In their theories of know how, proponents of Intellectualism routinely appeal to ‘practical modes of presentation’. But what are practical modes of presentation? And what makes them distinctively practical? In this essay, I develop a Fregean account of practical modes of presentation: I argue that there are such things as practical senses and I give a theory of what they are. One of the challenges facing the proponent of a distinctively Fregean construal of practical modes of presentation is to provide (...) an account of their nature on which they are plausible qua Fregean senses. I take up this challenge, arguing that we find examples of practical senses in the semantic values assigned to programs by operational semantics for programming languages. By looking at a species of practical senses, we will have taken one important step towards legitimizing the genus. In particular, I show that certain features of operational semantic values can be generalized towards a comprehensive theory of practical senses. The upshot is a full-fledged account of what practical senses are, which can be put to use in an explanatory theory of know how. (shrink)

In this essay, I provide a new argument for Intellectualism about knowing how, one that does not rest on controversial assumptions about how knowing how is ascribed in English. In particular, I argue that the distinctive intentionality of the manifestations of knowing how ought to be explained in terms of a propositional attitude of belief about how to perform an action.

In this paper we give a rather detailed algebraic investigation of interpolation and Beth’s property in propositional many-valued logics extending Hájek’s Basic Logic [P. Hájek, Metamathematics of Fuzzy Logic, Kluwer, 1998], and we connect such properties with amalgamation and strong amalgamation in the corresponding varieties of algebras. It turns out that, while the most interesting extensions of in the language of have deductive interpolation, very few of them have Beth’s property or Craig interpolation. Thus in the last part of the (...) paper we look for conservative extensions of having such properties. (shrink)

Orthodoxy has it that knowledge is absolute—that is, it cannot come in degrees. On the other hand, there seems to be strong evidence for the gradability of know-how. Ascriptions of know-how are gradable, as when we say that one knows in part how to do something, or that one knows how to do something better than somebody else. When coupled with absolutism, the gradability of ascriptions of know-how can be used to mount a powerful argument against intellectualism about know-how—the view (...) that know-how is a species of propositional knowledge. This essay defends intellectualism from the argument of gradability. It is argued that the gradability of ascriptions of know-how should be discounted as a rather superficial linguistic phenomenon, one that can be explained in a way compatible with the absoluteness of the state reported. (shrink)

1. What is the relation between skilful action and knowledge? According to most philosophers, the two have little in common: practical intelligence and theoretical intelligence are largely separate...

A good surgeon knows how to perform a surgery; a good architect knows how to design a house. We value their know-how. We ordinarily look for it. What makes it so valuable? A natural response is that know-how is valuable because it explains success. A surgeon’s know-how explains their success at performing a surgery. And an architect’s know-how explains their success at designing houses that stand up. We value know-how because of its special explanatory link to success. But in virtue (...) of what is know-how explanatorily linked to success? This essay provides a novel argument for the thesis that know-how’s special link to success is to be explained at least in part in terms of its being, or involving, a doxastic attitude that is epistemically alike propositional knowledge. It is argued that the role played by know-how in explaining intentional success shows that the epistemic differences between know-how and knowledge, if any, are less than usually thought; and that "revisionary intellectualism", the view that know-how is true belief that might well fall short of knowledge, is not really a stable position. If its explanatory link to success is what makes know-how valuable, an upshot of my argument is that the value of know-how is due, to a considerable extent, to its being, or involving, a kind of propositional knowledge. (shrink)

This idea that what is distinctive of intentional performances (or at least of those intentional performances that amount to skilled actions) is one’s practical knowledge in it —i.e., knowledge of what one is doing while doing it— famously traces back to Anscombe ([]1963] 2000). While many philosophers have theorized about Anscombe’s notion of practical knowledge (e.g., Setiya (2008), Thompson et al. (2011), Schwenkler (2019), O’Brien (2007)), there is a wide disagreement about how to understand it. This paper investigates how best (...) to understand practical knowledge for it to play the desired explanatory role in a reductive theory of intentional action, of intention-in-action, and of control-in-action. I argue that practical knowledge ought to be construed as a dynamic knowledge state and that structured practical senses (Pavese 2015) are needed to model it. (shrink)

In certain cases, people judge that agents bring about ends intentionally but also that they do not bring about the means that brought about those ends intentionally—even though bringing about the ends and means is just as likely. We call this difference in judgments the Kraemer effect. We offer a novel explanation for this effect: a perceived difference in the extent to which agents know how to bring about the means and the ends explains the Kraemer effect. In several experiments, (...) we replicate the Kraemer effect in a variety of non-moral and moral scenarios, and we find support for our new account. This work accords with a burgeoning area of action theory that identifies an important connection between know-how and intentionality. (shrink)

The prequel to this paper has discussed the relation between knowledge and skill and introduced the topic of the relationship between skill and know how. This sequel continues the discussion. First, I survey the recent debate on intellectualism about knowing how (§1-3). Then, I tackle the question as to whether intellectualism (and anti-intellectualism) about skill and intellectualism (and anti-intellectualism) about know how fall or stand together (§4-5).

Knowledge and skill are intimately connected. In this essay, I discuss the question of their relationship and of which (if any) is prior to which in the order of explanation. I review some of the answers that have been given thus far in the literature, with a particular focus on the many foundational issues in epistemology that intersect with the philosophy of skill.

From artistic performances in the visual arts and in music to motor control in gymnastics, from tool use to chess and language, humans excel in a variety of skills. On the plausible assumption that skillful behavior is a visible manifestation of intelligence, a theory of intelligence—whether human or not—should be informed by a theory of skills. More controversial is the question as to whether, in order to theorize about intelligence, we should study certain skills in particular. My target is the (...) view that only a particular class/kind of skill (i.e., ‘theoretical’, or ‘intellectual’ skills, versus ‘practical’, or ‘embodied’ skills) manifests intelligence, or especially does so. I call this view ‘Intelligence Elitism’. Intelligence Elitism is pervasive in popular culture, in academic culture, as well as in psychometrics. It has, arguably, a long pedigree in philosophy (though explicit arguments for it are rare). But it is a substantive view which, if false, can promote unfairness. In this article, I defend Intelligence Socialism—the claim that intelligent behavior is everywhere skillful behavior is. I go on to isolate the best case for the further Elitist claim that, even if all skillful behavior is intelligent in some modest sense of ‘intelligence’, there is a principled difference in intelligence between theoretical, or intellectual, skills, on one side, and practical, or embodied skills, on the other, and I show it wanting. (shrink)

We represent the world in a variety of ways: through percepts, concepts, propositional attitudes, words, numerals, recordings, musical scores, photographs, diagrams, mimetic paintings, etc. Some of these representations are mental. It is customary for philosophers to distinguish two main kinds of mental representations: perceptual representation (e.g., vision, auditory, tactile) and conceptual representation. This essay presupposes a version of this dichotomy and explores the way in which a further kind of representation – procedural representation – represents. It is argued that, in (...) some important respects, procedural representations represent differently from both purely conceptual representations and purely perceptual representations. Although procedural representations, just like conceptual and perceptual representations, involve modes of presentation, their modes of presentation are distinctively practical, in a sense which I will clarify. It is argued that an understanding of this sort of practical representation has important consequences for the debate on the nature of know-how. (shrink)

In the recent literature, several authors have argued that the capacity to track factive mental states plays a central role in explaining our ability to understand and predict people’s behavior (Nagel 2013; Nagel 2017; Phillips & Norby 2019; Phillips et al. 2020; Westra & Nagel 2021). The topic of this chapter is whether this capacity also enters into an explanation of our ability to track skilled and intentional actions.

This essay is divided into two parts. In the first part (§2), I introduce the idea of practical meaning by looking at a certain kind of procedural systems — the motor system — that play a central role in computational explanations of motor behavior. I argue that in order to give a satisfactory account of the content of the representations computed by motor systems (motor commands), we need to appeal to a distinctively practical kind of meaning. Defending the explanatory relevance (...) of semantic properties in a computationalist explanation of motor behavior, my argument concludes that practical meanings play a central role in an adequate psychological theory of motor skill. In the second part of this essay (§3), I generalize and clarify the notion of practical meaning, and I defend the intelligibility of practical meanings against an important objection. (shrink)

A inizio estate del 2018 l’editore Les Belles Lettres di Parigi ha pubblicato una nuova «édition bilingue commentée» dello Ione platonico, la prima opera di filosofia greca antica a essere ospitata nella collana Commentario. Si tratta di un lavoro a quattro mani a cura del filologo italiano Lorenzo Ferroni e del filosofo francese Arnaud Macé, che presenta una chiara divisione dei compiti: oltre all’introduzione, alla traduzione e a un commento del dialogo (a cura di Macé), come previsto dalla...

The article examines Mary Wollstonecraft’s interpretation of revolutionary movements, particularly through her analysis of the French Revolution. Wollstonecraft examines the oppression of women as a form of slavery, but also uses it as a lens through which to denounce socio-economic injustices and propose radical change. Her critique of mercantile society and property contrasts with her rethinking of the domestic sphere as an alternative political space. The article shows how these reflections lead to a rethinking of femininity and the construction of (...) a new female subjectivity based on collective independence, proposing a relational autonomy beyond the disillusionment of revolutionary hopes. (shrink)

This paper reexamines the case for mentality — the thesis that knowledge is a mental state in its own right, and not only derivatively, simply by virtue of being composed out of mental states or by virtue of being a property of mental states — and explores a novel argument for it. I argue that a certain property singled out by psychologists and philosophers of cognitive science as distinctive of skillful behavior (agentive control) is best understood in terms of knowledge. (...) While psychological theories of agentive control that appeal to monitoring mechanisms, such as attention, have been proposed, these theories cannot account for the full scope of controlled action. By contrast, I argue that an epistemic theory of agentive control that invokes knowledge is extensionally adequate. It is when it comes to understanding the hallmarks of skillful performance that the theoretical benefits of thinking of knowledge as mental can be fully appreciated. (shrink)

The article discusses the relation between skills (or competences), creditability, and aptness . The positive suggestion is that we might make progress understanding the relation between creditability and aptness by inquiring more generally about how different kinds of competences and their exercise might underwrite allocation of credit. Whether or not a competence is acquired and whether or not a competence is actively exercised might matter for the credit that the agent deserves for the exercise of that competence. A fine-grained taxonomy (...) of competences opens up the possibility of instinctual knowledge (knowledge by mere instincts) as well as the possibility of habitual knowledge (knowledge by mere habits), alongside knowledge by skills (or alongside knowledge by yet other sorts of competences). If instinctual knowledge were possible, it is suggested that it might not be of the sort that deserves credit at all. By piggybacking from the literature in evolutionary psychology, I suggest that, as inborn social learners, merely instinctual—and so not fully creditable—knowledge might be a reality for us. (shrink)

This paper is devoted to the algebraization of an arithmetical predicate introduced by S. Feferman. To this purpose we investigate the equational class of Boolean algebras enriched with an operation (g=rtail), which translates such predicate, and an operation τ, which translates the usual predicate Theor. We deduce from the identities of this equational class some properties of (g=rtail) and some ties between (g=rtail) and τ; among these properties, let us point out a fixed-point theorem for a sufficiently large class of (...) (g=rtail)-τ polynomials. The last part of this paper concerns the duality theory for (g=rtail)-τ algebras. (shrink)

According to a standard assumption in epistemology, if one only partially believes that p , then one cannot thereby have knowledge that p. For example, if one only partially believes that that it is raining outside, one cannot know that it is raining outside; and if one only partially believes that it is likely that it will rain outside, one cannot know that it is likely that it will rain outside. Many epistemologists will agree that epistemic agents are capable of (...) partial beliefs in addition to full beliefs and that partial beliefs can be epistemically assessed along some dimensions. However, it has been generally assumed that such doxastic attitudes cannot possibly amount to knowledge. In Probabilistic Knowledge, Moss challenges this standard assumption and provides a formidable defense of the claim that probabilistic beliefs—a class of doxastic attitudes including credences and degrees of beliefs—can amount to knowledge too. Call this the probabilistic knowledge claim . Throughout the book, Moss goes to great lengths to show that probabilistic knowledge can be fruitfully applied to a variety of debates in epistemology and beyond. My goal in this essay is to explore a further application for probabilistic knowledge. I want to look at the role of probabilistic knowledge within a “knowledge-centered” psychology—a kind of psychology that assigns knowledge a central stage in explanations of intentional behavior. My suggestion is that Moss’s notion of probabilistic knowledge considerably helps further both a knowledge-centered psychology and a broadly intellectualist picture of action and know-how that naturally goes along with it. At the same time, though, it raises some interesting issues about the notion of explanation afforded by the resulting psychology. (shrink)

The similarity approach stands as a significant attempt to defend scientific realism from the attack of the pessimistic meta-induction. The strategy behind the similarity approach is to shift from an absolute notion of truth to the more flexible one of truthlikeness. Nonetheless, some authors are not satisfied with this attempt to defend realism and find that the notion of truthlikeness is not fully convincing. The aim of this paper is to analyze and understand the reasons of this dissatisfaction. Our thesis (...) is that the dissatisfaction with the notion of truthlikeness concerns the double role that this notion plays within the similarity approach: This notion plays both a regulative role in the conception of theories and a constitutive one in their selection. (shrink)

Can we think of a task in a distinctively practical way? Can there be practical concepts? In recent years, epistemologists, philosophers of mind, as well as philosophers of psychology have appealed to practical concepts in characterizing the content of know-how or in explaining certain features of skilled action. However, reasons for positing practical concepts are rarely discussed in a systematic fashion. This paper advances a novel argument for the psychological reality of practical concepts that relies on evidence for a distinctively (...) productive kind of reasoning. (shrink)

One can intentionally do something only if one knows what one is doing while they are doing it. For example, one can intentionally kill one’s neighbor by opening their gas stove overnight only if one knows that the gas is likely to kill the neighbor in their sleep. One can intentionally sabotage the victory of one’s rival by putting sleeping drugs in their drink only if one knows that sleeping drugs will harm the rival’s performance. And so on. In a (...) slogan: Intentional action is action guided by knowledge. This essay reviews some motivations for a ‘knowledge-centered psychology’ — a psychology where knowledge enters center stage in an explanation of intentional action (§2). Then it outlines a novel argument for the claim that knowledge is required for intentional action (§3) and discusses some of its consequences (§§4-5). (shrink)

This is the introduction to my forthcoming book and the table of contents.

Arguments have always played a central role within logic and philosophy. But little attention has been paid to arguments as a distinctive kind of discourse, with its own semantics and pragmatics. The goal of this essay is to study the mechanisms by means of which we make arguments in discourse, starting from the semantics of argument connectives such as `therefore'. While some proposals have been made in the literature, they fail to account for the distinctive anaphoric behavior of `therefore', as (...) well as uses of argument connectives in complex arguments, suppositional arguments, arguments with non-declarative conclusions, as well as arguments with parenthetical remarks. A comprehensive account of arguments requires imposing a distinctive tree-like structure on contexts. We show how to extend our account to accommodate modal subordination and and di fferent flavors of `therefore'. (shrink)

Suppose I say, ‘That is my dog’ and manage to refer to my dog, Fido. According to intentionalism, my intention to refer to Fido is part of the explanation of the way that the demonstrative gets Fido as its referent. A natural corollary is that the speaker is, to some extent, in control of this semantic fact. In this paper, we argue that intentionalism must give up the claim that the speaker is always in control, and thus, that intentions are (...) always the mental states that do the semantic work: we provide new examples where reference is successful but the speaker either lacks the intention to refer, or does not know how to refer; in all of these cases, the speaker is not in control of reference. We argue that these cases provide better objections against classical intentionalism than the ones offered by conventionalists (for example, Stojnić et al. 2013; Stojnić 2021) and also that our discussion has as notable consequence that referring is not an essentially intentional action. Finally, we put forward our own view, which gives up claims of control but retains from intentionalism the importance of the speaker’s mental states. (shrink)

This essay argues that the main lesson of Lewis Carroll's Regress is that arguments are constitutively presuppositional.

This paper overviews some recent work on the semantics and pragmatics of arguments.

I argue for an analysis of ‘therefore’ as presupposition trigger against the more standard conventional implicature story originally put forward by Grice (1975). I propose that we model the relevant presupposition as “testing” the context in a way that is similar to how, according to some dynamic treatments of epistemic `must', ‘must’ tests the context. But whereas the presupposition analysis is plausible for ‘therefore’, ‘must’ is not plausibly a presupposition trigger. Moreover, whereas ‘must’ can naturally occur under a supposition, the (...) same is not true for ‘therefore’. In the light of these differences, I suggest we distinguish between different sorts of tests on the basis of the mechanisms whereby these expressions test the context (whether through a presupposition or through their core content) and on the basis of whether they can operate only on categorical contexts or on both categorical and hypothetical contexts. (shrink)

Aristotle’s use of the term ‘eironeia’ in the Nicomachean Ethics (NE) appears to be inconsistent: first, he attributes the attitude termed ‘eironeia’ to the great-souled man (megalopsychos), who is defined by his virtuousness, then he classifies ‘eironeia’ as one of the two vices which are central to his account of the virtue of truthfulness. Modern attempts to explain and to solve the “riddle of the great-souled eiron” have not been satisfying. This paper argues that the riddle results from Aristotle trying (...) to reconcile aristocratic values with democratic reality. In the process, some insight will be gained on the concept of the megalopsychos in general, on Aristotle’s notion of the virtue of truthfulness and on his depiction of Socrates. Finally, it is argued that Aristotle’s use of the notion of ‘eironeia’ in the NE bears some resemblance to the use of the notion of ‘irony’ in modern political theory. (shrink)

Guaspari (J Symb Logic 48:777–789, 1983) conjectured that a modal formula is it essentially Σ1 (i.e., it is Σ1 under any arithmetical interpretation), if and only if it is provably equivalent to a disjunction of formulas of the form ${\square{B}}$ . This conjecture was proved first by A. Visser. Then, in (de Jongh and Pianigiani, Logic at Work: In Memory of Helena Rasiowa, Springer-Physica Verlag, Heidelberg-New York, pp. 246–255, 1999), the authors characterized essentially Σ1 formulas of languages including witness comparisons (...) using the interpretability logic ILM. In this note we give a similar characterization for formulas with a binary operator interpreted as interpretability in a finitely axiomatizable extension of IΔ 0 + Supexp and we address a similar problem for IΔ 0 + Exp. (shrink)