[MD] Know-how

[david buchanan]

Matt said:
I remember reading a transcript of a lecture Pirsig gave once where (if memory serves) he used Bertrand Russell's distinction between knowledge by appearance and knowledge by description to catch hold of the same thing.



dmb says:

As my wiki tweaky shows, the distinction Russell used was between "knowledge by acquaintance" and "knowledge by description". This distinction shows up in many languages and it certainly wasn't invented by James but he puts it to use in his Principles of Psychology. "In 1890, William James, agreeing there were two fundamental kinds of knowledge, and adopting Grote's terminology, further developed the distinctions made by Grote and Helmholtz", Wiki says. And the article quotes James from that massive book: "I cannot impart acquaintance with them to any one who has not already made it himself I cannot describe them, make a blind man guess what blue is like, define to a child a syllogism, or tell a philosopher in just what respect distance is just what it is, and differs from other forms of relation. At most, I can say to my friends, Go to certain places and act in certain ways, and these objects will probably come. (1890, p.221)

It's worth pointing out that James was still talking in terms any positivist could love. In the Psychology book, he was a SOMer. But this distinction was one of the things that prompted James to do rethinking. Knowledge by acquaintance would be developed and carried into his radical empiricism. If we look at the Russell section of the same Wiki article, we can see that he understands the concept in terms of SOM.

"According to Russell, knowledge by acquaintance is obtained through a direct causal (experience-based) interaction between a person and the object that person is perceiving".

If we take knowledge by acquaintance to mean direct causal interaction between knower and known, then we are not talking about something Pirsig has in common with Russell. And, more importantly, that's exactly how we should NOT understand the concept of pure experience. Even back in his psychology book, James was talking about the ineffable quality of knowledge by acquaintance whereas Russell took it to mean something causal, like the raw sense data. 

It's also worth pointing out that this is the very same SOM framework in which it makes sense to say all that "snow is white" business. The Wiki section on Russell goes on to say...

"To be fully justified in believing a proposition to be true one must be acquainted, not only with the fact that supposedly makes the proposition true, but with the relation of correspondence that holds between the proposition and the fact. In other words, justified true belief can only occur if I know that a proposition (e.g. "Snow is white") is true in virtue of a fact (e.g. that snow is indeed white). ..This direct contact with the fact and the knowledge that this fact makes a proposition true is what is meant with knowledge by acquaintance".

In any case, my point is that it makes quite a lot of difference how, exactly, one conceives of the distinction between those two kinds of knowledge. Later, Bertrand Russell would comment on James's attack on SOM. Oddly, I found Ken Wilber quoting Russell on James. Russell is reviewing one of James's essays in radical empiricism....

"The main purpose of this essay ["Does 'Consciousness Exist?"] was to deny that the subject-object relation is fundamental. It had, until then, been taken for granted by philosophers that there is a kind of occurrence called “knowing,” in which one entity, the knower or subject, is aware of another, the thing known or the object [the "two hands" of experience]. The knower was regarded as a mind or soul; the object known might be a material object, an eternal essence, another mind, or, in self-consciousness, identical with the knower. Almost everything in accepted philosophy was bound up in the dualism of subject and object. The distinction of mind and matter and the traditional notion of “truth,” all need to be radically reconsidered if the distinction of subject and object is not accepted as fundamental."


I think he sounds like he's very impressed with the idea, but also a bit skeptical. 


There was another point I wanted to make about the know-how/know-that distinction, which I think is not quite the same thing either but I'll save that for another time.



 		 	   		  
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