LPS 221: Seminar on Knowing How, Knowing That, and AI

my presentation of the motivating idea for the class (my slides)

discussion of logistics

sign-ups for dates and topics

Required reading/watching:

Videos 1, 2, 3, and 5 of the 3blue1brown sequence on neural networks (it's ok if you don't follow all the math of part 2 - if you do, then you should watch 4 as well). 

Timothy B Lee, "How computers got shockingly good at recognizing images", Wired, Dec. 18, 2018

Timothy B. Lee and Sean Trott, "A jargon-free explanation of how AI large language models work", Wired, July 31, 2023

At least skim Chapter 1 of Russell and Norvig's Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, from 2010

Further resources:

General neural nets:

Neural network playground - a place to try out the basics of neural nets with simple datasets

The rest of the 3blue1brown sequence on neural networks

Michael Nielsen, Neural Networks and Deep Learning - a free online book that teaches you to build a neural net

Emergent Garden, Why neural networks can learn (almost) anything, March 12, 2022

Art of the problem, How neural networks learn - backpropagation intuition, Nov. 14, 2019

Wikipedia, History of artificial neural nets

Large language models:

Vaswani et al, "Attention is all you need", June 12, 2018 - the paper that launched large language models

Vox, Computers just got a lot better at writing, March 4, 2020 - a video about GPT-3 - notice the date!

Textsynth - a site to try out pure predict-the-next-word LLMs. Note that they tend to work better if you give them paragraphs of text as a prompt, but still make some attempt even with just part of a sentence as a prompt.

Ben Levinstein's 5-part series explaining large language models from Jan/Feb 2023

Understandability:

Welch Labs, The moment we stopped understanding AI, July 1, 2024

Golden Gate Claude, May 23, 2024 - a step forward in interpretability, from Anthropic (see some examples here, or by searching for others)

Robotics:

Brian Potter, "Robot dexterity still seems hard", April 24, 2025

Gilbert Ryle on knowing-how and knowing-that

Gilbert Ryle, "Knowing how and knowing that: the presidential address" (1946)

Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind, chapter 2, "Knowing how and knowing that" (1949)

Possible supplements:

Barry Smith, "Knowing how vs. knowing that" (1988)

Lewis Carroll, "What the tortoise said to Achilles" (1895)

Knowing how and motor control

Jason Stanley and John Krakauer, "Motor skill depends on knowledge of facts" (2013)

Neil Levy, "Embodied savoir-faire: knowledge-how requires motor representations" (2017)

Ellen Fridland, "Skill and motor control: intelligence all the way down" (2017)

Modal properties of knowledge - safety, sensitivity, reliability, tracking, etc.

Alvin Goldman, "Discrimination and perceptual knowledge" (1976)

Ernest Sosa, "How must knowledge be modally related to what is known?" (1999)

Ernest Sosa, "How to defeat opposition to Moore" (1999)

Alvin Goldman and Bob Beddor, Reliabilism (in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) (2021)

Knowing how and luck

Katherine Hawley, "Success and knowledge-how" (2003)

Carlotta Pavese, "Know-how, action, and luck" (2018)

J. Adam Carter and Duncan Pritchard, "Knowledge-how and epistemic luck" (2015)

J. Adam Carter and Jesús Navarro, "The defeasibility of knowledge-how" (2017)

Ted Poston, "Know how to be Gettiered?" (2009)

Hubert Dreyfus's criticisms of AI

Hubert Dreyfus, "From Socrates to expert systems: the limits of calculative rationality" (1987)

Hubert Dreyfus and Stuart Dreyfus, "What artificial experts can and cannot do" (1991)

Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, chapter 26

Dreyfus (and Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty?) on skill

Stuart Dreyfus and Hubert Dreyfus, "A five-stage model of the mental activities involved in directed skill acquisition" (1980)

Hubert Dreyfus, "Why Heideggerian AI failed and how fixing it would require making it more Heideggerian" (2007)

System 1 and System 2 thinking

Steven Sloman, "The empirical case for two systems of reasoning" (1996)

Jonathan St.B.T. Evans, "In two minds: dual-process accounts of reasoning" (2003)

Gideon Keren and Yaacov Schul, "Two is not always better than one: A critical evaluation of two-system theories" (2009)

Jonnathan St. B. T. Evans and Keith Stanovich, "Dual-process theories of higher cognition: Advancing the debate" (2013)

The connection of words and know-how

Katherine Hawley, "Testimony and knowing how" (2010)

Thi Nguyen, "Transparency is Surveillance", 2021