Knowledge-To in Classical Confucianism

Early Confucian philosophical texts offer a view on which a person's knowing to f is a distinct kind of knowledge irreducible to more familiar kinds, such as knowledge-that, knowledge-how, or knowledge-by-acquaintance. Unlike knowledge-that, knowing-to is non-propositional, and unlike knowledge-how and knowledge-by-acquaintance, knowing-to is present only if the agent is performing a corresponding intelligent action. The author motivates such an early Confucian account of knowledge-to by arguing that it offers the people an attractive conceptual alternative to standard ways of thinking about the relation between knowledge and intelligent action.