In the sixth lecture, we proceeded to evaluate these "drops of grammar" and the "clouds of philosophy" they condense, noting in passing that Stanley and Williamson are the first to criticize their linguistic arguments in favor of intellectualism. We have distinguished several types of objection here, both linguistic and metaphysical: Stanley and Williamson claim a certain syntax and semantics to explain their analyses of attributions of savoir faire, but can't we invoke others? Can we so easily reduce all embedded questions to "wh-questions [1] "? Are there no other possible semantics of savoir faire? Is it necessarily reducible to propositional knowledge? Shouldn't we take into account the two lexical meanings of the single verb " know " in English, which are translated into German as " kennen " and " wissen", and into French as "savoir" and "connaître"? Propositional knowledge faces the well-known problem of referentialopacity, but aren't attributions of know-how rather "transparent"? In some cases, we are ready to attribute a form of practical knowledge or savoir faire to animals (Medor knows (how) to catch the ball), but find it harder to judge them conceptually sophisticated enough to possess "propositional" knowledge [2]. This is not to say that we couldn't argue - as Stanley and Williamson do - in favor of the thesis that ascribing a savoir faire F goes hand in hand with the possibility of ascribing false beliefs about how to do F, which are obviously propositional.
14:30 - 16:00
