Practical knowledge (8)

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The eighth lecture focuses on these issues, assessing the relevance of the intellectualist attitude in the light of recent developments in linguistics and the philosophy of mind, as well as phenomenology and cognitive psychology.

We began by looking at works that, particularly since Noam Chomsky, have stressed that the linguistic competence demonstrated by an ordinary speaker involves a form of intelligence, or that the knowledge manifested in knowing how to speak is a factual type of knowledge that cannot be understood in anti-intellectualist terms [1]. Should we, against Ryle, refuse to assimilate this knowledge to an ability to speak and understand, or to a system of dispositions, or should we take issue with Chomskyan analyses, following instead authors such as Peirce, Wittgenstein, or, or, more recently, Hilary Putnam and Michael Devitt [2], who insist that the knowledge involved in linguistic competence must take account of tacit knowledge, of what cannot be said but only shown, of what it means to "follow a rule", but also of know-how, abilities, aptitudes andskills (see Annalisa Coliva's contribution to the seminar). Even if our intuitions tend to point in the latter direction - anti-intellectualism - settling the question of what constitutes the practical knowledge on which linguistic competence rests is anything but straightforward, as Stanley and Williamson's discussion against Michael Devitt shows. For Devitt, there's no reason to suppose that someone who is competent in relation to a sentence - who has the ability to use it with a certain meaning - must thereby have the slightest propositional knowledge of what constitutes its meaning. But Devitt is rather allusive about what he means by "competence", remains a prisoner of the Cartesian doctrine he is supposed to reject, and mistakenly thinks that the distinction between propositional knowledge and knowing how to do things overlaps with a distinction often made in cognitive neuroscience between declarative and procedural knowledge, which is a distinction not between kinds of states but between ways of implementing (or realizing) the knowledge that is ours. If such an overlap is not justified, then this position does not constitute an objection to intellectualism and remains perfectly compatible, according to Stanley and Williamson, with a conception of savoir faire as propositional knowledge.

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.

References

[1] John Bengson & Marc A. Moffet, Knowing How: Essays on Knowledge, Mind, and Action, Oxford University Press, 2011, introduction.

[2] Michael Devitt, Designation, New York, Columbia University Press, 1981; Realism and truth, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1984/1997; Ignorance of language, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2006.

[3] Gareth Evans, The Varieties of Reference, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1982. John McDowell, "Singular thought and the extent of inner space", in J. McDowell and P. Pettit (eds.), Subject, Thought and Context, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1986. C. Peacocke, Concepts, Cambridge (Mass.), The MIT Press, 1992. H. Putnam, "The meaning of 'meaning'", Philosophical Papers, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1973.

[4] Alva Noé, "Against intellectualism", Analysis, 65(4), October 2005, pp. 278-90.

[5] J. Stanley, op. cit. 2011, p. 167.

Speaker(s)

Claudine Tiercelin

Professor at the Collège de France

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Speaker(s)

Claudine Tiercelin

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Practical knowledge and language skills

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Vicariance and practical knowledge