Hyman, Ryle, and the Unity of Knowledge

Abstract In a number of papers and a book over the past thirty years, John Hyman has developed a unified account of knowledge that builds on Gilbert Ryle and Ludwig Wittgenstein's conceptions of knowledge as closely linked to ‘ability’. On Hyman's account, knowledge that p is the ability to be guided by the fact that p. In recent work, he has argued that such a notion of factual knowledge makes Ryle's notion of knowledge‐how superfluous: knowledge‐how, for Hyman, just is such factual knowledge. This paper defends Ryle against these arguments, in part by bringing out an unnoticed aspect of Ryle's discussions of knowledge‐that: namely, that he discusses two distinct notions of knowledge‐that, only one of which he himself endorses. In investigating this notion of knowledge‐that, as well as Ryle's arguments for the claim that knowledge‐how is logically prior to such knowledge‐that, it is argued both that Hyman's arguments against Ryle fail ‐ meaning that his attempt to unify knowledge‐how and knowledge‐that is unsuccessful ‐ and that he lacks a plausible response to Ryle's logical priority arguments.