From Yuri Cath
I wanted to share one anecdote and some thoughts on Katherine’s work on knowledge-how.
I know Katherine from when I was a post-doc at Arché. Towards the end of my fellowship, I was looking for my next job, and I was very happy when the UEA wanted to offer me a permanent lectureship. But suddenly HR at the UEA though that a technicality meant that I wouldn’t qualify for a new working visa as a non-EU citizen, and it looked like the job offer would evaporate. With my wife and I having one young child, and another on the way, the stakes were very high for us. I spoke to Katherine and she suspected that the UEA had misinterpreted the rules, so she investigated that further with people in HR at St Andrews, and then wrote a long email to the UEA that very carefully, and diplomatically, explained the error. And Katherine did all this just a few days before Christmas.
Without Katherine’s intervention I can’t be sure I would still be in the profession (the job market was ruthless even then), and while this was the most dramatic example it was just one of the many times when Katherine was very generous to me with her time and support. So many people have similar stories, and yet I never once heard Katherine draw the slightest attention to any of her kind acts. The last time we corresponded was briefly on the last day of 2019 when Katherine messaged to check on how my family and I were coping in Australia with the awful bushfires that summer, a small kindness now magnified by my knowledge of the much greater challenges that Katherine had ahead of her.
In recollections of Katherine’s philosophical work, a lot of the focus has, understandably, been on her outstanding work on the metaphysics of time and persistence, and on trust, which were the respective subjects of her two major books. But Katherine also made very significant contributions to the literature in epistemology on knowledge-how. Katherine wrote three key papers in this area. In “Success and Knowledge-How” (2003) Katherine, drawing on her background in metaphysics, analysed the connection between knowing-how and action in terms of an elegant condition involving counterfactual success. At a time when everyone was focused on the debate between ‘intellectualist’ versus ‘anti-intellectualist’ accounts of knowledge-how, Katherine’s analysis was distinctive in that it was intentionally neutral on that issue. Perhaps because of that fact, people were slow to discuss Katherine’s paper but, in time, both sides of the debate realised the importance of Katherine’s analysis, and how they could draw on it in developing better versions of their theories. In this way, Katherine advanced a debate even while trying to avoid it.
In “Testimony and Knowing How” (2010) Katherine explored the many different ways that we can learn how to perform an action by being both told and shown how to perform it; a paper that was noteworthy for being the first extended discussion of testimony in relation to knowing-how rather than the usual focus on knowing-that. And in “Knowing How and Epistemic Injustice” (2011) Katherine offered a brilliant new view of the social function of our concept of knowledge-how, and she used that view to shed light on how epistemic injustice interacts with knowledge-how.
Again, both papers were ahead of their time, and it took us all a while to catch up. In just the last few years the knowing-how literature has increasingly focused on testimony and the social function of our thought and talk about knowing-how, and Katherine’s work is central to these ongoing discussions. And in the wider literatures on testimony and epistemic injustice many others have followed Katherine’s lead by starting to think about how these topics interact with epistemic states other than knowing-that.
Thank you, Katherine, for showing us how to think and live well.