ABSTRACT
In 2013, Stanley and Krakauer’s (S&K) paper “Motor skill depends on knowledge of facts”, argued the intellectualist case for practical knowledge. Here I will focus on criticisms directed at how S&K used the seminal case of the amnestic patient HM to make their argument. The core of S&K’s argument was that the demonstration that HM, who lacked short-term declarative memory, was able to learn and recall how to mirror draw across days does not prove that declarative knowledge is not needed to acquire such an ability in particular or motor skills in general. Indeed, in their paper, S&K reported on other amnestic patients who could not learn to use novel tools. Critics deal with this awkward fact by saying that the declarative knowledge needed to use such tools does not count as part of the motor skill or is not really knowledge at all. I argue here that these positions are untenable. More importantly, based on recent experimental evidence, I show that even those parts of a motor skill that seem to survive the loss of declarative memory are initially constructed with declarative knowledge but then automatize. For example, I initially knew my six-figure PIN declaratively but through practice it automatized. If I were to become amnestic I would still be able to use an ATM but this does not mean there was no initial declarative phase. The mistaken idea that neuroscience supports the distinction between “knowing-how” and “knowing-what” is attributable to inadequate lab-based motor skill tasks.
