2020 Placement Job Talk – Juan Piñeros Glasscock

Juan Piñeros Glasscock is a UTM Postdoctoral Associate. He holds BA and MA degrees from the University of Toronto, and a PhD from Yale University. His central areas of interest are in philosophy of mind and action, epistemology, and moral psychology.

Talk Title

“Practical Intellectualism: An Account of Skill/Know-How”

Abstract

I defend a novel account of knowledge-how, based on two central components. The first is the view that there is a practical way of answering a question that consists in acting (intentionally) in a certain way. The second component is the view that practical reasoning is an inquisitive process, one defined by the question “How?”. Putting these two contentions together yields the view that the paradigm case of someone who knows how to Φ is the person who knows a practical answer to the deliberative question “How to Φ?”. Because it recognizes the mutual dependence between know-how and intentional action, while explaining why knowledge-how is a genuine form of knowledge, this account is to be preferred to traditional forms of intellectualism and anti-intellectualism.