[MD] Know-how

[david buchanan]

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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