My father knew which cedar beam would split. He could never say how. Did he know?
When I was a boy my father would walk past a stack of beams and tap one with his knuckle and say: not that one, it will split when we carve it. He was almost always right. If you asked him how he knew, he would shrug, or say "listen to it", which is not an explanation.
I have some of this now myself. I could tell you a few things about grain and sound and weight, but if I am honest, the judgement comes first and the reasons come afterwards, and the reasons I give are not really what produced the judgement.
I have been reading about the debate between internalists and externalists. If I understand it, an internalist would say my father did not really know the beam would split, because he could not give the reasons. An externalist would say he did know, because his way of judging was reliable. The externalist answer feels right to me as a craftsman, but I also remember Aristotle in the Metaphysics saying that the person with experience often succeeds better than the one with theory, yet the master craftsman is wiser because he knows the cause, the why.
So which is it? And I want to add a practical question. When a client asks me why I refused a beam they paid for, what do I owe them? "Trust me" is not enough. But the real reason is something in my hands.