Jason Mark Roehrig My Web Home

Most of us learn how to ride a bicycle at some point of our life. The process of learning consisting of the acquisition of a skill. Once we acquire the skill of riding a bike we usually refer to this ability as "knowing how to ride a bicycle". In other words, we state to be in possession of knowledge allowing us to ride a bicycle.

This is a peculiar usage of the term knowledge, as the skill has less to do with knowledge and more so with ability. All you need to know really, is how to keep you balance and treat the peddles, move the steering bar to control your direction, and use the brakes to come to a stand still. Although there is more to it. To keep your balance you need to know how to control your center of gravity. To steer you need to know how big of a turning circle you are required to make in relation to your current speed. Just as coming to a stand still requires the application of varying amounts of pressure onto your brakes.

Never the less, if you ask someone who claims to know how to ride a bike, they will probably not mention those extra bits I mentioned above, and most likely just report (a form of) my first description. This is due to us believing to know about something, because we have experienced our ability to do so. Unaware of not being conscious of what is really involved in riding a bicycle.

What ever action a human does, it always involves a certain amount of unconsciousness to be able to do so. For example let us look at the task of holding a glass. Everyone will agree, that it requires the wrapping of fingers around the glass. What not everyone will know or rather be conscious of, in the sense of knowing involved physical processes, is the need to understand the relation ship of friction (produced by the skin of our finger tips and the surface of the glass) and pressure (applied by our fingers) required to ensure the glass not slipping out of our hand. Even while able to demonstrate their ability to hold glasses of different weights. In other words, while claiming to know how to hold a glass, the demonstration of doing so, only shows their ability to do so, not their knowledge. A distinction that needs to be made. And we haven't even looked into the biological processes involved, such as how to control our muscles to wrap our fingers around the glass, while simultaneously applying the right amount of pressure to keep it in place without crushing the glass or our fingers (though I'm not sure that last one is at all possible, without suffering from osteoporosis).

Back to our bicycle we find a similar pattern. The demonstration of being able to ride a bicycle, only shows that one has acquired the skill to do so, not the possession of knowledge how to do so. And still we say "I know how to ...".