Notes on Ryle's "Knowing how and knowing that"

Ryle argues against two intellectualist assumptions that arise from the dogma of ghost in the machine and the category mistake regarding the mental. The first assumption is that theorizing is the primary activity of minds and the second is that theorizing is intrinsically a private, silent, or internal operation. Ryle’s proposal is that when we talk about qualities of mind, we are not referring to occult episodes that cause overt acts and utterances, but rather (in a sense) referring to those overt acts and utterances themselves. Ryle also argues that knowledge is primarily knowing how to do things; and most of what is normally called knowledge, is actually skills and abilities.

Ryle admits that there is a difference between doing a given action absent-mindedly and on-purpose, intelligently or unintelligently. But he believes that these differences do not consist in the absence or presence of some shadow-action covertly prefacing the overt action. He thinks the difference is in the absence or presence of certain dispositions that are testable.

I fully agree with Ryle’s negative argument against the intellectualist view that all mental conduct concepts can be defined in terms of concepts of cognition. According to this intellectualist view, when we talk about intellect we are referring primarily to operations which constitute theorizing; and the goal of these operations is the knowledge of true propositions or facts. However, as Ryle points out, there are many activities which directly display qualities of mind and are not themselves intellectual operations or effects of intellectual operations. So theorizing is just one practice among other practices of mind. Besides, the assumption that intelligent activities can be explained in terms of prior theoretical operations leads to a vicious regresses. The regress results from the fact that theorizing itself is an activity and can be done intelligently or unintelligently, and doing it intelligently would require another prior theoretical operation, which in turn can be done intelligently and so on. To break this circle, Ryle concludes and I agree that we must allow that some intelligent behavior is not the outcome of prior theoretical operations.

One implication of rejecting the intellectualist legend is to realize that knowing-how cannot be defined in terms of knowing-that, and does not simply follow from it. For instance, excellence at surgery is not the same thing as knowledge of medical science, nor is it a simple product of it. Besides, Ryle is also right that thinking what one is doing does not connote both thinking what to do and doing it. There are not two processes involved, but one. The part of Ryle’s argument that I did not fully appreciate was his proposal that knowing-how is a disposition. He says that although knowing-how is not a single track disposition like a reflex or a habit, it still comprises of hypothetical and semi-hypothetical properties that can be tested. In other words, intelligence relies in abilities and propensities which actualize in intelligent performance. What I don’t understand is how exactly a mental property such as being a careful driver or knowing how to play the piano is to be translated into hypothetical scenarios. It seems like given any hypothetical setting, no matter how well we try to describe the situation, there are still various ways the person can behave. A careful driver may occasionally have an accident, a piano player may not feel like playing the piano when we ask her to, etc.