Hyman, Ryle, and the Unity of Knowledge

In a number of papers and a book over the past thirty years, John Hyman has developed a unified account of knowledge that builds on Gilbert Ryle and Ludwig Wittgenstein's conceptions of knowledge as closely linked to ‘ability’. On Hyman's account, knowledge that p is the ability to be guided by the fact that p. In recent work, he has argued that such a notion of factual knowledge makes Ryle's notion of knowledge-how superfluous: knowledge-how, for Hyman, just is such factual knowledge. This paper defends Ryle against these arguments, in part by bringing out an unnoticed aspect of Ryle's discussions of knowledge-that: namely, that he discusses two distinct notions of knowledge-that, only one of which he himself endorses. In investigating this notion of knowledge-that, as well as Ryle's arguments for the claim that knowledge-how is logically prior to such knowledge-that, it is argued both that Hyman's arguments against Ryle fail - meaning that his attempt to unify knowledge-how and knowledge-that is unsuccessful - and that he lacks a plausible response to Ryle's logical priority arguments.

Type

Journal article

Date

2025-06-24

Identifiers

10.1111/ejop.13086

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Other Academic Units
Philosophy