Disimplicature

Speranza

There is an emerging skepticism about the existence of testimonial knowledge-how (Hawley (2010)1, Poston (2016), Carter and Pritchard (2015a)). 

This is unsurprising for Grice since a number of influential approaches to knowledge-how struggle to accommodate testimonial knowledge how. Nonetheless, this scepticism is misguided. This paper establishes that there are cases of easy testimonial knowledge-how. It is structured as follows: First, a case is presented in which an agent acquires knowledge-how simply by accepting a speaker’s testimony. Second, it is argued that this knowledge-how is genuinely testimonial. Next, Poston’s (2016) arguments against easy testimonial knowledge-how are considered and rejected. The implications of the argument differ for intellectualists and anti-intellectualists about knowledge-how. The intellectualist must reject widespread assumptions about the communicative preconditions for the acquisition of testimonial knowledge. The Anti-intellectualist must find a way of accommodating the dependence of knowledge-how on speaker reliability. It is not clear how this can be done.