Practical knowledge (8)

We then moved on to objections from representatives more in favor of a conception of savoir faire as "affordance" or "embodied knowledge", found in phenomenology, but also in authors such as Gibbons, Alva Noé or Jérôme Dokic (see his contribution to the seminar) who appeal to the "situated" character of cognition. All of them are keen to emphasize other aspects of practical knowledge, which they consider to be insufficiently taken into account, both in the intellectualist approach, often assimilated by them - but in my view wrongly - to a fundamentally representationalist approach, or in certain reductionist physicalist approaches to the mind, which pay too little attention to phenomena such as the non-conceptual content of some of our mental states, to their phenomenal and qualitative aspect, or to the links between perception and action. They all deplore the fact that practical knowledge is no longer presented as an activity, involving a wide range of skills and talents, and in which our perceptions, emotions and, quite simply, our bodies play a part(see Alain Berthoz's speech at the seminar). This is the type of argument put forward by Alva Noé, a paradigmatic representative of this kind of approach, who fiercely criticized the intellectualism of Stanley and Williamson in their analyses. For Noé, practical knowledge involvesabilities that areembodied, in the sense that they depend on our bodily nature, andsituated, in the sense that the conditions for their exercise are external to the agent. Possession of these capacities affects our attitude and enables us to have experiences we wouldn't otherwise be able to have, to detect meaning where otherwise there would be none. In this way, the body, the world and our practical knowledge open up a realm of experience filled with meaning. And that's why it's reasonable to think of practical skills as a kind of knowledge. They cover a type of understanding that we apply in our practices, just as we might apply our conceptual understanding. This is what undermines any conception that would see the knowledge in question as something "propositional". If to know how to do something is to know that certain propositions are true, then it becomes properly mysterious that something like incorporation or situation can matter so much. Some philosophers (who are not phenomenologists) have argued that context, situation and evenembodiment provide the very conditions of possibility for certain propositional contents. Thus, for Gareth Evans and John McDowell, certain contents are object-dependent in the sense that one could not grasp the proposition other than by facing the object itself, while Putnam suggests that the causal relations between perceiving subjects (real beings made of flesh and bone) and their environment place constraints on what their thoughts are about [3]. If these analyses are correct, Stanley and Williamson, and intellectualists in general, need to explain how the type of propositional knowledge to which practical knowledge is assimilated accounts for the essential role that situation and incorporation seem to play. Noé, for his part, concludes in the opposite direction: "All propositional knowledge depends on and must be analyzed in terms of a fundamental savoir faire. The intellectualist over-intellectualizes the mind [4] To which the intellectualist can always retort that, just as we can thwart an interpretation aimed at reducing the distinction between savoir faire and propositional knowledge to the procedural/declarative distinction, we can also give this kind of analysis of "embodied" abilities and talents a reading that is not radically opposed to intellectualism, including by drawing on certain findings of cognitive neuroscience [5], or by reviving notions such as automaticity and tacit representation, which are prominent in contemporary cognitive science, ethology and psychology. This would also enable us to rethink the undoubtedly too clear-cut distinctions that some people make between practical knowledge and theoretical knowledge, to see that states that we are perhaps too spontaneously inclined to call "theoretical" are perhaps more than we think already pervaded, to varying degrees, by a whole series of skills and aptitudes, such as imagination, the capacity for iconic representation, etc., and finally, not to adopt too hastily, an anti-intellectualist attitude.