Introduction
Chapter 4: What’s the Point of Knowledge-how?
4. Knowledge-How and Mutual Reliance
Craig’s account of the function of KNOWS-HOW does a good job explaining his data points, and naturally combines with his account of the information pooling function of KNOWS-THAT to provide a general account of the function of KNOWS. However, I think that there are two serious worries about this account:
i. Knowing how to do something and being a good teacher of that activity come apart;
ii. Pooling Skills neglects an important function of knowledge-how ascriptions: flagging collaborators.
4.1. Knowing How to Do and Knowing How to Teach
One problem with Pooling Skills is the divergence between knowing how to do something, and being a good teacher of that activity. It is a familiar point that many agents who know how to do something are largely inarticulate about how to engage in that activity.134 Craig is aware of this fact, and this is part of what motivates his disjunctive
conception of teaching: the thought is that someone who is inarticulate can still transmit their skill via demonstration. I don’t think that appealing to showing rescues the
connection between knowing how and teaching.
There are cases in which it is possible to transmit a capacity or skill simply by performing a particular routine, and saying ‘this is a way to V’, but these are special cases. I might be able to teach you how to make a cup of builder’s tea just by making one, since
133Pooling Skills can also yield a general norm by combining the knowledge norms on intention, and
action.
the steps are fairly obvious to an observer. However, it would be bizarre to suggest that I could teach you how to play the trumpet or how to write a decent philosophy paper just by performing the relevant activities.
This point is connected to our discussion of the use of demonstratives to pick out ways of acting in chapter 3: a token performance will instantiate a great many possible methods, meaning that without further hints the apprentice will be unable to determine which methods at which level of generality she ought to be replicating in her own
performance. One general feature of successful demonstrations that is that they require the teacher to decompose her performance into simpler elements which she can highlight to the student. This decomposition might take a number of forms: the teacher might draw a diagram, pantomime the activity, or narrate her performance as she goes along. Without decomposition, a learner will not be able to pull out the important aspects of the
performance or the method that they need to be able to employ themselves. Given enough time, a bystander might be able to reconstruct the central elements of an activity just by trial and error. However, it would be strange to think about this case as one of teaching; rather in this case the actor merely plays the role of being a rich source of evidence.135 The
cases in which knowing-how comes apart from being a good teacher are fairly common. I know how to ride a bike, but I couldn’t teach someone else. I know to play Haydn’s trumpet concerto, but I don’t think that I’d be any use in teaching someone else to play it.
One way to put the challenge against Pooling Skills is to that there is an important difference between knowing how to do something, and knowing how to teach other people how to do something. Both kinds of knowledge can plausibly be treated as species of the general category of practical knowledge, but they concern different activities: doing, and
teaching others to do.136 Our consideration of the difficulties of teaching by showing shows
that knowing how to do does not entail knowing how to teach, and suggest that being a good teacher of some activity relies on knowing how to teach that activity, rather than knowing how to teach it (we’ll return to this distinction in chapter 5). This gives us a powerful argument against Pooling Skills.
135 This point echoes Craig’s distinction between informants and sources of information (Craig,
1990, Chapter 5).
4.2. Clients and Collaborators
Although Craig isolates one pragmatic function of our knowledge-ascriptions, it is not the only use of knowledge-how ascriptions, and it is not obvious that it is their central function. Consider the following exchange:
Nat: I need someone to record a Trombone part for a piece that I’m working on. Do you know anyone who could help?
Guiditta: Sure! Trenton knows how to play the Trombone
As with the exchange between Anika and Marta above, Guiditta’s response does not directly answer the question of who might record the line for Nat, instead making a claim about Trenton’s knowledge. The natural way to understand this exchange is to think that Guiditta’s response implicates that Trenton will be able to help out with Nat’s
recording (perhaps given some presuppositions about how hard the Trombone part is). In this exchange, the knowledge-how ascription plays the role of flagging up someone not as a good teacher, but as a competent agent.
This function of knowledge-how ascriptions is noted by Moore and Hawley: On this [Craig’s] conception there is something basic about situations in which one wants to acquire some information, or a skill, and one is looking for reliable
instruction. Is there not something yet more basic about situations in which one is looking, not for someone who is a reliable instructor, but just for someone who is reliable? Suppose I need someone who knows how to fix the plumbing. I am probably not the least bit interested in acquiring the skill myself. (Moore, 1997, pp. 173–4)
There is, however, a further kind of motive for seeking someone who knows how, a motive that may be very central to our thinking about knowledge how. When I seek a plumber, hairdresser, or architect, usually this is because I need the drains fixed, my hair cut, or a building designed. I need have no interest in learning how to do these things myself, nor in finding someone who can either teach or assess
others. Perhaps I know how to do such things already but am too busy or too lazy to get them done myself (and I can’t reach to cut my own hair). I call this ‘the client's situation,’ in contrast with the inquirer's and the apprentice's situations. (Hawley, 2011, p. 287)137
Moore and Hawley are both pointing toward an alternative perspective on the function of KNOWS-HOW. This perspective connects knowledge-how not to our need to pool skills, but rather to our need for responsible co-operation between agents, suggesting the following function:
Mutual Reliance: the function of KNOWS-HOW is to help us to engage in responsible practices of co-operation
It’s worth noting that Mutual Reliance is in an important way broader than Moore’s and Hawley’s examples. They both focus on what Hawley calls the Client’s perspective: that of someone who is looking for someone else someone to do some task for you. Mutual Reliance also applies to cases where the agent is after someone to collaborate with them on some project which they either do not have the time, knowledge, or capacity to pull off alone. I will call the basic situation involved in this perspective that of the Collaborator.
The natural suggestion would be that KNOWS-HOW addresses our need for collaboration by picking some kind of standard on collaborators. There are a number of different dimensions of evaluation of collaborators: how good their work is, how much they will charge, how likely they are to show up for work, and so on. It is fairly clear that knowledge-how is not connected to the evaluation of the cost of collaborators. Rather, it is connected to whether a collaborator is trustworthy. It is common to distinguish two
dimensions of trustworthiness: whether the potential trustee is sincere, and whether she is
competent.138 The natural suggestion is that knowledge-how relates to the evaluation of the
competence of potential collaborators.139
137 See also (Kotzee, 2016). 138 (Jones, 1996).
139 We should distinguish competence from the simple notion of reliability. Someone can be
competent at performing some act, but be unable (in a sense) to perform that activity, because enabling conditions are not met. We might think competence is a kind of normal worlds reliability
Here we find a nice connection to the planning theory. The planning theory claims that INTENDS addresses our need for co-operation by picking out a mental state that marks a distinctive kind of commitment to performing some act. We can use INTENDS to facilitate collaboration by picking out other peoples’ commitment, thereby assessing their sincerity. But INTENDS doesn’t help us to address the competence of those who we are relying on. The natural suggestion is that KNOWS-HOW fills this hole in the planning theory. Consider again the situation of the flatmates who want to co-ordinate in order to avoid waits for the shower. It’s all very well for the flatmates to express intentions to shower at particular times, but this plan will be useless if one or both of them is
incompetent at telling the time, having reliably long showers, or planning their morning routine to avoid last-minute dashes for the bathroom. In order to make a successful plan, they need to rely not only on each others’ plans, but also on their respective competences. To co-operate, we need both INTENDS, and KNOWS-HOW.
The idea that KNOWS-HOW picks out a standard on intentions suggests a normative connection between knowing-how and intending, which I will call the knowledge-how norm on intention, or KNI for short:
KNI: One must: intend to V, only if one knows how to V.
KNI claims that knowledge is a necessary condition on appropriate intention. We will return to this norm in chapter 7.
The Collaborator is interested in finding people who can perform various tasks for her, and teaching her how to V might easily be one of those tasks. The Collaborator can address this need by determining whether various agents in her vicinity know how to teach others to V. Note that whereas Pooling Skills claimed that we evaluate teachers of V- ing by determining whether the know how to V, this extension of Mutual Reliance to the activity of teaching suggests that we evaluate teachers of V-ing by determining whether they know how to teach V-ing. This puts this view in a better position to explain the gap between knowing how to do and being in a position to teach.140 Craig makes this
observation (Craig, 1990, p. 160), but he doesn’t make very much of it. I think that this point suggests that a version of KNOWS-HOW shaped in the image of Mutual Reliance
can do all of the work of one shaped in the image of Pooling skills.