From Josh Habgood-Coote
I met Katherine in 2013, when I came up to St Andrews as a prospective PhD supervisee. I was a bag of nerves, worried about moving to what then felt like the end of the world (I grew up on the south coast, don’t @ me). I think I must have met with Katherine for something like an hour, but within about ten minutes I had a really strong sense that she was incredibly sharp, extraordinarily kind, and above all competent. There are things we talked about in that conversation – like the idea that knowledge-how is interesting as a kind of knowledge, and the puzzle of how to think about collective knowledge-how – that I’m still trying to figure out now.
When I was writing the acknowledgements for my thesis four years later, I honestly struggled to acknowledge how important Katherine had been to me. I think I ended up writing that she was the best supervisor anyone could hope for, and I don’t think I’ve got better words now. Looking back, Katherine took on such a huge amount of work with me: supervising a normal PhD, shepherding a bunch of articles through review, helping me put together my next project (on something completely different to the PhD project), and helping me through the job market. I didn’t appreciate at the time how much she was supporting me, and one of the things that I’ve been struggling to comprehend over the last couple of weeks is making sense of how many peoples’ backs she had in so many different ways.
I wrote my thesis on knowledge-how, and although Katherine had written some of the central papers in this literature, she never put any pressure on me to think about the problems or views she was interested in. I was often surprised when I realised that I had been thinking about things that she had written about decades before. I guess I particularly think here about how Success and Knowledge-How from 2003 had this sketch of a contextualist theory of knowledge-how ascriptions, and this prescient discussion of the idea that we could model knowledge-how on the model of justified true belief (an idea which she more recently applied to thinking about trust).
In video calls over the last couple of weeks I’ve been remembering smaller moments: Katherine’s infectious laugh, an evening at a reading party when she took the piss out of me for being perplexed at the existence of Capybaras (seriously, what’s up Capybaras), and her replying to a twitter post of a stupid glowing eyes Onora O’Neil meme (the best kind of context collapse). I’ll also remember the random emails I’d sometimes get when Katherine had seen something relevant to something we’d talked about, like the time she sent me a clip from the Big Bang theory which summed up a puzzle that I was working on at the time. It’s a pretty good joke:
I’ve not found it easy to find words for what Katherine meant to me, but one of the posts I saw on Facebook said it better than I could. ‘We all wanted to be Katherine when we grew up.’