Matthew Mosdell

An influential version of intellectualism about knowledge how holds that acquiring facts is necessary and sufficient for learning how to do things. I argue that such a view is incompatible with learning to do things through effort and practice, which suggests that intellectualists don’t have a coherent way to explain the role of work in our acquisition of knowledge how. By way of an alternative, I argue that work serves to establish patterns of thinking that coordinate propositional truths with powers of action.

Intellectualists about knowledge how argue that knowing how to do something is knowing the content of a proposition (i.e, a fact). An important component of this view is the idea that propositional knowledge is translated into behavior when it is presented to the mind in a peculiarly practical way. Until recently, however, intellectualists have not said much about what it means for propositional knowledge to be entertained under thought's practical guise. Carlotta Pavese fills this gap in the intellectualist view by modeling practical modes of thought after Fregean senses. In this paper, I take up her model and the presuppositions it is built upon, arguing that her view of practical thought is not positioned to account for much of what human agents are able to do.

Epistemicism is the view that seemingly vague predicates are not in fact vague. Consequently, there must be a sharp boundary between a man who is bald and one who is not bald. Although such a view is often met with incredulity, my aim is to provide a defense of epistemicism in this essay. My defense, however, is backhanded: I argue that the formal commitments of epistemicism are the result of good practical reasoning, not metaphysical necessity. To get to that conclusion, I spend most of the essay arguing that using a formal system like classical logic to manage seemingly vague situations requires practical principles to mediate between the formalism and what it aims to represent