(ANTI)‐Anti‐Intellectualism and the Sufficiency Thesis

Anti‐intellectualists about knowledge‐how insist that, when an agent S knows how to φ, it is in virtue of some ability, rather than in virtue of any propositional attitudpaes, S has. Recently, a popular strategy for attacking the anti‐intellectualist position proceeds by appealing to cases where an agent is claimed to possess a reliable ability to φ while nonetheless intuitively lacking knowledge‐how to φ. John Bengson and Marc Moffett and Carlotta Pavese have embraced precisely this strategy and have thus claimed, for different reasons, that anti‐intellectualism is defective on the grounds that possessing the ability to φ is not sufficient for knowing how to φ. We investigate this strategy of argument‐by‐counterexample to the anti‐intellectualist's sufficiency thesis and show that, at the end of the day, anti‐intellectualism remains unscathed.