Doing without believing: Intellectualism, knowledge-how, and belief-attribution

We consider a range of cases—both hypothetical and actual—in which agents apparently know how to φ but fail to believe that the way in which they in fact φ is a way for them to φ. These “no-belief” cases present a prima facie problem for Intellectualism about knowledge-how. The problem is this: if knowledge-that entails belief, and if knowing how to φ just is knowing that some w is a way for one to φ, then an agent cannot both know how to φ and fail to believe that w, the way that she φs, is a way for her to φ. We discuss a variety of ways in which Intellectualists might respond to this challenge and argue that, ultimately, this debate converges with another, seemingly distinct debate in contemporary epistemology: how to attribute belief in cases of conflict between an agent’s avowals and her behavior. No-belief cases, we argue, reveal how Intellectualism depends on the plausibility of positing something like “implicit beliefs”—which conflict with an agent’s avowed beliefs—in many cases of apparent knowledge-how. While there may be good reason to posit implicit beliefs elsewhere, we suggest that there are at least some grounds for thinking that these reasons fail to carry over to no-belief cases, thus applying new pressure to Intellectualism. Author names are listed in alphabetical order. The authors (Michael Brownstein and Eliot Michaelson) contributed equally to this paper. B Michael Brownstein [email protected] Eliot Michaelson [email protected] 1 Department of Philosophy Room 507, Philosophy Building, King’s College London Strand, London WC2R 2LS, UK 2 John Jay College/CUNY, 180 Carlton Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11205, USA