ryle regress defended
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Filosofía, percepciónTRANSCRIPT
Ryle’s regress defended
Jeremy Fantl
Published online: 30 August 2011
� Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011
In his (2010) contribution to the Oberlin Colloquium in Philosophy—an early draft
of the first chapter of his (2011a) Know How (at the time of this writing, still
forthcoming)—Jason Stanley explores in more depth the Rylean arguments for anti-
intellectualism that Stanley and Williamson consider and reject in their influential
(2001). In particular, he concentrates his efforts on versions of the regress argument
that appear in Ryle’s The Concept of Mind,1 arguing that there is no regress that
intellectualism is committed to that Rylean anti-intellectualism isn’t. I want to here
suggest that there might be.
Intellectualism is a view about the relation between what it is to know that
something is the case and what it is to know how to do something. According to
intellectualism, the second is a species of the first: what it is to know how to do
something just is to know that some relevant thing is the case. For example, for you
to know how to ride a bike is just for there to be a way for you to ride a bike and for
you to know, of that way, that it is a way for you to ride a bike (see, e.g., Stanley
(2011b, p. 209)). This makes know how no less propositional than your knowledge
of where you are; to know where you are is just for there to be a place that you are
located and for you to know, of that place, that you are located there (ibid). On
Ryle’s anti-intellectualist view, this is false. Know how is not a species of
knowledge-that. There is no set of propositions that constitutes what you know
when you know how to do something.
Stanley discusses most the anti-intellectualist argument he finds in Ryle (1949),
where Ryle says,
The crucial objection to the intellectualist legend is this. The consideration of
propositions is itself an operation the execution of which can be more or less
J. Fantl (&)
University of Calgary, Calgary, AB, Canada
e-mail: [email protected]
1 Ryle anticipates these arguments and provides additional ones in his (1971).
123
Philos Stud (2011) 156:121–130
DOI 10.1007/s11098-011-9800-8
intelligent, more or less stupid. But if, for any operation to be intelligently
executed, a prior theoretical operation had first to be performed and performed
intelligently, it would be a logical impossibility for anyone ever to break into
the circle. (30)
According to the Stanley, this ‘‘crucial objection’’ depends on two premises:
Premise 1 The Intellectualist view entails that ‘‘for any operation to be
intelligently executed’’, there must be a prior consideration of a
proposition
Premise 2 ‘‘The consideration of propositions is itself an operation the execution
of which can be more or less intelligent, less or more stupid.’’
From these premises, Stanley has Ryle argue like this:
By the first premise, the Intellectualist is committed to the view that each
intelligent action is preceded by a prior action of considering a proposition.
Since considering a proposition is something that can be done intelligently or
stupidly, it is an intelligent action. So, acting intelligently requires a prior
action of considering a proposition, and considering a proposition intelligently
requires a prior action of considering a proposition intelligently. Presumably,
if any of these prior actions is performed stupidly, then the original action will
not be performed intelligently. But then acting intelligently requires the
performance of an infinite number of prior actions, which is a vicious regress.
If intellectualism is true, then intelligent action requires a prior intelligent
consideration of a proposition—itself an intelligent action that requires a prior
intelligent consideration of a proposition. This is a regress, and one that’s supposed
to be vicious. What makes it vicious? There are a number of possibilities. One
problem might be temporal. If we take ‘‘prior’’ literally, the worry is that each
intelligent action must have been preceded in time by an intelligent action. Because,
for all of us, there was a time before which we didn’t exist, there must be some
action that was preceded in time by no action (of ours) at all, let alone any
intelligent action. So, intelligence could never have gotten started (temporally).
Alternatively, ‘‘prior’’ could mean just metaphysically prior, where a contem-
plation is ‘‘prior’’ to an intelligent action just in case the status of the action as
intelligent depends on the contemplation occurring (and being intelligent). Here
there is no essential worry about our having finite histories, so no essential worry
about the amount of time required to complete an infinite regress of intelligent
actions.
The temporal and the metaphysical regresses can each be problematic for two
different reasons. First, it might just be that it is impossible for us to perform the
requisite number of acts or at least implausible that we do so. Again, on the
temporal interpretation, if we are temporally finite beings (in the past), then there
just isn’t enough time to execute the infinite number of temporally sequential acts.
On the metaphysical interpretation, it’s not plausible that we have at any moment
the infinite number of mental operations of the sort that the regress would require.
Second, the regress might be problematic because, whether the regress is temporal
122 J. Fantl
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or metaphysical, if there is a regress, there is no place for the intelligence to come
from. The intelligence of the target action is always deferred to the prior act in the
regress, so that there is no way for the intelligence to enter into the picture.
Which is the problematic regress that Stanley is taking Ryle as committing the
intellectualist to? If the problematic regress is supposed to be temporal, then there is
a very simple argument available to Stanley that he doesn’t make. He could argue
this way:
Intellectualism says that when an action manifests your know-how, you
manifest a bit of knowledge-that. But your action occurs simultaneously with
your manifestation of know-how and simultaneously with the knowledge-that
that the intellectualist says is thereby manifested. Therefore, no temporal
regress is generated.���QED���
This is not how Stanley argues. I think he’s right not to, because I wouldn’t think
that a temporal regress is the central problem for intellectualism. That’s because I
wouldn’t think that an intellectualist is committed to the view that the status of your
act here and now—whether it’s intelligent or not—depends on the status of an act
temporally prior to it. There are of course views in epistemology that make this
claim—views that make the epistemic ancestry of beliefs and, I suppose, actions
essential to the evaluation of the beliefs and actions themselves. But this debate—
whether epistemic ancestry is relevant to the evaluation of current states—seems
like it should be distinct from the debate over whether to manifest know-how is to
manifest some bit of knowledge-that.
That leaves the metaphysical regress. Is it so problematic to require for know-
how (or any other state) an infinite number of mental acts? It doesn’t seem so in
principle. It depends on how the mental acts relate to each other. If the acts lower
down on the regress constitute the acts higher up in the regress, then commitment to
an infinite number of such acts is not obviously a difficulty. Any act it seems admits
of an infinite number of specifications. I open the door by turning the doorknob. I
turn the doorknob by grasping the doorknob and rotating my hand. I grasp the
doorknob by contracting certain muscles and rotate my hand by contracting others.
There seems no principled way to limit this regress to a finite length. Similar
considerations can be invoked when it comes to mental acts as well. Do we have
here an infinity of acts? Or an infinity of specifications of the same act? Whatever
you want to say about this, it hardly seems problematic if a view is committed to an
infinite list of this sort.
That leaves the deferral problem, suggested in any case by Ryle’s talk of it being
‘‘a logical impossibility for anyone ever to break into’’ the regress: if a regress is
generated, then the intelligence of the act—or its status as know-how—is infinitely
deferred. If Stanley’s objection to Ryle is successful, however, the intellectualist
need not worry about this consequence any more than the anti-intellectualist does.
That’s because the intellectualist gets to end the regress if the anti-intellectualist
does. Stanley rightly construes the intellectualist not as claiming (as Ryle contends)
that all intelligent acts require prior acts of mental contemplation, but as claiming
that all intelligent acts are manifestations of some bit of knowledge-that. That this is
Ryle’s regress defended 123
123
the right interpretation of intellectualism is demonstrated by Carl Ginet’s (1975)
observation that
…all that [Ryle] actually brings out, as far as I can see, is that the exercise (or
manifestation) of one’s knowledge of how to do a certain sort of thing need
not, and often does not, involve any separate mental operation of considering
propositions and inferring from them instructions to oneself. But the same
thing is as clearly true of one’s manifestations of knowledge that certain
propositions are true, especially one’s knowledge of truths that answer
questions of the form ‘How can one…?’ or ‘How should one…?’ I exercise (or
manifest) my knowledge that one can get the door open by turning the knob
and pushing it (as well as my knowledge that there is a door there) by
performing that operation quite automatically as I leave the room; and I may
do this, of course, without formulating (in my mind or out loud) that
proposition or any other relevant proposition. (7)
Whereas prior acts of mental contemplation are very plausibly either intelligent
or stupid, manifestations of knowledge-that are not. But, and this I take it Stanley’s
crucial point, even if manifestations of knowledge-that are either intelligent or
stupid, so too must manifestations of knowledge-how be. If you must know how to
manifest your knowledge-that, so too must you know how to manifest your
knowledge-how. To say otherwise is to unfairly load the dice against the
intellectualist. What’s needed is a principled argument that there is such a
difference between knowledge-how and knowledge-that. But that principled
argument is exactly what the regress argument is supposed to be. So, Stanley
concludes, the regress argument fails:
In order to draw a conclusion about knowing how, Ryle draws an unwarranted
distinction between manifesting propositional knowledge and manifesting
knowing how. He assumes that manifesting propositional knowledge requires
a prior mental act, like the prior triggering of a maxim or a rule (this is the first
premise of his regress argument). Secondly, he assumes that knowing how in
contrast can be manifested without there being any prior mental act whatever.
It is only because of this second assumption that he is able to conclude that
knowing how is not a species of knowing that. The problem is that these
assumptions draw an unwarranted asymmetry between manifesting proposi-
tional knowledge and manifesting knowledge-how.
Does Stanley succeed in blocking the regress—that is, in showing that the
intellectualist is no more committed to an infinity of manifestations than is the anti-
intellectualist? Or is there, in fact, a relevant disanalogy between knowledge-that
and knowledge-how?
Return to Ginet’s example of knowing that you can open a door by turning the
doorknob. Suppose that you manifest your knowledge how to open a door by
manifesting your knowledge that you can open a door by turning the doorknob.
Manifesting this bit of knowledge-that, of course, does not require a prior act of
contemplation: ‘‘Hmmm, how can I open this door? Hey, I know! By turning the
doorknob. Here I go!’’ So, it might seem, manifesting this bit of knowledge-that
124 J. Fantl
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need not be done intelligently or stupidly; it’s not a prior act. But does this mean it
can’t be done intelligently or stupidly? You might, after all, not know how to turn a
doorknob. So, you might fumble with the doorknob, try to push it up or down, etc.
You might even, by luck, manage to get it turned. But this wouldn’t be an intelligent
turning of the doorknob. In general, if you know that you can open the door by
turning the doorknob, it does not follow that you know how to turn the doorknob.
But, plausibly, in order to know how to open the door by turning the doorknob, you
must know how to turn the doorknob. If so, it is not sufficient to know how to open
the door that you know that you can open the door by turning the doorknob.
If this is right, then the simplest way for the anti-intellectualist to block her own
regress while committing the intellectualist to a regress is to insist on two claims:
1. any intellectualist account of know-how must say that manifestation of
knowing-how to open the door is manifestation of some propositional
knowledge of a proposition consisting of at least two terms: opening the door
and a way to open the door. An intellectualist might say that to manifest
knowledge how to open the door is to manifest knowledge that turning the
doorknob is a way for her to open the door or knowledge that she can open the
door by turning the doorknob. But the crucial point here is that, if this claim is
right, the knowledge-that that is manifested is always knowledge of a
proposition in which a way to open the door essentially figures.
2. anti-intellectualist accounts of know-how need not make essential reference to a
way. There are some things you can know how to do full stop, without knowing
how to do them a certain way.
If 1 is true, and if you don’t know how to open the door by turning the doorknob
unless you know how to turn the doorknob, then any intellectualist account of know-
how is going to require that, to manifest know-how, you’ll have to manifest an
infinite series of distinct bits of knowledge-that. For the intellectualist, to manifest
knowledge-how to open the door, you’ll have to manifest knowledge that you can
open the door by turning the doorknob. But your manifestation of knowledge that
you can open the door by turning the doorknob will only count as manifestation of
know-how, if you know how to turn the doorknob. But, then, on the intellectualist
account, there has to be a way to turn the doorknob—say, by grasping it and rotating
your hand—such that you know that you can turn the doorknob that way. And that
means you have to know how to grasp the doorknob and rotate your hand. Which
means there has to be a way for you to grasp the doorknob and rotate your hand such
that you know how to do that. Etc.
On the other hand, on the current anti-intellectualist account, the regress never
gets going. You can just know how to do certain things full stop. It’s not required
that there be a way of, say, grasping the doorknob and rotating your hand, such that
you know how to do it. So, the intellectualist is committed to a regress that the anti-
intellectualist is not committed to.
However, it may not be plausible, even for an anti-intellectualist, to claim that
there are any acts that you can know how to do full stop. Can you know how to do
something if there is no way such that you know how to do it that way? Plausibly
not. Plausibly, whenever you know how to do something, there is a way such that
Ryle’s regress defended 125
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you know how to do it that way. And, if this is true, it might seem that a regress is
generated for the anti-intellectualist as well: to know how to open the door is for
there to be a way of opening the door—say, turning the doorknob—such that you
know how to open the door that way—by turning the doorknob. But, if you know
how to open the door by turning the doorknob, you’d better know how to turn the
doorknob. Therefore, there is going to be a way of turning the doorknob—say,
grasping the doorknob and rotating your hand—such that you know how to turn the
doorknob by grasping it and rotating your hand. So you’d better know how to grasp
the doorknob and rotate your hand. Etc. A regress is generated for the anti-
intellectualist just as much as for the intellectualist.
However, there is still this crucial difference: that you know how to open the door
by turning the doorknob entails that you know how to turn the doorknob. But that
you know that you can open the door by turning the doorknob does not entail that
you know how to turn the doorknob. And this means that it seems perfectly
consistent with failing to know how to open the door, that you know that you can
open the door by turning the doorknob. You might know that you can open the door
by turning the doorknob and even that you can turn the doorknob by grasping the
doorknob and rotating your hand. But if you fail to know how to grasp the doorknob
and rotate your hand, then you fail to know how to turn the doorknob and, thus, fail
to know how to open the door. Does it help to just keep adding more ways, so that
you now know the way you can grasp the doorknob and rotate your hand? What if
you add infinite iterations? It still doesn’t seem that the know-how becomes
generated at any point. There is no way, as Ryle might say, to ‘‘break into’’ the
regress. In contrast, it doesn’t seem consistent with failing to know how to turn the
doorknob that you know how to open the door by turning the doorknob; once you
know how to open the door by turning the doorknob, it is guaranteed that you know
how to turn the doorknob (again, in contrast with knowing that you can open the
door by turning the doorknob).
Notice that this also provides us with a disanalogy between know-how and other
attitudes expressed by ‘‘know-wh’’ expressions, like knowledge-where and knowl-
edge-when. If I know how to open the door, we are supposing, then there is a way
such that I know how to open the door that way. And if you there is a way such that
you know how to open the door that way, it follows that you know how to perform
that way. That is, it follows from
(1) I know how to open a door
that
(2) I know how to open a door in some way (say, by turning the knob).
And it follows from 2 that
(3) I know how to turn the knob.
Hence our disanalogy. For it doesn’t follow from
(2a) I know that turning the knob is a way I can open a door
126 J. Fantl
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that
(3a) I know how to turn the knob.
But now consider knowledge-where. On the account favored by Stanley, if you
know where to open a door, then there is a place such that you know you can open a
door at that place. So, according to Stanley, it follows from
(1b) I know where to open a door
that
(2b) I know, of a place (say, my sister’s house), that I can open a door there.
If our disanalogy is to survive when it comes to knowledge-where, it can’t follow
from 2b that
(3b) I know where my sister’s house is.
Grant that 3b fails to follow from 2b, though it doesn’t seem as obvious as the
failure of 3a to follow from 2a. That half of the disanalogy is preserved. What of the
first half? In the case of know-how, because knowing how to open the door entails
knowing how to open a door by, say, turning the knob, and because knowing that
entails knowing how to turn the knob, knowing how to open the door entails
knowing how to turn the knob. Analogous reasoning in the case of knowledge-
where would have to look like this:
(1c) I know where to open a door.
Therefore,
(2c) I know where to open a door at some place (say, my sister’s house).
Therefore,
(3c) I know where my sister’s house is.
The difficulty with figuring out whether this line of reasoning is valid is that 2c
isn’t even obviously grammatical, let alone true if 1c is. Note that 2c doesn’t say
that I know where to open a door in my sister’s house—that I know where in my
sister’s house I might go to open a door. It says that I know where to open a door at
my sister’s house. If this is not even grammatical, let alone true, then I lack
resources for deciding whether it follows from 1c or entails 3c.
The point is even more obvious when it comes to knowledge-who. Here it is even
less obvious that
(2d) I know, of some time, t, that I can open a door at t.
does not entail
(3d) I know at what time t occurs.
But even if we grant that 3d does not follow from 2d, it’s completely unclear
whether it follows from
Ryle’s regress defended 127
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(1e) I know when to open a door
that
(2e) I know, of some time, t, when to open a door at t
and likewise whether it follows from 2e that
(3e) I know at what time t occurs,
because it is not at all clear whether 2e is even grammatical, let alone true.
Know-how seems distinctive then in clearly involving the following disanalogy:
On the one hand,
(A) Necessarily, if S knows how to phi, then there is a way, w, for S to phi such
that S knows how to instantiate w.
But,
(B) It is not the case that, necessarily, if S knows that w is a way for her to phi,
then S knows how to instantiate w.
The reason is that know-how is distinctive in licensing the inferences from 1 to 2 to
3, above.
If that’s right, then it is open to the anti-intellectualist to claim this: it is because you
know how to turn the doorknob by grasping the doorknob and rotating your hand that
you know how to grasp the doorknob and rotate your hand. But it’s not open to the
intellectualist to say that it is because you know that you can turn the doorknob by
grasping the doorknob and rotating your hand that you know how to grasp the
doorknob and rotate your hand. And that’s because you could perfectly well know that
you can turn the doorknob by grasping it and rotating your hand and yet not know how
to grasp the doorknob and rotate your hand. So, the anti-intellectualist has a way to stop
the regress or, rather, make the regress less vicious: once you know how to turn the
doorknob, or even just open the door by turning the doorknob, you automatically know
how to perform all the other ways that are relevant. But this isn’t the case for the
intellectualist. The intellectualist needs a way to get all the other relevant knowledge-
that, because such knowledge is not guaranteed just by the knowledge that you can
open the door by turning the doorknob. And even if all that relevant knowledge-that
were in place, it would still be possible for know-how to be lacking.
Consider how you might learn how to dice onions. First, you might be told ways
of doing it—rocking the knife, holding the tip on the counter, cutting slices in the
onions up to the base, etc. You learn how to dice onions by learning to dice them a
certain way. And you know how to perform the acts that constitute that way of
dicing onions as well. But the way you really learn how to perform these ways of
dicing onions is by repetition: taking a knife and dicing 1,000 onions. At a certain
point, the ways just come along for the ride. You learn to chop and the way you
chop is explanatorily secondary—that is, you know how to perform the acts that
constitute that way of chopping because you know how to chop, and that just
happened to be the way you learned it. Your know-how of some higher acts can be
explanatorily prior to your know-how of the deeper ways.
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Not so for the intellectualist. It is consistent with knowing that you can chop by
keeping the point of the knife on the table that you fail to know how to chop because
you fail to know how to keep the point of the knife on the table. If the intellectualist
makes knowing how to chop by keeping the point of the knife on the table a matter of
knowing that you can chop by keeping the point of the knife on the table, then the
intellectualist requires that you first know how to keep the point of the knife on the
table and that this explains how you know how to chop. The intellectualist, then, is
forced to keep pushing the explanation of how you know how to chop further and
further back in the regress. Intellectualist know-how requires a bottom up guarantee
that can never come; your knowing how to open the door by turning the doorknob does
not entail that you know how to turn the doorknob, so whether you know how to open
the door, even when you know that you open the door by turning the doorknob, waits
on a guarantee that you know how to turn the doorknob. Anti-intellectualist know-how
provides a top-down guarantee that is there at the beginning; if you know how to open
the door by turning the doorknob, you of course must know how to turn the doorknob in
order to know how to open the door. But, fortunately, that you know how to open the
door by turning the doorknob entails that you know how to turn the doorknob.
It’s possible that a mechanism that Stanley and Williamson invoke can make
things work out better for the intellectualist. According to Stanley and Williamson,
you know how to open the door just in case there is a way for you to open the door,
w, such that you know that w is a way for you to open the door and for you to know
this under the practical mode of presentation. Perhaps it’s the case that one of the
things that distinguishes the practical mode of presentation from other modes is that,
when you know that w is a way for you to open the door under the practical mode of
presentation, you know how to instantiate w. Some have worried that this amounts
to Stanley and Williamson smuggling in a notion of anti-intellectualist know-how in
their intellectualist account. As John Koethe (2002) says, ‘‘It appears, then, that
entertaining the proposition that w is a way for one to F under a practical mode of
presentation involves knowing how to instantiate w one’s self. But, if so, then
Stanley and Williamson’s account of knowing how appeals to the very notion it
seeks to explicate’’ (327).
I’m not so worried by this. It seems to me that even if knowing that w is a way for
you to F under the practical mode entails that you know how to instantiate w, there
is no worrisome circularity here. That’s because, it seems to me, even if it’s both the
case that w is a way for you to F and that you know how to instantiate w, you might
fail to know how to F, if you fail to know that w is a way for you to F. What is more,
even if you know that w is a way for you to F and know how to instantiate w, you
might still fail to know how to F, if your knowledge that w is a way for you to F is
not under the right mode of presentation. So, though knowing how to instantiate w
might come along for the ride when you know that w is a way for you to F under the
practical mode of presentation, it does seem to me that knowing that w is a way for
you to F under the practical mode is a different sort of thing from knowing how to
instantiate w. So it’s not at all clear to me that Stanley and Williamson’s account
‘‘appeals to’’ the notion of knowing how.2
2 See also Fantl (2009, pp. 460–462).
Ryle’s regress defended 129
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What I find less plausible, though, is the claim that knowing that w is a way to F
under the practical mode of presentation entails that you know how to instantiate w.
For one thing, you might have gotten knowledge that w is a way to F (under the
practical mode of presentation) by opening the door by instantiating w, but simply
forgotten how to instantiate w. So, Salieri might have thought after briefly
glimpsing, with Mozart’s help, the sort of cognitive act required to compose the
Requiem, ‘‘That’s it! That’s how you compose music like that!’’ Once the moment
is gone, he might no longer know how to compose music like that. He might still
remember the kind of cognitive act required and know, under the practical mode,
because he did it, that performing that cognitive act is the way to compose music
like that. But he no longer knows how to compose music like that because he no
longer knows how to perform that cognitive act.
If knowing that w is a way for you to F under the practical mode of presentation
doesn’t entail knowing how to F, because it doesn’t entail knowing how to
instantiate w, then knowing how to F isn’t equivalent to knowing that w is a way for
you to F under the practical mode of presentation. What is needed is a way of
knowing that w is a way for you to F that guarantees that you know how to
instantiate w. The intellectualist, though, is limited to only one kind of knowing:
propositional. So, to guarantee that you know how to instantiate w when you know
how to F by knowing that w is a way for you to F, the intellectualist can only invoke
another bit of knowledge-that—knowledge that y is a way to instantiate w, for
example. But why do you have that knowledge? It’s not simply because you know
that w is a way for you to F. For knowing that w is a way for you to F doesn’t entail
that you know that y is a way to instantiate w—doesn’t entail, even, that you know
how to instantiate w. The problem isn’t that intellectualism is committed to a regress
while anti-intellectualism isn’t. It’s that intellectualism’s regress defers know-how
to the next step in the regress while anti-intellectualism’s regress need not. Of
course, this doesn’t mean that anti-intellectualism isn’t committed to an infinite
number of acts (or infinite ways performed in performing an act). But, again, mere
commitment to the existence of infinite such ways doesn’t itself present a problem.
The problem is that the target property is infinitely deferred. Barring a regress-
stopper, for intellectualism, it is. For anti-intellectualism, it perhaps isn’t.
References
Fantl, J. (2009). Knowing-how and knowing-that. Philosophy Compass, 3, 451–470.
Ginet, C. (1975). Knowledge, perception, and memory. Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company.
Koethe, J. (2002). Stanley and Williamson on knowing how. The Journal of Philosophy, 99, 325–328.
Ryle, G. (1949). The concept of mind. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Ryle, G. (1971). Knowing how and knowing that. Collected papers (pp. 212–225). New York: Barnes and
Noble.
Stanley, J. (2010). Ryle on knowing how. Oberlin colloquium in philosophy. Oberlin, OH.
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Stanley, J. (2011b). Knowing (How). Nous, 45, 207–238.
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