How can it be true that the knowledge held by a person is “propositional” in its semantic sense[8] without being conceptual? Would not the person necessarily need a grasp of the concepts a proposition is “composed of” in order to have knowledge of that proposition? The answer is that in order to have conscious knowledge of a proposition given in linguistic form it is necessary to have a grasp of the concepts of which the linguistically-given proposition is composed. But Stanley’s notion of knowing a proposition is not restricted to linguistically-given propositions. For example, if Hannah knows the proposition that “this way is a suitable way for me to ride a bicycle”, her way of knowing this proposition is a practical way of knowing that does not include knowledge of linguistic entities, but shows up by manifesting dispositions to react to certain kinds of bodily experiences. Thus, as much as knowledge-how is involved, it is possible to have knowledge of a proposition without being able to grasp the concepts the proposition is “composed of” when given in a linguistic form. The case can be made plausible by looking again at the Milner/Goodale-experiments: although the patient DF knows “how to put a card into a vertical slot”—and thus knows a proposition—due to a defect in her ventral pathway she is not able to have a conceptual understanding of the linguistic components of that proposition.
Stanley (2011b) has formulated objections to conceptions of non-conceptual content, at least when they are directed against propositionality tout court, as for example in Dreyfus (2007), according to whom “embodied skills […] have a kind of content which is non-conceptual, non-propositional, non-rational […]” (p. 360). His main argument is that ascriptions of knowing-how create opaque contexts (Stanley 2011b, p. 168). But this argument does not seem very strong, if seen from Stanley’s own perspective of a dispositional reading of ways of knowing a proposition in the case of knowing-how. How the objects occurring in the propositional content are conceptualized does not make any difference to the subject’s knowing the proposition, namely his being disposed to react to his own bodily experiences in a certain way (think of the guitar player). Thus, the dispositional reading of propositional knowledge is simply not compatible with the proposed fact that propositional contents are individuated by concepts. Instead, it implies that, in case of knowledge-how, persons have propositional knowledge that is indeterminate with respect to any conceptualization of the objects occurring in the propositional content. We therefore object to Stanley’s claim that “I cannot be said to know how to ride a bicycle if I have no clue what a bicycle is” (Stanley 2011b, p. 170). Someone can be able to manifest a well-determined disposition with respect to riding a bicycle, whatever conceptual understanding, if any, he has about bicycles.
In face of the DF-case in the Milner/Goodale-experiments, Stanley admits that:
[…] DF cannot accurately report on the orientation of the slot, whereas the normal agent can. DF’s knowledge of how to put a card into a slot is propositional knowledge that is based on a non-conceptual understanding of the orientation of the slot, understood here in the sense of an understanding of the orientation of the slot that is not available to conscious apprehension. She is able to have propositional attitudes about a way of posting a card into a slot in virtue of this non-conceptual understanding of orientation, yielded by her intact dorsal processing pathway. In contrast, the normal agent does have consciously available knowledge of the orientation of the slot before she acts. This is a difference between DF and the normal agent, but not one that can be used to deny that DF’s action is guided by propositional knowledge of how to put a card into a slot. (Stanley 2011b, p. 172)
In the remaining sections, we will follow the path opened by the suggestion that knowledge can be propositional without being conceptual. Whereas we hope to have shown that the propositional/non-propositional-distinction is not fruitful for explaining practical knowledge, we argue that the conceptual/non-conceptual distinction does have this potential. The idea, following Stanley’s proposal, is that knowledge-how is, in general, knowledge of propositions by way of non-conceptual understanding. But we do not stick to the definition of “conscious apprehension” that in the DF-case indeed coincides with conceptual grasp. There can be conceptual grasp even in the absence of conscious apprehension (as it seems to be the case for certain animal species where the presence of consciousness is at least doubtful). Instead we take recourse to a minimal conception of “conceptuality” that has been developed by Newen & Bartels (2007) in the context of animal concepts. This minimal conception does not depend on consciousness. First, however, we shall explore the already-noted peculiarities of practical knowledge. It is these peculiarities that a fruitful conception of knowledge-how, based on the contrast between “conceptuality” and “non-conceptuality” needs to be able to explain.