Beth Reichle

Philosophers working on knowledge-how, or ‘know-how’ aim to characterize know-how as a distinctively practical kind of knowledge. Anti-intellectualists characterize it as an ability that amounts to a kind of knowledge, and intellectualists characterize it as a distinctively practical kind of propositional knowledge. In this paper, I argue that this is a false errand. There’s no need to characterize know-how as distinctively practical. I develop and defend an account of know-how ascriptions according to which ‘S knows how to φ’ is true iff S knows (in the ordinary propositional knowledge sense) whatever they need to know in order to φ. If we understand know-how to be knowledge of not one, but a set of propositions, there’s no need to posit and explain any ‘distinctively practical’ features of knowing how.

Intellectualists about know-how tend to deny that knowing how to ϕ requires the corresponding ability to ϕ. So, it’s supposed to be an attractive feature of intellectualism that it can explain cases of knowing how without ability, while anti-intellectualism—roughly, the view that knowing how is a kind of ability—cannot. I show that intellectualism fails to explain the very cases that are supposed to showcase this feature of the view. Despite appearances, this does not amount to an objection to intellectualism per se, but to the intellectualist’s rejection of ability entailment. It turns out that all parties to the debate about know-how should accept that knowing how entails ability. The upshot is that the central question of the debate should not be whether knowing how entails ability, but whether ability suffices for knowing how, as anti-intellectualists sometimes claim.

In this paper, I expand our framework for epistemic injustice by shifting focus from epistemic evaluations of individuals in information exchange to epistemic evaluations of individuals engaging their know-how in performance. I call the injustice to individuals qua knowers-how performative injustice, and I argue that performative injustice has distinct features worth understanding apart from varieties of epistemic injustice devoted to information exchange. I develop an account of the performative authority that is unfairly evaluated in cases of performative injustice and show how, in some cases, cognitive penetration can affect observers’ evaluations. Finally, I show how stereotype threat may short circuit what would otherwise be cases of performative injustice, which in turn reveals the significance of its systemic manifestations.