Knowledge As Potential For Action

Professor Stephen Hetherington (University of New South Wales)

Knowledge’s roles are at least partly a function of what knowledge is. All the more so if this paper’s hypothesis is correct, since I argue for a conception of knowledge-that as knowledge-how. The knowledge-how in question may be thought of as a possibly multi-pronged ability – to do this, that, and/or the other: to question, to answer, to assert, to represent, to believe, to investigate, to move from here to there, etc. In short, knowledge is to be thought of as a potential for various sorts of action – inner, outer, wherever. It is not merely that knowledge is a state with interesting normative links to these actions. Rather, knowledge is the potential to perform those actions. Accordingly, knowledge’s role, generically described, is to be the modal locus for knowing actions. This picture of knowledge is reached by applying a Rylean anti-intellectualism about intelligent actions, by highlighting the concept of a knowing action, and by adapting some ideas from Hume, Descartes, and perhaps others.