Satsuki Inoue

This paper develops an intellectualist account of the transmission of knowledge-how. The question of whether knowledge-how can be transmitted to others, or whether it is more difficult to transmit than knowledge-that, is the central debate between intellectualists and anti-intellectualists. After several discussions, anti-intellectualists have come to endorse a promising view that unlike knowledge-that, knowledge-how is difficult to transmit by testimony. On this basis, they conclude that existing intellectualist theories cannot explain this asymmetry. However, I argue that this assumption is mistaken. I refine the notion of successful transmission of knowledge-how in terms of counterfactual success. On this basis, I claim that knowledge-how can be transmitted when the hearer acquires the capacity to succeed in nearby possible worlds through appropriately communicated propositional information. I further develop this claim by proposing necessary and sufficient conditions for testimonial knowledge-how. By making these refinements, this paper offers a revised intellectualist account of testimonial knowledge-how.

In recent epistemology, the debate between intellectualism and anti-intellectualism about knowing-how is a central topic. A commonly acknowledged virtue of intellectualism is supposed to be its theoretical simplicity. This paper therefore evaluates the dispute by taking simplicity as the theoretical virtue. To do so, we analyse what simplicity amounts to, and we argue that two dimensions are at stake in the present assessment: how many further questions a theory must answer, and how many primitive notions it must introduce. Once simplicity is understood in these terms, intellectualism does not outperform anti-intellectualism. In conclusion, we argue that it is a mistake for intellectualism to treat simplicity as a main source of its justification.