Know how by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Format: epub, pdf
Published: 2014-05-24T04:00:00+00:00

Keywords: propositions, ways of thinking, modes of presentation, Fregean senses, knowing who

Knowing how to do something is first-person knowledge. It is knowledge about oneself, or knowledgede se. My favored account of the de se appeals centrally to ways of thinking of things. But many find appeal to ways of thinking of things of any kind objectionable, preferring an ontology of the mental that consists simply of the things themselves. The bias is understandable. Cloaking its constituents in various garments seems to obscure rather than illuminate the task of explaining how we manage to have thoughts about the world.

I have two central aims in this chapter. The first aim is to demystify ways of thinking of things (i.e. modes of presentation) and motivate their inclusion in an account of the contents of thought. The second is to show that the view that the contents of thought include ways of thinking, conceived of as I describe in this chapter, entails that propositional knowledge is not behaviorally inert – indeed evenentertaining certain thoughts is not behaviorally inert, but entails the possession of dispositions.

I begin in the first section by explaining and responding to the overarching worries with accounts of the nature of thought that appeal to an ontology of ways of thinking. In the second section, I describe different ways in which an account of the nature of thoughts can incorporate ways of thinking. In the third section, I show how the recognition that propositions contain ways of thinking is precisely the missing ingredient that allows one to account for the remaining unresolved problems in the semantics of questions from Chapter 2. Finally, in the fourth section, I show that the view of ways of thinking I have sketched allows us to see the error in the thought that propositional knowledge is behaviorally inert, a thought that provides much of the intuitive motivation to postulate a non-propositional epistemic state.

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