Matt said to Steve:
I think if we follow the Turner letter definition of intellectual patterns as
manipulation of symbols, then that's pretty much coextensive with propositional
knowing-that. And that, I think, would mean that bio and social are
know-how--you can't articulate what you are doing, but you get things done
successfully nevertheless. The trouble, as always, in the schematic is how to
describe DQ's place.
dmb says:
Does "know-how" refer to knowledge that can't be articulated or is it just
distinct from the other kind of knowledge, knowledge-that? Unless I'm missing
something, the distinction is just pointing out the difference between knowing
THAT two plus two equals four, and knowing HOW to add. In the case of Pirsig's
letter to Turner, understanding the meaning of the abstract symbols is
knowledge-that and the skill to manipulate them is know-how. You know how to
read and then you know what you read. As is the case with the math example,
both kinds of knowledge are intellectual (the skill and the content) and can be
articulated, although most of my math teachers were primarily coaches and gym
teachers. They had a way of making the know-how seem like quite an ineffable
thing.
I'll check out the "TV show with Tim Roth out right now (instant on Netflix!)
called Lie to Me". Sounds good.
Matt said:
While there's nothing in Sellarsian pragmatism that has to deny any of this
(...), it also isn't clear to me how the distinction between know-how and
knowing-that gets what some people seem to want out of the notion of
"pre-intellectual cutting edge of reality." For example, Russell absolutely
did _not_ mean the distinction between know-how and knowing-that. He meant
more like "direct experience of reality," and...
dmb says:
Yea, I think you're right about Russell's understanding of knowledge by
acquaintance. He saw it in terms the pragmatist is supposed to reject; SOM and
correspondence, etc.. But that's not how pre-intellectual reality, as radical
empiricist conceive it, is supposed to be understood. It does not claim to have
a unconceptualized access to the things of the world as they in themselves
because radical empiricism says that whole idea is just that, an idea. Things
and objects are derived from pure experience. Objects are not the cause of
unconceptualized experience or the sender of unprocessed sensory data, but a
habitually used hypothesis that is added precisely in order to conceptualize
the primary empirical reality.
For a radical empiricist, pre-conceptual reality is just experience, not
experience OF an external reality as it is in the raw. Maybe it's harder to
ACCEPT the full impact of the attack on SOM, rather than just an attack on the
correspondence theory. I mean, these guys are serious. They're making a
negative ontological claim, if you will. In the MOQ, there are is no such thing
as things-in-themselves. And so they do NOT claim to have direct access to any
such things-in-themsleves. They're NOT saying concepts stand between us those
things either. This is not Kantian at all, that that sense.
Instead, pure experience refers to undifferentiated awareness in which there
are no distinctions, which is what we need to tell the difference between
things and ourselves, things and other things, etc,,. In that sense, pure
experience is undifferentiated experience or a no-thing-ness. They really are
saying that objective reality is a fiction, you know? It's not a bad
hypothesis, but it's only that.
Rorty seems to have given up on the correspondence theory for a different, less
radical reason. He thinks we have a causal relationship with the world, but not
a rational one. There really is an external world, he thinks, but we can't get
outside our web of beliefs to see if it corresponds with them. He says it is
impossible to make them correspond in any sort of rational way such that we
could use it to justify our beliefs. Our classical pragmatists, on the other
hand, attack the correspondence theory by attacking the subject-object
assumptions on which it was predicated in the first. Rorty thinks it's an
impossible problem. We think it's a fake problem.
Matt continued: ...once we have an awareness of know-how and knowing-that it
either A) takes away all the analogies with know-how in explicating what
"language doesn't capture" or B) makes it even more unclear how language
(knowing-that) gets in the way of "direct experience" (know-how)--because on
the analysis being offered, knowing-that is just one kind of know-how.
dmb says:
Language gets in the way of direct experience? That sounds like a Kantian
picture of the problem and would NOT jibe with what "direct experience" means
in the MOQ.
How about this. Instead of concepts shaping what's "given" to the senses,
concepts are "taken" from the stream of experience they way one would "take" a
bucket of water from a river.
The bucket of water does not get in the way of the river. It does not represent
the river or correspond to the river. It's derived from the river. You captured
something from the river and in some sense it's not something ontologically
distinct from the river. But it sure ain't moving like a river and in some
sense you can't even compare them. In this analogy, pure experience is the
river and concepts are the buckets of water.
Feeling damp yet?
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