Some philosophers hold that learning about something by acquaintance or experience (including the experience of trying to do something, which, when we are succe

Some philosophers hold that learning about something by acquaintance or experience (including the experience of trying to do something, which, when we are successful, gives us know-how) is different from learning, and coming to believe in, a collection of true propositions. Others, such as Stanley and Williamson in their influential paper "Knowing How", argue that all knowledge is, fundamentally, propositional knowledge - a position known as intellectualism. I have always had strong doubts about the latter position, and I do not think it can survive the challenge presented by the sort of cases presented in this article. With knowledge by acquaintance or experience (including of pain), we grasp the concept before we have a name for it, and the name is an optional relationship. I am well aware of this because I have a small problem remembering names, but when it happens, it does not interfere in any other way in my knowledge of that person. When it happens, I have, indeed, temporarily forgotten a name that I once knew (or at least lost conscious access to it), but it seems plausible that most of what I still know about them could have been learned without ever knowing their name. Language can supplement our experience in at least a couple of ways: we can learn some concepts that might, in principle, be learned by experience, but we have not actually done so (this is not quite the same, however, which might explain my yearning to visit places with an interesting history, even if everything from that time have crumbled to dust, and so, intellectually, I realize that such a visit will not lead to significant new insights.) Secondly, it is not clear to me that one could gain abstract concepts such as the square root of -1 or entropy by language-free experience alone, which I think is the thesis expressed in the article's title. [1] Stanley, Jason and Timothy Williamson, 2001, “Knowing How”, Journal of Philosophy, 98(8): 411–444. doi:10.2307/2678403