Cheerskep; I like that phrase, "everything following my colon..." with its scatological allusion, i.e., a "dumping" on Harris. Of course I know you refer to the grammatical colon and not the biological colon but actually the latter meaning is considered primary in Webster's.
Actually Collins is not the person who employs a narrow use of the word tact. His new book is a critique of earlier understandings of tacit, mainly Michael Polanyi's (who is the author of the bicycle example and the chief researcher in the field of tacit knowledge) and his own. Now Collins actually expands his treatment of tacit, describing several different types of tacit knowledge, some of which can be explicit, and some which can't. The book of his book I'm referring to was published just a few weeks ago (a comp copy sent to me by Univ. Chicago Press). I always have trouble with your hair-trigger eagerness to accuse others of not knowing the difference between art and, say, rock. Yes, yes, yes, a million times, yes, we all realize that art is not mind independent. But ordinary usage in language enables us to sidestep numerous linguistic mud puddles with a certain degree of confidence in others' ability to follow along. I use a metaphorical construct in saying art as if it was a personage that does such and such to avoid pedantic word clutter. It's so common that one finds this sort of sidestepping in all levels of language without needing to wave red flags on every page. So please stop the walloping . We are peers here, not schoolboys scratching on slates at your feet. I am not sure that Harris is confused about the mind-independent issue. He lists the ideocentric (art is--in my mind-- what I say it is) view of art as invalid because it can only be experienced one person at a time with no guarantee of transference at all to anyone else and thus cannot be a testable theory. This is the problem, too, with the insistence that art cannot be intrinsic to anything and is therefore a subjective construct. Only something extrinsic can be testable or qualified except, perhaps, clusters of opinions among people who have some common attitudes or tastes or self-interest (the institutional theory as a collective ideocentric opinion). This is the problem with your view. Only you can be the single authority of your own construct for art as a subjective case fictionally projected. It is untestable and therefore art as an explicit concept cannot exist. Harris has a similar problem with the conceptual view of art because he sees idea (the concept) as necessarily verbal and no matter what is offered or withheld as evidence of the idea it is only knowable in language, and again, a subjective language that reduces the experience to description. Of course I simplify. There remains the question of whether or not some objective (significant) form is implicitly evidenced by manipulation of material evoking a gestalt in consciousness, perhaps a neural patterning. If so, it can be tested, at least in its most general way. This may be a intrinsic human capability, to perceive form (an abstract unity or selection, a framed field). I don't mean significant form in the way invented by Roger Fry -- which is too loaded with societal values -- but significant in the sense of being immediately comprehended once a framing limit is imposed. When the frame is described and measured then it may be that most humans will immediately sense a gestalt form within the framed field, albeit inflected differently via custom, emotional state, and the like. Michael Brady has moved toward this, or something similar enough to be allied to it. The framing does not create mind-independent art but it may establish form and that has ever been called art has a dialectical engagement with form. If listers receive the NYTimes Review of Books, take a look at the inside front cover of the new issue. There's Reginald Gibbons' new book with my painting on the cover. If you like poetry this is the book. Reginald was a 2009 finalist for the National Book Award. And in the same ad there is Collins' book, too. Buy books and save civilization! ----- Original Message ---- From: cheerskep <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Wed, June 2, 2010 5:34:18 PM Subject: Re: book William asks: I 'm a little confused re the statements you provide. Are both from Harris? Is one your own, or Damasio's? Everything following my colon there is by Harris. I can't say I'm a champion of Damasio, but I felt Harris's dismissing remark was a bad reflection on Harris, not Damasio. I haven't read Harry Collins's "Rethinking Expertise", but I've read an interview with him that I suspect might spur many scholars to protest his narrow usage of 'knowledge': idea of "tacit knowledge"things you can do but can't describe how. Riding a bike is the best-known example, but both everyday life and contributions to technical domains depend on tacit knowledge. Then I myself protest Harris's and (forgive me, William) your assumption that, for example, the word 'art' and related terms have mind-independent "referents". I realize my protest is too unclear in so short an assertion. In a subsequent posting I'll try to make it more comprehensible. I do like to think about Harris' idea that art is being subsumed by other disciplines, broken up into varied modes of practice within those disciplines. This is opposite the normative view that art is blurring the boundaries or is taking from other disciplines. ----- Original Message ---- From: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Wed, June 2, 2010 12:13:29 PM Subject: Re: book William -- Since I know your respect for Damasio, I think the following excerpt from Harris's brief intro to integrational linguistics may be of interest to you: It is sometimes said that a full understanding of our blinguistic knowledgeb (or, alternatively, a bscientificb understanding of language) will be impossible until advances in the study of the brain reveal exactly how the language faculty and other faculties are related. This is held out as one of the hopes for future bcognitive scienceb. 7c. Thinking of language in this way, however, rests on a misunderstanding. The mistake is analogous to supposing that the explanation of why a clock keeps good time must be that inside it there is a set of instructions for time-keeping. Research into brain mechanisms is interesting in its own right. But the fact that linguistic communication has already come to play such a central role in civilization without relying so far on any such research suggests that whatever human beings already know about language from their own experience is quite adequate for an bunderstandingb of the relevant phenomena.
