Jay CarlsonFr. Murphy-PHIL 450

Seemings and Successful Performance: An Examination of Two

Accounts of Know-how

Broadly construed, the dominant positions in debates over the nature of

know-how and its place in a general account of knowledge are intellectualism

and anti-intellectualism. This paper will examine two positions that are related

but remain aloof to the central tenets of these positions. One of these positions

is the seeming analysis of knowing-how. In his 2011 article “Knowing How

without Knowing That” Yuri Cath wishes to critique the primary positions in the

debate over the relationship between knowing how and knowing that (Cath

2011). He wants to resist, on one side, the intellectualists who claim that

knowing-how can be reduced to some propositional knowledge that something is

the case. Equally though, Cath also wants to reject the variety of accounts in the

tradition of Gilbert Ryle that in various ways construe knowing-how as either a

distinct or even more basic kind of knowledge. Against these two tradtions, Cath

ends by proposing a third alternative that construes knowing-how as a seeming

relation. I will also consider the position of J. Adam Carter and Duncan Pritchard,

who advocate for understanding knowing-how as a particularly robust kind of

cognitive achievement. These two respective positions present knowing-how as

either, as Cath argues, a very minimal and tacit form of knowledge, or, as Carter

and Pritchard argue, as a rather robust and demanding kind of cognitive

achievement.

In this paper, I will begin with an attempt to spell out in more detail how to

understand the seeming relation Cath proposes. From this explication I hope to

Carlson 2

delineate some of the significant problems for the seeming analysis. I will then

move to an exposition of Carter and Pritchard’s proposed variant of knowing-how

qua cognitive achievement, as well as some of the problems inherent to this

approach.

I will begin by showing what motivates Cath’s development of the seeming

analysis. Intellectualists—here represented by Jason Stanley and Timothy

Williamson (Stanley and Williamson 2001)—claim that knowing-how ascriptions

are true just in cases where, for some subject S and some act Φ, there is some

way w to Φ and S knows-that w is a way for her1 to Φ. In other words, a subject

must assent to a proposition that a certain way is how she might perform a given

act. For instance, one knows how to ride a bicycle just in cases where one

knows that a particular way of operating a bicycle is how one is able to

competently ride a bicycle. This account of knowing-how is intended to avoid

ascribing knowledge-how in two kinds of scenarios. The first kind is one where a

person is able to perform an action correctly but either does not understand what

she was doing during the performance or luckily happens upon the correct

performance. Stanley and Williamson think that it is intuitive to deny knowing-

how in cases where an agent luckily stumbles on the correct performance without

grasping why or how that performance was correct. The second kind of case

1 It is important that the agent’s consideration of the proposition w is a way to is Φtaken under a “practical mode of presentation” meaning that the way is taken from the first person perspective, as being a way for this agent herself to . As Yuri Cath Φnotes that the practical mode of presentation is Stanley and Williamson’s way of traversing from the intellectual aspect of the proposition under consideration to its practical, action-guiding aspect (Cath 2011, 133-4 note 20). This consideration under practical mode of presentation will obviously be connected to various dispositional states, but it is not reducible to them (Stanley and Williamson 2001, 429-430).

Carlson 3

they consider is one where an expert at a particular act becomes disabled such

that she is unable to perform the action she previously did expertly. Here, the

intellectualists want to say that it seems intuitive that we can ascribe know-how to

the disabled expert even though she is unable to perform the particular action in

question (Stanley and Williamson 2001, 416). The reason they can attribute

knowing-how to the latter case and not the former is that the disabled expert is

aware of the way in which the action can be competently performed, especially

for her (her disability notwithstanding). More precisely she believes the

proposition that there is a way for her to perform said action. The upshot of this

is that although some might think that knowing-how and knowing-that are very

distinct kinds of knowing, Stanley and Williamson assert that in fact knowing-how

is simply a species of knowing-that.

Yuri Cath critiques this position by providing a case where intuitively a

subject knows how to perform a particular action but lacks the sort of

propositional knowledge the intellectualist think is necessary for knowing-how.

He gives the case of the person, Charlie, who finds a manual with correct

instructions on how to install a light bulb. Charlie grasps the instructions perfectly

and successfully knows-how to install a light bulb. However, the author of this

manual was malicious and intentionally mis-described how to perform the stated

task. A computer glitch at the printing company, however, caused the author’s

false instructions to be replaced with correct instructions in only in the copy,

which happened to be the one that Charlie consulted. The import of this case is

that while it seems clear that Charlie knows-how to screw in a light bulb, his

Carlson 4

knowledge-that the instructions in the manual are the way to install a light bulb is

undermined since they are accidentally true (Cath 2011, 117). Thus, Cath

argues, Charlie seems to be an instance where one can have knowledge-how

without the attendant propositional knowledge the intellectualists think is

necessary, demonstrating that the intellectualist’s claim that all knowing-how is

knowing-that is false.

Cath finds himself in agreement with other critics of the intellectualist

account, namely the anti-intellectualist and neo-Ryleans. Figures in these camps

understand knowing-how either in terms of possessing a complex set of

dispositions or in terms of the ability to perform said action. Yet Cath resists the

Rylean-inspired class of positions because of cases like “the salchow case”

raised by John Bengson and Marc Moffett (Bengson and Moffett 2011, 182).

This case illustrates that one can have the ability to Φ without knowing how to Φ.

An ice skater, Irina, has a mistaken conception that to perform a figure skating

move known as the salchow is to take off on the outside edge of her skate and

land on the inside edge of the other skate, when in fact the move is correctly

performed in the opposite order. However, Irina has a neurological disorder that

causes her to perform the move correctly in spite of her mistaken belief about the

way to perform it (Cath 2011, 129). The lesson drawn from this case is

disputable, but Cath takes the meaning to be that since the ice skater’s intention

and what she thinks she is doing when she performs the salchow are not

causally related to her successful performance, we cannot truly say that she

knows-how to perform a salchow. He takes both this salchow case and the

Carlson 5

disabled expert (mentioned earlier with Stanley and Williamson) as convincing

counterexamples to the Rylean inspired positions, as they illustrate that

successful performance is neither necessary nor sufficient for knowing-how (Cath

2011, 132).

Having found both the intellectualist and the Rylean accounts of

knowing-how inadequate, Cath ends his article by briefly sketching out a possible

third alternative he terms “the Seeming analysis.” On this account, S knows how

to Φ just in case there is some way w that seems to S like a way for S to Φ.

Cath’s proposal is that the seeming relation is not a belief relation, thus

distinguishing it from the intellectualist requirement that there be a belief that

some w is a way for S to Φ. Cath takes this account of knowing how to be

superior because it can accommodate both the intuitions of the lucky light bulb

and salchow cases, where what seems to be a way to perform an action is either

accidentally true or false, respectively (Cath 2011, 134).

The seeming relations Cath provides is only briefly sketched, so it bears

exploring the sources he draws on to fully understand the proposal. In a footnote

to this passage, he specifies that he understands the relevant seemings as

nonperceptual, nonoccurrent states wherein there is a disposition that for some S

some w seems like a way to Φ (Cath 2011, 133 note 19). He mentions that his

account parallels David Hunter’s account (Hunter 1998) of the relationship

between linguistic understanding and dispositions to understand. Hunter argues

that while a subject’s linguistic faculties and her dispositions to understand can

be understood as states of belief, that does not entail that the occurrent states of

Carlson 6

understanding are likewise states of beliefs (Hunter 1998, 565). On the same

analogy, Cath wants to say that though a seeming can lead one to having a

corresponding belief—and certainly a bevy of dispositions as well—it is not itself

a belief. Though Cath wants to distinguish the seeming relation as a state where

“For S it seems to be that p” from the state where “S believes that p,” he notes

that this distinction is consistent with seeming consisting in an inclination or

disposition to believe (Cath 2011, 133 note 18). Yet he also draws on George

Bealer’s account of intellectual seemings that are defeasible, such that the

Müller-Lyer figure can seem to be lines of two different lengths even if one knows

that they are (Bealer 1992). This allows his account to accommodate cases

where a subject can perform an act but whose way by which one would perform

the act is false or undermined.

In a way, Cath’s account can be seen as an understanding of knowledge-

how as a form of tacit knowledge. Though Cath does not cite him as inspiration

for the seeming analysis Jerry Fodor presents a defense of an understanding of

know-how as tacit knowledge in his 1968 paper “The appeal to tacit knowledge in

psychological explanation.” Fodor notes that anti-intellectualists would cite as

evidence against the intellectualist position the findings of cognitive psychology

that much of the causes our behavior are not reportable or easily accessed from

the subject perspective. If the intellectualist requires that an agent use or have

access to some internal instructions or rules for her to know-how, then many

intuitive cases of knowing-how would be dismissed as false. Fodor thinks that

the anti-intellectualists present the intellectualist claim as much stronger than it

Carlson 7

needs to be. Fodor thinks that the anti-intellectualists conflate a performer’s

knowing-how with her providing an account or explanation of how she performs

that task (Fodor 1968, 634). He points out that there are plenty of cases where

knowing-how and explaining can come apart. Higher animals and preverbal

toddlers know how to perform tasks without any ability to explain their actions,

and many typists can competently use a keyboard without any explicit knowledge

of where the specific keys are. For Fodor, such cases would demonstrate latent

forms of knowing operative in a performer of which she is either unaware or

unable to explain her performance (Fodor 1968, 631). The intellectualist position

does not require that the knowledge of how or why a subject is acting be

available or even directly articulable to her; rather Fodor thinks that the

intellectualist is minimally committed to saying that when an agent acts she is

acting according to some rule, even if it is latent or tacit for her (Fodor 1968,

636). If there is a set S of tasks which are constitutive of performing some Φ and

a sufficient answer to the question “How does one Φ?” then S constitutes the

relevant agent’s tacit knowledge-how (Fodor 1968, 638). While Fodor and

Cath’s approach to know-how are not completely parallel, we can certainly see

Cath’s seeming analysis does not require that the agent is necessarily in a

position to explain or articulate why w seems like a way for her to Φ.

One preliminary objection to the seeming analysis is that it does not seem

to be an adequate description of many cases of knowing-how. One way to

illustrate this putative inadequacy is it seems to run afoul of the “assert the

stronger” principle. In the ethics of belief literature, the “assert the stronger”

Carlson 8

principle is that one should assert the strongest justified attitude one has for a

claim (Chignell 2013). On this rule one should not assert that one merely

believes p if one has a justified belief or has knowledge that p. In the present

context of know-how, then, there are cases where it seems intuitive to say that a

performer’s know-how regarding some Φ is more than just that there seems to be

a way for her to Φ. The principal cases in mind would be instances of expert

know-how. Intuitively the expert football player who knows-how to perform

corner kicks well has more than just a way that seems like a way for him to

perform that action. One might understand this to say that he has greater

subjective confidence that the way it seems for him to perform corner kicks is in

fact a way to perform corner kicks, or that his seeming is less likely to be subject

to defeaters like distortions and biases such that what seems to him is not

actually way to perform corner kicks. However one describes this state, it hardly

seems plausible that the most justified attitude about an expert subject in these

cases is just that S has a way w that seems like a way for S to Φ.

Another objection to Cath’s account is that what seems to be the case for

some subject does not offer a very firm grounding for claims about what that

subject knows. The importance of this point for knowing-how should be noted.

Results from cognitive psychology have demonstrated that our reasoning

faculties are riven with all manner of heuristics and biases that affect our

perception of how the world around us works. This general point appears to be

particularly relevant for cases where one seems to know-how to Φ: the fact that

Carlson 9

w seems like a way for a subject to Φ is not much evidence in itself that w is in

fact a way to Φ.

Of course, Cath grants that seemings relations are defeasible, as he cites

the apparent difference Müller-Lyer figures and the apparent truth of naïve set

theory as instances where apparent seemings are false. The same would be

true of seemings for knowing-how. His initial sketch of the seeming analysis

does include that there is some true way to Φ that the subject is aware of (Cath

2011, 133). Recall as well that he denies know-how to the figure skater who has

a wrong seeming of how to perform a salchow (Cath 2011, 128).

Yet here we might ask if having a true seeming that w is a way to Φ is

sufficient for knowing-how. This leads us to consider possible Gettier cases for

Cath’s seeming cases, where the agent meets the stipulated conditions for

knowing-how but intuitively fails to attain knowledge-how. Stanley and

Williamson give an instance of a novice pilot in a flight simulator as a candidate

Gettier case for knowing-how. Bob the novice pilot is being instructed by Henry

on how to fly a plane in the flight simulator. Unbeknownst to Bob, Henry is a

malicious instructor and intends to give Bob wrong instructions about how to fly a

plane. He has inserted a randomizing device in the simulator’s controls to further

disrupt Bob’s simulation. The randomizer happens to malfunction, however, and

as a result Henry’s instructions turn out to be precisely the correct directions for

flying a plane. Bob follows these instructions and successfully completes the

simulation. Stanley and Williamson claim that even though Bob has a justified

true belief about how to fly a plane, he does not know how to fly a plane (Stanley

Carlson 10

and Williamson 2001, 435). We can modify the original example to Cath’s

seeming analysis that Bob has way w that seems like a way for him to fly a

plane, but he does not know how to fly a plane.

Cath pushes against Stanley and Williamson’s analysis, noting that it is

“simply wrong” about Bob not knowing how to fly a plane (Cath 2011, 125). If

there was another pilot, Joe, who successfully completed the same flight

simulator by following the same advice that was given to Bob except that Joe

received it from an intentionally benevolent instructor, we would clearly say that

Joe knows how to fly a plane. Cath claims that if Joe has know-how in this case,

then so does Bob.

Presumably Cath would say the same thing with the flight simulator case

modified to his seeming analysis. If there is a way to fly a plane and it seems to

Bob that that way is how to fly a plane, then Cath would say that Bob knows how

to fly a plane. But Cath’s proposed analysis misses a crucial feature of what

makes Bob’s case intuitively one of actual know-how. It is not just that he has a

true way that seems like the way for him to fly a plane, but also that he was

successful as a result of acting on that true seeming. These two features are not

included in Cath’s analysis. Suppose that Henry gave Bob the correct

instructions for how to fly a plane but also slipped him a drug that caused him to

not act in accord with the directions. While in the simulation, it seems to Bob like

the instructions are in fact a way for him to fly a plane, all while not noticing that

he is acting totally out of sync with the instructions given. Some unrelated fluke

in the simulation causes him to successfully complete the mission.

Carlson 11

I think that it is quite clear in this modified case that Bob does not know

how to fly a plane. That the instructions seemed to Bob like a way for him to fly a

plane was not the cause of Bob’s successful completion of the simulation. The

disruption between Bob’s true seeming and the successful outcome was that his

behavior was neither in accord with the true instructions nor causally related to

the successful outcome. In this light we do not even need an extravagant drug

scenario to illustrate the insufficiency of seeming analysis for knowing how: if

Bob was given the correct instructions which seem to him like a way for him to fly

a plane, but he performs the wrong actions due just to his own sheer

incompetence, it is clear that he does not know how to fly a plane. A possible

response is for Cath is to focus on the claim, drawn from William Tolhurst

(Tolhurst 1998), that seemings include some kind of inclination or disposition to

act or even believe in a particular way (Cath 2011, 133 note 18). But this would

be tantamount to conceding the force of the seemings analysis: they are only

important for understanding knowing-how in what other states they bring about,

not in themselves. Even under the most ideal conditions the seeming is at best

only a contributing factor to a subject’s knowing-how.

If we are right to see Cath’s seeming analysis of know-how as giving

insufficient attention to the performance involved in know-how, then we are lead

quite naturally to consider the anti-intellectualist accounts that indeed focus on

the performed actions when demonstrating know-how. In this tradition, Ted

Poston succinctly describes know-how as the successful display of skill, and that

“if one can intelligently and successfully Φ” then one knows how to Φ (Poston

Carlson 12

2009, 744). An important and critical development of the anti-intellectualist

tradition is the account given by J. Adam Carter and Duncan Pritchard. The

remainder of this paper will focus on their account. They want to argue that

knowing-how in its essence is some kind of cognitive achievement2 (Carter and

Pritchard 2013, 13). On this account, a subject knows-how to Φ just in cases

when her Φ’ing can be legitimately credited to her.

Though Carter and Pritchard are anti-intellectualists, they note from the

outset the inadequacy of the dominant neo-Rylean understanding of knowing-

how simply in terms successful performance. The problem with this account is

that the success of a performance might have little to do with the competence or

skill of the agent in question. A person might make a lucky shot or some fluke

event in the environment might be the cause a successful performance. For

example, suppose a skillful archer fires an arrow at a target and one fluke gust of

wind blows it off course but another gust of wind in the opposite direction blows it

back on track so that it successfully hits the bullseye. Even if we stipulate that

the archer skillfully fired the bow, Carter and Pritchard would point out that

manifested skill was not directly causally related to the successful outcome 2 The notion of creditworthiness is also a likely theoretical cost for the seeming analysis. Since seeming is not something that is likely under volitional control, it is hard to see how a seeming relationship would be something that could plausibly credited to the agent in question. Though the focus on the achievement or credit of agent’s know-how is strongly defended in the anti-intellectualist tradition, knowing-how as an achievement cuts across the intellectualist/anti-intellectualist distinction. Julia Annas, for instance, holds a kind of intellectualist position that the rational achievement of agents is not solely in successful performances, but rather in an agent’s internal “fact-oriented states” (Annas 2001, 244). Likewise, John Bengson and Marc Moffet take the cognitive achievement element of knowing-how as one of the central explanada of their nonpropositional intellectualism (Bengson and Moffett 2011, 165).

Carlson 13

because of the fluky counteracting gusts. In most counterfactual scenarios

where those gusts do not intervene on the situation, the archer would fail to hit

her target. Instead Carter and Pritchard want to say that it’s not just that the

agent demonstrated skill nor that she attained the outcome she intended, but

rather that the successful outcome was the result of her demonstrated skill.3

But if luck could undermine the achievement status of just a successful

performance, why could luck not could also undermine the achievement of the

performances whose success are because of the ability of the performers in

question? Here Carter and Pritchard want to make a distinction between two

different kinds of luck: intervening and environmental. Intervening luck is the

kind of luck that manifests itself between the skillful ability and the successful

outcome, as the gusts of wind intervened between the archer’s firing and the

arrow hitting the target in the previous example (Carter and Pritchard 2013, 4).

Carter and Pritchard admit that intervening luck does undermine the achievement

status of a performance. But suppose that there is no intervening luck on an

action but some aspect of the environment in which the performance takes place

is still fluky or lucky. To give a variant on the archer case mentioned above,

suppose that the archer hits the bullseye at a moment when there were no gusts

of wind to blow the arrow off course, but the could have been gusts. It is still

true that the circumstances of this shot were lucky, as fluky gusts could very

easily have blow the arrow off course and made the performance a failure.

3 Note the similarities between this view and Sosa’s virtue epistemology of an apt belief that is accurate because it was aptly formed or utilized (Sosa 2007, 23).

Carlson 14

In cases like this, Carter and Pritchard want to claim that environmental

but non-intervening luck does not undermine achievement like intervening luck

does. Their reasoning is that the success of the performance in these cases is

the direct causal result of the agent’s ability—which is not true in intervening luck

cases—even though it was lucky in the sense that it happened to not be

interfered with in any way (Carter and Pritchard 2013, 4).

Carter and Pritchard note that while environmental luck does not

undermine knowledge-how achievements, the same is not true of knowledge-

that. Consider the standard case of perceiving a real barn in fake barn country.

If one is in fake barn country one is not justified in believing that one is looking at

a barn even if one happens to be looking at a genuine barn. In this case, even

though the luck is not directly intervening between the subject and the object,

nevertheless the knowledge-that the subject perceives a barn is undermined by

the unfavorable conditions of the environment (Carter and Pritchard 2013, 6)

Carter and Pritchard even use a variant of Cath’s lucky light bulb case to

illustrate their point about how environmental luck does not eliminate knowing-

how. Suppose that Charlie consulted a bookshelf full of various manuals for how

to screw in a light bulb. He chooses one that provides the correct instructions,

allowing him to successfully learn how to screw in a light bulb. As it turns out

however, all of the other manuals on that shelf were the product of malicious

authors who intentionally misdescribed how to install a light bulb. By chance,

though, Charlie happened to select the one book that gave genuine, accurate

instructions; e then is able to successfully change a light bulb. Carter and

Carlson 15

Pritchard claim that while it is not obvious in the original case Cath gives that

Charlie knows how to screw in a light bulb when he consults the fluky manual—

while he can certainly successfully change a bulb, whether he knows-how a bit

muddier—it seems like he does know how to screw in a light bulb when he

consults a genuine manual that happens to be surrounded by fakes (Carter and

Pritchard 2013, 11).

Serious questions arise when one tries to use Carter and Pritchard’s

formulation of know-how to answer the difficult cases that opponents of anti-

intellectual raise such as the Salchow performer and disabled violinist cases. Of

the two, the answer Carter and Pritchard would give for the salchow case seems

like the more straightforward. Carter and Pritchard deny that the person in the

salchow case has know-how, since the intervening luck of the correcting

neurological disorder is what actually causes her to perform the move

successfully. Carter and Pritchard point out in a footnote that it is “not at all

obvious that Irina is performing the Salchow intelligently.” since her cognitive

disorder is more the cause of her performing the correct sequence of steps

(Carter and Pritchard 2013, 17). In an important sense therefore she is not the

one who is really responsible for her successful performance of the salchow.

Since she plausibly fails two criteria, it seems more than reasonable to deny that

she has knowledge-how.

This does raise the question of how Carter and Pritchard conceive of

intelligence what precisely it consists in. For them, intelligence is a property of

acts that are directed by knowing-how (Carter and Pritchard 2014, 17 note 24).

Carlson 16

In itself this definition is standard fare for an anti-intellectualist position. But I

think it is worth pointing out that Carter and Pritchard’s account requires that an

intelligent action involved with knowing-how must also be connected with

successful performance in the right way. They cannot be just happen to be

conjunctively true. But in the case of Irina, though she does execute a salchow

successfully, she does not perform the act intelligently because, properly

speaking, it is her neurological malady and not Irina herself who is responsible

for the successful performance.

The more challenging case for Carter and Pritchard however is the

disabled expert violinist. An virtuoso violinist is in a tremendous accident that

causes her to lose the use of her fingers. Intuitively we don’t want to say that this

disability has any effect on her know-how regarding how to play the violin; yet if

Carter and Pritchard take successful performance caused by ability as the

standard for know-how and the violinist is unable to perform the task at all, then

she is unable to meet the necessary conditions for know-how. Furthermore, the

problem in this case is not a fluky intervening luck between the skill and

successful performance, but one where some tragic luck cut short the ability

altogether. One response might be that we could say that the disabled expert

knows how to play the violin in a residual, backward-looking sense that she used

to know-how to play a violin; but this response simply avoids the claim under

consideration, that she retains this know-how in her present condition.

Another response might be to take performance in a much broader, more

flexible sense than Carter and Pritchard might originally conceive. One of Carter

Carlson 17

and Pritchard’s significant influences is Ernest Sosa. In his book A Virtue

Epistemology, Sosa mentions that a virtuous performance involves “the agent’s

constitution and his situation” (Sosa 2007, 81). One possible way to understand

what Sosa says here is that the performance involved can vary according the

capacities that the subject has available to her. So if playing the violin is not

something that the expert violinist is able to do because of her situation with her

disability, then perhaps there could be a different kind of performance wherein

she might manifest her knowing-how. Another possibility along these lines might

be the response from another anti-intellectualist, Stephen Hetherington. On his

account, knowing-how just is “the ability to manifest various accurate

representations” of the performance in question (Hetherington 2006, 86). So

even if a person is disabled and thus incapable of performing an act as such,

they are still able to realize that knowledge in a variety of different ways

commensurate with their capacities and impairments, e.g., by being able to

describe how one performs the act, by contemplating the act of playing, by

correcting and teaching other performers, etc. And while obviously Carter and

Pritchard would not accept Hetheringtons’ overall account of what constitutes

knowing how, perhaps they could make use of the apparent flexibility of his

account of performance.

Is there sufficient flexibility in Carter and Pritchard’s notion of performance

such that they can say that the disabled violinist could manifest her know-how

even though she can no longer play the violin? Put another way, could know-how

be multiply-realized? For Carter and Pritchard it is difficult to say; from the their

Carlson 18

own articles it is unclear what exactly they take performance to be, so it is hard to

determine whether they could accommodate a kind of know-how that ϕ could be

multiply realized by various distinct performances other than the literal ϕ’ing.

One reason to be skeptical about this possible approach is that it could be

possible that the abilities required in ϕ’ing are not necessarily identical with

abilities to perform other action, even ones peripherally related to ϕ’ing. In the

present case a violinist with irreparably damaged fingers might be able to

manifest some measure of her expertise in teaching others to play, critiquing

performances, or authoring books on playing the violin, etc. But these would be

distinct performances from actually playing the violin, and each of them would

require a skillset distinct from what a virtuoso violinist would have qua violinist.

Though the set of skills involved in each performance would certainly have some

overlap with each other, but they would almost certainly not be identical. All of

this is to say that it is not necessarily true that an expert violinist would be

manifesting the same expertise qua violin instructor as she would qua violinist.

So even if Carter and Pritchard take this proposed route, it is not clear that know-

how could be multiply realized in different kinds of performances in a way that

one could ascribe know-how to the disabled violinist.

In this paper I have demonstrated the insufficiency of Cath’s proposed

seeming analysis of knowing-how and expressed some less certain but serious

reservations about Carter and Pritchard’s account of knowing-how as a kind of

cognitive achievement. In doing so I am left in a precarious spot. On the one

hand, the problem with the seeming analysis is that it did not pay sufficient

Carlson 19

attention to the actual performance involved in know-how; but the know-how qua

cognitive achievement position became problematic because it might be tied too

rigidly to performance that manifest ϕ, which would require that one deny know-

how to those who cannot perform said actions. What then shall we say? I think

the takeaway from this discussion is that we can see some of the kinds of

features we want our account of knowing-how to have. I think Carter and Pri

tchard are correct to say that successful performance linked in the right way to

one’s cognitive abilities is a desirable aspect of knowing-how and an important

improvement over the standard account given by the anti-intellectualists. On the

other hand, our account of successful performance needs to be sufficiently

flexible to accommodate cases like the disabled violinist. Figuring how to

construe performance in a more flexible way will require further investigation.

Carlson 20

Works Cited

Julia Annas (2001). Moral knowledge as practical knowledge. Social Philosophy and Policy 18 (02):236-256.

George Bealer (1992). The incoherence of empiricism. Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 66:99-138.

John Bengson & Marc A. Moffett (2011). Nonpropositional Intellectualism. In John Bengson & Marc A. Moffett (eds.), Knowing How: Essays on Knowledge, Mind, and Action. Oxford University Press. 161-195.

J. Adam Carter & Duncan Pritchard (2014). Knowledge‐how and cognitive achievement. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 88 (1): 1-19.

J. Adam Carter & Duncan Pritchard (2013). Knowledge‐how and epistemic luck. Noûs 47 (4). 1-14.

Yuri Cath (2011). Knowing How Without Knowing That. In John Bengson & Mark Moffett (eds.), Knowing How: Essays on Knowledge, Mind, and Action. Oxford University Press. 113-135.

Andrew Chignell (2013). Rational Hope, Moral Order, and the Revolution of the Will. In Eric Watkins (ed.), Divine Order, Human Order, and the Order of Nature. 197-218.

Jerry A. Fodor (1968). The appeal to tacit knowledge in psychological explanation. Journal of Philosophy 65 (October):627-40.

Stephen Hetherington (ed.) (2006). How to know (that knowledge-that is knowledge-how). In Stephen Hetherington (ed.), Epistemology Futures Oxford University Press. 71-94.

David Hunter (1998). Understanding and belief. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 58 (3): 559-580.

Ted Poston (2009). Know how to Be Gettiered? Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 79 (3): 743 - 747.

Ernest Sosa (2007). A Virtue Epistemology. Oxford University Press.

Jason Stanley & Timothy Williamson (2001). Knowing how. Journal of Philosophy 98 (8): 411-444.

Carlson 21

William E. Tolhurst (1998). Seemings. American Philosophical Quarterly 35 (3): 293-302.