ABSTRACT
Much of the philosophical literature on skill takes for granted that skill and know-how are roughly equivalent. Two recent developments provide an opportunity to question this prevailing notion. The first development is Jason Stanley and Timothy Williamson’s account of skill as a disposition to manifest know-how; and of know-how as entailing knowing whether, knowing which, knowing what, and other ‘know-wh’ states. Since the latter are states of propositional knowledge, skill is understood to be a disposition to manifest situation-specific propositional knowledge states. The second development is Jessie Munton’s project to understand visual perception as a type of skilled performance, drawing on Stanley and Williamson’s analysis of skill. Munton’s project is itself motivated by two other developments in the philosophical literature on perception: cognitive penetration of vision and perceptual learning. Let’s call instances of cognitive penetration that manifest implicit biases visual prejudice. I argue that instances of visual prejudice are skilled. First, I canvass philosophical and empirical literature for a set of features characteristic of skilled performances and argue that visual prejudice is skilled because it instantiates those features. Next, I argue that visual prejudice is skilled on Stanley and Williamson’s analysis because it manifests situation-specific know-wh states. But since visual prejudice does not manifest knowledge of facts, instances of visual prejudice are not instances of know-how. I conclude that visual prejudice is a counterexample to the prevailing notion that skill and know-how are roughly equivalent.
