Matthew Mosdell Colloquium Feb 12

The first colloquium of the year will take place on Friday, February 5 at 3pm in HUM 290. All are welcome. Our own Matthew Mosdell will present a paper entitled “Acquiring Knowing How”. Here is the abstract:
 
Pretty much anyone engaged in philosophy is aware of the distinction between knowledge-how and knowledge-that. The distinction comes to this: you have knowledge-that when you are warranted in believing a fact; knowledge-how when you are capable of doing certain things.  You know that Albany is the capital of New York;  you know how to swim or ride a bicycle.  Recently, a number of philosophers have argued that knowledge-how is simply another species of knowledge-that. On this intellectualist view, knowing how to do something is knowing a proposition (or set of propositions) that truly answers the question “How could one Q?” It follows that learning how to Q is learning a proposition (or set of propositions) describing how to Q. In this paper, I argue that the intellectualist view is mistaken by showing that the content of a proposition (or set of propositions) is not sufficient to explain what we learn when we learn how to do things.
 
Looking ahead in February, Avery Archer, a philosopher of mind from Georgetown, will present at our department on February 26. And over at Union, Shaun Nichols (Arizona) will present on February 11 and David Christensen (Brown) will present on February 18.