Propositional Knowledge

I suggested yesterday that knowledge is more basically knowledge-how than knowledge-that. In other words that knowledge is more basically knowledge of how to do things than knowledge of propositions. In this post, I want to articulate a view of propositional knowledge which builds on yesterday's account. One might easily have thought, given yesterday's post, that I would simply reduce all knowledge to capacities--that is basically where I left the discussion in yesterday's post.

While I do claim that all knowledge involves capacities, knowledge-that is distinctive in the kinds of capacities it involves. Knowledge-that involves a particular kind of linguistic capacities. The knowledge of a language uses linguistic capacities of a different sort--the ability to say things in French is a kind of knowledge-how, but not, in itself, a kind of knowledge-that. When one knows a proposition, one can work linguistically and logically with that proposition to derive further knowledge.

If I know where my wife is, there are two kinds of capacities which I may possess. I may have the ability to go find my wife. Stopping here, all I need to have is know-how. I may also have the ability to state where she is, and to make inferences based on the articulation of that claim. I can also transfer the information to others in a particular fashion, that is, without directly exhibiting other capacities. I could teach you how to find my wife be showing you my own capacity to find her, just as most of us learn physical activities partially by watching others do the actions involved and mimicking them, but if I need you to go get her for me, then that will not help. Propositions are able to package some capacities with them, given shared background understandings, in such a way that we can teach those capacities more efficiently. One may need to understand the field in order to understand the proposition and thus gain the capacities--it is not enough to be able to repeat the proposition--yet this is a distinction between knowledge-how and knowledge-that. This account leaves know-how as the more basic of the two, but does not completely reduce knowledge-that to knowledge-how.

One might respond that I have reduced knowledge-that to knowledge-how, since I have given an account of knowledge-that in terms of capacities, albeit a particular kind of capacity. In a sense, this is right, but I have not simply defined every instance of knowledge as identical to a set of capacities. This can be applied more broadly: two individuals can know how to play baseball equally well, yet have different baseball-relevant capacities: one might throw farther, the other might run faster. The two individuals might even know equally well how to throw a baseball, yet one might have torn a ligament in his shoulder and thus lack the capacity. So knowledge is not just capacities. Nevertheless, the basis of knowledge is formed by capacities.

So, to refine my claim: capacities are more basic than knowledge-how, and knowledge-how is, in turn more basic than knowledge-that. Each one adds to the prior and goes beyond it, so that it might exist apart from it. I can know a proposition without being able to do anything with it, but I can only know propositions because they usually enable me to make use of information contained in them, and my knowledge of a currently useless proposition presumes that it might become useful to me, perhaps after I have learned more about the field it is about. Similarly, knowledge-how may occur without capacities, but I can only possess knowledge-how because I can possess capacities, and I can only be said to know how to do something without possessing the capacity to do it now under the assumption that I might possess the capacity should I be in a suitable position to use my know-how.