Intellectualism and Ways of Acting

The bare bones of Stanley and Williamson’s theory of knowledge-how — bracketing the commitment to practical modes of thinking, the claim that know how is a kind of de re knowledge and some other twists83 _{— is the following claim:}

ANSS&W: Ruth knows how to swim iff Ruth knows that w is a way in which she can

swim

This claim is derived from i) the answer theory of knowledge-wh, ii) the claim that ‘how’ picks out questions which are about ways, and iii) a particular interpretation of PRO and the infinitive in the question-abstract of the embedded interrogative ‘how to V?’. In

chapter 1 §4.2. we focused on elements i) and iii) but left ii) to one side. I now want to return to this issue.

Above I pointed out that different question-words are associated with answers which concern different kinds of things: ‘where’ with propositions about places, ‘why’ with

propositions about reasons, ‘who’ with propositions about people and so on. The general category of how-questions seems to be associated with propositions about ways. These might be ways of looking (how did she look?), ways of being (how is your brother?), or ways in which something happened (how did the fire start?). However, when it comes to how-

questions concerning actions, the relevant kind of ways are ways of acting (how did she enter the room?, how to open the safe?). Ways of acting are plausibly picked out by a subset of adverbial phrases such as ‘slowly’, and ‘by turning the knob’. Adverbs are a much

discussed topic in the philosophy of action, which means that Stanley and Williamson can appeal to independently motivated accounts of ways of acting to supplement their account (Stanley & Williamson, 2001, pp. 427–8; Stanley, 2011b, p. 58). According to the standard Davisdon-inspired account of adverbs, adverbs are treated as predicates of actions

(Parsons, 1990, 1995; Davidson, 2006).84 _{On this account a sentence like ‘Jane swam}

carefully’ predicates of the act of Jane’s swimming the property of being careful. This means that the question how did Jane swim? is answered by a proposition which

characterises Jane’s swimming under a contextually appropriate adverb, for example Jane swam sloppily.85 _{If adverbs are predicates of actions, according to this account the ways of}

acting which figure in the propositions which answer the question how to V? will be properties of actions, or way-types.86 _.87

84 _{Here, I am bracketing Davidson’s commitment to the claim that actions are events (for criticism,}

see (Steward, 2012; Hornsby, 2013), and sticking with the more general claim that adverbs are predicates of actions.

85 _{This question concerns a particular act. How questions can also involve generics. Consider: how}

does Tahlia play the piano? Plausibly, such questions will be answered by generics, such as Tahlia plays with feeling.

86 _{We will need way-tokens to make sense of various other kinds of sentence. For example the}

sentence ‘the way that Patti looks is very similar to the way Raul looks’ on the face of it says that the token ways of looking associated with Patti and Raul share many properties in common.

87 _{The main alternative to the Davidsonian semantics is to treat adverbs not as predicates, but as}

predicate modifiers (Thomason & Stalnaker, 1973). I don’t think that the difference between these two treatments is significant for our purposes. The predicate modification account still treats adverbs as picking out features of action, the key difference between the two accounts is the question of what the linguistic mechanism for picking out features of action is.

It is not just any kind of way of acting which can figure as an appropriate answer to the question ‘how to V’. Consider the following line from Liberace in Behind the Candelabra

(Soderbergh, 2013):88

You know, I always get asked: How do you play the piano with all those rings on your fingers? And I always tell them: very well, indeed.89

The interviewers’ question how do you play the piano with all those rings on your fingers?

is intended to raise the issue of which techniques or adjustments Liberace needs to make in order to play the piano with so many rings on. But Liberace deliberately interprets the question as raising the issue of how to characterise his piano playing when he has so many rings on his fingers.90 _{The ambiguity in this kind of question seems to stem from two}

different kinds of ways of acting, which we might call manners and methods.91 _{Manners are}

the ways of acting which are most familiar from discussions of adverbs, which are

associated with adverbs like ‘slowly’, ‘carefully’ and ‘gracefully’. By contrast methods are something like a directive, or a set of instructions, and are associated with the by-gerund construction, for example: ‘by lifting from the knees,’ ‘by taking a left at Pilrig street’. I will rely on an intuitive sense of this distinction, leaving space to substitute in a more

developed theory of methods.92

Intuitively manners do not seem to figure for the interestingly practical kind of knowledge-how, whereas methods do. Knowing that I can open the door gracefully is not sufficient for knowing how to open the door, whereas knowing that I can open the door by

88 _{Thanks to Mark Bowker for this example} 89 _{See (Jaworski, 2009) for some more examples.} 90 _{There is a whole family of jokes with this structure:}

1) My dog has no nose. How does he smell? Awful 2) How do hedgehogs make love? Carefully

3) How are we going to escape this planet? With great difficulty

91 _{This distinction in the meaning of ‘how’ questions is noted by (D. G. Brown, 1970, pp. 239–340;}

White, 1982, pp. 22–3; Cross, 1991, p. 248), and is discussed in depth by (Jaworski, 2009; Sæbø, 2016). Elizabeth Fricker also informs me that Gareth Evans stressed this distinction in lectures on modes of presentation. I will remain neutral on whether to understand this distinction as a

metaphysical one (as Jaworksi does), or as a linguistic one (as Saebø does).

92 _{There are a number of possible views of methods: one might take them to be a series of action}

types, a set of imperatival instructions, or something analogous to an algorithm (Pavese, 2015b). The Generality problem will emerge for any of these views of methods, since each are committed to

jiggling the key in the lock is plausibly sufficient for knowing how to open it. Whereas finite how questions can be answered by either methods or manners, infinitival how questions can seemingly only be answered by methods.93 _{This means that an infinitival how question}

will be answered by a proposition concerning a method of engaging in some activity. Given Stanley and Williamson’s preferred interpretation of the question-abstract, this means that a how-to question will be answered by a proposition expressing a modal relation between the embedded verb and some contextually appropriate method. For example, the question

how to swim? will be answered by a proposition like S can swim by moving her arms and legs in the water.94

Although Stanley and Williamson don’t explicitly mark the distinction between methods and manners, it seems charitable to interpret them as claiming that knowledge- how concerns methods rather than manners. Stanley switches between talk of methods and ways in several places.95 _{Putting together the Stanley and Williamson’s account of the}

meaning of ‘how’ questions ANSS&W, and the Davidsonian account of adverbs, we get

following account of knowledge-how:

93 _{Note that adverbs which normally pick out a manner can pick out a method. Consider the}

following report:

Sanjeet is really worried about not upsetting her mother. She asked me how to tell her mother than she was dating a women, and I told her: extremely gently

This reply need not be a joke along the lines of Liberace’s one-liner. Rather the speaker might be offering a genuine piece of advice about what kinds of method Sanjeet ought to employ in order to tell her mother that she is dating a women without upsetting her: sensitive methods.

94 _{In this case the method involves another action. If all methods involve other actions, then we}

might worry that Intellectualism leads to a regress in which one performs an intentional action by means of employing an infinite series of distinct actions. This kind of regress will be worrying for philosophers who want to endorse a category of teleologically basic actions which we do but not by means of doing anything else (Danto, 1965; Hornsby, 1980, Chapter 8). Hornsby employs this kind of consideration as an argument for a non-propositional species of knowledge-how relating to basic action (or basic activity, in her preferred terminology) (Hornsby, 2005, 2013). On this kind of picture, non-basic knowledge-how can be propositional knowledge concerning a means-ends proposition, but basic knowledge-how can only be propositional (for a related view which is motivated in somewhat different grounds, see (Setiya, 2012). However, the success of this kind of argument relies on there being a category of basic action, which some philosophers of action have recently denied (Thompson, 2008; Lavin, 2013). Intellectualists can also insure themselves against the possibility that there is basic action by claiming that methods need not involve other actions, but can instead claim that methods are something non-agential.

95 _{“The question word “how” adds a λ-abstract over ways (or methods) […]”(Stanley, 2011b, p.}

122), “If someone shows me how to do something, before I learn how to do it from their

demonstration, I must acquire a practical way of thinking of that method of doing it.” (Stanley, 2011b, p. 129)

ANSS&W+DAV: S knows how to V iff S knows that S can V by employing M

This account claims that the practical species of knowledge-how concerns propositions about method types that are related to some activity by the can A by B-ing

relation. ANSS&W+DAV extends Stanley and Williamson’s theory, but does so in a way that is

supported by accounts of the meaning of adverbs, and different kinds of how-questions, meaning that the added detail has a linguistic motivation