Know -wh ascriptions are ubiquitous in many languages. One standard analysis of know -wh is this: someone knows-wh just in case she knows that p, where p is an answer to the question included in the wh-clause. Additional conditions have also been proposed, but virtually all analyses assume that propositional knowledge of an answer is at least a necessary condition for knowledge-wh. This paper challenges this assumption, by arguing that there are cases where we have knowledge-wh without knowledge- that of (...) an answer, for example in the cases familiar from arguments for the Extended Mind hypothesis. (shrink)

The central and paradigmatic cases of knowledge discussed in philosophy involve the possession of truth. Is there in addition a distinct type of practical knowledge, which does not aim at the truth? This question is often approached through asking whether states attributed by “know-how” locutions are distinct from states attributed by “know-that”. This paper argues that the question of practical knowledge can be raised not only about some cases of “know-how” attributions, but also about some cases of so-called “know-wh” attributions; (...) and that certain features of this practical knowledge-wh put pressure on the standard analysis of know-wh. (shrink)

Do you know who you are? If the question seems unclear, it might owe to the notion of ‘knowing-wh’ (knowing-who, knowing-what, knowing-when, etc.). Such knowledge contrasts with ‘knowing-that’, the more familiar topic of epistemologists. But these days, knowing-wh is receiving more attention than ever, and here we will survey three current debates on the nature of knowing-wh. These debates concern, respectively, (1) whether all knowing-wh is reducible to knowing-that (‘generalized intellectualism’), (2) (...) whether all knowing-wh is relativized to a contrast proposition (‘contrastivism about knowing-wh’), and (3) whether the context-sensitivity of knowing-wh is a semantic or purely pragmatic phenomenon (‘contextualism vs. invariantism about knowing-wh’). (shrink)

Much of the debate on the nature of knowing how has been concerned with whether it is to be conceived of as an ability or as the possession of propositional knowledge, perhaps in a practical form. Comparatively little has been written about knowing wh constructions and the ways in which they do or do not fit into this debate. Do such debates have any bearing on the practical concerns of the educators of professionals? This paper considers the case (...) of Knowing Wh constructions and their epistemic status with reference to their use in professional contexts. The argument to be developed is that KT and KH are distinct but closely related epistemic abilities and that in assessing professional capacity we often find them together as part of an overall professional competence. The use of KWh constructions in professional settings supports this contention, as they can occur as cases of both KT and KH, depending on context. The claim is illustrated by examining and interpreting KWh constructions in professional qualifications and interpreting them in the context of what is required to make sense of them as elements of qualifications. (shrink)

This article presents a new criticisms of reductive approaches to knowledge-‘wh’ (i.e., those approaches on which whether one stands in the knowledge-‘wh’ relation to a question is determined by whether one stands in the knowledge-‘that’ relation to some answer(s) to the question). It argues in particular that the truth of a knowledge-‘wh’ attribution like ‘Janna knows where she can buy an Italian newspaper’ depends not only on what Janna knows about the availability of Italian newspapers, but on what she believes (...) about the matter. This dependence of Janna's knowledge-‘wh’ on her (possibly false) beliefs is incompatible with the reductive approach. (shrink)

For sentences such as (1), "Columbus knows that the sea is unpredictable", there is a face-value theory, according to which ‘that’-clauses are singular terms denoting propositions. Famously, Prior raised an objection to the theory, but defenders of the face-value theory such as Forbes, King, Künne, Pietroski and Stanley urged that the objection could be met by maintaining that in (1) ‘to know’ designates a complex relation along the lines of being in a state of knowledge having as content. Is the (...) theory safe, then? The aim of this paper is to show that a new problem for the theory arises if we consider attributions of skills, knacks, propensities and abilities. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss a view of de re thoughts that can be naturally endorsed in the wake of Russell's account. This is the view that a thought is about the very thing (res) rather than a mere characterization of it if and only if it is constitutively tied, if not to the existence, at least to the identity of its object and the thinker knows which/who the object of his/her thought is. Faced with the challenge of accommodating far (...) from uncommon cases of mistaken identity or substantial confusion on the part of the subject, I argue that the integrity of the view can be preserved and that the restrictions set on its truth by the advocates of the two-component picture and the anti-essentialists can be lifted. (shrink)

This article discusses a kind of knowledge classifiable as knowledge-wh but which seems to defy analysis in terms of the standard reductive theory of knowledge-wh ascriptions, according to which they are true if and only if one knows that p, where this proposition is an acceptable answer to the wh-question ‘embedded’ in the ascription. Specifically, it is argued that certain cases of knowing what an experience is like resist such treatment. I argue that in some of these cases, one (...) can know that p, where an acceptable answer to the question ‘What’s the experience like?’ is that p, but where one does not know what the experience is like. This could point to the distinctiveness of this sort of knowledge. (shrink)

It is often said that ‘what it is like’-knowledge cannot be acquired by consulting testimony or reading books [Lewis 1998; Paul 2014; 2015a]. However, people also routinely consult books like What It Is Like to Go to War [Marlantes 2014], and countless ‘what it is like’ articles and youtube videos, in the apparent hope of gaining knowledge about what it is like to have experiences they have not had themselves. This article examines this puzzle and tries to solve it by (...) appealing to recent work on knowing-wh ascriptions. In closing I indicate the wider significance of these ideas by showing how they can help us to evaluate prominent arguments by Paul [2014; 2015a] concerning transformative experiences. (shrink)

Epistemic logic has become a major field of philosophical logic ever since the groundbreaking work by Hintikka [58]. Despite its various successful applications in theoretical computer science, AI, and game theory, the technical development of the field has been mainly focusing on the propositional part, i.e., the propositional modal logics of “knowing that”. However, knowledge is expressed in everyday life by using various other locutions such as “knowing whether”, “knowing what”, “knowing how” and so on ( (...) class='Hi'>knowing-wh hereafter). Such knowledge expressions are better captured in quantified epistemic logic, as was already discussed by Hintikka [58] and his sequel works at length. This paper aims to draw the attention back again to such a fascinating but largely neglected topic. We first survey what Hintikka and others did in the literature of quantified epistemic logic, and then advocate a new quantifier-free approach to study the epistemic logics of knowing-wh, which we believe can balance expressivity and complexity, and capture the essential reasoning patterns about knowing-wh. We survey our recent line of work on the epistemic logics of ‘knowing whether”, “knowing what” and “knowing how” to demonstrate the use of this new approach. (shrink)

This paper argues that knowledge of what it’s like varies along a spectrum from more exact to more approximate, and that phenomenal concepts vary along a spectrum in how precisely they characterize what it’s like to undergo their target experiences. This degreed picture contrasts with the standard all-or-nothing picture, where phenomenal concepts and phenomenal knowledge lack any such degreed structure. I motivate the degreed picture by appeal to (1) limits in epistemic abilities such as recognition, imagination, and inference, and (2) (...) the semantics of ‘knows what it’s like’ expressions. I argue that approximate phenomenal knowledge cannot be explained merely via determinable or vague phenomenal concepts. I develop a framework for systematizing approximate knowledge of phenomenal character. And I explain how my view challenges some standard assumptions about the acquisition conditions, requirements for mastery, and referential mechanisms of phenomenal concepts. (shrink)

Reductionists about knowledge-wh hold that "s knows-wh" (e.g. "John knows who stole his car") is reducible to "there is a proposition p such that s knows that p, and p answers the indirect question of the wh-clause." Anti-reductionists hold that "s knows-wh" is reducible to "s knows that p, as the true answer to the indirect question of the wh-clause." I argue that both of these positions are defective. I then offer a new analysis of knowledge-wh as a special kind (...) of de re knowledge. (shrink)

How should one understand knowledge-wh ascriptions? That is, how should one understand claims such as ‘‘I know where the car is parked,’’ which feature an interrogative complement? The received view is that knowledge-wh reduces to knowledge that p, where p happens to be the answer to the question Q denoted by the wh-clause. I will argue that knowledge-wh includes the question—to know-wh is to know that p, as the answer to Q. I will then argue that knowledge-that includes a contextually (...) implicit question. I will conclude that knowledge is a question-relative state. Knowing is knowing the answer, and whether one knows the answer depends (in part) on the question. (shrink)

This article proposes an account of knowing-who constructions within a generalisation of Hintikka’s quantified epistemic logic employing the notion of a conceptual cover Aloni PhD thesis [1]. The proposed logical system captures the inherent context-sensitivity of knowing-wh constructions Boër and Lycan, as well as expresses non-trivial cases of so-called concealed questions Heim. Assuming that quantifying into epistemic contexts and knowing-who are linked in the way Hintikka had proposed, the context dependence of the latter will translate into a (...) context dependence of de re attitude ascriptions and this will result in a ready account of a number of traditionally problematic cases including Quine’s well-known double vision puzzles Quine. (shrink)

Some of α may be semantically interpreted in the position it is not pronounced in. illustration: Which story about her should none of the women forget? * Which story about her should someone who knows none of the women forget?

What does it mean to know how to do something? This book develops a comprehensive account of know-how, a crucial epistemic goal for all who care about getting things right, not only with respect to the facts, but also with respect to practice. It proposes a novel interpretation of the seminal work of Gilbert Ryle, according to which know-how is a competence, a complex ability to do well in an activity in virtue of guidance by an understanding of what it (...) takes to do so. This idea is developed into a full-fledged account, Rylean responsibilism, which understands know-how in terms of the normative guidance and responsible control of one's acts. Within the complex current debate about know-how, this view occupies a middle ground position between the intellectualist claim that know-how just is propositional or objectual knowledge and the anti-intellectualist claim that know-how just is ability. In genuine know-how, practical ability and guiding intellect are both necessary, but essentially intertwined. (shrink)

In this paper, we present a number of problems for intellectualism about knowledge-how, and in particular for the version of the view developed by Stanley & Williamson 2001. Their argument draws on the alleged uniformity of 'know how'-and 'know wh'-ascriptions. We offer a series of considerations to the effect that this assimilation is problematic. Firstly, in contrast to 'know wh'-ascriptions, 'know how'-ascriptions with known negative answers are false. Secondly, knowledge-how obeys closure principles whose counterparts fail for knowledge-wh and knowledge-that. Thirdly, (...) as opposed to knowledge-wh and knowledge-that, knowledge-how is inferentially isolated from further knowledge-that. We close by providing some evidence against the further reduction of knowledge-wh to knowledge-that, which is presupposed by the intellectualist theory under discussion. (shrink)

What kind of knowledge does one have when one knows what it is like to, say, fall in love, eat vegemite™, be a parent, or ride a bike? This Element addresses this question by exploring the tension between two plausible theses about this form of knowledge: (i) that to possess it one must have had the corresponding experience, and (ii) that to possess it one must know an answer to the 'what it is like' question. The Element shows how the (...) tension between these two theses helps to explain existing debates about this form of knowledge, as well as puzzling conflicts in our attitudes towards the possibility of sharing this knowledge through testimony, or other sources like literature, theories, and simulations. The author also offers a view of 'what it is like' knowledge which can resolve both the tension between (i) and (ii), and these puzzles around testimony. (shrink)

Chapter 1: Ryle on Knowing How Chapter 2: Knowledge-wh Chapter 3: PRO and the Representation of First-Person Thought Chapter 4: Ways of Thinking Chapter 5: Knowledge How Chapter 6: Ascribing Knowledge How Chapter 7: The Cognitive Science of Practical Knowledge Chapter 8: Knowledge Justified Preface A fact, as I shall use the term, is a true proposition. A proposition is the sort of thing that is capable of being believed or asserted. A proposition is also something that is characteristically (...) the kind of thing that is true or false; that snow is white is a true proposition, that Barack Obama is President of the United States as I am writing these words is another. Facts in this sense are not only among the things we believe and assert; they are also the kinds of things we know. The thesis of this book is that knowing how to do something is the same as knowing a fact. It follows that learning how to do something is learning a fact. For example, when you learned how to swim, what happened is that you learned some facts about swimming. Knowledge of these facts is what gave you knowledge of how to swim. Something similar occurred with every other activity that you now know how to do, such as riding a bicycle or cooking a meal. You know how to perform activities solely in virtue of your knowledge of facts about those activities. (shrink)

In ‘Knowing What Things Look Like,’ I argued against the immediacy of visual objectual knowledge, i.e. visual knowledge that a thing is F, for an object category F, such as avocado, tree, desk, etc. Joseph Shieber proposes a challenging dilemma in reply. Either knowing what Fs look like requires having concepts such as looks or it doesn’t. Either way my argument fails. If knowing what Fs look like doesn’t require having such concepts, then he claims we can (...) give an immediacy-friendly anti-intellectualist account of knowing what Fs look like, one that I neglected. If it does require having such concepts, then knowledge of what Fs look like plays no important role in ordinary cases of knowing things to be F by their looks. I argue for several claims. First, Shieber's anti-intellectualist proposal fails for independent reasons. Second, I give reasons for thinking that knowing what Fs look like doesn't require having a general concept of looks, which lessens worries about nonhuman animals having such knowledge. Finally, I consider the possibility, important to Shieber's argument, that nonhuman animals are simply incapable of knowing what Fs look like. I argue the implications for human knowledge are far from clear. (shrink)

This is the first detailed study to explore the little-understood notions of "knowing who someone is," "knowing a person's identity," and related locutions. It locates these notions within the context of a general theory of believing and a semantical theory of belief- and knowledge-ascriptions.The books's main contention is that what one knows, when one knows who someone is, is not normally an identity in the numerical sense of "a = b," but rather a certain sort of predication to (...) know who someone is is just to know that that person is F, where "F" is a predicate that is "important," in a technical sense defined by the authors, for the purposes determined by context. Their book offers a rigorous formal semantics for ascriptions of knowing and of knowing-who in particular, solving such well-known problems and paradoxes as Kripke's Puzzle, and Quines difficulties with de re belief, along the way.The authors apply their analysis to each of several important issues in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and ethical theory in which the previously unexamined notion of "knowing who" has loomed large-the mechanics of linguistic referring, the foundations of epistemic logic, problems of self-knowledge and self-regarding belief, universalizability and "Golden Rule" arguments in ethics, and moral "personalism" versus "impartialism."Stephen Boër is Professor of Philosophy at the Ohio State University. William Lycan is Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina and author of Logical Form in Natural Language. A Bradford Book. (shrink)

We consider two issues relating to WH-questions:(i) when you ask aWH-question you already have a description of the entity you are interested in,namely the description embodied in the question itself. You may evenhave very direct access to the entity – see (1) below.In general, what you want is an alternative description of some item thatyou already know a certain amount about.

In "Knowing the Answer" I argued that knowledge-wh is question-relative. For example, to know when the movie starts is to know the answer p to the question Q of when the movie starts. Berit Brogaard and Jesper Kallestrup have each responded with insightful critiques of my argument, and novel accounts of knowledge-wh. I am grateful to them both for continuing the discussion in so thoughtful a way.

A significant argument for the claim that knowing-wh is knowing-that, implicit in much of the literature, including Stanley and Williamson (2001), is spelt out and challenged. The argument includes the assumption that a subject's state of knowing-wh is constituted by their involvement in a relation with an answer to a question. And it involves the assumption that answers to questions are propositions or facts. One of Lawrence Powers' counterexamples to the conjunction of these two assumptions is developed, (...) responses to it are rebutted, and the possibility of rejecting the second rather than the first of these assumptions is explored briefly. (shrink)

This submission is addressed to the symposium on Prof. André Abath’s book “Knowing What Things Are: An Erotetic-Based Account” (2022).

This paper falls into three parts. The first looks at wh-constructions, focussing on the so-called factual whs, ‘X knows where… ’, ‘when’, ‘who’, ‘what’ etc. I suggest, drawing on both linguistic considerations and evidence from developmental psychology, that these constructions take things as their objects, not propositions; and that this may be why they are learned before those taking sentential complements. The second part moves to the case of telling-wh: to constructions such as telling someone who is at the door. (...) This construction brings a very particular set of requirements, not just to tell the truth, but to tell all the relevant truths and nothing but. The third section, in a critical discussion of Katherine Hawley's work, argues that an account of trust and testimony focussing on the telling-wh construction brings better results than one focussed on the blander idea of assertion. (shrink)

This is a précis of my book "Know-how as Competence. A Rylean Responsibilist Account".

This paper examines different kinds of definite descriptions denoting purely contingent, necessary or impossible objects. The discourse about contingent/impossible/necessary objects can be organised in terms of rational questions to ask and answer relative to the modal profile of the entity in question. There are also limits on what it is rational to know about entities with this or that modal profile. We will also examine epistemic modalities; they are the kind of necessity and possibility that is determined by _epistemic_ constraints (...) related to knowledge or rationality. Definite descriptions denote so-called _offices_, roles, or _things to be._ We explicate these α-offices as partial functions from possible worlds to chronologies of objects of type α, where α is mostly the type of individuals. Our starting point is Prior’s distinction between a ‘weak’ and ‘strong’ definite article ‘the’. In both cases, the definite description refers to at most one object; yet, in the case of the weak ‘the’, the referred object can change over time, while in the case of the strong ‘the’, the object referred to by the definite description is the same forever, once the office has been occupied. The main result we present is the way how to obtain a Wh-knowledge about who or what plays a given role presented by a hyper-office, i.e. _procedure_ producing an office. Another no less important result concerns the epistemic necessity of the impossibility of knowing who or what occupies the impossible office presented by a hyper-office. (shrink)

Many epistemologists have been attracted to the view that knowledge-wh can be reduced to knowledge-that. An important challenge to this, presented by Jonathan Schaffer, is the problem of “convergent knowledge”: reductive accounts imply that any two knowledge-wh ascriptions with identical true answers to the questions embedded in their wh-clauses are materially equivalent, but according to Schaffer, there are counterexamples to this equivalence. Parallel to this, Schaffer has presented a very similar argument against binary accounts of knowledge, and thereby in favour (...) of his alternative contrastive account, relying on similar examples of apparently inequivalent knowledge ascriptions, which binary accounts treat as equivalent. In this article, I develop a unified diagnosis and solution to these problems for the reductive and binary accounts, based on a general theory of knowledge ascriptions that embed presuppositional expressions. All of Schaffer's apparent counterexamples embed presuppositional expressions, and once the effect of these is taken into account, it becomes apparent that the counterexamples depend on an illicit equivocation of contexts. Since epistemologists often rely on knowledge ascriptions that embed presuppositional expressions, the general theory of them presented here will have ramifications beyond defusing Schaffer's argument. (shrink)

What is the relationship between the linguistic properties of knowledge-how ascriptions and the nature of knowledge-how itself? In this chapter I address this question by examining the linguistic methodology of Stanley and Williamson (2011) and Stanley (2011a, 2011b) who defend the intellectualist view that knowledge-how is a kind of knowledge-that. My evaluation of this methodology is mixed. On the one hand, I defend Stanley and Williamson (2011) against critics who argue that the linguistic premises they appeal to—about the syntax and (...) semantics of knowledge-how and knowledge-wh ascriptions—do not establish their desired conclusions about the nature of knowledge-how itself. But, on the other hand, I also criticize the role that linguistic considerations play in Stanley’s (2011a) response to apparent Gettier-style counterexamples to intellectualism. (shrink)

Intellectualism about knowledge-how is the view that practical knowledge is a species of propositional knowledge. I argue that this view is undermined by a difference in properties between knowledge-how and both knowledge-that and knowledge-wh. More specifically, I argue that both knowledge-that and knowledge-wh are easily transmitted via testimony while knowledge-how is not easily transmitted by testimony. This points to a crucial difference in states of knowledge. I also consider Jason Stanley's attempt to subsume knowledge-how under an account of de se (...) knowledge. I argue that there are crucial differences between de se knowledge and knowledge-how. Thus, this paper advances both the discussion of intellectualism and the literature on the nature of de se knowledge. (shrink)

SummaryThe apparent conflict between first person authority and externalism arises only from needlessly thinking of first person authority in terms of “knowing what.”.

The goal of this paper is primarily to pinpoint some substantial analytical and conceptual difficulties with the account of knowledge how proposed by (Stanley & Williamson, Knowing How, 2001) [henceforth S&W] and (Stanley, Knowing (How), 2011), (Stanley, Know How, 2011) based on (Groenendijk & Stokhof, 1984) [henceforth G&S] semantic analysis of embedded questions. In light of such difficulties, (1) we propose supplementing their account with an integrated approach of knowledge how, and suggest adding a mereological layer to the (...) semantic framework of embedded questions (2) we argue that the characteristics of what we call hybrid ways and hybrid knowledge strongly indicate reopening the issue of the proper account of questions towards the complementary relevant account of interrogation in communicative interactions, and the role of the context (in)forming knowledge-how. As a methodological principle, we remain neutral on the intellectualist vs anti-intellectualist debate. We also remain silent on the nature and explanation of the modes of presentations or ways of thinking that should be developed in order to adequately account for hybrid ways and hybrid knowledge. (shrink)

The verb know has the following well-known property. If someone is correctly described as knowing that p then it is the case that p , and if someone is correctly described as knowing wh , then any proposition which spells out what they know in knowing wh will be true.

In this dissertation I attempt to develop a better understanding of knowledge and belief. In Chapter 1 I offer an analysis of knowledge-wh . I argue that knowledge-wh ascriptions express that a subject stands in the knowledge relation to a question--where to stand in this knowledge relation to a question is to know an answer to the question. Additionally I adopt a contextualist picture of knowledge- wh . I raise some problems for invariantism about knowledge- wh and I argue that (...) contextualism about knowledge-wh fits nicely with a very natural understanding of the semantics of interrogatives, and the nature of questions. In Chapter 2 consider whether knowledge-how is importantly different from knowledge-wh . I argue that 'knows how' is ambiguous, but on one sense knowledge-how ascriptions should be treated just like the other knowledge ascriptions with interrogative complements. Hence this type of knowledge-how is not fundamentally distinct from knowledge-wh . In Chapter 3 I reconsider various theories about knowledge and knowledge- that ascriptions in light of our conclusions about knowledge- wh ascriptions. It seems that doing so can help adjudicate between contextualism and invariantism about knowledge-that and may help determine which form of contextualism about knowledge-that is the most plausible. In Chapter 4 I consider whether there is some fact about the nature of the attitudes that determines the verb's complement selection. Some have suggested that the embedding behavior of attitude verbs is correlated with the factivity of the attitude verb. I evaluate this suggestion and the possible explanations for the embedding behavior of the various attitude verbs. I attempt to determine the extent to which the factivity of verbs is correlated with their embedding behavior and I attempt to explain why factivity plays such an important role. I argue that these facts can provide important insights into the nature of the attitudes. In Chapter 5 I explore the way in which knowledge and action are related in an important way. I consider the claim that it is appropriate to treat the proposition that p as a reason for action if and only if you know that p . I first present and explain the principle. Next I consider some objections to the proposal, and I argue that none of these objections is successful. I claim that the contrastivist, in particular, has several moves available in the face of the alleged problems with this Reason-Knowledge principle. (shrink)

This paper responds to comments and criticisms by Stefan Brandt and Eva-Maria Jung, directed at the book "Know-how as Competence. A Rylean Responsibilist Account".

Determiner phrases embedded under a propositional attitude verb have traditionally been taken to denote answers to implicit questions. For example, 'the capital of Vermont' as it occurs in 'John knows the capital of Vermont' has been thought to denote the proposition which answers the implicit question 'what is the capital of Vermont?' Thus, where 'know' is treated as a propositional attitude verb rather than an acquaintance verb, 'John knows the capital of Vermont' is true iff John knows that Montpelier is (...) the capital of Vermont. The traditional view lost its popularity long ago, because it was thought to rest on the controversial assumption that determiner phases embedded under a propositional attitude verb function semantically in the same way as the corresponding wh-clauses. Here we defend the traditional assumption against objections. We then argue that wh-clauses are not to be given a uniform treatment as indirect questions. When occurring under a propositional attitude verb, wh-clauses are better treated as having a predicate-type semantic value. We conclude by considering some possible objections to the predicate view. (shrink)

Intellectualism about knowledge-how is the view that knowing how to do something amounts to knowing a fact. The version of intellectualism defended by Jason Stanley and Timothy Williamson holds that knowledge-how is a species of knowledge-wh, i.e., knowledge-where, -when, -who, etc. It draws its major motivation from the uniformity between ascriptions of knowledge-how and ascriptions of knowledge-wh in English, being all infinitival embedded question constructions. My aim in this paper is to challenge intellectualism of this sort. I argue (...) that the linguistic motivation for the view is not preserved across languages and that it cannot be sustained from the perspective of other languages. I will show this by examining ascriptions of practical knowledge and knowledge-wh in Russian, Turkish and German. The cross-linguistic data further suggest that ‘know how’ is ambiguous in English. In the end, the cross-linguistic data will be used to question an argument for the propositionality of practical knowledge. (shrink)

The ability to explain the occurrence of errors in children's speech is an essential component of successful theories of language acquisition. The present study tested some generativist and constructivist predictions about error on the questions produced by ten English-learning children between 2 and 5 years of age. The analyses demonstrated that, as predicted by some generativist theories [e.g. Santelmann, L., Berk, S., Austin, J., Somashekar, S. & Lust. B. (2002). Continuity and development in the acquisition of inversion in yes/no questions: (...) dissociating movement and inflection, Journal of Child Language, 29, 813-842], questions with auxiliary DO attracted higher error rates than those with modal auxiliaries. However, in wh-questions, questions with modals and DO attracted equally high error rates, and these findings could not be explained in terms of problems forming questions with why or negated auxiliaries. It was concluded that the data might be better explained in terms of a constructivist account that suggests that entrenched item-based constructions may be protected from error in children's speech, and that errors occur when children resort to other operations to produce questions [e.g. Dabrowska, E. (2000). From formula to schema: the acquisition of English questions. Cognitive Liguistics, 11, 83-102; Rowland, C. F. & Pine, J. M. (2000). Subject-auxiliary inversion errors and wh-question acquisition: What children do know? Journal of Child Language, 27, 157-181; Tomasello, M. (2003). Constructing a language: A usage-based theory of language acquisition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press]. However, further work on constructivist theory development is required to allow researchers to make predictions about the nature of these operations. (shrink)

We discuss a phenomenon that appears when ‘even’ occurs in questions. Specifically, an inference of what we call “extreme ignorance” is projected onto the speaker. We argue that this effect arises when the known unlikelihood ‘even’ focuses an entire question, resulting in the focused question being the least likely to be asked. Specific implicatures then conspire to bring about the inference that the speaker does not know the answer to the question that is most expected to be known. The environments (...) explored are Wh-questions and Y/N questions, and the languages looked at primarily English, Greek, German and Russian. (shrink)

We discuss the 'problem of convergent knowledge', an argument presented by J. Schaffer in favour of contextualism about knowledge attributions, and against the idea that knowledge- wh can be simply reduced to knowledge of the proposition answering the question. Schaffer's argument centrally involves alternative questions of the form 'whether A or B'. We propose an analysis of these on which the problem of convergent knowledge does not arise. While alternative questions can contextually restrict the possibilities relevant for knowledge attributions, what (...) Schaffer's puzzle reveals is a pragmatic ambiguity in what 'knowing the answer' means: in his problematic cases, the subject knows only a partial answer to the question. This partial knowledge can be counted as adequate only on externalist grounds. (shrink)

In a now famous thought experiment, Frank jackson asked us t0 imagine an omniscient scientist, Mary, who is coniincd in a black-and-white room and then released into the world 0f color . Assuming that she is omniscicnt in respect of all physical facts—roughiy, all the facts available to physics and all the facts that they in turn Hx or determine-physicalism would suggest that there is no new fact Mary can discover after emancipation; physicalism holds that all facts are physical in (...) the relevant sense . Yet we cannot help but feel that coming out of that room would be an occasion of dramatic enlightenment and, in particular, an occasion for learning facts to do with how red or yellow or blue 100ks or, as it is usually said, with what it is like t0 sec red or yellow or blue. Many in the black-and—whit<—: room knew all the physical facts about the world, where these may be taken to include three sorts of color facts: objcctual facts, as to what surface colors different objects have, assuming as I shall do throughout—that colors are properties of objects; intentional facts, as to which colors different objects 0r apparent objects are represented as having in the subjc-:ct’s experience, rightly or wrongly; and nonintentional facts, about what such color experiences are like in their effects on subiccts—wh<—:ther they are comforting, or arousing, or whatever. But, according to the argument, Mary didn’t know how any color looks or, equivalently, what color experience is like in itself, not just in its effects O1'1 subjects. This particular nonintentional fact about the quality of color c-zxpc-2ri<—:ncc-—this phenomenal fact, as it is often describcd—she did not. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with reconstruction theories of which-questions, and shows that one major limitation of these approaches lies in the way these theories derive de dicto readings of sentences such as Mary knows which children cried. Specifically, we show that when a wide range of de dicto facts is considered, an analysis where wh-phrases never reconstruct must be preferred over the reconstruction approach.

In cue-based content-addressable approaches to memory, a target and its competitors are retrieved in parallel from memory via a fast, associative cue-matching procedure under a severely limited focus of attention. Such a parallel matching procedure could in principle ignore the serial order or hierarchical structure characteristic of linguistic relations. I present an eye tracking while reading experiment that investigates whether the sentential position of a potential antecedent modulates the strength of similarity-based interference, a well-studied effect in which increased similarity in (...) features between a target and its competitors results in slower and less accurate retrieval overall. The manipulation trades on an independently established Locality bias in sluiced structures to associate a wh -remnant ( which ones ) in clausal ellipsis with the most local correlate ( some wines ), as in The tourists enjoyed some wines, but I don't know which ones. The findings generally support cue-based parsing models of sentence processing that are subject to similarity-based interference in retrieval, and provide additional support to the growing body of evidence that retrieval is sensitive to both the structural position of a target antecedent and its competitors, and the specificity or diagnosticity of retrieval cues. (shrink)

Discussions of group knowledge typically focus on whether a group’s knowledge that p reduces to group members’ knowledge that p. Drawing on the cumulative reading of collective knowledge ascriptions and considerations about the importance of the division of epistemic labour, I argue what I call the Fragmented Knowledge account, which allows for more complex relations between individual and collective knowledge. According to this account, a group can know an answer to a question in virtue of members of the group (...) class='Hi'>knowing parts of that answer, when the whole answer is available to group-level action. I argue that this account explains a swathe of central cases of group knowledge, as well as explaining some central features of group knowledge. (shrink)

In Chapter V of his book Res Cogitans — “On What One Knows” — Zeno Vendler attempts to maintain the thesis that the objects of knowledge and belief are incompatible, i.e., that the immediate object of believing is a picture of reality and “the immediate object of knowing is not a picture of reality but reality itself”. We shall argue that he fails in this attempt because his “incompatibilism” depends on the view that the that-clauses which are the basic (...) verb objects of know and believe are of a type which reflect a distinction between the subjective and objective dimensions of the mental world; and it is exactly this which he does not establish;and question the philosophical significance of the wh-nominal.In Chapter IV — “Propositions” — Vendler tries to draw a distinction between “the subjective and objective dimensions of the mental world”. The subjective dimension corresponds to the world of propositions. (shrink)

In Chapter 5 of his book, Res Cogitans, Zeno Vendler argued for the thesis that what we know when we know that p, e.g. that Los Angeles is south of San Francisco, and what we believe when we believe that p cannot be the same despite being expressed in the same words, on the ground that ‘believe’ is what he called a subjective verb and ‘know’ what he called an objective verb. For this he gave two main criteria that subjective (...) verbs can take only ‘subjective that- clauses,’ by which he means clauses which express propositions, whereas objective verbs can take only ‘objective that-clauses,’ by which he means clauses which express facts; that subjective verbs cannot take, whereas objective verbs can take, wh- nominalisations - in practice these are the interrogatives what, who where, when, how - which Vendler also takes as a mark of the objective. (shrink)

This is an introduction to the debate about Know-how.

According to a prominent account of knowledge-how, knowledge-how is a species of propositional knowledge. A related view has it that to know how to perform an action is for it to seem to one that a way to perform that action is in fact a way to do so. According to a further view, knowledge-how is a species of objectual knowledge. Each of these intellectualist views has significant virtues including, notably, the ability to account for the seemingly epistemic dimensions of (...) knowledge-how. However, while intellectualist views can account for the seemingly epistemic dimensions of knowledge-how, such views have difficulty accounting for the practical dimensions of knowledge-how. The objection I level against existing intellectualist views here seizes on this deficiency. I argue that, in virtue of the practical dimensions of knowledge-how, propositional knowledge under a practical mode of presentation is not sufficient for knowledge-how. Even when the sufficiency conditions for knowledge-how set out by extant intellectualist views are met, one may fail to know how to perform an action in virtue of a disposition to act on a false belief about a way for one to perform that action. Thus, whereas critics of intellectualist views often allege that such views place overly demanding conditions on knowledge-how, the objection developed here suggests that existing intellectualist views place insufficiently demanding conditions on knowledge-how. (shrink)