Boleslaw Czarnecki

Anti‐intellectualists about knowledge‐how insist that, when an agent S knows how to φ, it is in virtue of some ability, rather than in virtue of any propositional attitudpaes, S has. Recently, a popular strategy for attacking the anti‐intellectualist position proceeds by appealing to cases where an agent is claimed to possess a reliable ability to φ while nonetheless intuitively lacking knowledge‐how to φ. John Bengson and Marc Moffett and Carlotta Pavese have embraced precisely this strategy and have thus claimed, for different reasons, that anti‐intellectualism is defective on the grounds that possessing the ability to φ is not sufficient for knowing how to φ. We investigate this strategy of argument‐by‐counterexample to the anti‐intellectualist's sufficiency thesis and show that, at the end of the day, anti‐intellectualism remains unscathed.

According to reductive intellectualists about knowledge-how (e.g. Stanley and Williamson 2001; Stanley 2011; Brogaard 2008; 2009) knowledge-how is a kind of knowledge-that. To the extent that this is right, then insofar as we might conceive of ways knowledge could be extended with reference to active externalist (e.g. Clark and Chalmers 1998; Clark 2008) approaches in the philosophy of mind (e.g. the extended mind thesis and the hypothesis of extended cognition), we should expect no interesting difference between the two. However, insofar as anti-intellectualist approaches to knowledge-how (e.g. Ryle 1946; 1949) are a viable option, there is an overlooked issue of how knowledge-how might be extended, via active externalism, in ways very differently from knowledge-that. This paper explores this overlooked space, and in doing so, illustrates how a novel form of extended knowledge-how emerges from a pairing of active externalism in the philosophy of mind with anti-intellectualism in the theory of knowledge. Crucial to our argument will be a new way of thinking about the extended mind thesis, as it pertains to the kinds of state one is in (on an anti-intellectualist construal) when one knows how to do something, and how this state connects with non-accidentally successful performance.

Some everyday cases of cognition show how computers functioning within Plain Reality give us a new type of knowledge. In contrast, the project of Augmented Reality is epistemologically challenging because it proposes hybrid scenarios which are friendly for cognitive agencies but infuse them with Virtual Reality (VR) overlay that is alienated from reality. Working with the assumption that Augmented Reality is ontologically heterogeneous, as it mixes experiences of individual objects with experiences of models, we examine its cognitive usefulness.We argue that insofar as our cognitive contact with Augmented Reality-based simulations may be even better than the celebrated contact with reality, there is room for extending the notion of knowledge.

The entry is intended as an advanced introduction to the topic of knowledge-how. It starts with a list of overviews, monographs and collections, followed by selected 20th century discussions. The last two sections contain sources pertaining to Ryle's own work on the topic as well as work by other influential thinkers, and themes that are sometimes associated with knowledge-how. The remaining seven sections survey the contemporary literature on knowledge-how from three perspectives: (i) generic desiderata for accounts of knowledge-how, (ii) specific topics that are already well-entrenched in the tradition of particular subdisciplines and (iii) second-order controversy regarding distinct assumptions and tools employed by the debaters.

Anti-intellectualists about knowledge-how insist that, when an agent S knows how to φ, it is in virtue of some ability, rather than in virtue of any propositional attitudes, S has. Recently, a popular strategy for attacking the anti-intellectualist position proceeds by appealing to cases where an agent is claimed to possess a reliable ability to φ while nonetheless intuitively lacking knowledge-how to φ. John Bengson & Marc Moffett (2009; 2011a; 2011b) and Carlotta Pavese (2015a; 2015b) have embraced precisely this strategy and have thus claimed, for different reasons, that anti-intellectualism is defective on the grounds that possessing the ability to φ is not sufficient for knowing how to φ. We investigate this strategy of argument-by-counterexample to the anti-intellectualist’s sufficiency thesis and show that, at the end of the day, anti-intellectualism remains unscathed.