell us—and indeed is not meant to tell us—how the distinction between practical and theoretical knowledge can be grounded. That there is such a distinction seems obvious inter alia on the basis of the functional characteristics peculiar to practical knowledge, such as its domain-specific nature, its limited transferability, its non-penetrability, and so on. Stanley’s dispositional theory fails, at least at first sight, to deliver any resources for explaining why practical knowledge is distinct from theoretical knowledge on the basis of these functional characteristics. The main shortcoming of recent intellectualist approaches, in our opinion, is not that they simply neglect the peculiarities of practical knowledge. Rather they are deficient insofar as they do not provide an explicit positive demarcation criterion of practical versus theoretical knowledge that would go beyond capturing the well-known phenomenological peculiarities and make it compatible with the proposed fact that all knowledge is (semantically) propositional. Before we go back to Stanley’s analysis, in order to show how some explicit demarcation criterion could possibly be drawn from it, we ask whether recent anti-intellectualist approaches do a better job of providing a demarcation criterion.