Knowledge-How, Abilities, and Questions

Abstract

The debate about the nature of knowledge-how is standardly thought to be divided between intellectualist views, which take knowledge-how to be a kind of propositional knowledge, and anti-intellectualist views, which take knowledge-how to be a kind of ability. In this paper, I explore a compromise position-the interrogative capacity view-which claims that knowing how to do something is a certain kind of ability to generate answers to the question of how to do it. This view combines the intellectualist thesis that knowledge-how is a relation to a set of propositions with the anti-intellectualist thesis that knowledge-how is a kind of ability. I argue that this view combines the positive features of both intellectualism and anti-intellectualism.

Use of Foundational Knowledge as a Basis to Facilitate Critical Thinking: Nurse Educators’ Perceptions

“…Foundational knowledge is what is needed to know which is core content knowledge of the disciplines, information literacy (sometimes called digital literacy), and crossdisciplinary knowledge or synthetic knowledge [2]. e suggestion is that the conceptual knowledge (information) and procedural knowledge (process-based information) used for problem-solving or step-by-step task completion forms the basis for acquisition of domain-specific knowledge [26]. For example, the student who analyses relationships between a respiratory condition and cardiac output and those defined as "other" will need conceptual knowledge of the respiratory and circulatory systems and mechanisms within the two systems to understand their points of convergence or divergence.…”

Group Inquiry

“…Forming an intention to investigate some question immediately raises the question of how to resolve that question; just as forming an intention to do something immediately raises the question of how to do that thing. Answering a question will often involve an intertwined process of answering both object and methodological questions, just as action often involves an intertwined process of doing something and working out how to do it see (Habgood-Coote 2019). And, we might think that knowing an answer to the object question may requires agreement on a possible answer to the methodological question.…”

The generality problem for intellectualism

“…I will italicize questions and put interrogative phrases in quotation marks. 6 On the semantics of knowledge-wh ascriptions, see (Bhatt, 2006;Groenendijk & Stokhof, 1984;Hamblin, 1958Hamblin, , 1973Karttunen, The application of the answer theory to knowledge-how has been subject to a good deal of criticism, focusing on whether it is the correct general account of knowledge-wh (Brogaard, 2009;Farkas, 2016;George, 2013;Masto, 2010;Parent, 2014;Schaffer, 2007), whether the linguistic evidence supports applying the answer theory to knowledge-how (Habgood-Coote, 2018;Roberts, 2009), and whether linguistic evidence is a legitimate source of evidence on philosophical issues (Brown, 2013;Devitt, 2011;Noë, 2005). My focus will be on the philosophical success of the account of knowledge-how suggested by the answer theory, and I will assume both that linguistic theory is relevant to the nature of knowledge-how and that ANS is the best linguistic account of knowledge-wh ascriptions.…”

“…Some anti‐intellectualist theories face a related Sufficiency problem (Bengson & Moffett , pp.172–173). For a contextualist treatment of this problem for one kind of anti‐intellectualist view, see Habgood‐Coote (2018). …”