Knowledge-how and the problems of masking and finkishness
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Knowledge‑how and the problems of masking and finkishness M. Hosein M. A. Khalaj1 Received: 22 August 2018 / Accepted: 20 February 2019 © Springer Nature B.V. 2019
Abstract Ryle, the most prominent proponent of anti-intellectualism, and Stanley and Williamson, the most influential intellectualists, both invoke dispositions to explain the ascription of knowledge-how. It is now well known that conditional analyses of disposition suffer from two types of counterexamples: finkish and masked dispositions. If it is the case that dispositions play a role in the analysis of ascription of knowledge-how, and dispositions can be masked and finkish, then an important question arises: Can knowing-how be masked or finkish too? In response to this question, Hawley claims that (1) unlike dispositions, knowledge-how does not seem liable to finkishness, and (2) knowledge-how can be accounted for in terms of counterfactual success. In this paper both claims will be challenged. I seek to show that Hawley’s account faces two problems: an unjustified asymmetry and a puzzle. I also argue that knowledge-how can, intuitively, be finkish and masked, and therefore the counterfactual analysis of knowing-how suggested by Ryle, Stanley and Hawley fails. What is more, I show that the debate on finkish and masked dispositions can shed a new light on the practical component which is necessary for knowing-how. Keywords Knowledge-how · Disposition · Masking · Finkishness · Ability · Hawley
1 Introduction What is the relationship between knowledge-how and knowledge-that? One prominent approach, intellectualism, holds that knowledge-how is a species of knowledge-that, or, at least, that knowing how to do something requires some prior propositional knowledge. Anti-intellectualist positions, meanwhile, deny intellectualism, and therefore don’t posit knowledge-how as a kind of knowledge-that, nor see propositional knowledge as a necessary condition for knowledge-how (Fantl 2008). Ryle, the pioneer of anti-intellectualism in the twentieth century, is the most * M. Hosein M. A. Khalaj [email protected] 1
Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran
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influential member of this camp. Following him, most philosophers of the analytic tradition have accepted the distinction between knowing-how and knowing-that. At the beginning of twenty-first century, however, Stanley and Williamson attacked Ryle’s anti-intellectualism and thereby attempted to establish a persuasive intellectualist account of knowledge-how. The crucial point for our purpose here is that both Ryle and critics like Stanley and Williamson are interested in employing dispositions to explain ascriptions of knowledge-how. It is by now clear that analyses of dispositions are afflicted by various metaphysical and semantic problems, including the most significant and most widely discussed counterexamples to the conditional analysis of dispositions, which are represented by cases of masked and finkish dispositions. If it is the case that dispositions play a role
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