Doing Without Believing Skill, Intellectualism, and Knowledge-How

The debate between Intellectualists and Anti-Intellectualists on the nature of ‘knowledge-how’ has thus far centered on arguments from the syntax or semantics of natural languages, surveys of folk judgments, and appeals to intuitions about hypothetical cases. We propose a new approach, focusing on real-world cases found in the empirical psychology literature. Our argument is simple: while the hypothetical cases found in the philosophical literature are underspecified in crucial respects, an analogous set of real-world cases are not so underspecified. These cases speak strongly against Intellectualism, or the position that knowledge-how is a species of knowledge-that.