How should we understand knowledge-how – knowledge how to do something? And how is it related to knowledge-that – knowledge that something is the case? In this paper, I will discuss a very important and influential aspect of this question, namely the claim – dubbed ‘Intellectualism’ by Gilbert Ryle – that knowledge-how can be reduced to knowledge-that. Recently, Jason Stanley and Timothy Williamson have tried to establish Intellectualism with the aid of linguistic considerations. This project – Linguistic Intellectualism – will (...) be criticized on three levels. First, I will reconstruct and object to Stanley and Williamson’s positive argument in favour of Intellectualism. Second, I will assess their view of the relationship between knowledge-how and practical ability and argue that their stance is not well-motivated. Third, I will discuss their criticism of Ryle’s objection against Intellectualism. After distinguishing between different versions of Ryle’s argument, I will show that its strongest version is both immune to the objection by Stanley and Williamson and a decisive argument against their own theory. Given that Intellectualism fails for these three reasons, I finally draw on a broader reading of Ryle in order to develop the beginnings of a positive account of knowledge-how and its relationship to knowledge-that. (shrink)

In “How to Be an Infallibilist,” Julien Dutant (2016, 149) presents a simple and seemingly plausible argument that knowledge requires infallible belief—roughly, belief that could not be mistaken. As Dutant recognizes, infallibilism is almost universally dismissed, in large part because it seems to rule out any knowledge of the physical world. He seeks to show how we can be an Infallibilist without being a skeptic, based on the assumption that knowledge has a safety condition. I critically examine each line of (...) Dutant’s argument, showing that the argument is unsound on any plausible interpretation. I also question the idea that knowledge cannot be the conjunction of true belief and a nonfactive condition, that any belief about the physical world could not be false, and that any nonskeptical alternative to infallibilism would have to allow knowledge of chancy outcomes. I briefly suggest that a fallibilist account can be strict enough to satisfy the Infallibilist’s quest for certainty. (shrink)

Although the fallible/infallible distinction in the theory of knowledge has traditionally been upheld by most epistemologists, almost all contemporary theories of knowledge claim to be fallibilist. Fallibilists have, however, been forced to accommodate knowledge of necessary truths. This has proved to be a daunting task, not least because there is as yet no consensus on how the fallible/infallible divide is to be understood. In this article, after examining and rejecting a number of representative accounts of the notion of fallible knowledge, (...) I argue that the main problems with these accounts actually stem from the very coherence of that notion. I then claim that the distinction is best understood in terms of the externalist/internalist conceptions of knowledge. Finally, I seek to garner some independent support for the proposal by highlighting some of its consequences, including its surprising bearing on certain recent and seemingly distant controversies involving issues in epistemology and philosophy of mind. (shrink)