ABSTRACT
There has been a swathe of writing in Analytic philosophy during the past decade or two aiming to undercut the ‘Rylean’ category of ‘knowing-how’. The “intellectualist” desire, focal in the work of Timothy Williamson and his followers, to convert know-how into knowledge-that, is a seemingly captivating desire, one that is troublingly easy for philosophers to fall into and not be able to get out of again. But, Read argues here, it is not a desire best countered simply by a defence of know-how as an independent category of knowledge. Nor even by claiming it necessarily to be a more fundamental category of knowledge. To the contrary: we ought to question whether there is any such thing as an over-arching category of ‘knowledge’ at all; we ought to question therefore whether know-how is well-understood as a kind of that (of knowledge); and, only insofar as it might (not ‘must’) be seen thus ought we, roughly, to follow Ryle et al. in inverting the supposed pre-eminence of knowledge-that over ‘knowledge-how’. Understanding the heart of Wittgenstein’s discussion of knowledge and understanding, which opens with PI 149, enables one to do these things.
