Specter of Reason

I still haven't had a chance to look at Bruce Waller's book, Against Moral Responsibility   (2011) , but I've been reading about it and related topics in my spare time a bit over the past several days.  One reader, David Duffy, was kind enough to bring one of Waller's papers to my attention.  It's called "Empirical Free Will and the Ethics of Moral Responsibility"(2003).  In it, Waller claims that moral responsibility and free will are either conceptually wedded by definition (in which case, he says, we only get confusion) or there is some synthetic (empirical) connection between them.  He then argues that there is no such empirical connection. I question the claim that there is any confusion resulting from regarding a logical (analytic) entailment between moral responsibility and free will.  Unfortunately, Waller does not support his assertion here, though perhaps he addresses the issue in his more recent book.  I think the only conceptual confusion...

I want to clarify and expand on a point I recently raised against Ryle. A friend has suggested that I moved a little too quickly through the points, especially concerning the relevance of Wittgenstein, so I'll try to make it a bit more cogent. I'll draw some connections to Dennett, Millikan and Kripke in the process. It begins with Ryle's distinction between museum-possession and workshop-possession of factual knowledge (see Ryle, "Knowing How and Knowing That," 1946). Let MUSEUM(p) = museum-possession of knowledge that p. Let WORKSHOP(p) = workshop-possession of knowledge that p. Ryle claims that MUSEUM(p) is impoverished with respect to knowing-how, where "knowing how" is a general term for intelligence associated with the application or expression of knowledge. In order to intelligently exploit one's propositional knowledge that p, one needs WORKSHOP(p). Ryle is also clear that, in order to know that p, one must establish or derive the f...

I want to further explain my misgivings about Ryle's account of knowing-how ( see here ).  Ryle's positive view of knowing-how is embedded in his arguments against intellectualism. As Jason Stanley noted during his "meisterkurs," these arguments are targeted against a number of different positions at the same time, and Ryle lumps them all together under the banner of "intellectualism." First there is the notion that all knowledge is knowing the answer to a question. This is the position Jason wants to defend. Ryle is also arguing against the view that the intellect is the defining feature of the mind: that to be a person is to have a mind, and to have a mind is to have an intellect, where the intellect is defined as that which considers and grasps propositions, or truths. I think Jason wants to defend this position, as well; and it may very well be entailed by the first position. Along with these views is the view that, in order to act intelligently, ...

I'm just 24 hours back from Jason Stanley's "meisterkurs" at the Berlin School of Mind and Brain. It was phenomenal. It was great to finally meet Jason in person. He was wonderfully receptive and gracious. I didn't have time to ask him everything I wanted, but a number of important bases were covered. He was excited and good-humored and always kept me on the edge of my seat. I was glad to see him being critical of some of the arguments in his recent book. At one point, he seemed to want to reject the idea of practical ways of thinking as a natural kind or category of cognitive capacities. He said he had never claimed they were necessary in the first place, at which point I picked up my copy of his book and turned to page 130 and read aloud: "[Practical ways of thinking] are necessary to explain the acquisition of skill on the basis of knowledge of facts, which are true propositions." Jason responded that he didn't know what he meant by...

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...

In addition to Jason Stanley's Know How, there's another, even more recent book on the same topic:   Knowing How: Essays on Knowledge, Mind and Action . It's a collection of 15 new papers presumably commissioned by the editors of the volume, which are John Bengson and Marc A. Moffett. I've only just begun to peruse the bits that are available online.  I don't expect to get to the whole book any time soon.  But it looks like at least some of the contributors are defending Ryle, and in ways not unlike my own.  Still, there are some confused interpretations of Ryle, as well. For example, on page 65, Paul Snowdon admits, in his criticism of Ryle's "Knowing How and Knowing That" (1946), that Ryle "is very hard to follow."  Snowdon claims that the confusion is Ryle's, and not his own.  He thinks Ryle is confused in his presentation of knowing-that, as if Ryle conflated the state or condition of knowing-that with the act or process of contem...

Kent Bach has published  a review of Jason Stanley's  Know How .   It's a generally positive review, though with a strongly critical bent.  Bach is not sold on Stanley's variety of intellectualism, but he does not want to object prematurely.  He finds a lot worth taking seriously, but he also finds a lot of problems that need to be resolved. In pointing out one of these 'loose ends', as he charitably calls them, Bach suggests a small amount of sympathy for Ryle.  The concern relates to Stanley's claim that, while learning how to do something entails learning a fact, learning how to do something better does not entail learning a new fact.  Bach's fear is that Stanley might be inviting "a Ryle-style regress problem." Though I haven't read this part of Stanley's book yet (still don't have a copy), Bach's concern is plausibly justified, though not clearly expressed.  We might raise a general question against Stanley:  If knowing how...

I'm not done reading and responding to Stanley's chapter on Ryle , but I've found another big mistake in his interpretation which deserves a post of its own.  Stanley says that Ryle claims the following:  If intelligent action is guided by rules or if it involves the application of criteria, then those rules or criteria must be intellectually acknowledged prior to the intelligent performance.  Stanley couldn't be more wrong.  [Stanley's error leads him to mischaracterize Ryle's knowing-how/knowing-that distinction. See update below.] Stanley rejects the position which he attributes to Ryle.  He says Ryle's view is unjustified, because Ryle has not demonstrated that the mere application of criteria requires an antecedent acknowledgment of that criteria.  Stanley says ( Know How , p. 13):  "Ryle therefore needs an argument that the view that 'intelligent performance involves the observance of rules, or the application of criteria' entails that...