Practical knowledge (9)

We have emphasized the importance of the nuances and weightings to be taken into account (cf. the Platonic ambivalence on the value of practical knowledge, the subtlety of the Aristotelian position, the nuances of Ryle, but also of Stanley and Williamson), making it necessary to minimize the idea of a supposed priority of practical knowledge over theoretical knowledge, but also of too frank oppositions between the two and between the forms of intelligence that we would see at work there. This also invites us to integrate certain elements into the proposed new model of practical knowledge, foremost among them intellectual virtues such as those recently highlighted in the ethics of belief and the epistemology of virtue, which insist less on epistemic obligations and duties than on the character of the agent of knowledge, prompting us to distinguish (i) epistemic justification and ethical justification, (ii) what can be worth (and even be valued) at the level of inquiry and what is worth at the level of epistemic justification ; and to draw an important lesson: if there is no strict parallel between the practical sphere and the epistemic sphere, there must also be a relationship between them: otherwise there would be a disconnect between our cognitive and epistemic reasons or virtues on the one hand, and our practical reasons or virtues on the other.

In the end, then, we proposed a model of practical knowledge whose fundamental features would be as follows. Knowledge is indeed a process of inquiry that takes the (Socratic) form of questions and answers, rather than that of beliefs whose truth must simply be established and justified. In this sense, there is no need to fundamentally distinguish the model of practical knowledge from the one used to define theoretical knowledge, to which we have set a certain number of constraints (condition of sensitivity, safety, need to provide the conditions for the possibility of doubt, principle of fallibility and revisions of beliefs - see the 2010-2011 lecture for details). While there is no need to fundamentally change the model by placing it within the more general framework of an epistemology of virtues, we do need to take care to integrate certain epistemic virtues as effectively as possible. For someone to be said to "know how to do", to be truly endowed with "practical knowledge", he or she must not only be endowed with linguistic competence, but also be capable of exercising particular abilities. He must surely be precise(accurate), deft(adroit), well adjusted(apt). But he must also be able to link the three: for the archer's bow shot to be well adjusted, it must not only be accurate and adroit, it must be accurate because it is adroit, in short, successful because the archer has demonstrated his competence [2]. In practical knowledge, then, we must be able to identify "a kind of success stemming from aptitude", since "knowledge is a special case of more general normative phenomena such as success stemming from aptitude (or success stemming from excellence, or success stemming from virtue [3])", and doubtless also from other epistemic virtues (such as discernment, honesty, attention to data, a sense of responsibility, the absence of epistemic vices, etc.).we concluded by pointing out that this first set of lessons devoted to practical knowledge did not claim to have gone to the heart of what makes its nature or essence. At this stage, the aim was above all to highlight a number of difficulties inherent in both intellectualist and anti-intellectualist versions of practical knowledge, as well as in the problematic opposition between practical and theoretical knowledge. In so doing, we hope to have rendered more comprehensible the way in which our thoughts, acts and actions are articulated, as well as the more natural links we have, mind and body combined, with the world.