Specter of Reason

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...

What follows is a review and somewhat heated criticism of the essay, "Moral Psychology and the Misunderstanding of Religion ", by Jonathan Haidt, Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia. Those accused of the "misunderstanding" mentioned in its title are the "new atheists" (though this fact does not become clear until about two-thirds of the way through Haidt's rather lengthy exposition.) The basic idea is that the new atheists are too morally motivated (i.e., too emotional) to adhere to the scientific principles they exhalt. Interestingly, Haidt isn't out to criticize atheism. He is a self-professed atheist. What he is after is a more tolorant view of religion. His main point (which he doesn't state until the very end of the essay) is that we should regard "every longstanding ideology and way of life" as having some "moral wisdom" to impart. Bizarrely, everything written up until the explicit st...