Category Archives: Philosophy

A Friendly Amendent to Nina Strohminger’s McGinn Review

Nina Strohminger–a post-doctoral fellow at the Kenan Institute for Ethics–recently wrote a scathing review of Colin McGinn‘s book The Meaning of Disgust. Thanks to Strohminger’s flamboyant cuffing of McGinn around the ears, her review earned her some well-deserved ‘net fame. I have not read the book so I cannot comment on it but the review does make for quite an entertaining read. I say that as someone who has mixed feelings about such ‘takedowns’ in the academic context; I have no such compunctions when it comes to bad movies (see below). Still, McGinn has dished out plenty in the past, so he should be used to this sort of jousting. (An interesting subtext: Strohminger is a newly minted Ph.D from the University of Michigan’s Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience program; McGinn is a senior professor in a related field. Let’s hope McGinn has the grace to retaliate only in print.)

Strohminger’s review begins:

In disgust research, there is shit, and then there is bullshit. Colin McGinn’s book belongs to the latter category.

From there it moves on to:

McGinn’s view of disgust is insistently mysterian: not merely ignorant or unenlightening but obfuscatory. Baroque, eye-catching explanations are given precedence over parsimony, evidence, or even common sense….Another property of the book, of which potential readers should be aware, is its unintentional hilarity. The humor derives less from the unblushing content than from the unblushing purpleness of his prose.

And so on. You get the picture. There is however, a missed opportunity in the review, and it occurs when Strominger catches McGinn being sloppy and sexist:

McGinn suggests that inorganic items—a list which includes cars, houses, and, apparently, fine silks—lack the ambivalence of human companions, so we can love them wholeheartedly, unencumbered by the physical disgust that attends our love for children and romantic partners. Diamonds, being forever, do not remind us of death. He muses: “Is this why women tend to love jewelry so—because of a relatively high level of bodily self-disgust? Just asking.” Is Colin McGinn a sexist, penis-gazing blowhard? Just asking!

Strohminger’s retort to the line she quotes is good, but I think it could have been better. By placing an exclamation mark at the end of the ‘Just asking’ Strohminger defuses her counter-volley’s rhetorical impact significantly. With that punctuation, Strohminger’s retort looks a little hurried and nervous, one quickly made, and then withdrawn. McGinn’s ‘Just asking’ ends with a period; its offensiveness is a function of the baldness of its statement. It is the period that makes clear his ‘just’ asking is insincere.

Consider now:

Is Colin McGinn a sexist, penis-gazing blowhard? Just asking.

This, I think, is the right mirror to McGinn’s line. I do not know if reviews ever appear in revised editions; but if they ever do, then Strohminger should take the opportunity to ditch the exclamation mark, replace it with a period, and email McGinn and myself a copy. (Come to think of it, I don’t think Strohminger’s review has been published yet; time yet to revise!)

Note: Thanks to reading around the McGinn review, I stumbled on Anthony Lane’s hilarious review of George Lucas’ disastrous Star Wars episode 3. The review is genuinely funny and Lucas deserves every single word in there.

The Question Asked, Inquiry Begins

Classes for the 2012 spring semester ended last week. And with that, I completed ten years of teaching at Brooklyn College. (I’m well aware that I have yet to complete grading for this semester but for now, I’m trying to put that thought out of my mind.) When I first started, in the 2002 fall semester, I taught in both the computer science and philosophy departments. Since January 2010, it has been all philosophy, all the time. In these ten years, I think I’ve learned a great deal from my students. (I’ll let them tell me if they think I have contributed in any way to their learning.)

I’ve learned, most importantly,  that almost any question asked by a student is gold: a chance to elaborate, embroider, embellish, and expand a philosophical theme. The question is not an interruption, one to be dispensed with efficiently and quickly, before I get back to the business of teaching; answering it is the main act. The question is a clear and visible sign that thought has been provoked; it deserves attention, care, and thoughtful nurturing. In answering a question, further avenues for exploration open up; new thoughts are prompted, which might in turn provoke more questions, more interaction. (In a teaching observation conducted this past semester, I advised one of our adjunct instructors, who had shown some signs of haste in his answers to student questions, that he needn’t worry that the class was being ‘held up.’ Rather, he’d do better to exploit the opportunity to slow down, and examine the issue at hand in greater detail. The student had not thrown a spanner in the works; the student had, instead, kickstarted the engine.)

So nothing quite improves my classroom experience like the answering of a question: I find my knowledge of the material tested; I discover that I can be creative in the construction of examples that will aid my explanation. This latter aspect is especially valuable. Teaching can often be physically, emotionally and intellectually draining work; the spur to creativity that a question provides is a bracing tonic. I find nothing quite as exhilarating in teaching as finding out that in answering a student’s question, I myself have acquired a deeper understanding of the material. (A stellar example of this came during a Logical Foundations of Artificial Intelligence class some eight years ago; as I answered a student’s question about how a proposition was to be expressed in predicate logic, I suddenly realized that I understood WVO Quine‘s classic paper ‘On What There Is‘ just a little better. My sense of pleasure in this enhanced comprehension was so pronounced that I almost broke off mid-sentence to try to digest it.)  In particular, questions that are directed at passages in the assigned reading invariably enrich my encounter with a text previously considered familiar; I was stunned by the depths I discovered in David Hume‘s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion every time I was asked for clarification by the students in my Spring 2010 Philosophy of Religion class.

None of the observations above should be surprising; after all, all inquiry is the attempt to answer questions.

Freud, Goethe and Burke on Happiness, Pleasure, and Satiation

Defining ‘happiness’ is hard; how are we to know what to do to be happy, if we don’t have a good handle on what happiness is? And thus, the persistent efforts through the ages, of philosophical minds–and more recently, grimly determined social scientists and psychologists alike–to provide some delineation of the concept. (Even David Brooks thinks he has something to contribute to this discussion and thus, often deigns to provide–from his Op-Ed perch–disquisitions on moral psychology.)

One recurring suspicion has been that happiness might not be all it’s cracked up to be; that happiness may only be transient, not a sustainable state, that to seek recurrence of a pleasurable state might be to commit oneself to a foolishly deluded pursuit of rapidly diminishing value, that satiation is likely to result all too soon on the attainment of a pleasurable state, leaving one again, discontent and unhappy. (The phenomenon, noted by many over the years, of how seeking the re-creation of a pleasurable event like a particularly successful vacation or family reunion, never, ever works, is related to this suspicion as are the drug addict’s vain attempts to re-experience the first really great high.)

At the heart of this suspicion is the notion that novelty and contrast play too great a role in our understanding of happiness and pleasure. This has often been articulated, and quite well too.

For instance, in that masterpiece of modern pessimism, Civilization and its Discontents, Sigmund Freud notes in Chapter II,

What is called happiness in its narrowest sense comes from the satisfaction——most often instantaneous——of pent-up needs  which have reached great intensity, and by its very nature can only be a transitory experience. When any condition desired by the pleasure-principle is protracted [link added], it results in a feeling only of mild comfort; we are so constituted that we can only intensely enjoy contrasts, much less intensely states in themselves. [footnote 8]

Footnote 8 reads:

Goethe even warns us that ““nothing is so hard to bear as a train of happy days. ““ [Freud then adds: 'This may be an exaggeration all the same.']

And of course, Edmund Burke in A Philosophical Inquiry Into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, in ‘The Difference Between Pain and Pleasure’ famously noted,

[I]t is very evident that pleasure, when it has run its career, sets us down very nearly where it found us. Pleasure of every kind quickly satisfies; and when it is over, we relapse into indifference

So there is resonance, when it comes to talking about happiness and pleasure, between ambitious psychoanalytic speculation which references the insight of the poet–always great diagnosers of the human condition–and philosophical attempts to analyze aesthetic sensibility. (These suggestions show too, that nothing is quite as much a downer as talking about happiness.)

More seriously, what lends these commentaries their particular gravity is that securing novelty and contrast is hard work, requiring constant reinvention, at the end of which awaits, not a serenely quiescent state, but further disappointment. Thus too, the particularly irony of the pursuit of happiness: it marks the beginning of a journey, which is always a return to the state which prompted its commencement.

David Mitchell on Cloud Atlas’ Provenance: Good Writers are Good Magpies

David Mitchell‘s bestselling 2004 novel Cloud Atlas sold millions of copies, and garnered ample critical praise (I have mixed feelings about it). What I found most interesting about the novel was Mitchell’s recounting of its genesis:

The germ of the opening (and closing) Adam Ewing narrative, about a notary crossing the Pacific in the 1850s, comes from a section in Jared Diamond’s book Guns, Germs and Steel…For mid-19th-century language I ransacked Herman Melville, in particular Moby-Dick and his superb sketches of the Galápagos Islands, The Encantadas….Robert Frobisher, the louche second narrator of Cloud Atlas, can trace his ancestry to a book called Delius As I Knew Him by the frail composer’s amanuensis, Eric Fenby….Frobisher’s language comes from Evelyn Waugh and Christopher Isherwood….Luisa Rey, an American investigative journalist, is a mix of the 1970s TV detectives I enjoyed as a kid, All the President’s Men and James Ellroy, whose plot-velocity always impresses me….The care home that Cavendish finds himself incarcerated in comes fromOne Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and a young man’s fear of senescence….Architectural features from pioneering SF classics such as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We and The Machine Stops by EM Forster…are present, with rich dollops of Blade Runner. The university where Sonmi is housed is a carbon copy of the technical college where I worked in Japan…. The question/answer format for the story was inspired by…those interviews you get in Hello! magazine

Note that Mitchell does not say the ideas, characters and language for Cloud Atlas sprang fully formed from his mind, and in a sudden burst of primal creativity–that owed no debts to any cultural formations around him–transformed themselves into the written word on a blank page. He does not make himself out to be a writer that is a creative singularity or a fount of originality; he is, in short, not suggesting he is that creature so beloved of ‘intellectual property’ defenders the world over. Rather Mitchell is simply acknowledging what every honest writer knows is the case: to write is to borrow; the more you read works written by others, the more you draw upon them in your writing to enrich it; no one is truly ‘original’ or ‘creative’ in the primitive, fantastical, magical sense imagined by deluded artists and IP lawyers. Mitchell has lifted plots, or characters, or language with varying degrees of directness; his writing bears the impress of his reading, his cultural immersion. His skill as an author, acknowledged by many of his readers, and some of his critics, lies in his expert transformation of that material into something simultaneously distinctive and revelatory of its provenance.

What is remarkable about the excerpt above is that Mitchell is able to articulate some of the influences on his writing quite clearly; most artists cannot do so quite distinctly and thus are able to convince themselves of their ‘originality.’ It is a fair bet Mitchell would admit there are numerous other literary and cultural inferences–not so clearly noted–that have also found their way into his writing.

A good writer is a good magpie, building his nest from materials brought home from afar.

A Bad Argument Against Same-Sex Marriage

I would have scarcely believed it possible, but a few short hours after teaching the naturalistic fallacy in my Philosophy of Biology class, I was exposed to an argument–from a professional philosopher–that, roughly, same-sex marriage is problematic because a) marriage is all about procreation and the raising of children and because b) evolution tell us that reproductive success is important, therefore: Gay marriage should be frowned upon. This resistance then, has nothing to do with religion, God, or the divine sanctification. Rather, it is the scientific thing to do: resist gay marriage because it is against evolutionary demands made on us as a species. This means that active disapproval of homosexuality–societal and legal discrimination for instance–is an expression of a biological instinct and should not be condemned as a moral failing.

The outlines of this argument should be familiar to most folks. It has been made time and again and despite having been spectacularly debunked, it rises again and again, like a zombie, or your favorite refusing-to-die cinematic ghoul.

What this argument attempts–and fails–to do is derive a proposition with normative import from a set of propositions that are purely descriptive. This–as David Hume pointed out a long time ago in his A Treatise of Human Nature–is an instance of the naturalistic fallacy, an attempt to bridge the is-ought gap:

In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remarked, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary ways of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when all of a sudden I am surprised to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, ’tis necessary that it should be observed and explained; and at the same time that a reason should be given; for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it.

This fallacy manifests itself in the current situation as follows. There are biological facts about us: We reproduce, we pass on our genes, various reproductive strategies are adopted, some work better than the others (in securing more offspring to whom we can pass on our genes). This much can be ascertained by observation and measurement. But what should  we do on noting these observations? The proponent of the argument noted above, wants to derive the following: Those reproductive strategies that work ‘better’ are ‘good’, and therefore should be encouraged, should be praised. The rest should be condemned. (Marriage, it will be noted, has been admitted as a successful reproductive strategy; this is a matter of empirical assessment and could well turn out to be false.)

But whence ‘better’, whence ‘good’? Why is ‘reproductive success’ a moral good to be sought? What is the source of that valuation and why is it allowed to override other values in the derivation above? Might we be allowed to admit other values in arriving at an alternative conclusion? Like, for instance, a more tolerant society is a ‘better’ society than one that isn’t? But then, we would be opening up a debate–conducted within some broad ethical and moral frameworks–on valuation, which is precisely what our protagonist didn’t want. He merely wanted the straightforward elevation of reproductive success to the preeminent moral value without further debate.

The tireless proponents of the so-called evolutionary arguments against same-sex marriage forget that efforts to read normative judgments off the historical workings out of the evolutionary process have as much difficulty in bridging the is-ought gap as any other species of argument. Calling upon biology here is not the scientifically sophisticated thing to do; it is merely to reveal one’s ignorance of the limitations of evolutionary explanation.

Vale Jonathan E. Adler (1949-2012)

On Saturday, along with many others, I attended a simple–yet intensely emotionally moving–memorial service for Jonathan Adler, formerly Professor of Philosophy at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of CUNY. Jon and I had been colleagues in the Philosophy Department at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center; before that Jon had served on two of my graduate committees: first, for my oral exam and then, for my dissertation defense.

During the summer and fall of 1997, I had struggled to schedule my oral exam and to constitute its committee; Jon helped on both counts and ensured my reading list was both comprehensive and reasonably sized. I soon learned that Jon–while genial in his personal interactions–could be a formidable examiner; he would not tolerate any sloppiness or philosophical clumsiness in responses to his questions. When the oral exam began, he asked the first question–on Dorothy Edgington’s “Conditionals’; I thought I had hit it out of the park; only when Jon asked his follow-up did I realize I hadn’t. (Earning a passing grade with distinction on the orals meant a great deal with Jon on the examining committee!)

Later, while serving on my dissertation committee, Jon ensured that my thesis, which was ostensibly a work in mathematical logic, paid its dues to the normative and prescriptive epistemology that lay at its core. He read the entire work carefully, and despite disagreeing with me at many points–’I'm not sure what you are calling beliefs are in fact, beliefs to begin with’–offered many useful critical comments that helped me sharpen its arguments.

Jon did philosophy the right way. He read a lot, wrote a lot, thought a great deal about what he read and wrote about, talked with his students and colleagues, and remained unfailingly courteous throughout. He attended many philosophy colloquia, and his mannerisms in asking his invariably-acute questions became familiar: he would remove his glasses, before carefully phrasing his query. He was never rude or abrasive, thankfully disdaining the philosophy-as-contact-sport model so beloved of too many in its academic community. When I worked on a knowledge attribution analysis for my work on the legal theory of autonomous artificial agents, I made sure I ran it by him, trusting that if there were fatal errors in its framing, Jon would be sure to point them out to me. Knowing that Jon was sympathetic to the intuitions expressed in the analysis was critical to my confidence that it would work as intended.

The memorial service on Saturday concluded with a beautiful slideshow that showed us a set of wonderful photographs from Jon’s life, accompanied by Van Morrison’s Philosopher’s Stone. As I watched the photos flash by, set to Morrison’s distinctive voice, encapsulating in their frames Jon’s powerful and vivid personality, I realized again what we lose in a friend’s passing: a very particular world come to an end, taking with it all its experiences. Jon inhabited the world he lived in in his own unique way, bringing a little bit of himself into each life he came into contact with, enriching its world by his wisdom and humanity.

Nietzsche as Reservoir Dog With ‘Style’

A few months ago, an  ex-student of mine sent me the image–courtesy bros.failblog.org–above. It made him chuckle out loud; he was in a library when he came across it and decided to send it to me because he thought I would have a similar reaction. (This was shortly after I had announced that I would be teaching a Nietzsche seminar in the spring semester.) Well, it made me chuckle and chortle a bit. I sent it on to a couple of friends–yup, they chuckled too–, and went so far as to make it my GMail profile image.

But what is so funny here? The juvenile rhyming, the placement of the sunglasses on Nietzsche’s otherwise solemn visage, the color coding in black and white that evokes Tarantino-cool? Well, of course. And they work because in turning Nietzsche into a Reservoir Dog,  the image reinforces a well-established not-so-academic impression of Nietzsche that supposedly appeals to angsty undergraduates and teenagers everywhere: the ass-kicking, taking-no-prisoners polemicist, slashing and burning his way through the thickets of orthodoxy.  (This is the Nietzsche imagined walking into a Wild West saloon, and suggesting, not so gently, that everyone put down their rotgut whisky and pay attention to the Zarathustrian gunslinger now in town.) It might also be the Nietzsche that tries to emerge from Ecce Homo, letting everyone know what time it is, and why indeed, the clocks have been commanded to do so by him.

Let’s not forget too, that if you wanted to dig a bit deeper, you could associate ‘sunglasses’ with ‘style,’ and well, when you think of Nietzsche, don’t you remember all those times he went on–and on–about ‘style’?

From The Gay Science, Book IV, Section 290:

Giving style” to one’s character – a great and rare art! It is exercised by those who see all the strengths and weaknesses of their own natures and then comprehend them in an artistic plan until everything appears as art and reason and even weakness delights the eye.

Or, from Twilight of the Idols, “Reconnaissance Raids of an Untimely Man”, Section 11:

The highest feeling of power and sureness finds expression in a grand style. The power which no longer needs any proof, which spurns pleasing, which does not answer lightly, which feels no witness near, which lives oblivious of all opposition to it, which reposes within itself, fatalistically, a law among laws — that speaks of itself as a grand style.

Finally, it might also be that we associate Nietzsche with laughter, for he often makes us laugh out loud when we read him. Sometimes the laughter is provoked by his wordplay, his puns; sometimes it is evoked by the pleasure he provides us as he goes after those that deserve his scorn, far more skillfully than we can imagine ourselves ever being able to. Nietzsche knows he can be a joker and a jester; in dressing him up as he has been above, we are reminded of that aspect of his persona. There was plenty of grimness in Nietzsche’s life, but his writing, at least, often tried its best to keep that at bay.

Must One Vote for President to Be Political?

I concluded yesterday’s post by saying:

There is a far more fundamental problem…it centers on my disillusionment with elections–especially in modern politics in this nation–and with my evolving understanding of my political responsibilities.

I should have been more specific above. I have acquired a profound dislike of presidential elections: the campaigning by candidates, the so-called ‘debates,’ the insincere campaign promises. I consider presidential elections the worst part of American democracy: for the opportunities for pandering and demagoguery they provide, for their choking off of reasoned discourse, and especially in the US, the inordinate amount of time, energy and money they consume. The Republican primaries began last year, or at least, it felt like they did. That’s a full year before the elections. Really, US polity, really? A year-long election season?

I dislike too, the elevation of the presidential election to the center-piece of American democracy–that somehow casting my vote for the president is the most important political act I can commit. This often results in guilt-mongering:  If you don’t vote for a presidential candidate, you’ve committed a grievous abdication of political responsibility. The propagandizing and resource consumption associated with presidential elections is especially insidious; their prioritization cripples a great deal of engagement with the political process; it denudes political activism of energy, purpose and resources by drawing too much attention to itself.

The privileging of these elections has meant all too many US citizens imagine that presidential elections are all there is to their democracy;’ that to participate in their polity, one need only show up once in four years to vote, followed by rapid disengagement. Presidential candidates, like Barack Obama, are guilty of the precise converse; they imagine that having won the election, there is no need anymore to engage with those that brought them to power. A fraction of the passion spent in engaging with the ‘base’ during the election season, had it been deployed during the last few years, might have earned Obama considerably more legislative victories, and not cost him the support of his ‘base.’ (It didn’t help, either, that the option chosen, instead, was denigration of the ‘base.’)

I’ve come to think of the presidential election as the deployment of a vast machinery of systematic obfuscation. The disappointed voter is a cliché now, precisely because he imagined that voting was all there was to it; better to ignore elections and do politics somewhere other than the presidential polling station. The real action lies elsewhere; in local elections where one might, for instance, vote for judges who can rule on important decisions affecting families and groups: divorce or bankruptcy proceedings for example.

A citizen can be political in many ways. I can be political by resisting the policies that my nation’s rulers seek to impose:  sometimes by writing here, sometimes by my daily utterances, sometimes in my teaching, sometimes in the lifestyle I adopt, and in those I encourage. My politics resides in my daily actions, in the many little decisions I make on a daily basis. The political process operates on many levels; it can be poked, prodded, and interacted with via a multiplicity of processes; voting for the president is but one of them.

Earnin’ a Livin’ With Humiliation as a Perk

A New Yorker cartoon from last year shows a woman walking out from her boss’ office and saying to a co-worker, “That’s the worst humiliation I’ve been subjected to this week.” Or something like that. We laugh, a little nervously, or perhaps wince just a little, because the punchline hits home. Or we breathe a sigh of relief, just in case our workplace isn’t one that subjects us to situations that provoke and inspire cartoonists thus. (It is not an insignificant feature of this cartoon that the workers depicted are women; for more on which, see below.)

For too many workers–whether blue-collar or white–the workplace is where you go to be subjected to behavior that you wish your family would never come to know about.  It is where you go to be subjected to naked exertions of power; in the American context, the workplace is where you check the Constitution at the door. If I had a dollar for every time I have had to remind my students in my Philosophy of Law or Social and Political Philosophy classes about this simple fact…well, let’s just say my kids would be able to afford Brooklyn College’s steadily rising tuition quite easily.

The worker who returns home, seething with barely repressed anger, which is then channeled into either intemperate expressions directed against loved ones (“Having a bad day, love?”) or in seeking the bromides of intoxication–’A quick one after work to take the edge off?”–is a well-established trope of our modern lives. There is a reason why ‘going postal‘ is one of the modern era’s most distinctive phrases. Anyone that has worked for a ‘boss’ and by that I mean, you know, someone that bosses you around, knows why. All too well. Which brings us back to the cartoon.

Consider then, the following story:

Martha Reyes walked in the employee entrance of the Santa Clara Hyatt Regency to the sound of her male colleagues laughing. She believed they were laughing at her. It was “Housekeeping Appreciation Week” at the Hyatt and to celebrate, a digitally altered photo collage of Hyatt Housekeepers’ faces — including Martha’s and her sister Lorena’s — superimposed on bikini-clad cartoon-bodies was posted on a bulletin board at work. She felt humiliated and embarrassed. But she knew her sister Lorena — also a housekeeper at Hyatt — would be even more so. Martha tore the posters of her and her sister down.Then, with management present, a coworker told Martha she needed to return the photos. She refused and said if they wanted it back, they’d have to take her to court. Hyatt management fired Martha and Lorena just a few weeks later.

Martha and Lorena worked at that hotel as housekeepers for 7 and 24 years respectively….On the day she was fired, the HR Director told Martha she was an “excellent worker” and that there hadn’t been any complaints about her. Before the day Lorena was fired, she had never in her 24 years been written up for a single break violation….What happened to the Reyes sisters is just another example of Hyatt’s culture of disrespect for its workers: Hyatt housekeepers have high rates of injury, and in 2011 various state and federal agencies issued 18 citations against Hyatt for alleged safety violations. Hyatt has even lobbied against new laws that would make housekeeping work safer, and has made it a pattern  of firing housekeepers only to hire subcontractors everywhere from Manilla [sic] to Boston.

 If this story sounds all too familiar, consider signing the petition available at the link above.

The Fallacious Knowing-How, Knowing-That Distinction

Over at the Stone, Jason Stanley offers some thoughtful remarks on the fallacious distinction between the practical and the theoretical, or rather, between practical and theoretical knowledge. Stanley examines the case to be made for the dichotomy between reflection–’guided by our knowledge of truths about the world’–and action–’guided by our knowledge of how to perform various actions’:

If these are distinct cognitive capacities, then knowing how to do something is not knowledge of a fact — that is, there is a distinction between practical and theoretical knowledge.

Stanley dismisses this distinction by way of considering and rejecting different ways in which a ‘bright line’ could be drawn between practical and theoretical knowledge (for instance ‘talking’) and concludes with:

The plumber’s or electrician’s activities are a manifestation of the same kind of intelligence as the scientist’s or historian’s latest articles — knowledge of truths….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 find Stanley’s analysis congenial, though I would collapse the distinction from the other direction. That is, I consider ascriptions of knowledge to be recognitions of practical abilities: to know a ‘truth’ is to bear a particular practical relation to the world, of being capable of interacting with the world in particular ways; of making some kinds of judgments and not others; knowing-that is a species of knowing-how.  To ascribe knowledge is not to recognize a special mental state, distinguished by some peculiar, yet-to-be-specified relationship with a proposition. Knowers are doers first and foremost. To know something is to be either doing or to be capable of doing (like making certain utterances and not others, for instance). A knower is distinguished from a non-knower by his actions, by his placement within a nexus of active relationships.

There are some advantages to thinking of knowledge in these terms. It makes more continuous the relationship between humans, animals, and other entities in the world such as sophisticated machines; animals can ‘know’ too, even if they cannot be understood as knowing propositions. To confine ourselves to propositional accounts of knowledge is to make human knowledge a singularity in the natural world; it means we cannot meaningfully make claims like ‘My cat knows the mouse is behind the door’ (or at least when we do it is by making a distinction between ‘animal’ and ‘reflective’ knowledge); it fails to acknowledge the cat’s particular interactions with its environment. It prompts meaningless questions like  ’Who does the knowing?’ when it comes to ascribing knowledge to sophisticated systems such as robotic currency traders.

The long, protracted disputes in epistemology bear adequate testimony to the futility of trying to think of knowledge in excessively mentalistic and semantic terms. Thinking of knowledge as a species of interaction, a description of an agent enmeshed in his world and distinguished from others that don’t know what it does by its actions, clears up many of the puzzles created by traditional epistemology. This understanding of knowledge has its own distinguished pedigree in the history of philosophy, of course, most notably in Wittgenstein, Dewey and Nietzsche. Hopefully, I’ll be able to spin those views out a bit more here in future posts.