Rules, Means, Abilities. Issues Concerning the Analysis of "S Knows How to Do X"

Abstract

Questions about the nature of knowing-how have often been disregarded in contemporary epistemology. It is easily assumed that know-how can be reduced to propositional accounts of knowledge. In this paper, I offer a diagnosis of the issues involved in the analysis of knowing-how. The confrontation between "dispositionalists" and "propositionalists" is considered as a dispute about different ways of explaining the normativity in the knowledge of rules. Knowing-how consists in grasping those rules that would explain the success in doing something. Finally, I provide a criticism of traditional reductive accounts of knowing-how to knowledge of propositions and advance a proposal to elucidate the nature of "practical grasping" of rules in terms of those capacities and competences that are subjectively identified by an agent and guide practically her performance.