Ryle’s Knowing how and knowing how to act

Ryle's paper ‘Knowing How and Knowing That’ (1945), like chapter 2 of The Concept of Mind (1949), is concerned with how “thinking affects the course of practice,” but the paper treats a more compendious category of practice than the chapter does, and Ryle's arguments are best understood when this is taken into account. I argue that Ryle's central claim in both places was that putting propositional knowledge into practice requires a sort of knowledge that could not itself be propositional. This claim is rejected by those of Ryle's opponents who maintain that propositional knowledge is ascribed whenever someone is said to know how to do something. I argue against their account of ‘know how to.’ And I explain why they might be seen as complicit in a sort of Cartesianism that it was the purpose of The Concept of Mind to trounce. Knowing How covers a broad range of topics dealing with tacit and procedural knowledge, the psychology of skill, expertise, intelligence and intelligent action, the nature of ability, the syntax and semantics of embedded questions, the mind-body problem, phenomenal character, epistemic injustice, moral knowledge, the epistemology of logic, linguistic competence, the connection between knowledge and understanding, and the relation between theory and practice. This is the book on knowing how-an invaluable resource for philosophers, linguists, psychologists, and others concerned with knowledge, mind, and action