Does know-how need to be autonomous?

ABSTRACT

In chapter 4 of Autonomous Knowledge: Radical Enhancement, Autonomy and the Future of Knowing (OUP, 2021), Carter takes on the question of whether there is an epistemic autonomy condition on know-how, e.g. one that might rule out cases of radical performance enhancement as genuine cases of know-how. In this paper, I examine Carter’s proposal and identify an asymmetry in the way his epistemic autonomy condition is applied to enhanced and non-enhanced instances of know-how. In particular, it seems that either an autonomy condition is required for all forms of knowledge-how or it is not. If it is, then a potential worry is that young children do not manifest their know-how when doing things that we would normally be inclined to say they know how to do. If it is not, then young children do manifest some forms of non-enhanced know-how. While Carter chooses the second option, I argue that it is better to choose the first one, that is, to claim that all know-how needs to be epistemically autonomous along the lines he has described. I also show how this does not exclude young children from knowing how to do things.

KEYWORDS:

• Knowledge–how
• autonomy
• cognitive enhancement
• cognitive development

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For a comprehensive introduction to extended epistemology, see the essays in Carter, Palermos and Pritchard. For my own take on this debate, see Andrada (2021a, 2021b).

2 For more on the connection between virtue epistemology, cognitive abilities and cognitive integration, see Breyer and Greco (2008).

3 See Pritchard (2010) and Kirchhoff and Newsome (2012).

4 This is something that Carter also explicitly rejects (see p. 114).

5 Flexibility is a key feature of intelligent action. See Bengson and Moffett (2011).

6 Following Ryle (1949) and Elzinga (2021). See also (Andrada 2022). And, in fact, an interesting question that arises is: what is the relation between cognitive ownership and self-regulation? I hope to come back to this question in the future.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Foundation for Science and Technology (Fundação para a Ciência e para a Tecnologia) of the Portuguese Ministry of Education and Science under the project UIDB/00183/2020 and the individual contract CEECIND/00591/2021; and by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation under the project PID2021-123938NB-100.