Geoff Pullum is a syntax nerd, but don’t let that stop you reading “his latest post”:http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000580.html!
But just to illustrate that even nerds can make mistakes, he’s wrong when he says that “macaques have knowledge how but not propositional knowledge”:http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000525.html. This is not to say that Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy, the target of Geoff’s attack, is right. It’s pretty clear that the macaques in question have never said anything with propositional content. But since, as Jason Stanley and Tim Williamson argued (“Knowing How”, __Journal of Philosophy__, **98**, 2001: 411-44) all knowledge-how is propositional knowledge, it is impossible that the macaques could know how to get food without having propositional knowledge.
Stanley and Williamson argue that we can directly construct a proposition that a creature who knows how to blah knows: __thus is a way to blah__, where __thus__ picks out demonstratively the method they use to blah. I won’t repeat Stanley and Williamson’s argument here, instead I’ll run a secondary argument that can bolster their conclusion. (UPDATE: Actually, this is one of the arguments they run as well. Oops. Think of this whole post as being expository rather than setting out something that might be construed as, er, new.)
‘Knows’ is not ambiguous between (on the one hand) a relation that holds between a knower and a proposition and (on the other) a relation that holds between a knower and a type of action. If it were, (1) would be problematic, when actually it is fine.
bq. (1) Alex knows which places sell beer this time of night and how to get to the nearest one.
‘Knows’ is ambiguous between the relation denoted in (1) and a relation that holds between two people as in (2).
bq. (2) Alex knows Shea.
We can argue for that by noting that (3) is odd, in a way that (1) isn’t.
bq. (3) ??Alex knows which places sell beer this time of night and Shea, who runs a couple of them.
So the standard test for whether a term is ambiguous seems to work here – it correctly returns the verdict that ‘knows’ is at least two-ways ambiguous – and it says that it isn’t ambiguous between a ‘knowing-how’ reading and a ‘knowing-that’ reading.
(I know that some languages have different words for these two meanings. That’s no proof that English ‘knows’ is ambiguous. After all, most European languages have different words for female cousin and male cousin, but that’s no proof that English __cousin__ is ambiguous between female cousin and male cousin. The ambiguity test seems to show fairly definitively the English word is not ambiguous.)
From the fact that the English word is unambiguous, we can get the conclusion that knowledge how is propositional knowledge in a couple of ways.
First, we can try a sledgehammer approach. ‘Propositional knowledge’ is a term of art. It’s not like we have these independently defined things, propositions, and we can then ask whether a macaque or whatever knows one of them. Propositional knowledge is just the relation that a creature stands in to something when a sentence “x knows y” is true, x refers to that creature, and ‘knows’ means what it means in paradigm instances of propositional knowledge claims. So saying “That macaque knows how to get food” just is to say that the macaque has a piece of propositional knowledge.
If you don’t like being that blunt, we can try more subtle methods. The best explanation for the fact that there’s no ambiguity in English at this point is that there’s no difference in meaning for English to latch onto. Since many competent speakers think there’s an ambiguity, the best explanation of that is that there’s only one relation here for the word(s) to latch onto. So we again conclude that propositional knowledge also encompasses knowledge-how.
So I think Geoff is wrong to say macaques don’t have propositional knowledge, though he’s right to say they don’t express that knowledge.
To conclude on a more conciliator note, Geoff is entirely correct about which things “should be taught in high school but aren’t”:http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000548.html.