Abstract

Philosophers working on knowledge-how, or ‘know-how’ aim to characterize know-how as a distinctively practical kind of knowledge. Anti-intellectualists characterize it as an ability that amounts to a kind of knowledge, and intellectualists characterize it as a distinctively practical kind of propositional knowledge. In this paper, I argue that this is a false errand. There’s no need to characterize know-how as distinctively practical. I develop and defend an account of know-how ascriptions according to which ‘S knows how to φ’ is true iff S knows (in the ordinary propositional knowledge sense) whatever they need to know in order to φ. If we understand know-how to be knowledge of not one, but a set of propositions, there’s no need to posit and explain any ‘distinctively practical’ features of knowing how.