Comments on Professor Williams’ 'Knowledge and Reasons'

My remarks on Professor Williams’ paper will be relatively brief, both because I think that the opener of the discussion should be brief, and because I am in substantial agreement with what Professor Williams has said. In the first place, I accept his distinction between propositional and practical knowledge, and I too shall have nothing to say about practical knowledge. I agree with him that the labels which Ryle used to mark this distinction are not quite satisfactory, and I think that his use of the formula “A knows wh-p,” in the propositional case, is an improvement on Ryle’s “knowing that.” I think he is right in saying that one narrows the problem unduly, if one concentrates only on true assertions of the form “it is known that p,” and I agree that from the fact that a person A knows that some proposition p is known it does not follow that A himself knows that p.