A Third Kind of Knowledge

In a number of his writings, Ryle warns us of the ill consequences of regarding knowing how as a species of knowing that. Philosophers have too often, he thinks, taken propositional knowledge as a model for the knowledge of techniques, procedures and practices. Ryle was a great anti-reductionist, a great pluralist; so it comes as no surprise to find that he did not regard knowing how and knowing that as together exhausting the types of knowledge. In ‘On Forgetting the Difference between Right and Wrong’ (1971), he argues that moral knowledge, or certain important species of moral knowledge, represent a third kind of knowledge, one that cannot be reduced to either or both of the other two. The reason for this is that a person who learns what Ryle summarizes as ‘the difference between right and wrong’ is someone who learns to care about and take seriously such things as telling the truth, resisting certain temptations and so on. And this is why, as he writes,

The concept of forgetting is out of place here, Ryle suggests, because we think of forgetting as losing something, e.g. some ‘equipment’, rather than as changing in some way: