DOI: 10.1111/ejop.

12150

A Capacity to Get Things Right: Gilbert Ryle on

Knowledge
Michael Kremer

Abstract: Gilbert Ryle’s distinction between knowledge-how and knowledge-that

faces a significant challenge: accounting for the unity of knowledge. Jason Stanley,
an ‘intellectualist’ opponent of Ryle’s, brings out this problem by arguing that
Ryleans must treat ‘know’ as an ambiguous word and must distinguish
knowledge proper from knowledge-how, which is ‘knowledge’ only so-called. I
develop the challenge and show that underlying Ryle’s distinction is a unified
vision of knowledge as ‘a capacity to get things right’, covering both
knowledge-how and knowledge-that. I show how Ryle specifies the general
notion into knowledge-how and knowledge-that and discuss the mutual
interdependence exhibited by the two forms of knowledge. Ryle’s positive view
of knowledge, properly understood, emerges as an important, neglected,
alternative which should be brought back into the ongoing conversation about
practical and theoretical knowledge.

1. Introduction

Gilbert Ryle is perhaps most famous for making a distinction between

knowledge-how and knowledge-that, a distinction he drew in opposition to
‘intellectualists’ who understand practical competences as instances of proposi-
tional knowledge of truths. On the face of it, Ryle’s position must overcome a
significant difficulty: to explain the unity of knowledge. Jason Stanley, a contem-
porary proponent of intellectualism, brings out this problem by arguing that
Ryleans must treat ‘know’ as an ambiguous word and must distinguish
knowledge proper from knowledge-how, which is ‘knowledge’ only so-called. I
will show, however, that underlying Ryle’s distinction is a unified vision of
knowledge as a ‘capacity to get things right’, covering both knowledge-how
and knowledge-that. On Ryle’s view, properly understood, the two forms of
knowledge stand in mutual, complex, relations of interdependence, so that
neither can be said to be simply prior to the other. This not only sheds light
on Ryle’s views but is also significant for the contemporary debate on the
nature of knowledge-how, in which, though the name of Ryle is often invoked,
his actual views have been neglected. Ryle’s position thus emerges as an impor-
tant alternative which should be brought back into the ongoing conversation
about practical and theoretical knowledge.1

European Journal of Philosophy 25:1 ISSN 0966-8373 pp. 25–46 © 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
26 Michael Kremer

2. Ryle on ‘The Intellectualist Legend’

Ryle develops his view of practical knowledge in opposition to the ‘prevailing

doctrine’, which he labels ‘the intellectualist legend’. (Ryle 1945a: 212, 217) He
initially formulates this as a view about ‘intelligence’ concepts: ‘intelligence is a
special faculty, the exercises of which are … specific internal acts … of thinking
… the operations of considering propositions’; ‘practical activities merit their titles
“intelligent”, “clever”, and the rest only because they are accompanied by …
internal acts of considering propositions’. (Ryle 1945a: 212) Ryle, however, links
‘intelligence’ to ‘knowing-how’ and so treats ‘intellectualism’ as a view about such
knowledge2:
Philosophers have not done justice to the distinction which is quite
familiar to all of us between knowing that something is the case and
knowing how to do things. …They assume that intelligence equates with
the contemplation of propositions and is exhausted in this contemplation.
I want to turn the tables and to prove that knowledge-how cannot be
defined in terms of knowledge-that … (Ryle 1945a: 215)
‘Intellectualists’, as Ryle calls his opponents, ‘suppose that the primary exercise
of minds consists in finding the answers to questions and that their other occupa-
tions are merely applications of considered truths or even regrettable distractions
from their consideration’. (Ryle 1949: 26) His aim is to show that ‘All this intellec-
tualist legend must be rejected…’ (Ryle 1945a: 215, 217; Ryle 1949: 27, 29, 30, 32).
He attacks this ‘legend’ by the use of regress arguments turning on the principle
that ‘The consideration of propositions is an operation the execution of which
can be more or less intelligent, less or more stupid’. (Ryle 1949: 30)
While Ryle provides no references to supporters of this ‘prevailing doctrine’, it is
not hard to find examples of the sort of thinker he had in mind. For example, in his
Manual of Psychology, the philosopher and psychologist G.F. Stout3 distinguished
‘animal intelligence’, which is guided by perceptual processes and concerns only
‘action in its actual execution’, from ‘human intelligence’, which depends on idea-
tional processes that allow man to ‘construct[s] “in his head”, by means of trains of
ideas, schemes of action before he begins to carry them out. He is thus capable of
overcoming difficulties in advance. He can cross a bridge before he comes to it’.
(Stout 1901: 276) For Stout, while not all intelligence depends on prior mental
planning, such thinking is characteristic of the higher form of human intelligence.
This view of human intelligence exemplifies Ryle’s intellectualist target.4 In
contrast, Ryle maintains that intelligence is exhibited in knowledge-how, which
does not depend on ‘trains of ideas’ or ‘schemes of action’.

3. Stanley’s intellectualist challenge

Beginning with his co-authored 2001 paper, ‘Knowing How’ (with Timothy
Williamson), Jason Stanley has opposed Ryle’s distinction and argued for what

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he calls ‘intellectualism’: ‘Knowledge-how is simply a species of knowledge-that’.

(Stanley and Williamson 2001: 411) In his 2011 book, Know How, Stanley, like Ryle’s
intellectualist, holds that knowing-how is knowing the answer to a question: ‘…
when you learned how to swim … you learned … the proposition that answers
a question – the question “How could you swim?” Knowing how to do something
therefore amounts to knowing the answer to a question’. (Stanley 2011b: vi) More
precisely, for Stanley, S’s knowledge-how-to-V is S’s knowledge-that [W is a way
for S herself to V], for some way W with which S is acquainted. (Stanley 2011b: 122)
Stanley characterizes his position as ‘reasonable intellectualism’ since he allows
that propositional knowledge (and belief) can be manifested in action without
the occurrence of an act of contemplating or self-avowing its content. As we shall
see, Ryle views both belief and propositional knowledge as dispositions (a
tendency and a capacity, respectively) and so would also accept this view of the
manifestation of propositional knowledge. Nonetheless, Stanley attributes to Ryle
the thought that ‘possession of propositional knowledge is behaviorally inert’ and
‘does not entail the possession of dispositional states’.5 (Stanley 2011b: 26)
Stanley gets to this misunderstanding of Ryle in several stages. First, he attri-
butes to Ryle the view that ‘the thinking of thoughts [is] behaviorally inert … “oper-
ating from and with propositions” … is disengaged from action’. (Stanley 2011b:
11) This reading is correct, so long as ‘the thinking of thoughts’ and ‘operating with
propositions’ refer to explicit acts of propositional avowal or contemplation.
Second, Stanley diagnoses Ryle’s regress argument against intellectualism as de-
pending on a questionable premise: that intellectualism entails that any intelligent
action depends on a prior act of contemplating a proposition. (Stanley 2011b: 12)
He argues that if this premise is built into the definition of intellectualism, Ryle’s tar-
get is a ‘manifestly absurd’ position that can only be a straw man. (Stanley 2011b:
14) Stanley then jumps to attributing to Ryle the assumption that propositional
knowledge is behaviorally inert. I think that Stanley must here be reading Ryle
as holding that knowledge-that is always a matter of ‘thinking thoughts’ or
‘operating with propositions’. That would both explain why Ryle would think that
intellectualism – the thesis that knowledge-how is always to be regarded as guided
by propositional knowledge – requires that knowledge-how is guided by explicit
contemplation of propositions, and entail that for Ryle, knowledge-that is
‘behaviorally inert’. But it would also attribute to Ryle a view of propositional
knowledge against which he sets himself when he argues that knowledge is
dispositional and cannot be reduced to acts of ‘ “cognising”, “judging”, or
internally re-asserting, with a feeling of confidence’. (Ryle 1949: 44–5) Stanley’s
motivation for this complex misunderstanding of Ryle’s view of propositional
knowledge seems to be that it avoids attributing a straw man argument to Ryle.
However, this argument commits a fallacy of anachronism; as the example of
G.F. Stout shows, the sort of intellectualism considered by Stanley to be ‘manifestly
absurd’ was actually held by philosophers and others in the first part of the
twentieth century and in fact is what Ryle is arguing against.6
It follows, however, that Ryle’s famous regress arguments do not target
Stanley’s ‘reasonable intellectualism’, according to which knowledge-how is a

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28 Michael Kremer

species of propositional knowledge which can be manifested in behavior without

explicit acts of propositional avowal or contemplation. Thus, to argue for the
Rylean distinction between knowledge-how and knowledge-that, one would
have to adduce other Rylean considerations, such as those deriving from the fact
that knowledge-how comes in degrees, while knowledge-that does not. 7 (Ryle
1949: 59) Stanley rebuts such arguments in Know How (Stanley 2011b: 31ff),
and in a full argument for Ryle’s distinction, it would be necessary to undercut
his replies.8 However, this is not my project. My goals are preliminary: to get
clear on Ryle’s positive account of knowledge-how and knowledge-that and
thereby to show how this account meets the challenge of explaining the unity
of knowledge.
The problem facing a Rylean account of the unity of knowledge emerges from a
contrast with Stanley’s intellectualism. Stanley emphasizes that his account offers a
unified treatment of two forms of knowledge, in which knowing-how is a species of
knowing-that. Semantically, it allows for a univocal treatment of ‘know’, which
always denotes a relation to a proposition; the difference between attributions of
practical knowledge and more ordinary knows-that attributions lies only in the na-
ture of the proposition known. In contrast, he claims: ‘According to Gilbert Ryle …
knowing how to F is not a species of propositional knowledge. Instead, knowing
how is a distinctive kind of non-propositional mental state. … the fact that it is
expressed with the same word is an accident of the English language’. (Stanley
2011a: 211) Therefore, ‘those who [like Ryle] deny that skill requires propositional
knowledge must endorse a genuine ambiguity claim’. (Stanley 2011b: 176; see also
Stanley 2011a: 232) On Stanley’s view, Ryle has to treat practical knowledge as
knowledge in name only, which must be demoted to a second-class status and
contrasted with knowledge proper: ‘According to the Rylean, knowing-how is a re-
lation that holds between a person and an action-type. It is distinct from knowing,
which is a relation that holds between a person and a proposition’. (Stanley 2011a:
227) In a co-authored piece with John Krakauer, Stanley asserts that ‘knowledge is,
minimally, a state with propositional content’ and claims that the use of the phrase
‘procedural knowledge’ in psychological literature ‘already introduces a
contradiction’. As they put the point in a rhetorical question, ‘What is non-factual
knowledge of an action?’ (Stanley and Krakauer 2013: 1-2)
This paper develops Ryle’s account of knowledge and shows how it evades
such criticisms. In section 4, I discuss two ways in which one could unify
knowledge-how and knowledge-that, other than by treating the former as a
species of the latter: (a) treating knowledge-that and knowledge-how as species
of a common genus; or (b) treating ‘knows’ as a polysemous term with a core
meaning shared by both ‘knows that’ and ‘knows how to’. I argue that Ryle should
be understood as embracing the second of these options. Section 5 lays out the core
meaning of ‘knows’ in terms of the idea of a ‘capacity to get things right’. Section 6
develops Ryle’s account of knowledge-how, while sections 7 and 8 are devoted to
his account of knowledge-that. Sections 9 and 10 explore the interdependencies
between the two forms of knowledge, and in Section 11, I conclude that the
challenge of explaining the unity of knowledge can be met by Ryle.

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4. Ambiguity, Polysemy, and How to Unify Knowledge

How can knowledge be unified, without treating one of its forms as subsuming the
other? One obvious alternative is to take knowledge-how and knowledge-that to
be two species of a common genus, knowledge. As Ephraim Glick suggests in
‘Two Methodologies for Evaluating Intellectualism’, ‘anti-Intellectualism need
not be construed as postulating an ambiguity in “knows”’, since all that is needed
is ‘a distinction between two kinds of knowledge, not two meanings of “knows” ’.
Glick offers an analogy: ‘perhaps there are two kinds of pain, emotional and
physical, but “pain” is not thereby ambiguous’. (Glick 2011: 431)
Much of what I say below can be easily accommodated to this ‘two-species’
model of the unity of propositional and practical knowledge. However, this is
not precisely the right account to give of Ryle’s thinking. To see the alternative,
we should begin from the linguistic side. Stanley assumes that Ryle must choose
between two options: either ‘know’ is univocal, or it is simply ambiguous
(homonymous by a mere ‘accident of the English language’). But there is a third
possibility: ‘know’ might be polysemous, possessing ‘different meanings’ that are
‘closely related’, as the linguist Barbara Abbott puts it. (Abbott 2013: 7) Abbott
points out that ‘of course know must already be regarded as polysemous because
of uses such as that in “Mary knows Bill Clinton” ’, ascribing knowledge of things
(Russellian acquaintance).9
In ‘Philosophical Arguments’, delivered in the same year as ‘Knowing How and
Knowing That’, Ryle develops an account of the phenomenon of polysemy, although
he (somewhat unfortunately) calls it ‘systematic ambiguity’.10 (Ryle 1945b: 205–7)
Ryle distinguishes this phenomenon from simple homonymy, in which ‘words …
happen to have two or more different meanings’, dismissing such cases as ‘pun-
words’ where ‘the different ideas expressed … have … little connexion with one
another’. His interest is in ‘another sort of elasticity of signification’ which is
‘systematic’: as in polysemy, the ‘ideas expressed … are intimately connected with
each other … in one way or another different inflections of the same root’. (Ryle
1945b: 205–6) Ryle provides an example: we can use the word ‘punctual’ in
speaking of ‘a given person’s arrival at a place, the person who arrives there, his
character, and even the average character of a class of persons’. We would not be
predicating the same property in each case, yet the meanings of ‘punctual’ are
closely connected.
Ryle writes that systematic ambiguity arises when a ‘given word … in different
sorts of context, express[es] ideas of … differing logical types and, therefore, with
different logical powers’. (Ryle 1945b: 206) As a ‘philosophically more interesting
example’, he considers ‘the verb “to exist” ’. He argues that ‘it may be true that
there exists a cathedral in Oxford, a three-engined bomber, and a square number
between 9 and 25’, yet we should not conclude that ‘there are three existents, a
building, a brand of aircraft, and a number’, since ‘the senses of ‘exists’ in which
the three subjects are said to exist are different and their logical behaviors are
different’. (Ryle 1945b: 206) In The Concept of Mind, Ryle returns to the ‘systematic
ambiguity’ of ‘exists’, arguing that while one can say ‘there exists minds’ and ‘there

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30 Michael Kremer

exist bodies’, ‘these expressions do not indicate two different species of existence,
for “existence” is not a generic word like “colored” or “sexed”. They indicate
two different senses of “exist”’. (Ryle 1949: 23)
The different uses of a term having ‘systematic ambiguity’ do not represent dif-
ferent species of a common genus. Nonetheless, they bear important connections
and analogies to one another. The verb ‘exists’ again provides a good example.
The different uses of this verb all share the basic logical functions captured by
the existential quantifier. Consider how Russell would have understood the
difference between a first-order quantification ‘(∃x)Fx’ and a second-order
quantification ‘(∃F)Fa’. The same symbol ‘∃’ occurs in each formula. Its logic is
in a sense the same, since analogous inferential rules govern its use in reasoning,
and its semantics is structurally analogous, in the two cases. But the two
quantifiers work at different levels of the Russellian hierarchy of types, so they
have different but systematically interrelated meanings.11
I propose to understand Ryle’s view of ‘knows’ on the model of his view of
‘exists’ – as a ‘systematically ambiguous’ or ‘polysemous’ term, with distinct
but closely related meanings, bearing important structural and logical
analogies. ‘Knows how to’ and ‘knows that’ express different concepts, in
different logical categories, because they take different objects, and – as Ryle
repeatedly argues – they exhibit different logical behavior. Nonetheless, there
is a core meaning involved in the different uses of the verb ‘knows’. In a
slogan, to know is to have a ‘capacity to get things right’. Because of this, we
can treat knowledge as a unified subject, without treating all forms of
knowledge as species of propositional knowledge or treating them all as
different species of a common genus.12
An objection might be raised, however, that while Ryle does not see
knowledge-how as a species of knowledge-that, his comment in ‘Knowing How
and Knowing That’ that ‘knowledge-how is a concept logically prior to
knowledge-that’ (Ryle 1945a: 215) commits him to the converse that knowledge-
that is a species of knowledge-how. John Hartland-Swann, for example, argued
in 1956 that Ryle’s claim that ‘know’ is a capacity verb entails that ‘all cases of
knowing that … can … be reduced ultimately to cases of knowing how’ and
suggests that to know that p is just to know how to answer the question ‘p?’.
(Hartland-Swann 1956: 113–114) Ryle would diagnose two errors in his argument,
both of which will be important to bear in mind. First, Hartland-Swann tacitly
assumes that all capacities are cases of knowing-how, whereas Ryle recognizes
some human capacities, including those produced by ‘habit’ that leads to
‘automatisms’, as not rising to the level of knowledge. Ryle’s view is not that
‘capacity’ is a knowledge term but that ‘knowledge’ is a capacity term. Second,
Hartland-Swann treats knowledge as a ‘single-track disposition’ – to know that
p is to be able to answer correctly the question whether p – whereas for Ryle,
knowledge, like belief, is a ‘multi-track disposition’. (Ryle 1949: 44–45, 134–135)
On his view, one who has memorized the answer to the question ‘p?’ does not
thereby count as knowing that p (or not-p, as the case may be). As he puts it in
‘Knowing How and Knowing That’, ‘I can’t be said to have knowledge of the fact

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 A Capacity to Get Things Right 31

unless I can intelligently exploit it’, and this will involve a whole complex of
tendencies and capacities, only one of which (and not the most important) is the
capacity to answer the question ‘p?’.13 (Ryle 1945a: 224–225) This complex of
tendencies and capacities will include various forms of knowing-how. But that
does not entail that knowledge-that is merely a species of knowledge-how.14
Ryle did not repeat his remark about ‘logical priority’ in The Concept of Mind and
never took up Hartland-Swann’s suggestion. Instead, he treated knowledge-how
and knowledge-that as distinct forms of knowledge. But distinctness does not
entail total independence. For as David Wiggins points out, ‘To say that knowing
how to V and knowing that p represent or manifest different determinable powers
of mind and the second cannot subsume the first is not to say that these powers can
be activated separately or to deny that they have manifold relations of interdepen-
dence’. Wiggins insists that ‘Ryle is in a position not merely to allow but also to
assert that, in their full distinctness, knowing how to and knowing that need one
another’, so that there is a ‘constant back-and-forth between knowledge that rests
upon the practical and knowledge which rests on the propositional’. (Wiggins
2009: 264–5) He provides some examples to illustrate this ‘back and forth’ but does
not progress beyond examples to a deeper analysis; but we will see below that the
form of interdependence of which Wiggins speaks is for Ryle part of the very
structure of knowledge, both propositional and practical.

5. Knowledge as a Capacity

We can approach Ryle’s core conception of knowledge through his contrast

between propositional knowledge and belief. Unlike most contemporary
epistemologists, Ryle does not conceive of knowledge-that as a species of belief;
rather, he holds that they are of radically different logical type. While both are,
broadly speaking, dispositional, belief is a tendency and knowledge is a capacity.
(Ryle 1949: 133–4)15
In introducing the distinction between belief-as-tendency and knowledge-as-
capacity, Ryle speaks in general terms of ‘know’ as ‘a capacity verb and a capacity
verb of that special sort that is used for signifying that the person described can
bring things off or get things right’. (Ryle 1949: 134) While this occurs in the
midst of his drawing an epistemological distinction between propositional
knowledge and propositional belief, there is no indication that he means to
restrict this characterization to knowledge-that. His more detailed discussions
of both knowledge-how and knowledge-that show that when he says ‘to know
is to be equipped to get something right and not to tend to act or react in certain
manners’, (Ryle 1949: 134) he is laying out the basic logical structure which is the
‘core meaning’ of the polysemous term ‘know’. Teasing out the different ways in
which this basic structure is filled in, in the two cases of knowing-how and
knowing-that and the interrelationships between them, is a complex matter to
which I now turn.

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32 Michael Kremer

6. Ryle on Knowledge-how

I begin with Ryle’s understanding of knowledge-how. In the second chapter of The

Concept of Mind, Ryle asks ‘What is involved in our descriptions of people as
knowing how to make and appreciate jokes, to talk grammatically, to play chess,
to fish, or to argue?’ He answers that while we expect of such people that ‘their per-
formances come up to certain standards or satisfy certain criteria … this is not
enough’.16 For ‘to be intelligent is not merely to satisfy criteria but to apply them;
to regulate one’s actions and not merely to be well-regulated’. (Ryle 1949: 28) Ryle
elaborates this in a crucial passage, which brings out the connection between knowl-
edge how and the core concept of knowledge as ‘a capacity to get things right’:
A person’s performance is described as careful or skilful, if in his
operations he is ready to detect and correct lapses, to repeat and improve
upon successes, to profit from the examples of others and so forth. He
applies criteria in performing critically, that is, in trying to get things right.
(Ryle 1949: 28–9)
In this dense passage, Ryle is saying that to exhibit intelligence or know-how,
one must be critically engaged with one’s performance, working to bring it into
line with the criteria and standards of success embodied in the practice in which
one is taking part. He is aware that this thought can be given an intellectualist
interpretation, in which these standards and criteria must be consciously kept in
mind, and is quick to reject the thought that to ‘apply criteria in performing
critically’ is ‘to do a bit of theory and then to do a bit of practice’. (Ryle 1949: 29)
His point is that there is a way to ‘perform critically … in trying to get things right’
without modeling the intellectualist assumption that ‘for an operation to be
intelligent it must be steered by a prior intellectual operation’. (Ryle 1949: 32)
Ryle’s characterization of knowledge-how emphasizes the constant possibility
of improvement in one’s performance. In ‘Knowing How and Knowing That’, he
puts the point by contrasting ‘drill’, or ‘habituation’, which produces ‘automa-
tisms’, or ‘blind habits’ – ‘performances which can be done perfectly without
exercising intelligence’ – with ‘education or training’ which produces ‘intelligent
powers’.17 Education allows the student to become ‘a judge of his own perfor-
mance – he learns what mistakes are and how to avoid or correct them’. The pupil
is enabled to move beyond the need for a teacher not by reaching the stage of
perfect performance, but by learning ‘how to teach himself and so to better his
instructions’.18 (Ryle 1945a: 223-4) As we will see, this implies that the exercise of
knowledge-how requires a great deal of knowledge-that – but not the particular
knowledge-that which Stanley equates with knowledge-how.19

7. Ryle on Knowledge-that

Ryle’s account of knowledge-how thus fits with his general conception of knowl-
edge as a ‘capacity to get things right’. This is the easy part of the task; clearly

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knowledge-how has some sort of connection to ability. But Ryle introduced the idea
of a ‘capacity to get things right’ in contrasting propositional belief and propositional
knowledge. We need to understand how knowledge-that could be understood as
such a capacity. In order to elucidate what Ryle might have in mind here, I will
borrow from the work of John Hyman.20 In ‘How Knowledge Works’, Hyman calls
attention to a passage in The Concept of Mind in which Ryle elaborates his distinc-
tion between belief as a tendency and knowledge as a capacity. (Hyman 1999:
446) In this passage, Ryle explains that belief involves a host of propensities to
act and think in various ways, ‘to make certain theoretical moves but also to make
certain executive and imaginative moves, as well as to have certain feelings’. For
instance, ‘to believe that the ice is dangerously thin’ is both ‘to be unhesistant in
telling oneself and others that it is thin, … in drawing consequences from the
original proposition, and so forth’ and ‘to be prone to skate warily, to shudder,
to dwell in imagination on possible disasters and to warn other skaters’. Ryle
admits that ‘a person who knows that the ice is thin, and also cares whether it is
thin or thick, will, of course, be apt to act and react in these ways too’. In this sense
Ryle’s position is amenable to the view that knowledge commonly brings with it
belief. However, Ryle adds that ‘to say that he keeps to the edge, because he knows
that the ice is thin, is to employ quite a different sense of “because”, or to give quite
a different sort of “explanation”, from that conveyed by saying that he keeps to the
edge because he believes that the ice is thin’. (Ryle 1949: 134-5)
Hyman makes a useful suggestion about how to understand this compressed
and allusive passage. Commenting on Ryle’s final sentence, he writes: ‘In the first
case, the man’s reason is that the ice is thin; in the second case, it is that he believes
that the ice is thin’. (Hyman 1999: 446) For Hyman, when I keep to the edge be-
cause of my knowledge that the ice is thin, I am equipped to rely on the facts about
the ice as my reason for action. Hyman uses this idea to fill out the ‘minority view’,
that ‘knowledge is not a species of belief: it is a species of ability’ (Hyman 1999:
432) – ‘knowledge is the ability to do things, or refrain from doing things, or be-
lieve, or want, or doubt things, for reasons that are facts’.21 (Hyman 1999: 441) I
will adopt this suggestion as a hypothesis to spell out more carefully Ryle’s
thought that propositional knowledge is a ‘capacity to get things right’ – where
the ‘getting right’ aspect is understood in terms of the capacity to rely on the facts
about the world as one’s reasons for action, so that one’s actions will, in a sense,
line up properly with the way things are.

8. Knowledge as an Achievement

Hyman’s analysis of knowledge provides us with an understanding of how prop-

ositional knowledge, as well as knowledge-how, can be understood as ‘a capacity
to get things right’. However, there is another dimension of Ryle’s account of
knowledge-that in The Concept of Mind, which has been thought to be in tension
with his view of knowledge as a capacity. This is his claim that knowledge can
be thought of as an ‘achievement’. Ryle distinguishes the ‘class of episodic words

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34 Michael Kremer

… labeled “achievement words”, “success words”, or “got it words” ’, such as

‘win’, from ‘task words’ such as ‘run’ (as in ‘win/run the race’). (Ryle 1949: 149)
He explains the difference ‘between the logical force of a task verb and that of a
corresponding achievement verb’ by pointing out that ‘in applying an achieve-
ment verb, we are asserting that some state of affairs obtains over and above that
which consists in the performance, if any, of the subservient task activity’. (Ryle
1949: 150) He is thus led to include ‘know’ as an achievement verb, along with
‘discover’, ‘solve’, ‘prove’, ‘perceive’, ‘see’, and ‘observe’. (Ryle 1949: 152) For
whether one knows that p depends on the obtaining of a state of affairs over and
above anything one does or undergoes or is disposed to do or undergo or has
the capacity to do or undergo – namely, the truth of p. However, this has been
claimed to be incompatible with Ryle’s characterization of knowledge as a capacity
– for can a capacity be an achievement?22 Israel Scheffler and Alan V. White have crit-
icized Ryle along these lines, and considering how Ryle might respond to their crit-
icisms will deepen our understanding of his account of propositional knowledge.
Scheffler argues that Ryle’s treatment of propositional knowledge is ‘literally in-
consistent’ since Ryle takes knowing-that to be both an achievement and disposi-
tional, whereas ‘these properties exclude each other…’. Since Ryle considers
achievement words to be ‘episodic’, they must be taken to signify occurrences,
while a dispositional word ‘is not used for an episode’. (Scheffler 1968: 728, citing
Ryle 1949: 116). White agrees with this assessment and draws the moral that Ryle
should have distinguished acquiring knowledge, which is episodic and can happen
‘at a particular point in time’, from possessing knowledge, which one can do ‘for or
during a particular time’. (White 1978: 130) For White, ‘To know is not to achieve
something, it is to possess it…’ (White 1978: 130). He claims that this view is
implicit in Ryle’s own talk of knowledge as a capacity, since this requires that
‘know’ ‘signifies a possession, namely the possession of a disposition, or, rather,
an ability or capacity’. (White 1978: 131)
However, this line of criticism misses an important distinction, which Ryle
draws when he introduces the idea of achievement words, between ‘gettings’
and ‘keepings’. He writes that among achievement words, some ‘signify more or
less sudden climaxes or denouements; others signify more or less protracted
proceedings. The thimble is found, the opponent checkmated or the race won, at
a specifiable instant; but the secret may be kept, the enemy held at bay, or the lead
be retained, throughout a long span of time’. On Ryle’s view, in spite of this differ-
ence, the ‘active verbs’, ‘with which we ordinarily express these gettings and keep-
ings’, belong together because they exhibit the same quasi-factive behavior. For
both ‘gettings’ and ‘keepings’, ‘in applying an achievement verb, we are asserting
that some state of affairs obtains over and above that which consists in the perfor-
mance, if any, of the subservient task activity’. (Ryle 1949: 150) Thus, consider
holding the enemy at bay: this is not an occurrence which is clockable (as Ryle
would say) at a particular point in time, but it does involve a task which requires
effort and can be counted as successful; and to say that one is holding the enemy at
bay is not only to describe one’s task behavior but also to assert that the enemy has
not advanced further or breached the defenses. It makes sense to say that holding

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the enemy at bay until reinforcements have arrived is an achievement in which one
might take pride.
Ryle provides one example of a ‘getting’ and a corresponding ‘keeping’ which is
most relevant for our present purposes: ‘The sort of success which consists in
descrying the hawk differs in this way from the sort of success which consists in
keeping it in view’. (Ryle 1949: 149) This is close to the requisite distinction
between acquiring knowledge (descrying the hawk) and possessing it (keeping it
in view). Following this suggestion, I read Ryle as holding that ‘know’ is an
achievement verb in the ‘keeping’ sense, while the verbs for acquiring knowledge
such as ‘discover’, ‘solve’, ‘prove’, ‘perceive’, ‘see’, and ‘observe’ (Ryle 1949: 152)
are achievement verbs in the ‘getting’ sense. Thus, the acquisition of knowledge-
that – an occurrence – and the possession of knowledge-that – a capacity – both
count as ‘achievements’. We can even think of the possession of knowledge-how
as an ‘achievement’ in this sense, though its acquisition is not an occurrence but
an ongoing affair involving education and, eventually, self-teaching.

9. Knowledge-that as Dependent on Knowledge-how

We have seen how to understand both knowledge-that and knowledge-how as

forms of knowledge, under the core meaning of a ‘capacity to get things right’,
and we have also seen that these two forms of knowledge can both be seen as
achievements. I will now address the relationships between them, starting with
the dependence of knowledge-that on knowledge-how. Ryle makes his case for this
at the end ‘Knowing How and Knowing That’, when he argues that ‘the fact that
mathematics, philosophy, tactics, scientific method, and literary style cannot be
imparted but only inculcated reveals that these too are not bodies of information
but branches of know how’. More generally, he argues that ‘to know a truth, I must
have discovered or established it. But discovering and establishing are intelligent
operations’.23 In consequence, even ‘a scientist … is primarily a knower-how and
only secondarily a knower-that’.24 (Ryle 1945a: 224) Furthermore, ‘effective posses-
sion of a piece of knowledge-that involves knowing how to use that knowledge,
when required, for the solution of other theoretical or practical problems’. (Ryle
1945a: 225) In our Hyman-inspired terms: effective possession of the capacity to
act for the reason that p is, ultimately, dependent on knowing how to use that
capacity properly – as with any capacity. One must know when to draw on that
capacity and not some other capacity, how exactly to apply it to the case at hand,
and so on – as Ryle argues repeatedly.
The point that knowledge-that depends on knowing how to acquire such
knowledge is brought out clearly in Ryle’s discussion of the ‘tug-of-war’ between
empiricism and rationalism in the entry on ‘Epistemology’ which he contributed to
Urmson’s 1960 Concise Encylopedia of Western Philosophy and Philosophers. Sketching
a Kantian alternative to empiricist and rationalist accounts of the foundations of
knowledge, Ryle argues that ‘perception calls not only for sentience but also for ra-
tionality, though not, save in unusual circumstances, for explicit ratiocination’.

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36 Michael Kremer

(Ryle 1960: 126) In order to distinguish, for example the real from the apparent, we
need to ‘master the manifold techniques of deciding between them’ – we must
achieve an epistemic knowledge-how. The application of this knowledge-how is
a manifestation of our rationality, even though it does not involve reasoning. In
‘Knowing How and Knowing That’, Ryle similarly reformulates his case against
the intellectualist in terms of rationality, instead of intelligence, arguing that
‘ratiocination is not the general condition of rational behavior but only one species
of it’, since to assume otherwise generates a self-defeating regress which ‘credits
the rationality of any given performance to the rational execution of some anterior
performance’. (Ryle 1945a: 219)
Ryle returns to the empiricist–rationalist dispute about whether our knowledge
‘comes from experience’ later in the encyclopedia entry, asking ‘But what does this
apparent tug-of-war amount to? What does “come from” mean? What does “expe-
rience” mean?’ (Ryle 1960: 128) He argues that both empiricists and rationalists
leave out of their account altogether the most important sense of ‘experience’ – ‘con-
tinuous or repeated practice in something or accumulating familiarization with it’.
Consequently, neither can account for the practical masteries and competences that
underlie both our acquisition of knowledge and our application of it in reasoning.
The empiricist confuses the ‘uncontentious truth’ that ‘all knowledge, for exam-
ple, all expertness and all competence, comes from experience, in the second sense,
that is, from training and practice’, with the supposed principle that ‘whatever is
known is inferred from premises provided, ultimately, by particular sense-
experiences’. However, this principle cannot account for the ‘enormous differences’
between different forms of knowledge-acquisition, which require ‘special abilities’
acquired by ‘special kinds of training and practice’. (Ryle 1960: 128)
On the other hand, the ‘ultrarationalist’ who holds that ‘our only way of finding
out what exists and happens is to … deduce theorems from axioms’ cannot explain
how we come to know ‘both these axioms and these techniques of deducing
consequences’. To claim that these principles are innate would mean that ‘we have
masteries of things without ever having mastered them’, and this would reduce
our supposed knowledge of how to reason to an automatism which can be done
perfectly without exercising intelligence, to use the terms of Ryle’s distinction
between intelligent powers and blind habits. On the other hand, even granting that
‘knowledge of abstract truths and of the techniques of deriving consequences from
them itself requires experience, in the sense of training and practice’, this still does
not enable the rationalist to ‘replace the other special kinds of training and practice
which make us more or less experienced observers and experimenters…’ (Ryle
1960: 129)
In short, ‘the experience which is omitted from the theories of the empiricists is
the experience which is omitted from the theories of the rationalists’. It is this expe-
rience that yields the epistemic knowledge-how that constitutes our rationality as
‘successful investigators’. As he sums up his argument, ‘Knowledge comes not by
some immunization against the chance of error, but by precautions against possi-
ble errors – and we learn what precautions to take by experience, that is training
and patience. It is the expert, not the innocent, who knows’. (Ryle 1960: 129)

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For Ryle, then, knowledge-that p can be conceived of as an achievement which

depends on the possession and effective exercise of a number of interacting forms
of knowledge-how, including capacities of observation and reasoning; and at the
same time, knowledge that p is itself a capacity to act for the reason that p. Schemat-
ically, successful investigation is an exercise of a competence – knowing how to find
things out; this yields a discovery that something, p, is the case – a ‘getting’ achieve-
ment; this is solidified in possession of knowledge that p – a ‘keeping’ achievement;
and the latter is itself a capacity to get things right in both action and further inves-
tigation, by taking the truth that p as a reason. I conceive of this on a political
analogy: a candidate for office exercises a set of competences in running a successful
campaign; this results in their winning the election – a ‘getting’ achievement; this is
solidified in their taking and holding office – a ‘keeping’ achievement; and the latter
is itself a matter of their holding and exercising the powers of their office, a set of
capacities which they did not have prior to their winning the election.

10. Knowledge-how as Dependent on Knowledge-that

So, for Ryle, knowledge-that depends on knowledge-how. This might once again
leave us with the sense that knowledge-how is simply logically prior to knowl-
edge-that. Yet, this conclusion would be hasty, for the role of ‘performing critically’
in the acquisition and development of ‘intelligent powers’ implies a converse
dependence of knowledge-how on knowledge-that.
Shortly after explaining the distinction between knowledge as a capacity and
belief as a tendency in The Concept of Mind, Ryle observes that ‘we expect a person
who applies his mind to anything to be able to tell, without research, what he has
been engaged in or occupied with’ and asks ‘How can I have knowledge of what I
have been non-absentmindedly doing or feeling, unless doing or feeling something
with my mind on it at least incorporates some study of what I am doing or
feeling?’ (Ryle 1949: 147) He turns to discuss the teaching and learning of skills,
in order to develop ‘part of the answer’. The crucial idea is that in learning to do
something, the learner eventually comes ‘to double the roles of instructor and
pupil … to coach himself and heed his own coaching’. (Ryle 1949: 148) This trans-
formation is essential for the ‘critical performance’ characteristic of intelligence and
knowing-how. The developing knower-how must be heeding what she is doing, as
her coach heeded what she was doing as a beginner, and this heeding affords her
propositional knowledge of what she is doing, as well as of many aspects of what
is going on during her performance. That she possesses this knowledge is shown
by her being able to report what is happening if called upon and to notice and
correct her own mistakes; yet, the observation involved here is itself made possible
by her developing skill as she both learns to do the thing and ‘learns to understand
better and apply better the lessons in doing the thing’. For example, as one’s skill at
playing chess improves, so does one’s knowledge of what is going on in a game,
one’s ability to observe the position on the board, and so on. But one begins with
some basic pre-chess ability to observe oneself and one’s environment, and the use

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38 Michael Kremer

of this ability to acquire knowledge-that is essential to being able to begin to learn

how to play chess in the first place.
Ryle varies the metaphor from coach to referee, in order to make clear that while
the pupil must have her mind on what she is doing, this does not require that she
consciously think through the individual steps at all times; she is exercising her
knowledge-capacity in heeding her own behavior, in the same way that an atten-
tive referee knows what is happening in a game without having to constantly think
about each detail of the play. ‘The good referee does not blow his whistle at every
moment of the game’, just as the pupil does not rehearse to herself at each moment
what she is doing in order to evaluate it positively or negatively. But the referee is
ready to blow his whistle should the need arise, and this readiness shows that he
knows what is happening on the field of play. Through induction into a skilled
practice, ‘we are all trained in some degree to be our own referees’. Hence, ‘we
are not, all or most of the time, blowing our whistles’ – we are not, all or most of
the time explicitly rehearsing to ourselves what we are doing – but ‘we are most
of the time ready or half-ready to blow them, if the situation requires it, and to com-
ply with them, when they are blown’ – we are constantly aware of what is going on
and ready to take action if we notice that it is going awry. (Ryle 1949: 148) It is only
in this way that we can actively and intelligently develop and manifest our knowl-
edge-how, ‘performing critically … in trying to get things right’. (Ryle 1949: 29)
For Ryle, much of the knowledge that is possessed by the coach, the referee, or
the pupil functioning as her own coach and referee, while depending on a set of
observational capacities that themselves develop in tandem with the skilled prac-
tice in question, is nonetheless given in a fairly straightforward (and Myth-free25)
sense: the pupil, coach, and referee, at least when their observational capacities
have been suitably developed, do not need to try to observe what is happening
and what they are doing. In his discussion of achievements in The Concept of Mind,
Ryle notes that ‘it is always significant … to ascribe a success partly or wholly to
luck. A clock may be repaired by a random jolt and the treasure may be unearthed
by the first spade-thrust’. Accordingly, ‘there can be achievements which are
prefaced by no task performances. … Things thus got without work are often
described as “given”. An easy catch is “given”, a harder catch is “offered”, a
difficult catch is “made” ’. (Ryle 1949: 150)
In a posthumously published essay, ‘Reason’, Ryle explores this idea of what is
‘given’ further, arguing that it does not yield exceptions to the general dependence
of knowledge-that on knowledge-how. He holds that ‘there are certain sorts of
things that we ascertain by… observation, and this kind of ascertainment has its
rules of procedure’. He admits that ‘ordinarily, when I report having seen a cow
or detected a smell of gas, I cannot, with the best will in the world, report the prior
occurrence of a process of scrutiny’. In such a case, ‘no task was accomplished … I
just saw a cow… seeing a cow was in an important sense the first thing that
happened’. (Ryle 1993: 77) Nonetheless, ‘the non-occurrence of preliminaries does
not imply the non-occurrence of a technique’. (Ryle 1993: 78) Once we have
developed appropriate observational capacities, we can have knowledge of what
is going on around us simply by employing our senses.26

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So, we have something like the following schema: knowledge how to F is devel-
oped and manifested through doing F, or trying to do F. This requires some degree
of heed, as one moves from being a pupil to acting as one’s own coach and referee,
working to perform critically to improve one’s performance in order to ‘get things
right’. But this in turn requires knowledge of many facts about what one is doing
and what is happening in one’s environment. Such knowledge consists in the capac-
ity to take these facts as reasons for acting, as one would, for instance, in correcting
one’s behavior and learning from one’s mistakes. Much of this knowledge is itself
simply ‘given’, in the sense that one has developed capacities to observe oneself
and one’s environment that allow one to know what is happening and what one
is doing without making an effort or engaging in a task activity of inquiry.
This account of the role of knowledge-that in the development, maintenance,
and effective use of knowledge-how resonates with Barbara Montero’s descrip-
tions of the role of thinking in ballet performance in her recent essay ‘A Dancer
Reflects’ – although her essay allows the account I have drawn from Ryle to be de-
veloped further and deepened. Montero responds to Hubert Dreyfus’s argument
that ‘monitoring what we are doing as we are doing it degrades performance to
at best competence’. (Montero 2013: 308) Her reply develops out of reflection on
her own past experience as a professional ballet dancer. She emphasizes that often
‘the best dancers are thinking about what they are doing’ because ‘the best dancers
– and presumably experts in all fields – are always striving to improve. … a perfor-
mance on autopilot, as it were, leads to doing the same thing in the same way’.
(Montero 2013: 314) This jibes with Ryle’s thought that heeding what you are
doing is essential to critical performance, which has to be distinguished from
automatism resulting from habit. At the same time, Montero highlights a
dimension of conscious thinking that Ryle downplays, noting that her own
dancing often involved thinking about what she was doing, ‘mental effort…
concerted concentration’. Often she would be ‘self-reflective’. While that does not
mean ‘thinking about the mechanics of movement… on the anatomical level’,
nonetheless, ‘since performance quality is created by bodily movements, such a
focus occasionally occurs even in the best performances. … sometimes a very
specific detail … might be what is in mind’. She mentions in this connection
counting the steps in a particularly difficult dance and denies that this would show
that the performance was somehow lacking: ‘I don’t see why the need to count a
difficult piece such as Night during performances shows that the dancers are not
expertly performing the piece. It certainly appeared to the audience to be the work
of experts…’. (Montero 2013: 313) Above all, she emphasizes that ‘… the best
performances also allow observers to witness deliberate, conscious thought in
action, for a performance that proceeds automatically would be flat. … It would
be, in certain respects, like watching a machine; although the output would be
amazing, that most interesting of spectacles, the human mind, is lacking’. (Montero
2013: 315)
It is true that Ryle does not seem to make room for such ‘deliberate, conscious
thought in action’ in the account of the role of knowledge-that in the development
and manifestation of knowledge-how that I have sketched. Yet, there is no obstacle

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40 Michael Kremer

to his allowing such conscious thought a role, and even a decisive role. Ryle freely
admits that ‘we often do not only reflect before we act but reflect in order to act
properly … the chess-player may require some time in which to plan his moves
before he makes them’. (Ryle 1949: 29) Insofar as much of what Montero describes
is conscious attention to the details of what one is doing, with an eye to correcting
mistakes and improving performance, rather than conscious rehearsal of
‘regulative propositions’, rules, or recipes to be followed, it is no problem at all
for Ryle to allow that conscious thinking such as counting of steps may be essential
to the best performances in some areas of skill. As long as we avoid the strong
conclusion that ‘all intelligent performance requires to be prefaced by the
consideration of appropriate propositions’ (Ryle 1949: 29), Ryle’s position is
compatible with conscious thought as well as dispositional knowledge-that
playing an important role in knowing-how.

11. Conclusion: the Unity of Knowledge

On my reading of Ryle, ‘know’ is a polysemous term like ‘exists’, with a core mean-
ing that can be stated as ‘a capacity to get things right’. Knowledge-how (to V) and
knowledge-that (p) are distinct but interdependent capacities which exhibit the
basic logical structure captured in this core meaning of ‘know’. Consequently, Ryle
is not committed to any simple form of ambiguity in the English word ‘know’. The
fact that this one word is used for both practical and theoretical knowledge, far
from being ‘an accident of the English language’, reflects the fundamental unity
of the topic of knowledge – not the unity of a genus of which there are two species
but rather the unity of an analogous family of capacities.27 Thus, I have shown that
Ryle’s views on knowledge have neither the metaphysical consequences of taking
knowledge to be a disunified phenomenon, and denying knowledge-how its status
as proper knowledge, nor the semantic consequence of taking ‘know’ to be a mere
‘pun word’. I have not argued directly for Ryle’s views, or against alternative views
such as Stanley’s. But I have shown that Ryle’s account deserves a hearing in the
twenty-first century debate about knowing-how and knowing-that, as a genuine
alternative to the positions that have structured that conversation.

Michael Kremer
Department of Philosophy, University of Chicago
1115 E 58th St, Chicago, IL 60637, USA
kremer@uchicago.edu

NOTES

1
I received helpful comments from audiences at Nihon University, the University of
Chicago Wittgenstein Workshop, and a workshop on Ryle: Intelligence, Practice, Skill at Åbo
Akademi, as well as from an anonymous referee. I thank Fiona Richardson, librarian of

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 A Capacity to Get Things Right 41

Linacre College, Oxford, for allowing me unfettered access to the books donated by Ryle to
the College library upon his retirement in 1968.
2
I have left off the last words of the quotation: ‘and that knowledge-how is a concept
logically prior to knowledge-that’. These words, not repeated in The Concept of Mind, can be
misleading; as I will argue, the relationship between the two forms of knowledge is best
seen as one of interdependence.
3
The second edition of Stout’s Manual is among the books Ryle donated to Linacre
College library. I quote from this edition. Ryle’s annotations show Stout’s influence on his
thought – see note 17 below and Kremer 2016 for further discussion.
4
John Bengson pointed out to me a passage in volume 1 of Husserl’s Logical Investi-
gations which similarly describes human intelligence as going beyond perception and
experience through the use of conceptual thought, thereby allowing us to foresee future
events and ‘dominate them practically’ by calculating the consequences of our possible
actions. (Husserl 2000: 199) Husserl’s work deeply influenced Ryle, who owned both the
1900–01 German first edition and the 1922 German third edition and annotated the first
edition copiously. I discuss other examples of ‘intellectualist’ thinking in Ryle’s predecessors
and contemporaries in Kremer 2016.
5
See also Stanley 2011b: 25, 29, and later 110: ‘Ryle’s conception of propositional
knowledge did not entail possession of dispositions’.
6
See note 4, and Kremer 2016, for further examples.
7
Fridland 2013 develops Rylean concerns about gradable knowledge-how to cause
serious trouble for Stanley’s position.
8
To complete an argument for Ryle’s position, it would also be necessary to rebut the
argument, first presented in Stanley and Williamson 2001 and elaborated in Stanley 2011a
and Stanley 2011b that the best linguistic theories of embedded questions entail an
intellectualist view of knowledge-how. Developing such a response would be work for
another paper. But a number of recent papers by both linguists and philosophers cast into
doubt the mandatoriness of the syntax and semantics on which Stanley (and Williamson)’s
argument relies. In addition to Abbott 2013, see for example Roberts 2009, Douskos 2010,
Stout 2010, Ginzburg 2011, Michaelis 2011, Farkas 2016, and Sartorio 2016.
9
Christos Douskos similarly responds to Stanley’s claim that Ryleans ‘must argue for
a very strong ambiguity thesis’, arguing that ‘what seems to be the case is that verbs such as
“ksero” or “savoir” do have a core meaning, common to all constructions in which they oc-
cur, which is further specified by their syntactic environment (and perhaps other factors as
well)’. Douskos concludes: ‘if something along these lines is correct, the anti-Intellectualist
can accommodate the cross linguistic variety of knowledge ascriptions in a scheme which
is both theoretically elegant and empirically sound’. (Douskos 2010: 2337, fn. 20)
10
The term ‘systematic ambiguity’ derives from Russell and Whitehead’s account of
the theory of types in Principia Mathematica: they called their negation and disjunction signs
‘systematically ambiguous’ since they could be applied at different levels of the hierarchy of
propositions and propositional functions. (Whitehead and Russell 1927: 43, 55) Ryle likely
got the term from Susan Stebbing’s A Modern Introduction to Logic, of which he owned the
1933 second edition; he lightly annotated the section entitled ‘The Systematic Ambiguity
of “Exists”’. (Stebbing 1933: 158–163) Stebbing explains that words are ‘said to have
“systematic ambiguity”’ when ‘they are ambiguous because the words are used in different
senses; but this ambiguity is systematic, because it can be formulated according to a rule’.
(Stebbing 1933: 161)
11
Stebbing explains the application of systematic ambiguity to the concept of
existence in A Modern Introduction to Logic. She writes that ‘the recognition of systematic

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42 Michael Kremer

ambiguity has an important bearing’ on the meaning of ‘there are Φ’s’ and ‘Φ’s exist’. We can
meaningfully say both ‘there are numbers’ and ‘there are unicorns’, but ‘there are’ must dif-
fer in meaning in the two propositions, since ‘numbers are of a different logical type than uni-
corns’. Nonetheless, the different uses have analogous truth-conditions: ‘however many
different senses “There are Φ’s” may have, corresponding to different logical types
expressed by “Φ”, all of them are such that “(∃x).Φx” cannot be true unless “Φ” belongs
to something’. (Stebbing 1933: 162) This is the source for Ryle’s general talk of ‘systematic
ambiguity’ and his application of the idea to ‘exists’.
Recently, Huw Price has given a reading of the Concept of Mind passage which resembles
my explanation of the systematic ambiguity of ‘exists’: ‘in one important sense, it is exactly
the same existential quantifier we use in these different cases. … there is a single logico-
syntactic device of existential quantification … But … this device has application in a range
of cases, whose functional origins are sufficiently distinct that naturalism is guilty of a
serious error, in attempting to treat them as all on a par…’ (Price 2009: 331–2). But Price
misrepresents Ryle as holding that there is a ‘single species of existence’ and that ‘exists’ is
‘not ambiguous’ but instead a ‘univocal and very general’ term. It is noteworthy that Price
does not mention the relevant section of ‘Philosophical Arguments’ in his paper and this
may be the source of his errors here.
12
On my reading of Ryle, the core meaning of ‘knowledge’ is ‘a capacity to get things
right’. Kieran Setiya has also used the notion of capacity to unify practical and theoretical
knowledge. He argues that ‘knowing how to ϕ in the practical sense is being disposed to
act on the relevant intention when one has it’ and that this ‘explains why this state should
count as knowledge’, because ‘the disposition involved in knowing how to ϕ is a capacity
to know’. (Setiya 2012: 304) But this conclusion depends on the Anscombean view that ‘to
act on the relevant intention’ guarantees non-observational knowledge of what one is doing.
So, for Setiya, the disposition that is involved in knowing how to ϕ is a disposition whose
exercise implies knowledge that one is ϕ-ing. This is a roundabout way to secure the title
of ‘knowledge’ for knowing-how, which Stanley would not be out of bounds in claiming
to yield only knowledge so-called.
13
In the same passage, Ryle says that ‘a silly person can be stocked with information,
yet never know how to answer particular questions’. But the ‘particular questions’ the silly
person does not know how to answer are not those to which he has memorized the answer
but other, related questions. Ryle’s example is illuminating:
I might once have satisfied myself of … the distance between Oxford and Henley;
and I might have enshrined this in a list of road distances, such that I can on
demand reel off the whole list … But if, when told that Nettlebed is so far out from
Henley, I cannot tell you how far Nettlebed is from Oxford, or if, when shown a
local map, I can see that Oxford to Banbury is about as far as Oxford to Henley,
but still cannot tell you how far Oxford is from Banbury or criticise false
estimates given by others, you would say that I don’t know the distance any
longer… (Ryle 1945a: 224–225)
14
Stephen Hetherington has defended a ‘practicalist’ account of knowledge-that as
‘some combination of instances of knowledge-how’, on which knowledge that p is knowing
how ‘to manifest various accurate representations of p’. (Hetherington 2011: 42) He thinks
that because Ryle concedes ‘close links, which we might suspect are constitutive ones’,
between knowledge-how and knowledge-that’, he is ‘walking a thin line’ in insisting on
distinguishing them. (Hetherington 2011: 25) But, as we will see, Ryle can allow that such
links are ‘constitutive’ without thereby having to embrace either Stanley’s intellectualism

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or Hetherington’s practicalism. (Hetherington briefly considers and replies to two Rylean

arguments for distinguishing knowledge-that from knowledge-how: that knowledge-how
comes in degrees, while knowledge-that does not, and that learning-how is gradual, while
learning-that is not. (Hetherington 2011: 76) As with Stanley, there is not space here to
discuss Hetherington’s reponses to these Rylean arguments, or Hetherington’s positive
view, in detail.
15
Blake Myers-Schulz and Eric Schwitzgebel offer Ryle’s ‘capacity-tendency account’ as
an example of ‘what an account of knowledge that doesn’t require belief would look like’.
(Myers-Schulz and Schwitzegebel 2013: 380) However, they do not look further into Ryle’s
discussion of knowledge than this brief mention.
16
Ryle supports this with the examples of ‘the well-regulated clock’ which ‘keeps
good time’ and ‘the well-drilled circus seal’ which ‘performs its tricks flawlessly’,
commenting that ‘we do not call them “intelligent”’ since ‘we reserve this title for the per-
sons responsible for their performances’. (Ryle 1949: 28) Ephraim Glick, in ‘Abilities and
Know-How Attributions’, appears to take Ryle to be connecting intelligence and responsibil-
ity, citing Ryle’s discussion of the clever clown a few pages later as ‘an example of a person
responsible for his performance…’ (Glick 2012: 122) This is a mistaken interpretation: Ryle
intends that we reserve ‘intelligent’ to describe ‘the persons responsible for the clock’s and
the seal’s performances’, not ‘the persons responsible for their own performances’. Ryle is
not introducing responsibility into his account of intelligence but contrasting intelligent
knowing-how with the results of habituation and drill, which are more like the mechanical
adjustment of a clock.
17
Ryle’s terminology here derives from Stout’s Manual, Book I, Chapter II, §12,
‘Habit and Automatism’ – a section which he annotated fairly heavily. (Stout 1901: 108–
112) See Kremer 2016 for further discussion.
18
The goal of bringing pupils to the point where they could teach both themselves
and their instructors was part of Ryle’s approach to the teaching of philosophy. Reporting
on the performance of the young A.J. Ayer in his tutorials, he described him as ‘the best
philosopher I have yet been taught by, among my pupils’. (Rogers 1999: 69)
19
One might object that Ryle’s account of knowledge-how yields too strong a result.
Many things that we describe using ‘knows how to’ do not seem to fit Ryle’s rich description
of ‘performing critically … in trying to get things right’. To borrow an example from Kieran
Setiya: it seems that I can be said to know how to clench my fist; yet, there seems to be no
question here of my ‘trying to get things right’ or improving through critical reflection,
nor does it seem that I had to learn how to clench my fist.
Yet, matters are perhaps more complicated. Google searches for the combinations, ‘know
how to clench’ + ‘fist’, and ‘knows how to clench’ + ‘fist’, yield about 15 relevant results. One
site claims that at 30 weeks gestation, ‘Your baby already knows how to clench her fists
while sleeping’, thus appealing to a very low standard for knowing how to clench a fist.
But almost all of the rest refer to people who are said not to know how to clench their fists.
For example, a New York Times report on the murder trial of Matthew Shepard’s killer,
Russell A. Henderson, quotes Shepard’s father as saying ‘It takes a brave man to tie up
another man, who did not know how to clench a fist until he was 13 years old’.
Extending the search to ‘know how to make a fist’ yields another 181 results, including a
few low-standard examples like ‘even a toddler will instinctively know how to make a fist’.
But a large majority of these results imply that people in general do not know how to make a
fist and need to be taught how to do so (for example: ‘I have always been surprised at the
number of people who simply don’t know how to make a fist’, and ‘If you do not know
how to make a fist you will risk breaking your hand’). Many of these come from sites

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44 Michael Kremer

discussing boxing, martial arts, or self-defense; and here, very high standards for knowing
how to make a fist are called into play – standards that better fit Ryle’s account of know-
ing-how.
These examples suggest that ascriptions of knowledge-how give rise to phenomena, sim-
ilar to those familiar from the epistemology of knowledge-that, in which standards for
knowledge seem to vary with context, as the stakes involved in lacking or possessing
knowledge vary from low to high – compare the case of preborn infants’ behavior in the
womb with that of adults’ behavior in a self-defense or martial arts setting. In the epistemo-
logical literature on knowledge-that, there is a proliferation of responses to this kind of phe-
nomena, including relativist, contextualist, and invariantist approaches (the latter including
both approaches that attempt to distinguish loose and strict uses of ‘know’ and ‘subject-sen-
sitive’ or ‘interest-relative’ invariantism). It would be a project worth pursuing to consider
which if any of these approaches is most promising for the case of knowledge-how. Unfor-
tunately, however, it is beyond the scope of this paper to discuss this topic further.
20
I focus on Hyman’s 1999 paper ‘How Knowledge Works’. His views are developed
and modified in his 2015 book, Action, Knowledge, and Will, chapters 6–8. As I am not
expounding Hyman’s views but using them to illuminate Ryle’s, I will only touch on differ-
ences between Hyman’s original presentation and his later work in the next note.
21
In his 1999 paper, Hyman argues for a general analysis of knowledge, which he
equates with knowledge-that. He is skeptical of Ryle’s distinction between knowledge-
how and knowledge-that and accepts arguments (derived from D.G. Brown and Alan
White) similar to those of Stanley and Williamson for the claim that knowledge-how is a
species of knowledge-that. (Hyman 1999: 434)
In his 2015 book, Hyman replaces talk of taking a fact as a reason with a broader concep-
tion of being guided by a fact, so that ‘we can define knowledge as the ability to be guided by
the facts’. (Hyman 2015: 171) He also takes a more agnostic line on the debate about knowl-
edge-how and knowledge-that. Neither of these differences are important for the use I will
make of his work in elucidating Ryle’s account of knowledge-that.
22
A version of this criticism could be developed from Zeno Vendler’s influential clas-
sification of verbs into states, activities, achievements, and accomplishments, based on phe-
nomena of aspect. According to Vendler’s classification, ‘know’ is a state verb, not an
achievement verb, since it lacks a continuous tense but can be predicated for more than just
a moment of time. (Vendler 1957: 146–7, 150) But Vendler’s classification is not relevant to
Ryle’s discussion. The fact that Vendler is willing to treat ‘growing up’ and ‘recovering from
illness’, as accomplishments, and ‘being born’ and ‘even dying’, as achievements (Vendler 1957:
150) shows that his work does not answer to the concerns for which Ryle introduces the con-
cept of an achievement word.
23
Ryle somewhat modifies this claim in The Concept of Mind, as we shall see in the
next section. He there admits that some knowledge is “given” in the sense that no work
of discovery is needed to acquire it. Yet, even such “given” knowledge depends, for Ryle,
on the exercise of developed capacities for observation, in which a “technique” can be at
work – in short on knowledge-how.
24
Ryle develops this point in his 1962 essay, ‘A Rational Animal’, in which he argues
that ‘in its specialist sense, thought, i.e. intellectual work, has a discipline or rather a battery
of disciplines of its own’. (Ryle 1962: 430)
25
It is because (see below) having something ‘given’ in this sense involves the ‘exer-
cise of a technique’, that I call this notion ‘Myth-free’.
26
Ryle’s admission of ‘lucky’ achievements as constituting knowledge might seem to
conflict with the kind of ‘anti-luck’ intuitions in epistemology summarized by Duncan

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 A Capacity to Get Things Right 45

Pritchard: ‘knowledge is an achievement, something for which the agent can take credit, and
yet, genuine achievements are not attained via luck’. (Pritchard 2007: 277) However, the
appearance of conflict is deceptive. Anti-luck intuitions are typically tied to an account of
knowledge as a species of belief and ‘the core worry about luck as regards knowledge
possession relates to luck in the truth of the relevant belief’. (Pritchard 2007: 279, my
emphasis) Ryle, in contrast, has a capacity/tendency model of the relation of knowledge
and belief and allows the acquisition of a knowledge-capacity as sometimes ‘lucky’ or
‘given’ in the sense of requiring no effort or ‘trying’ but insists that even in such cases
rational capacities and techniques are at work. In Ryle’s sense of ‘achievement’ and in his
sense of ‘lucky’, one can achieve something – and be given credit for it – by luck. If a runner
wins a race due to a lucky break (two of her competitors collide, say), she still receives the
medal.
27
In fact, one might think that the real problem for Ryle – as for Stanley – is the
existence of languages which do not reflect this unity, in having distinct terms for the two
forms of knowledge. I will not address this worry here, except to say Ryle is not primarily
making linguistic points but is rather interested in the phenomena of rationality, intelligence,
knowledge, and so on.

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© 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd