An overview of the knowing-how debates over the last ten years.

According to all varieties of virtue reliabilism knowledge is always gained through the exercise of epistemic competences. These competences can be conceived as competences to form true beliefs, or as competences to know. I will present a short but decisive argument against the idea that knowledge is always gained through the exercise of competences to know. The competence to know isn’t necessary for gaining knowledge.

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. (shrink)

A pluralistic approach to folk psychology must countenance the evaluative, regulatory, predictive, and explanatory roles played by attributions of intelligence in social practices across cultures. Building off of the work of the psychologist Robert Sternberg and the philosophers Gilbert Ryle and Daniel Dennett, I argue that a relativistic interpretivism best accounts for the many varieties of intelligence that emerge from folk discourse. To be intelligent is to be comparatively good at solving intellectual problems that an interpreter deems worth solving.

Many recently released Hollywood films feature superheroes like Superman, Ironman, the Hulk, Optimus Prime, and so on who possess amazing superpower and defeat supervillains with unassailable commitment to moral justice. Interestingly, different superheroes possess and exercise their superpower in very different fashions. What is more, this aspect of their difference is intimately related to an issue that is lately in intense debate among metaphysicians of powers and dispositions, the issue of the possibility of intrinsic interferers with dispositions. This paper will (...) argue that a strong case can be made against this possibility when we give due weight to the commonsensical understanding of superheroes and their superpower. Whilst other arguments have been raised against the possibility of intrinsic interferers with dispositions in the latest literature, this will present further difficulties for those who accept it. (shrink)

I reflect on the commentaries on my ‘skill hypothesis’ from Andrews/westra, Tomasello, Sterelny, and Railton. I discuss the difference between normative cognition and the broader category of action-guiding representation, and I reflect on the relationship between joint intentionality and normative cognition. I then consider Sterelny and Railton’s variants on the skill hypothesis, which highlight some important areas where future evidence could help us refine the account: the relative importance of on-the-fly skill execution vs. longer-term strategizing, the relative importance of toolmaking (...) vs. collaborative foraging, and the question of whether norms are encoded in control models themselves or in the goals and ideals that our control models help us pursue. (shrink)