[MD] Know-how

[Steven Peterson]

Hi Matt, All

I like this distinction between knowledge-that and knowledge-how and
not just because it has to do with beavers. Do you think that
knowledge-that versus knowledge-how can be used to distinquish between
intellectual patterns and other types of patterns? Is knowledge-how
ever intellectual or always biological or social? Is knowledge-that
ever other than intellectual?

Best,
Steve



On Thu, May 6, 2010 at 9:18 PM, Matt Kundert
<pirsigaffliction at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> For fuckheads who like Rorty and beavers and think that Rorty has a bias towards language over non-linguistic experience, I present this passage talking about the distinction between propositional knowing-that and nonlinguistic know-how (with beavers):
>
> "If I understand [Barry] Allen's project, he thinks that we shall only understand 'the value of knowledge, its ecological singularity, the inextricability of its and our flourishing' better than the Greeks did if we set conversation in the context of the production of artifacts and skills.  Such understanding will, Allen believes, be blocked as long as we say, as I did, that 'conversation is the ultimate context in which knowledge should be understood.'  I should be happy to change 'knowledge' to 'knowledge-that' in that over-ambitious remark, but this would not eliminate my differences with Allen.  For I do not see that there is anything about the value of knowledge and its ecological singularity that we do not already sufficiently understand.
>
> "In particular, I do not see why we need to draw any line between the knowing animals and the non-knowing animals other than the line between the sentence-wielding knowers-that and the non-sentence-wielders who only know how.
>
> "Allen seems to want the former sort of line, for he says that plants...do not know how to photosynthesize.  Presumably he would also deny that beavers know how to build dams, for he suggests that 'knowledge is as uniquely human as our neurology.'  Admiring the beavers as I do, I cannot see anything especially human about knowing how to get things done.  Attributing knowledge-that, on the other hand, seems useful only when explaining ourselves, and perhaps our computers.  We attribute knowledge-how wherever telic description seems appropriate, but knowledge-that only when intentional description does."