Showing How to Derive Knowing How

Jason Stanley’s Know How is a rich and fascinating book, and an excellent example of the value of focused philosophical inquiry. Stanley’s book is deeply motivated by the understanding that with good philosophical judgment, we can choose focused topics for detailed inquiry which nevertheless have broad and philosophically important implications. His book also shows that even focused inquiry can itself be wide-ranging in its appeal to data, inspiration, and methodology. He is just as comfortable quoting Heiddeger as Evans, just as illuminating in expositing Ryle as Groenendijk and Stokhof, and just as interested in criticizing Korsgaard as Lewis. It’s a remarkable book. The lead idea of the book is that knowledge how is factual knowledge. Very roughly, to know how to do something is just to know, of some way in which you can do it, that you can do it in that way. But Stanley holds not only that this analysis of knowing how is right in its own terms, but that it is predicted by the compositional structure of sentences of the form, ‘Emile knows how to get his dad’s attention’. And this is a good thing. For insofar as we use sentences like this to ascribe knowledge how, and insofar as they have compositional structure, something about how they are composed must constrain how we manage to talk about knowledge how by using them. In what follows I am going to argue that Stanley’s semantic treatment of embedded wh-interrrogatives is inadequate, show where the inadequacy comes from, and show how to repair it. The inadequacy is particularly sharp, given that it is inadequacy in his own terms, because the compositional semantics fails to generate the result that even Stanley intuitively agrees is the right result. However, I will argue that my solution is arguably conservative enough to re-capture the main substance of Stanley’s view.