Practical Knowledge

Tacit Knowing, Knowledge-How, and Luck: Towards a 'Mitigated' Anti-Intellectualism
Introduction
In 'Practical Knowledge' David Wiggins (2012) laments the return of a tendency that Ryle calls "a not unfashionable shuffle" (1945—46, p. 7):
In cases like that of a child who learned to ride a bicycle by pedalling a bicycle, a philosopher tempted to make the intellectualist shuffle may suggest that, even where the child gets no 'explicit' knowledge that such-and-such is the way to do whatever it is, she must be achieving 'implicit' propositional knowledge. (p. 117)
In response, Wiggins offers two thoughts. The first is the Rylean contention that someone can be credited with this explicit or articulate knowledge of such-and-such being a way to do something and their efforts still misfire. Their declaring freely or being brought to acknowledge that such-and-such is a way to do something is neither necessary nor sufficient with respect to doing the thing in question because such articulations are abstractions from successful performances and not rules that constitute or direct them. Ryle acknowledges that articulated rules are "useful pedagogically" in initiating someone into a particular practice but appears to regard them as akin to the stabilising wheels one might attach to a child's bicycle as part of one's methodological approach to teaching them to ride. Wiggins' second thought comes in the form of a question: "what does it add" he asks? Why favour the "implicitist shuffle" (fn. 30) over the assumption that what lies below is a complex of dispositions and what have you? "What can it add but mystification" (op. cit.), he notes, to locate another level of propositional knowledge here and designate it 'implicit'?
Few contemporary intellectualists will acknowledge that in order to elucidate practical knowledge one need posit a sub-category of propositional knowledge. Indeed, their view would be that refusing to allow the analysis of practical knowledge in terms of propositional knowledge is itself something of a mystification—the sort of mystification that, for example, leads Wiggins to conclude that practical or agential knowledge somehow "coexists" alongside and interacts with propositional knowledge. As Timothy Williamson notes in The Philosophy of Philosophy, assigning to knowing the fundamental role in intelligent life is the hallmark of a tradition "that runs from Cook Wilson to Prichard and others, then to J.L. Austin and later to John McDowell" (p. 270, fn. 11). Ryle's name is omitted from this list of Oxford luminaries—indeed, from the whole book—on the grounds, presumably, that his sceptical assault on the univocality of knowing renders mysterious the very idea of intelligent action.
In their original attack on Ryle's treatment of knowledge-how and knowledge-that, Williamson and Stanley display scant regard for what motivated Ryle's account of the distinction in the first place. This related to challenging a set of connected, thought-distorting category mistakes associated with the myth of the ghost in the machine. In this respect, the somewhat parochial concern with linguistic considerations that has come to characterise discussion threatens to obscure—especially in Anglophone philosophy—the larger intellectual movement of which this debate is a part, and in so doing deprive us of the resources required to reach a satisfying resolution. The aim of this paper, then, is to offer a minor corrective to this trend. To that end, the first part of the begins by proposing an account of what Polanyi calls tacit knowing (or personal knowledge) in terms of practical knowledge-how. Since this turns in part on the coherence of a contrast with theoretical knowledge-how, the distinction is elaborated in terms of the role luck plays in the possession of such knowledge. In the second part of the paper this account of the role of luck is tested against recent work by Adam Carter and Duncan Pritchard (2015a, 2015b, 2015c), who argue that knowledge-how and knowledge-that, being compatible with the 'environmental' luck one finds in barn-façade-style examples, manifests a degree of resilience that propositional knowledge lacks and should thus be grouped along with understanding-why as a cognitive achievement. The conclusion is that although Carter and Prichard are right (contra the neo-Rylean) to stress that knowledge-how is a cognitive achievement, their emphasis on the parallel with understanding-why reveals their treatment to be too narrowly intellectualist to accommodate the peculiarly practical nature of that achievement.
Part I
As is well-known, it is economically highly advantageous to be able to determine the sex of chickens as soon as possible after they hatch. In the 1920s, Japanese scientists discovered a method by which this could be done based on subtle perceptual cues with a suitably held chick. It's a method that requires a great deal of skill developed through practice. After four to six weeks practice, a newly qualified chicken-sexer might be able to determine the sex of 200 chicks in 25 minutes with an accuracy of 95%. This rises to 1,000 - 1,400 chicks per hour with an accuracy of 98% after years of practice. Early Australian investigators of the skill were unable to determine, themselves, the nature of the skill and the story has developed that the chick-sexers themselves can't say how they know what they do. It appears to be a paradigmatic case of tacit knowing.
The term tacit knowing is of course due to the chemist turned philosopher of science Michael Polanyi. In Personal Knowledge, Polanyi makes evident that the task is to overcome an intellectual worldview still in thrall to the quest for the "purity" of an objective conception of knowledge in response to a global sceptical doubt:
The method of doubt… trusts that the uprooting of all voluntary components of belief will leave behind unassailed a residue of knowledge that is completely determined by objective evidence (p. 269).
The implication here is familiar from pragmatist and other narratives of the distorting effect of a Cartesian "quest for certainty": an unreasonable doubt determines epistemic criteria that set the bar for knowledge beyond the reach of finite, embodied creatures. Since this undermines any cognitive distinctions among dubitable beliefs, the threat is that one is left with no criterion with which to disambiguate genuine scientific inquiry from the sort of ideological usurpation that characterized Soviet science. This threat could of course be avoided if one could regroup, as it were, around the idea that the subjective is the source of doubt, to be contrasted with a realm of objective observation statements. For Polanyi, the exacted cost of this false dichotomy (cf. PK: 300) between a disavowed subjectivity and a "strict objectivity" (PK: 18) is a conception of science that denies the "personal participation of the knower in all acts of understanding" (PK: vii) and, as a consequence, renders inexplicable the very objectivity towards which it aspires.
Crucially the consequence of this denial is that it renders inexplicable the very objectivity towards which it aspires. For Polanyi, then, the genuinely objective is not the converse of the subjective; rather, it is that towards which we understand ourselves to be striving when we undertake responsibility for our attempts to comprehend the world. According to this "conceptual reform", once we recognize that objectivity only becomes intelligible through its relation to the personal we will come to acknowledge the extent and ineliminability of the tacit dimension of knowledge; of all the mute skills, expertise and connoisseurship that cannot be made explicit and yet without which no explicit knowledge would be possible.
The first point, then, is that for Polanyi tacit knowledge is personal knowledge: it involves an "active comprehension of things known, an action that requires skill" (Polanyi 1958: vii). The second point Polanyi sloganizes as follows: "we can know more than we can tell", whilst quickly adding that "it is not easy to say exactly what [that] means" (The Tacit Dimension, p. 4). Rather than discuss what Polanyi thinks it means, let's return to our chick-sexer example, though with one slight difference. Imagine, then, a world in which, as part of their basic education, everyone is taught to sex-chicks. Some people are better than others, but everyone is fallible and no one's skill is so superior to that of others that their performances are startlingly other. Return now to our world, where vent-sexing is an increasingly rare skill. Watching someone sex a chick is to witness a mysterious undertaking. What is it that they see that we don't? Whatever it is that they do see, their fellow chick-sexers see too. There is no mystery between chick-sexers, just as there is no mystery at all about chick-sexing in a world in which everyone can sex chickens. For mystery we need difference—some sort of cognitive mismatch. When I say cognitive, I don't of course mean knowledge in a simple sense (if there is such a thing). Sally the chick-sexer might know that that particular chick is male and John may not, but that mismatch isn't important. Perhaps John uses a DNA test to determine for himself the sex of chicks as Sally hands them to him. John now knows what Sally knows, but the mystery doesn't disappear. Indeed, a condition of the mystery seems to be that through Sally's expertise or the DNA test John can come to know that that, that, and that etc. chick is the sex it is. It seems clear that if the mystery derives from a mismatch, the mismatch relates to the ability that Sally has, which issues in her particular claims and which John lacks. Sally knows how to vent-sex chicks and John doesn't. The vent-sexing environment is one that Sally understands, but his understanding does not encompass it—at least, not fully.
Let's return now to the notion of tacit knowledge. The collocation 'tacit knowledge' doesn't yield much from an ordinary language perspective. Although some tend to use implicit (from implico—involve, entangle) and tacit as more or less synonymous in this context, the Latin root (tacitus—passed in silence, not spoken of, kept secret, unmentioned) indicates a degree of otherness to the tacit that isn't there with the implicit. Where the implicit announces itself through its omission, the tacit remains aloof, refusing to disclose its secret. Perhaps this is what Polanyi had in mind with his slogan. Sally certainly knows more than she can tell John, because John's understanding does not encompass the practice of chick-sexing. But does she know more than she can tell her fellow chick-sexers? In the world of universal chick-sexing, is there anything that they cannot tell each other?
For Polanyi, there is of course something they cannot tell one another: they cannot tell one another how they do what they do. As he says, we can all (more or less) pick out a loved one from a crowd, but we cannot "tell how we recognise a face we know. So most of this knowledge cannot be put into words" (op. cit.). But I suggest that we have far less of a grip on the idea that in such cases there's some knowledge that we can't express. If that is the case, what might one conclude from the chick-sexing example? Well, I suggest that the attribution of tacit knowledge marks the kind of mismatch observed above between the chick-sexer Sally and her observer. Specifically, the kind of mismatch in question is the one between Sally's skilful accomplishment and John's lack of relevant ability, between her practical knowledge-how and his ignorance-how. Informally, then, we have something like the following:
'That is a female' is known tacitly by B for A only if
'That is a female' is known explicitly by A;
'That is a female' is not known explicitly by B;
B knows how to vent-sex chickens;
A doesn't know how to vent-sex chickens;
A knows that B knows how to vent-sex chickens.
Since this analysis centres on the concept of practical knowledge-how it might be helpful to be reminded of the two basic positions in this area. Since I'll be turning to their work in due course, here's the characterisation offered by Carter and Pritchard:
Ryle's view is a paradigmatic form of what is called anti-intellectualism—viz., the position that one knows how to φ in virtue of possessing some relevant ability or disposition; anti-intellectualism is, strictly speaking, a position about what grounds one's knowledge-how. Likewise (and conversely), intellectualism insists that one counts a knowing how to φ in virtue of possessing—rather than some relevant ability—some propositional attitude (e.g., knowledge) vis-à-vis φ-ing.
Now, it is evident enough that the understanding of knowledge-how invoked in this analysis is one from which ability is inseparable. And it is in this respect at least that the account of tacit knowledge claims an affinity with Polanyi's own: the knowledge is personal because a knower's abilities constitute the active, skilful comprehension of a situation, and those who fail to understand it do so because they lack the appropriate, ability-based knowledge-how. Of course, that also suggests that a certain position is being taken on the contemporary debate about the status of knowledge-how; namely, anti-intellectualism. However, what is in fact being implied is what one might call a 'mitigated' anti-intellectualism, for once one accepts that the personal is part of the objective context in which understanding takes place there seems to be no reason to deny that knowledge is involved. Going forward, then, the suggestion is that knowledge-how can be expressed, though only practically and in context-dependent terms employing demonstrative concepts.
In our book Tacit Knowledge, Tim Thornton and I argue for this analysis of practical knowledge-how. It can be summarised usefully in contrast with the position advanced by Stanley and Williamson:
So, here is our complete account of knowing how. Suppose modes of presentation are semantically relevant. Then (29) is true relative to a context if and only if there is some contextually relevant way ώ such that Hannah stands in the knowledge-that relation to the Russellian proposition that ώ is a way for Hannah to ride a bicycle, and Hannah entertains this proposition under a practical mode of presentation. (2001, p. 430)
On the positive side, we agree that one can deploy context-dependent demonstratives to ways of doing things, and that these are entertained under a practical mode of presentation. But unimpressed by their anti-Rylean argument we reject the contention that this makes knowledge-how a subset of knowledge-that. Furthermore, having severed in this way the connection between knowledge-how and ability we argue that Stanley and Williamson have left themselves unable to make talk of 'practical modes of presentation' do much work. Indeed, one might wonder if this is an attempt to obscure the desire to undertake the 'implicitist shuffle'. Reinstating the connection with ability reinstates the priority of the practical qua personal. What it is to entertain a demonstrative thought under a practical mode of presentation is to have relevant practical know-how.
One touchstone for the difference between an intellectualist and anti-intellectualist account is the response to possible Gettierisation. Although Stanley and Williamson report that they doubt "that every kind of knowledge-that is susceptible to Gettier cases" they concede that "if knowledge-how is really a kind of knowledge-that, there should be such cases." They go on to sketch such a case:
Bob wants to learn how to fly in a flight simulator. He is instructed by Henry. Unknown to Bob, Henry is a malicious imposter who has inserted a randomizing device in the simulator's controls and intends to give all kinds of incorrect advice. Fortunately, by sheer chance the randomizing device causes exactly the same results in the simulator as would have occurred without it, and by incompetence Henry gives exactly the same advice as a proper instruc- tor would have done. Bob passes the course with flying colors. He has still not flown a real plane. Bob has a justified true belief about how to fly. But there is a good sense in which he does not know how to fly. (Stanley & Williamson 2001: 435)
The objection raised by Poston and others is that acquiring the right sort of skill through luck does not undermine the status of the know-how ascribed on the basis of that (right sort of) skill. That is to say, knowledge-how displays a resilience that knowledge-that lacks. Now, it's important to note that this is not an acceptable conclusion for our account of knowledge-how, since the contention is that this is indeed expressible in context-dependent terms where the personal is an irreducible part of the context. There is, however, a possibility that Poston overlooks; namely, that luck affects knowledge-how differently to knowledge-that and as a consequence affects the nature of relevant Gettier cases. Consider the following:
Tim has practiced bowling googlies and can reliably bowl them under most conditions, although sometimes his skill lets them down. When all goes well, a successful bowl can be ascribed to his know-how, which as a general and standing ability explains its instances. But suppose that, unknown to the bowler, his ability is systematically fallible and would break down under particular wind conditions. He cannot bowl googlies in a specific but unusual combination of wind speeds and directions. But on a particular occasion, distracted, he moves his arm non-standardly but in such a way that combines with the wind conditions to yield a perfect googly. This is a case where a generally reliable piece of know-how lets the subject down but, by luck, yields successful action.
Luck comes into play at a different level from cases of knowledge-that: specifically, at the level where ability is already presupposed and which gives us some insight into the content of the know-how in question. John didn't know, in fact, how to bowl that ball (by chance, a googly) though he does know how to bowl googlies.So the point at which luck effects knowing how reveals the sort of knowledge it is: that is to say, personal.
Part II
In recent articles, Duncan Pritchard and Adam Carter profess a desire to advance the debate about the status of knowledge-how by returning it to its epistemological roots. Since this involves establishing the relevance of considerations that predominate in Pritchard's epistemological project, their account of knowing how is intended to lend support to the anti-luck alternative to the robust virtue epistemology championed by—for example—Ernest Sosa. It turns on aligning our intuitions about knowing how with understanding why and away from knowing where (or knowing-wh).
This willingness to see knowledge-how as kith if not kin to understanding is of course in the spirit of Ryle's oft-quoted observation that "Understanding is part of knowing how", and Pritchard and Carter are content to classify their contribution as broadly anti-intellectualist. Of course, the orientation towards an account of knowledge-how that emphasizes its community with understanding is shared across the anti-intellectualist/intellectualist divide. In recent work those most Ptolomaic of Intellectualists Bengson and Moffett have asserted the importance of understanding to an account of knowing-how, and in doing so have associated their cause with the quote from Ryle. But since for Bengson and Moffett what characterises an Intellectualist analysis is that it "drives a wedge between know-how and ability" (KH&CP, 25), the understanding that knowledge-how manifests isn't linked in and of itself to practical ability. On the other hand, when David Wiggins writes in defence of the Aristotelian roots of Ryle's anti-intellectualism he notes that in acknowledging them "we are emphasizing how central the importance is of the understanding that agents need to bring to bear" (op. cit., p.105) in the exhibition of their practical or agential knowledge-how.
Given their attempt to articulate a modest anti-intellectualism and the use they make of discussions of luck I want to turn now to an evaluation of Carter and Pritchard's view. This will constitute a test of sorts of the analysis outlined in Part I. As noted there, in their original piece Stanley and Williamson use the flight simulator thought-experiment to demonstrate that there are good epistemological grounds for reducing knowledge-how to knowledge-that; namely, that the former is subject to the same undermining luck as the latter. That is to say, in both cases, where luck intervenes to bring about the alignment of cognitive achievement and cognitive success, we're inclined to withhold the attribution of knowledge. However, to some FS looks like a pretty good example of a case where knowledge-how and knowledge-that come apart precisely because of the resistance of FS to being Gettierized. Consider Yuri Cath's structurally similar thought-experiment:
Charlie wants to learn how to change a light bulb, but he knows almost nothing about light fixtures or bulbs. So he consults The Idiot's Guide to Everyday Jobs. Inside, Charlie finds an accurate set of instructions describing a light fixture and bulb, and the way to change a bulb. Charlie grasps these instructions perfectly. And there is a way, call it 'w1', such that Charlie now believes that w1 is a way for him to change a light bulb, namely, the way described in the book. However, unbeknownst to Charlie, he is extremely lucky to have read these instructions. For the disgruntled author of The Idiot's Guide filled her book with misleading instructions. Under every entry she misdescribed the objects involved in that job, and described a series of actions that would not constitute a way to do the job at all. However, at the printers, a computer error caused the text under the entry for 'Changing a Light Bulb', in just one copy of the book, to be randomly replaced by new text. By incredible coincidence, this new text provided the clear and accurate set of instructions that Charlie would later consult.
The claim is that Charlie knows how to change a light bulb but does not know that w1 is a way for him to do so. Stanley's response is in effect to argue that the epistemic environment outlined in LLB is such that rescripting it in terms of knowledge-where supports the same intuition about the resilience of that epistemic state to the luck involved and thus the contention that knowledge-where is nonpropositional.
The Lucky Light Bulb II: Charlie wants to learn where to purchase light bulbs, but he knows almost nothing about stores in his city of Syracuse. To remedy this situation Charlie consults The Idiot's Guide to Stores in Syracuse. Inside, he finds an accurate description of directions to a store at which one can buy light bulbs. Charlie grasps these directions perfectly. And so there is a place, call it 'p', such that Charlie now believes that p is a place he can buy light bulbs, namely the place described in the book. However, unbeknownst to Charlie, he is extremely lucky to have read these instructions, for the disgruntled author of The Idiot's Guide filled her book with misleading instructions. Under every entry she intentionally misdescribed the stores, and described a series of directions that would lead to parking lots and residential homes. However, at the printers, a computer error caused the text under the entry for "Purchasing Light Bulbs", in just one copy of the book, to be randomly replaced by new text. By incredible coincidence, this new text provided the clear and accurate set of instructions that Charlie would later consult.
Summarising the dialectical situation in terms of a lopsidedly-horned dilemma, Carter and Pritchard conclude that if one is to avoid that contention, one must either deny that FS and LLB involve knowledge-how at all, or argue that propositional knowledge (including knowledge-wh) is compatible with epistemic luck.
Now, it should be noted that that clearly doesn't exhaust the possibilities even taken straight. One might claim that in rescripting LLB as he does, Stanley is exploiting the situational underdetermination that's in play in here and deny that FS and LLB are isomorphic. After all, as Carter and Pritchard note, "it seems at least as plausible to contend that Bob does come to acquire knowledge-how in this case as to contend that he doesn't". With that concession in mind one might then go on to examine what is distinctive about the epistemological environment detailed in FS. That is not, however, their approach.
Since they do not take this line, how do they proceed? Deploying a distinction Pritchard has made much of elsewhere, the claim is that while cognitive achievements per se are subject to intervening luck of the sort associated with Gettier's original thought experiments, knowledge-how—unlike knowledge that—is immune to luck of the variety involved in barn-façade style examples, and which he terms 'environmental luck'. So knowledge-how asserts its cognitive credentials either by its resilience in the face of environmental luck or its vulnerability to intervening luck (and whether you think the vulnerability bit or the resilience bit is the right emphasis is important). Returning to the above characterisation of the argumentative strategy, then, the implication is that when Stanley poses his dilemma by rescripting LLB in terms of knowledge-where, he is exploiting the situational underdetermination to make it a clear case of cognitive-achievement defeating intervening luck. But if LLB is made to involve a clear case of environmental luck then Charlie can be seen to possess knowledge-how.
For Carter and Pritchard, then, the way to avoid the dilemma turns on the attempt to distinguish knowledge-how from knowledge-that through the identification of divergent epistemic properties that are themselves expressive of the different kinds of knowledge-undermining epistemic luck that can be in play. Now this is an elegantly simple solution, but it's not without its problems. Rather than evaluate these directly, let's consider that fact that since Carter and Pritchard accept the point that FS and LLB are, as presented, cases of intervening luck, they are committed to maintaining that there are no epistemologically interesting features distinguishing FS from LLB. Despite the thought that Poston appears to be on to something, Bob does not have knowledge-how in the situation FS presents because it involves a prima facie case of Intervening Luck. But if FS is a straight case of Intervening Luck, would an Environmental Luck counterpart of FS (one in which the instructor is a real instructor, but might have been fake) really characterise a sufficiently radically distinct epistemic situation? (What if the fake instructor actually teaches Bob on a real plane?). Is there not the danger that the attachment to the bipolar account of luck is wagging the dog here?
We can investigate this point by looking at how Carter and Pritchard go about establishing the connection between knowledge-how and environmental resilience. What I want to focus on, then, is the way that the overly intellectualised interpretations of the examples skew the results—especially where abilities are concerned. And they do this by skewing our understanding of understanding. As indicated, then, C&P's attempt to demonstrate the relevance of the distinction between environmental and intervening luck to the debate about the status of knowledge how proceeds via an association with understanding, and in particular through an account of the cognitive status of understanding why. That is to say, the aim to demonstrate: firstly, that understanding why, unlike know-wh in general, is resilient in the face of environmental luck; and secondly, that knowledge how should be understood as the same as understanding why. Let's start with the first step. We get, then, two examples: call them FO1 and FO2.
FIRE OFFICER 1. Campbell… comes home to discover that his house has burned down, and he wants to understand why. Accordingly, he asks a nearby fire officer {call him Peter} who is on the scene. Unbeknownst to Campbell, however, the person he is speaking to is not a real fire officer but rather someone on their way to a fancy dress party. Nonetheless, the fake fire officer doesn't let on that he is a fake, and offers Campbell a completely made-up explanation of why his house burned down—viz., that the cause of the house burning down was faulty wiring. Let us stipulate that the explanation that Campbell is offered is, as it happens, entirely correct. Even so, Campbell surely cannot gain an understanding of why his house burned down from consulting a fake fire officer who is making up an answer to his question, even if that answer turns out to be true. For that matter, he can't come to know that his house burned down because of faulty wiring in this way either.

FIRE OFFICER 2. Campbell… comes home to discover that his house has burned down, and he wants to understand why. Accordingly, he asks a nearby… genuine fire officer {call him Paul} … Imagine, however, that Campbell could have very easily asked someone who merely appeared to be a fire officer but who was fake, and who would have provided a false explanation (without revealing they are not in fact a fire officer). Perhaps, for example, the one real fire officer who Campbell spoke to was surrounded by fake fire officers on their way to a fancy dress party.
The claim is simple enough—in FO1 we have a case of Intervening Luck; in FO2 of Environmental Luck. In FO1 there is no cognitive achievement; in FO2 we get cognitive achievement—understanding why—that falls short of knowing that.
Now, what I want to draw attention to here is how thinly characterised understanding-why is here—in such a way as to exclude the practices (and associated abilities) that might be expected to be in play in understanding appreciated in a more full-blooded sense. So, for example, understanding why one's house burned down might involve going inside the house and checking for the signs of faulty wiring. It probably would involve asking Peter various questions, the answers to which are checked against and integrated with other beliefs and abilities that Campbell possesses. Is there a difference between Peter's answers and Paul's answers in this regard? Well, by hypothesis no there isn't. From the first-person standpoint there doesn't appear to be any difference here.
The suggestion, then, is that unless one had a prior commitment to the epistemic relevance of the bipolar view of luck, the difference that makes a difference between FO1 and FO2 starts to look a little tentative. Carter and Pritchard do have a further test, however—retrospection. Their thought is that in FO2, and unlike FO1, Campbell would
Regard himself as having possessed an understanding why his house burned down, and
Regard himself as lacking knowledge that his house burned down due to faulty wiring.
But I think this puts pressure on their account from a different direction. If in FO1 Campbell is told that his interlocutor was a fake, we cannot deprive him of a salient fact; namely, that what he was told—and what he tested and integrated into his other beliefs—was true. Now again, if what one is working with here is the assumption that the relevant path to truth is solely the interlocutor's—Peter's/Paul's—narrative, then that doesn't seem relevant. But that seems to beg the question about how to characterise the nature of the cognitive achievement that is understanding why. If FO1 describes the active integration of beliefs and the acquisition of new abilities then it seems that Campbell might well conclude that he did in fact understand why his house burnt down. Moreover, if one thinks of the achievement in FO2 in this light it seems odd to conclude that Campbell would lack knowledge of why his house burnt down. Imagine the following conversation:
- So, Campbell, do you understand why your house burned down?
- I do indeed. It burned down due to faulty wiring.
- So you know that it burned down due to faulty wiring?
- Gosh, no!
- So you mean you now understand one of the typical circumstances attending domestic conflagrations?
- Oh no, I understand why my house burned down.
- But you don't know why?
- Indeed I don't!
I'd hazard that Campbell would only take this line if he was committed to the Intervening Luck/Environmental Luck distinction and it seems tendentious to build that into the thought-experiment…
The claim so far, then, is that by excluding abilities in this way C&P succumb to intellectualism. I want to now apply that thought to the second step in their demonstration—the one that takes us to the alignment of understanding why with knowledge how. That will in turn take us back to that neglected alternative to Stanley's dilemma—the denial of isomorphism between FS and LLB. Here's the important quote:
There are two features of knowledge-how that must be borne in mind when considering cases like this. The first is that there is more to knowledge-how than the mere ability to perform the target action. In the LUCKY LIGHT BULB case it is not in question that Charlie can change a light bulb, but that should not by itself settle the question of whether Charlie knows how to change a light bulb… Sure, Charlie can change a light bulb. But, more than this, does he know how to change a light bulb? That's not so clear. Moreover, once we remember that knowledge-how is consistent with environmental epistemic luck, then this goes some distance towards explaining why we might initially think that the epistemic luck in play is compatible with knowledge-how, even while nonetheless contending that knowledge-how is lacking in this case.
One could make the distinction between the possession of abilities and knowledge-how this clearly only if one presupposed that abilities are what one might call mere abilities and can be factored out in this way. After all, what is a 'mere ability' to perform a target action? If the uncharacteristically nyctophobic demon possessing Charlie controlled his body to change a light bulb would we want to say that the latter had the ability—mere or otherwise—to do it? Do the chimpanzee and I have the same ability to ride a bicycle or a dog and his owner to bury a bone in the garden? Contra C&P, it is only if one has such a separation of mere ability and knowledge-how in mind that one can assert boldly that 'it is not in question' that Charlie can change a light bulb and yet maintain that that doesn't settle the question! It is precisely that distinction that does settle the question, and it's what settles it in the direction of an intellectualism that C&P formally disparage.
In this light we can return to FS. Recall that C&P are required to view this as a case of Intervening Luck and thus to withhold from Bob the confessedly intuitive attribution of knowledge-how to fly a plane. But what FS points up is precisely the sense in which the acquisition of abilities and integration of beliefs is central to the achievement in question. It's harder to disguise the cognitive effort required because learning to fly a plane is a considerable more complex undertaking that learning how to change a light bulb or coming to understand why one's house has burned down. Indeed, it would seem odd to characterise Bob's situation as one in which he has the 'mere ability' to fly an aeroplane. What could mere ability connote in these circumstances unless one already had a commitment to the separation of ability from knowledge-how? But what applies in FS applies in the other cases too.
In the conclusion to their Nous piece, C&P compliment themselves on having driven a wedge between knowledge-how and propositional knowledge. But the price of that particular wedge is another wedge between know-how and ability—precisely the dislocation that Bengson and Moffett use to characterise Intellectualism. In this respect it's worth noting that when Ryle says 'understanding is part of knowing how' he goes on to add:
The knowledge that is required for understanding intelligent performances of a specific kind is some degree of competence in performances of that kind.
So 'understanding is part of knowing how' insofar as the understanding involved in the active comprehension and evaluation of an intelligent performance is grounded in the know-how that is a degree of competence in performance. But competence in performance is not a behavioural-disposition relation to φ-ing, not a mere ability to φ. I suspect that part of the reason for this etiolation of our understanding of abilities is the sense that the intellectualist reaction to Ryle's analysis gives us two possibilities of the kind outlined in C&P's seemingly uncontroversial definitions. And that in turn is due to the way Stanley and Williamson's lack of interest in the dialectical niceties of Ryle's position have been carried forward in the debate. But it's important to note that Ryle's view is presented initially as a reductio. He seeks to show that the intellectualist analysis doesn't work in its own terms—if the grasp of a proposition is the basis—or the grounding—of intelligent action then there's no such thing as intelligent action. The Intellectualist does not say it is possession of propositional attitudes rather than possession of abilities that grounds knowledge-how; but even if she did, the converse opposition between intelligent possession of attitudes and non-intelligent possession of dispositions or abilities is not the anti-Intellectualist's. What we are to understand by ability/disposition talk is not a set of items that are as it were understood in advance and only in relation to another set of items (propositional attitudes). Rather, our understanding of what abilities are (drop talk of dispositions here—it doesn't help and Ryle went too far) is to be articulated through an account of the failure of propositional attitude possession to account for intelligent action. Anti-Intellectualism isn't anti-intelligence, and the account of abilities is meant to illuminate the intelligence of intelligent action.
What we require, then, is a mitigated anti-intellectualism: one that foregrounds the the rational nature of abilities in line with the account offered in Part I.
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Though in 'Know–how and Concept Possession' Bengson and Moffett (2007) talk about "implicit conceptions" and "implicit knowledge". Cf: "Abilities, it seems, are at most reliable dispositions to intentional behaviour, whereas know-how involves some degree of understanding". This thin conception of 'abilities' is shared with Carter and Pritchard.

Angus Gellatly. Skilful Mind.
The most immediate is the heavy lifting that the different sorts of luck have to do. Consider the well-known example of the archer who fires and hits target because one gust of wind corrects another. That's Intervening Luck. On Environmental Luck you fire and just happen to miss a gust that came a minute later. How different are these? Suppose you have a standing ability to shoot bulls-eyes but a gust of wind of the sort you can't normally correct for is compensated for by the fact that you twitch on this occasion? Or suppose that the twitch is triggered by the very wind conditions that it corrects for?
Are there grounds here for thinking that the conception of environmental luck that is often given is too thinly conceived. If we think of the Barn-façade case in knowledge-how terms then Smith knows how to identify barns but her standing ability isn't appropriate in this case. But she still knows how to do what she does even if in this case she didn't know that it was a barn.