Practical knowledge (5)

Following the semantics of certain linguists, they propose to read such sentences as containing embedded questions: "to knowhow" is to know the answer to a question, a question of the same type as that which can be asked when we substitute "when", "where", "if yes or no" for "how", i.e. " wh-questions " (for whether, whom, what, which, when, why). They focus on a subcategory of embedded question constructions of the form: x knows how, when, where, involving infinitive phrases - e.g. "John knows when to hit a ball on the fly" - that feature what linguists call a neutral element, or "PRO", in subject position in the embedded clause, meant to play the role of subject of the infinitive phrase [1]. Sometimes PRO is not linked in its sentence to a grammatical antecedent (e.g. "John asked Bill how PROshould behave (to behave oneself) in such circumstances". The subject of the infinitive phrase seems to be the generic term "soi" (" one ", " oneself "). Sometimes, PRO is "placed under control", i.e. receives its interpretation from a prior antecedent. E.g.: "Bekele expects PRO to win the race". Bekele doesn't simply expect someone to win the race, but that it will be him (" himself ", not " oneself "). In such "controlled" cases, the correct reading of the sentence must be " de se ", i.e. as a propositional analysis involving a first-person way of thinking, which does not prevent the content of the sentence being directed at an object [2]. The key point, then, is that savoir faire is essentially a relationship to a question that involves a mental state whose mode of presentation is in the first person. To give a non-trivial characterization of what a first-person mode of presentation consists in is not, in philosophy, an easy task. But the same applies to the non-trivial characterization of a practical mode of presentation. In both cases, we can provide proof of the existence of these modes. To think of a person as "oneself", or of a place as "here", is to be disposed to behave in certain ways, or to form certain beliefs, given the information we have about that person or place. Likewise, thinking about a way in a practical mode of presentation implies the possession of complex dispositions. Hence the close links between know-how and dispositional states [3]. But this in no way prevents us from saying that savoir faire is a species of propositional knowledge. To say that someone knows how to do F is always to attribute propositional knowledge, which can be expressed as follows:

(3) _Hannahi, knows [how _PROi to ride a bicycle].

We'll say that (3) is true relative to context, if and only if, for any contextually relevant way m for Hannah to ride a bicycle, Hannah knows that m is a way for her to ride a bicycle. The proposition is thus supposed to reflect the link intuitively felt between "Hannah knows how to ride a bike" and "Hannah knows which way to ride a bike". The first benefit of such an analysis is to be in line with the syntax and semantics proposed for this kind of construction. If we were to reject it, we'd have to reject some of the firmly held beliefs we have in linguistics about these constructions. This would justify trying something else if we had encountered serious difficulties in the analysis. But, say Stanley and Williamson, this is not the case. A second benefit of the analysis is therefore to explain certain features of the attributions of know-how, which other analyses are unable to do.