Know how to transmit knowledge?

Intellectualism about knowledge-how is the view that practical knowledge is a species of propositional knowledge. I argue that this view is undermined by a difference in properties between knowledge-how and both knowledgethat and knowledge-wh. More specifically, I argue that both knowledge-that and knowledge-wh are easily transmitted via testimony while knowledge-how is not easily transmitted by testimony. This points to a crucial difference in states of knowledge. I also consider Jason Stanley’s attempt to subsume knowledge-how under an account of de se knowledge. I argue that there are crucial differences between de se knowledge and knowledge-how. Thus, this paper advances both the discussion of intellectualism and the literature on the nature of de se knowledge. Timothy Williamson and Jason Stanley (2001) and Jason Stanley (2011) defend intellectualism about knowledge-how on the basis of our best theories of the syntax and semantics of embedded questions. Their view is that because a construction like ‘John knows how to ride a bike’ contains an embedded question ‘how to ride a bike?’ one should look to the semantics of embedded questions for determining whether states of knowing-how imply states of knowing-that. They argue that if the best linguistic theories take sentences of the form ‘S knows how to φ’ to imply sentences of the form ‘S knows that w is a way to φ’, then intellectualism about knowledge-how is true. While this is a plausible approach, it may be that there ∗Thanks to Adam Carter, Sandy Goldberg, Kevin McCain, Eleonore Stump, and Alex Whalen for helpful comments on an earlier draft. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer at this journal for detailed comments which led to significant improvements in the final version. (Stanley and Williamson 2001; Stanley 2011)