Abstract
Intellectualists suggest that practical knowledge, or ‘knowing- how’, can be reduced to propositional knowledge, or ‘knowing-that’. Anti-intellectualists, on the contrary, suggest, following the original insights by Ryle, that such a reduction is not possible. Rejection of intellectualism can be proposed either by offering purely philosophical analytical arguments, or by recruiting empirical evidence from cognitive science about the nature of the mental representations involved in these two forms of knowledge. In this paper, I couple these two strategies in order to analyze some crucial reasons for which intellectualism seems not to be the best theory we have to correctly understand and describe practical knowledge. In particular, I will start from a specific philosophical account against intellectualism offered by Dickie (Philos Phenomenol Res LXXXV(3):737–745, 2012), and suggest that it can be supported by current experimental results coming from motor neuroscience. The claim of the paper is that there is at least one kind of practical knowledge, which I call motor knowledge, and which is at the basis of the performance of skilled action, which cannot be reduced to propositional knowledge.
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Notes
Emphasis mine.
See also (Carter and Pritchard 2013) for the case of epistemic luck.
Objects display geometrical properties such as size, shape, and spatial location, which can be read, from the motor point of view of the subject, as action/motor properties, as they afford to the acting subject a precise action possibility, satisfiable with a specific motor act. For example, the geometrical features of a mug can be seen as action properties offering an action possibility (grasping), satisfiable by means of a proper motor act: a power grip (Ferretti 2016a, b, d, 2017b, 2018, 2019; Ferretti and Zipoli Caiani 2019).
For this point, see (Ferretti 2017b, forthcoming; Gallagher, forthcoming).
For a review of all the sub-representational components of a MR see (Ferretti 2016b).
Dickie suggested that “S is a skilled Φ-er iff, for appropriate range Σ of situations σ in most cases, if S were to intend to Φ in σ, S’s intention would lead S to act in some w ∈ f(σ), where f is a function taking each σ to the set of reliable ways for S to Φ in σ” (p. 739; cfr. Sect. 2.1). Here I am focusing on the case in which σ corresponds to Ψ.
This does not deny that some piece of ventral processing is recruited in other forms of action. But dorsal processing is the cutting edge of motor programming. Note that the fact that a mental state as a motor representation can be, in different contexts, mainly ventrally or mainly dorsally subserved, is not a problem (Ferretti 2016b, 2018, 2019).
There is an higher level of MRs that concerns higher motoric states. “The scope of pragmatic processing, however, is not limited to the visuomotor transformation, since pragmatic processing is involved in conceptually more complex operations like evaluating the feasibility of an action, anticipating its consequences, planning further steps, and learning the skilled use of tools by observation” Jeannerod and Jacob (2005). And, “The visuomotor transformation is but a first lower level component of the human 'pragmatic processing' of objects” (Jacob and Jeannerod 2003: xviii). Furthermore, saying that a MR is automatic does not mean that it does not need any form of attention, that is unintelligent, fixed, invariant (Fridland 2012a, b, 2014, 2015, 2016), as MRs really are complex open phenomena (Borghi and Riggio 2015; Ferretti 2016a), sensible to semantic content (Ferretti 2016a, Zipoli Caiani 2013), and deeply related, in the way that I will describe below (Sect. 5), to personal-level intentions. Furthermore, as said, though the component of motor processing related to MRs, dorsally subserved, is not consciously accessible, the component linked to planning, ventrally subserved, can. MRs are also responsible for motor acuity (Fridland 2014, 2015, 2016) in skilled Φ-ing, but that does not mean that they exhaust all the kinds of motor processing, as the world of the motoric is very broad and complex (see Ferretti 2016a, 2017b, 2018 for all the tasks of MRs, especially in relation to vision-for-action and its several levels of complexity). Summing up, my account is in tune with those who have suggested that motor acuity and MRs are intelligent processes (Fridland 2014, 2015, 2016; see also Levy 2015; Shepherd 2017).
The case of grasping is, in the literature, the cutting edge of the situations in Ψ.
In this respect, semantic influence by ventral action planning on dorsal motor programming is in principle possible when action is very slow (Briscoe and Schwenkler 2015; Ferretti 2017b, 2018, 2019; Zipoli Caiani and Ferretti 2017; Ferretti and Zipoli Caiani 2019). But this is not the case with automatic action.
For other discussions of the case of D.F. in accounts against intellectualism, see (Young 2009).
An interesting point to note is the following. It has been suggested that such an illusion is capable of deceiving our visual system effectively because of the failed design of the experimental setting, in which our ventral visual recognition can make contrastive identification between the two compared objects and, for this reason, is fooled with the size illusion, while once one of the two targets has been selected by it, our grip computed by the dorsal MR is always accurately shaped (Jacob and Jeannerod 2003: Sect. 6). However, this does not go against the idea that MRs cannot perform contrastive identification.
See the discussion of the non-lucky selectors of non-lucky means in (Sect. 2.1).
Some scholars have suggested that action hierarchies (think about the motor vocabulary) can be modeled as having a structure similar to syntactical structure (Pulvermüller 2014). First, that does not mean that action hierarchies are made by ensembles of propositional or conceptual representations; second, this parallel has been questioned (Moro 2014); third, the propositional representations concerning the dichotomy between knowing-that and knowing-how we are talking about here should be accessible for the subject and should be responsible for the subject grasping of the sentence < w is a way to Φ > . But, in order for a subject to grasp a sentence like < w is a way to Φ > a minimal semantic is needed; a semantic that is not reported in the syntactical modeling of action hierarchies. Finally, as suggested, MRs, during automatic visuomotor processing, do not present these characteristics. For a very recent analysis of the relation between MRs, concepts and compositionality see (Shepherd 2017). However, it is safe to hold that “sensorimotor representations underlying practical capacities and (…) propositional representations mark different representational formats” (Jung and Newen 2010: 128). Finally, as said, just because of the metaphor of a motor vocabulary (§3), we should not think that the representations coming from these mechanisms are propositional or conceptual.
For a complete overview of how MRs, as states subserved from the neural realizers described in (§3), can misrepresent see (Ferretti 2016d).
This is also suggested by studies showing that the mental states concerning conscious reasoning by means of sentence-like representations and beliefs are very slow compared to those related to different sensorimotor performances (Kahneman 2011) and by studies that our decisions and beliefs, formed in a propositional structure, cannot be as fast as our automatic motor decisions (Jacob and Jeannerod 2003; Jeannerod 2006; Ferretti and Zipoli Caiani 2019). Note also that, as already suggested (Sect. 4.1), MRs, being very fast, do not require any high propositional mental state from the subject, because the detection of motor possibilities, as well as the related trigger of motor processing, are at work even with brain lesions limiting inferential abilities (Zipoli Caiani 2013, Nanay 2011, 2013; Jacob and Jeannerod 2003; cfr. Sect. 4.1).
Note also that if one does not want to embrace the Same Format Thesis, positing such a propositional mediation, this would lead to Rylean regress.
Accordingly, “the representation can only be causally relevant to manifest abilities but do not represent abilities independently from the manifestations and thereby objectifying it” (Jung and Newen 2010: 125).
An important note on the novelty of my account is the following. Some other scholar has done a great job in invoking the notion of MRs when criticizing intellectualism (see the excellent accounts by Fridland 2016; Levy 2015, Young 2009, 2019; Jung and Newen 2010). However, here I use novel insights about the notion of MR as well as what we know from novel accounts explaining the way they interlock with intentions, which have never been invoked before.
Note that some new forms of intellectualism are committed to the view that subject’s propositional knowledge about how to Φ is accessed by her through a ‘practical mode of presentation’ (Pavese 2015a, b, 2019): she knows a proposition under a practical mode of presentation (Pavese, 2019). I cannot offer in full details a critic to this point. However, this does not solve the problems reaised here, as this point is still subject to the critics mentioned up to now. In brief, if we still talking of a propositional mental state, then we still need to explain how MRs and propositional states interlock. And the conclusion is the one offered here. But that means, for the reasons provided above, that propositional states do not guide MRs and, thus, knowing-how. If we are talking of a non-propositional mental state at the basis of practical knowledge, this is in conflict with the intellectualist view discussed here, which states that knowing-how to Φ is guided by propositional knowledge about Φ-ing (for a family of similar critics see Fridland 2012b, 2016, 2019; see also Schwartz and Drayson 2019).
Stanley and Williamson (2017) specify that “One might worry that because we make skill a disposition to acquire knowledge, we thereby put skill before knowledge in explaining intelligent action, and so vindicate anti‐intellectualism”. However, they say, “this does not mean that “skill comes before knowledge”, as Imogen Dickie (2012) has argued” (p. 722). Again, no final argument is presented, to describe how practical knowledge can be guided by propositions, that can escape the critics reported. See also (Fridland 2019).
I want to thank two anonymous reviewers, whose crucial and insightful comments allowed me to massively improve the paper. Special thanks also go to these excellent scholars who enthusiastically discussed with me about this topic: Silvano Zipoli Caiani, Albert Newen, Giorgia Committeri, Joshua Shepherd, Bence Nanay, Neil Van Leeuwen, Brian Glenney, Vittorio Gallese, Andrea Borghini, Alva Noë, Fausto Caruana, Nicola Bruno. This work was supported by a NOMIS Fellowship, awarded by the Eikones - Center for the Theory and History of the Image at the University of Basel, Switzerland.
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Ferretti, G. Anti-intellectualist motor knowledge. Synthese 198, 10733–10763 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02750-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02750-9