Know-How, intellectualism, and memory systems. De Brigard, F. Philosophical Psychology.
abstract   bibtex   
A longstanding tradition in philosophy distinguishes between know-that and know-how. This traditional "anti-intellectualist" view is so entrenched in folk psychology that it is often invoked in support of an allegedly equivalent distinction between explicit and implicit memory derived from the so-called "standard model of memory". In the last two decades, the received philosophical view has been challenged by an "intellectualist" view of know-how. Surprisingly, defenders of the traditional anti-intellectualist view have turned to the cognitive science of memory, and to the standard model in particular, to defend their view. In this paper, I argue that this strategy is a mistake. As it turns out, upon closer scrutiny, the evidence from cognitive psychology and neuroscience of memory does not support the anti-intellectualist approach, mainly because the standard model of memory is likely wrong. But this need not be interpreted as good news for the intellectualist, for it is not clear that the empirical evidence necessarily supports their view either. I argue that, currently, the philosophical debate is couched in terms that do not correspond to categories in psychological science. As a result, the debate has to either be re-interpreted in a vocabulary that is amenable to experimental scrutiny, or it cannot be settled empirically.
@article{DeBrigard,
abstract = {A longstanding tradition in philosophy distinguishes between know-that and know-how. This traditional "anti-intellectualist" view is so entrenched in folk psychology that it is often invoked in support of an allegedly equivalent distinction between explicit and implicit memory derived from the so-called "standard model of memory". In the last two decades, the received philosophical view has been challenged by an "intellectualist" view of know-how. Surprisingly, defenders of the traditional anti-intellectualist view have turned to the cognitive science of memory, and to the standard model in particular, to defend their view. In this paper, I argue that this strategy is a mistake. As it turns out, upon closer scrutiny, the evidence from cognitive psychology and neuroscience of memory does not support the anti-intellectualist approach, mainly because the standard model of memory is likely wrong. But this need not be interpreted as good news for the intellectualist, for it is not clear that the empirical evidence necessarily supports their view either. I argue that, currently, the philosophical debate is couched in terms that do not correspond to categories in psychological science. As a result, the debate has to either be re-interpreted in a vocabulary that is amenable to experimental scrutiny, or it cannot be settled empirically.},
author = {{De Brigard}, Felipe},
file = {:Users/michaelk/Library/Application Support/Mendeley Desktop/Downloaded/De Brigard - Unknown - Know-How, intellectualism, and memory systems.pdf:pdf},
journal = {Philosophical Psychology},
title = {{Know-How, intellectualism, and memory systems}}
}

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