Ascribing practical knowledge

Abstract

Stanley and Williamson (J Philos 98(8):411–444, 2001) (hereafter S&W) argue for intellectualism—the thesis that knowing how is a type of knowing that—in part by defending a thesis about the semantics of English ascriptions of knowing how. But ascriptions of practical knowledge seem to exhibit significant crosslinguistic variation. This observation has been invoked to argue that S&W’s analysis reflects a quirk of English rather than a general feature of the concept of knowledge. I argue that the type of argument employed by both S&W and their critics presupposes that the categories of denotational semantics correspond to those of the theory of mental content. But the relation between the semantic theory and the theory of content is more complex than this. Specifically, a closer look at ascriptions of practical knowledge and other obligatory control constructions in various languages shows (i) that semantic theory needs distinctions that are redundant from the perspective of the theory of content, and (ii) that important distinctions in the theory of content may fail to correspond to any distinctions in semantic theory. It follows that we may not be able to read off as much about mental states as S&W and their critics try to from the structure of their ascriptions.