Specter of Reason

I want to consider the idea that there are three different common uses for each the following sentences: (1) God does not exist. (2) God exists.  I will outline a version of theological noncognitivism (TN), which is normally taken to entail the belief that (1) and (2) are neither true nor false.  The idea of noncognitivism in general (be it theological, moral, or what have you) is that the concepts in question are not propositional, which is another way of saying that they cannot be evaluated as either true or false.  TN implies that (1) and (2) are non-truth-evaluable under religious usages of (1) and (2).  However, what I will argue is that TN can acknowledge truth-evaluable versions of (1) and (2), and that noncognitivists can even assent to common uses of (1) which are truth-evaluable. It might look like I'm trying to mix noncognitivism with cognitivism, but that's not entirely true.  It also might look like I'm trying to tweak noncognitivism to make ...

Jason Stanley says that we must understand the need for practical ways of thinking if we are going to understand what it means to know how to do something.  His thesis ( Know How , 2011, p. 130) is this:  "What happens when I acquire skill in the activity of catching fly balls?  What happens is that I come to the realization that a certain way of catching a fly ball, which I think of practically, is a way that will give me counterfactual success in fly ball catching."  Thus, one must not simply have a properly practical way of thinking about catching a fly ball; one must also realize that they have this practical way of thinking about that way.  One must thereby come to the conclusion that the way is a good way of doing it. Stanley's account implies two ways of thinking:  The first way is the practical one, and the second is the way of thinking  about  the practical way of thinking  such that it is about a good way of acting.   Is thi...

In a recent piece for  The Stone , Jason Stanley rejects the common distinction between theoretical knowledge and practical skill.  His goal, apparently, is to liberate society from a false and oppressive elitism. He says: "The distinction between the practical and the theoretical is used to warehouse society into groups. It alienates and divides. It is fortunate, then, that it is nothing more than a fiction."  I'm not sure why that would be fortunate.  I rather think it would be fortunate if the warehousing turned out to be for the better.  If there was a problem, the fact that it was based on a fiction would not make me feel better.  In any case, Stanley does not draw our attention to any documented evidence of any alienation or division resulting from the folk conception of a practical/theoretical distinction.  I'm not convinced the folk conception is a problem at all.  But that's not what I want to write about right now. Stanley's piece i...

Interesting philosophical issues can arise when we investigate what it is we know or perceive about our actions while we are acting intentionally.  It should probably go without saying that, when we are acting intelligently, we know what we are doing, at least to some extent and in some sense of the verb, "to know."  I'm going to try to motivate the thesis that what we know is not obviously propositional in nature. Consider the following question: (1) What is she doing? It goes without saying that, in many normal situations, a proper response to (1) is a description or identification of an action.  However, (1) has an idiomatic usage.  It can be used to communicate fear or anxiety about what somebody is doing.  It can communicate a desire for an explanation for an action.  Context usually makes it clear which usage is intended. Now consider what happens when (1) is embedded in the following knowledge ascription: (2) She knows what she is doing. It...

My first video performance, and it's by no means flawless.  But it's the best I can offer for now.  A short improvisation followed by an imperfect rendition of Chopin's Fantasie-Impromptu:

In Chapter 8 of Know How (2011), Jason Stanley discusses whether or not there can be Gettier cases for knowledge how, and whether or not this means knowledge how is not propositional knowledge.  He accepts the following proposition: (P1) Gettier cases for know-how, if they exist, require that the subject intelligently and successfully F, where F ranges over actions. (P1) is supposed to be self-evident, but this surely depends on how we understand "intelligently."  What counts as an intelligent action, in the sense that makes P1 self-evidently true?  Is it enough for the action to have been consciously decided upon? We might be tempted to read P1 as only requiring that F be successfully performed with the conscious decision to F, which would entail the following proposition: (P1*) Gettier cases for know-how, if they exist, require that the subject consciously decide to and successfully F, where F ranges over actions. However, (P1*) does not seem self-...

Helen Dragas has spoken in defense of her and the Board of Visitor's decision to force Terry Sullivan to resign from the position of President of the University of Virginia.  No reason was given for the move, and Sullivan had been a highly respected and appreciated leader.  Her resignation was a shock, but the most poignant demands were not that she had to be reinstated, but that the decision to remove her had to be explained.  Without transparency, only the most careless and vile motivations (e.g., corporate greed) can be supposed. Dragas apologizes for this. She says, "our actions too readily lent themselves to perceptions of being opaque and not in keeping with the honored traditions of this University. For that reason, let me state clearly and unequivocally: you - our U.VA. family - deserved better from this Board, and we have heard your concerns loud and clear." So you'd think she would try to close the gap and offer transparency, at least some. But she doesn...

Updated on July 1, 2012.  See bottom. On page 229 of Know How (2011), Jason Stanley argues that ascriptions of knowing how create opaque contexts, which (he claims) implies that knowing how to do something is conceptual.  An opaque context is one in which co-extensive terms cannot be substituted without changing the truth-value of an expression.  Stanley is responding to the relatively familiar view that procedural knowledge or knowledge how is non-conceptual.  If it is non-conceptual, then why would it create opaque contexts? Stanley quotes David Carr to prove that knowing how ascriptions create opaque contexts: Suppose a famous dancer was to perform before an audience, an item from his repertoire to which he has himself given the following title:    (12) A performance of Improvisation No. 15    To the astonishment of a member of his audience who just happens to be an expert on communications, the movements of the dancer turn out to ...

I'm still working my way through the required reading for Jason Stanley's upcoming Meisterkurs at Berlin School of Mind and Brain.  I'm currently reading Chapter 7 of his Know How (2011) .   At the moment, he's talking about how cognitive neuroscientists conceive of the distinction between declarative and procedural knowledge.  His argument is that the distinction has no implications for the question of whether knowing how is propositional in nature. Stanley makes some very questionable moves here.  First, he discusses the distinction between declarative and procedural memory.  He is appealing to Gabrieli, 1998, p. 90 : nondeclarative or procedural kinds of memory encompass the acquisition, retention, and retrieval of knowledge expressed through experience-induced changes in  performance. These kinds of memory are measured by indirect or implicit tests  where no reference is made to that experience. Skill learning, repetition prim ing, and conditi...

In Chapter 7 of Know How (2011), Jason Stanley discusses the origins of the distinction between procedural and declarative knowledge.  He argues that the distinction has never had any implications for the question of whether or not knowing how to do something is a kind of propositional knowledge.  In other words, he says the distinction has never implied that knowing how is different in kind from knowing that.  I think he's quite wrong and his argument misrepresents the literature. Stanley appeals to a paper by Dienes & Perner (D&P) called "A theory of implicit and explicit knowledge" (1999) , in which they claim that the distinction originated in AI and was later utilized in psychology.  On page 743, they claim that the distinction "concerned how best to implement knowledge."  They continue: Should one represent the knowledge that all men are mortal as a general declaration “for every individual it is true that if that individual i...

In "Are There Propositions?" (1929), Ryle interprets the word "proposition" as more or less synonymous with "statement." (See Ryle's  Collected Papers Volume 2: Collected Essays 1929-1968 , p. 39).  A logical result of this view is that propositional knowledge (aka "knowledge that") is knowledge related to statements of fact, linguistic or in other ways symbolic.  It would then follow that a person knows that x if and only if that person has some explicit recognition of the fact that x (via a representation of x), or the capacity to acknowledge or communicate that fact in some way. We can understand capacities in terms of counterfactual abilities.  Thus, if a person knows that x, that person can, in some situations, explicitly recognize, acknowledge or communicate that fact in some way.  In this way, propositional knowledge is tied intrinsically to intellectual and discursive capacities.  It's no wonder, then, that Ryle identifies propo...

I've just finished the first chapter of Stanley's Know How (2011).  He ends by summarizing Ryle as follows: "According to Ryle, one knows how to do something if and only if one bears an intellectual relationship to an action type."  This is wrong in two ways.  First, Ryle does not suppose all knowing how is intellectual.  That's precisely why he frames his version of knowing how against intellectualism.  Not all intelligence is a matter of intellect.  Second, Ryle explicitly denies that knowing how can be defined in terms of particular action types. In any case, Stanley makes a very strong argument on pages 48 to 51.  Ryle (1949) claims that the fact that we do not say "believes how to do something" is evidence for a strong type distinction between knowing how and knowing that.  Stanley observes quite persuasively that the verb "believe" does not take embedded questions, and so this is not a peculiarity of constructions involving "know...

In his 1946 paper, "Knowing How and Knowing That," Ryle makes brief mention of Lewis Carroll's 1895 paper, "What the Tortoise Said to Achilles."  (I discussed Carroll's argument and its relation to Ryle not so long ago .)  Jason Stanley addresses the problem in his recent Know How (2011).  He quotes Ryle's argument, which is not quite identical to Carroll's.  Ryle writes: A pupil fails to follow an argument. He understands the premises and he understands the conclusion. But he fails to see that the conclusion follows from the premises. The teacher thinks him rather dull but tries to help. So he tells him that there is an ulterior proposition which he has not considered, namely, that if these premises are true, the conclusion is true. The pupil understands this and dutifully recites it alongside the premises, and still fails to see that the conclusion follows from the premises even when accompanied by the assertion that these premises entail this c...

In early July, Jason Stanley will be giving a three-day Meisterkurs  (in English) at Humboldt University's Berlin School of Mind and Brain.  With his blessing and the permission of the organizers, I have registered and plan on attending the event.  It's going to be hard, because I have no sympathy at all for Stanley's interpretation of Ryle, which is likely going to take up a large portion of the course.  Discussion has been encouraged (even in German, which means I might not understand everything that's said), but I don't want to bother him or the other students with countless objections.  Still, half the required reading is either on or by Ryle, so I'm going to have a hard time biting my tongue.  I'll try to measure my comments carefully and keep them short and to the point.  I would love to go head to head with Stanley on Ryle, and perhaps I will have a suitable opportunity over the course of the three days, but I'm not going with that kind of agend...