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2026 08 17 Gilbert Ryle's distinction between 'Knowing How' and 'Knowing That' Gemini Chat

In his landmark 1949 work, The Concept of Mind, Oxford philosopher Gilbert Ryle introduced the distinction between "Knowing That" (propositional knowledge) and "Knowing How" (practical skill and competence).

Ryle’s primary goal was to dismantle what he termed the "Intellectualist Legend"—the long-standing philosophical assumption that intelligent physical action is merely a mechanical execution of prior, silent, internal theoretical contemplation.

1. The Two Types of Knowledge

Ryle argued that epistemology had spent centuries obsessed with only one kind of knowledge while completely mischaracterizing the other.

                     ┌─────────────────────────────────────────┐
                     │          The Varieties of Mind          │
                     └────────────────────┬────────────────────┘
                                          │
                  ┌───────────────────────┴───────────────────────┐
                  ▼                                               ▼
     ┌──────────────────────────┐                   ┌──────────────────────────┐
     │       Knowing That       │                   │       Knowing How        │
     │  (Propositional / Theory)│                   │  (Dispositions / Skill)  │
     ├──────────────────────────┤                   ├──────────────────────────┤
     │ • Facts and truths       │                   │ • Abilities and skills   │
     │ • Stated in words/logic  │                   │ • Exhibited in action    │
     │ • "True" or "False"      │                   │ • "Well" or "Badly"      │
     │ • e.g., Rules of chess   │                   │ • e.g., Playing chess well│
     └──────────────────────────┘                   └──────────────────────────┘

A. Knowing That (Propositional Knowledge)

  • What it is: Knowledge of facts, propositions, rules, and states of affairs.

  • Examples: Knowing that Paris is the capital of France; knowing that boiling water reaches 100°C; knowing the explicit rule that a bishop moves diagonally in chess.

  • Evaluation: Can be evaluated as true or false. You either possess the correct fact or you don't.

B. Knowing How (Dispositional Ability & Competence)

  • What it is: The capacity to perform activities skillfully, intelligently, and adaptively in real time.

  • Examples: Knowing how to play a musical instrument, ride a bicycle, tell a witty joke at a dinner party, or play a strong game of chess.

  • Evaluation: Evaluated by criteria of competence, mastery, and success—done skillfully, clumsily, elegantly, or poorly (not true or false).

2. The Target: The "Intellectualist Legend"

The Intellectualist Legend (rooted in Cartesian dualism) claims that:

An action is only "intelligent" if the agent first silently recites, consults, and applies an internal rule or proposition before acting.

Under this view:

  1. The mind formulates a plan or rule internally (Knowing That).

  2. The physical body acts out the order (Physical execution).

Ryle argued that this picture completely reverses reality. A person can know all the explicit rules of grammar and still be a dreadful writer; a person can memorize every tactical rule of chess and still play poorly; and a cook can recite a recipe verbatim and still burn the meal. Competence is not the mere recitation of rules; it is the capacity to act appropriately under open-ended conditions.

3. Ryle's Infinite Regress Argument

To prove that Knowing How cannot be reduced to Knowing That, Ryle leveled his famous Regress Argument:

  1. Assume the intellectualist is right: performing an action intelligently requires you to first consult an internal rule or proposition.

  2. But considering, selecting, and applying that internal rule is itself an action.

  3. You can perform this act of rule-application intelligently or stupidly (e.g., applying the wrong rule or misinterpreting it).

  4. If doing it intelligently requires consulting another rule about how to apply the first rule, you must consult that meta-rule first.

  5. This requires yet another rule for the meta-rule, and so on ad infinitum.

   Physical Action
         ▲
         │ (Requires prior rule)
   Consult Rule 1
         ▲
         │ (Must apply Rule 1 intelligently -> requires Rule 2)
   Consult Rule 2
         ▲
         │ (Must apply Rule 2 intelligently -> requires Rule 3)
   Consult Rule 3 ──► [Infinite Regress: Action never starts]

Ryle's Conclusion: Because intelligent action clearly does take place in the real world, the intellectualist premise must be false. Knowing how to act intelligently is logically prior to, and independent of, knowing the theoretical rules governing that action.

4. Dispositions, Not "Occult" Mental Events

When we describe someone as "clever," "careful," or "witty," Ryle argues we are not describing a hidden, ghost-like computational state occurring inside their skull. We are describing a complex disposition:

  • A disposition is a tendency or readiness to behave in particular ways across a wide variety of circumstances (much like saying glass is brittle means it will shatter if struck, not that it is performing a secret internal calculation).

  • When a musician improvises a solo, they do not pause between notes to look up music theory tables in an internal mental notebook. The intelligence is directly embodied in the playing itself, through the timing, touch, and sensitivity to the surrounding instruments.

Summary Comparison

Attribute Knowing That (Episteme) Knowing How (Techne)
Primary Form Propositional, theoretical, verbal. Practical, embodied, situational.
Object Facts, truths, states of affairs. Skills, techniques, fluencies.
Standard Assessed as True / False. Assessed as Expert / Amateur / Clumsy.
Acquisition Reading, hearing, memorizing data. Practice, training, habituation, feedback.
Logical Order Secondary and parasitic on practice. Primary and fundamental.

The Legacy for AI and Cognitive Science

Ryle’s distinction anticipated the major fault lines in modern cognitive science and AI:

  • Classical Symbolic AI (GOFAI): Assumed that intelligence is pure Knowing That—storing vast banks of facts and logic rules to deduce actions. This approach ran straight into Ryle's regress and the Frame Problem.

  • Embodied AI and Phenomenology (Dreyfus, Brooks): Built directly on Ryle's insight that everyday intelligence is foundational know-how—a living organism physically coping with its environment without needing an internal rule-book.