Orthodoxy has it that knowledge is bifurcated between different kinds of states and in particular that there are species of knowledge that cannot be reduced to knowledge of truths. Moreover, it is commonly alleged that knowledge of truths alone falls short of explaining a distinctive kind of human capacity: the human capacity for skillful actions. This dissertation challenges both these orthodoxies. In the first chapter, “Know how and Gradability, ” I defend the unity of knowledge against the single most powerful and thus far unanswered argument against it, what I call “The argument from gradability. ” According to this argument from gradability, due to Gilbert Ryle (151) in The Concept of Mind, know how and propositional knowledge cannot be the same state, because the first comes in degrees, whereas the latter is absolute. In this chapter, I argue that the Rylean argument from gradability to dualism fails, as it moves too quickly from the surface form of ascriptions of know how to conclusions about the state that is ascribed by means of those ascriptions. According to Intellectualism about know how, knowing how to do something is a matter of possessing a piece of propositional knowledge. Intellectualists about know

Speakers use prosodic structure to group words together into prosodic phrases and to highlight individual words by making them perceptually more salient. This dissertation examined the impact of prosody on the process of identifying the referents of definite noun phrases (e.g. the purple bottle) across utterances. Participants ’ eye movements were moni-tored as they used a mouse to select objects on a computer screen in response to auditory instructions (e.g. Click on the purple bottle). The research explored two primary aspects of intonation, pitch accents (tonal targets associated with metrically stressed syllables) and edge tones (pitch movements associated with the edge of a phrase). While previous stud-ies focused on the role of local pitch accents (i.e. in the target instruction), especially L+H* or ”contrastive ” accents, the current work considers the effect of prosodic context- non-local edge tones and pitch accents (i.e. in preceding instructions)- on referent identifica-tion. This dissertation poses two novel questions about the function of prosody in referent identification: How do local and non-local pitch accents act in combination to affect refer-ent identification? How do pitch accents interact with phrasal edge tone patterns to affect