Abstract
I develop the relatively familiar idea of a variety of forms of knowledge—not just propositional knowledge but also knowledge-how and experiential knowledge—and show how this variety can be used to make interesting sense of Plato’s and Aristotle’s philosophy, and in particular their ethics. I then add to this threefold analysis of knowledge a less familiar fourth variety, objectual knowledge, and suggest that this is also interesting and important in the understanding of Plato and Aristotle.
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Notes
Mill's Autobiography came out in 1873, so this is certainly an apparent and probably an actual allusion to Dickens' Hard Times (1854).
Pritchard (2009: 4). Of course Pritchard says this in an introductory book. My point is that Pritchard accurately represents an orthodoxy, not that he subscribes to it. (Williamson is perhaps more committed than Pritchard to the primacy of propositional knowledge.)
Jackson 1982. Jackson has since repudiated the “knowledge argument”, for reasons which I for one find much less convincing than I found the argument.
The later Wittgenstein explicitly denied that he was a behaviourist (Philosophical Investigations I, 308, my emphasis): “And now it looks as if we had denied mental processes. And naturally we don't want to deny them”). This plain fact is not to be got round by claiming that for all his denials he is best read as a behaviourist; he isn't. Behaviourism, after all, is verificationism about the mental: the meaning of mental discourse is (is identical with? Is determined by?) what verifies it, “external behaviour” (meaning what?). It should be perfectly obvious that the later Wittgenstein was no verificationist; ergo, he was no behaviourist. However, he was often misunderstood as a behaviourist both by his followers and by their opponents. Moreover, there is a lot in his philosophy that is rightly understood as an emphasis on various forms of knowledge-how: knowing how to apply a rule, to take one obvious example, and concept-mastery, to take another. More about concept-mastery in Sect. II.
Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 36e: Die Menschen heute glauben, die Wissenschaftler seien da, sie zu belehren, die Dichter und Musiker etc., sie zu erfreuen. Dass diese sie etwas zu lehren haben; kommt ihnen nicht in den Sinn.
Here I won't even try to engage with the vast literature on Aristotle's delphic definition. The best starting-points for that are Rorty (1992) and Halliwell (1998).
Veloso (2007), is the most recent attempt I know of to argue that the clause containing these words is a corruption and should simply be deleted. (Scott (2003) is another; Scott and Veloso both give full bibliographies of this long-running dispute.) Despite its current popularity, I am not attracted by this modest proposal, either on textual grounds or on philosophical ones. On the textual side, I think the purgers' central claim, that the notions of katharsis, fear, or pity do little or nothing elsewhere in the Poetics, is simply false: see e.g. 1452b–1453a. The main text shows what I think can be done with the clause philosophically.
It should be obvious both that being a spectator of a tragedy involves a kind of competence, and that the notion of such a competence is thoroughly Aristotelian: see e.g. Nicomachean Ethics 1113a30-4.
εἰ γάρ μ᾽ ὑπὸ γῆν νέρθεν θ᾽ Ἅιδου τοῦ νεκροδέγμονος εἰς ἀπέρατον Τάρταρον ἧκεν, δεσμοῖς ἀλύτοις ἀγρίως πελάσας, ὡς μήτε θεὸς μήτε τις ἄλλος τοῖσδ᾽ ἐπεγήθει. νῦν δ᾽ αἰθέριον κίνυγμ᾽ ὁ τάλας ἐχθροῖς ἐπίχαρτα πέπονθα.
Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound 152-160, my own translation. (And no doubt over-translation; here as always with poetry, a literal translation would fail in a different and more basic way.).
If we take the Codex Coislinianus seriously as an indication of what was in the lost second book of the Poetics, then in Poetics II Aristotle made a parallel claim about comedy: through laughter and pleasure, comedy brings about the purification of the first-order emotions that are aroused in the competent spectator by the action of the comedy. See Janko (1987).
“He spoke well who, when asked what in us makes us like the gods, replied ‘kindness and truth’.” Longinus, On the sublime, Chapter 1.
Such as Philip Larkin's words about a somewhat similar sense of finding a place where the transfiguration of commonplace experiences is possible, namely the church of “Church Going”:
A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognized, and robed as destinies.
Experiential knowledge is an ambiguous notion anyway; for a start, contrast knowing things by experience, knowing qualia, and Russellian acquaintance. These ambiguities do not make the notion unusable, but they do demand care.
ἡ παροῦσα πραγματεία οὐ θεωρίας ἕνεκά ἐστιν ὥσπερ αἱ ἄλλαι (οὐ γὰρ ἵνα εἰδῶμεν τί ἐστιν ἡ ἀρετὴ σκεπτόμεθα, ἀλλ᾽ ἵν᾽ ἀγαθοὶ γενώμεθα, ἐπεὶ οὐδὲν ἂν ἦν ὄφελος αὐτῆς)…
Theôria and its cognates can have a wide range of meanings, not all of which are at all closely related either to the English descendant word “theory” or to the notion of contemplation that theôria often indicates. LSJ tells us that θεωρίας ἕνεκά could (and commonly did) mean “just to see the world”. No translation of NE 1103b26-9 that I know attempts to capture this implied charge of intellectual tourism, presumably because ὥσπερ αἱ ἄλλαι would then apply the charge to Aristotle himself.
A passage that Aristotle may well have in his sights in NE 1103b26-29 is Republic 527b1, τὸ δ᾽ ἔστι που πᾶν τὸ μάθημα γνώσεως ἕνεκα ἐπιτηδευόμενον, “the whole of this academic study [of geometry is undertaken for the sake of knowledge”. Plato immediately goes on to stress how geometry is good for the character: because it concentrates on timeless truths, it makes the soul that studies it truthful and philosophical.
“Practical reasoning” would be a better phrase; “reasoning towards action” would be better still. As Kenny 1979: 112–113 points out, the Greek, syllogismoi tôn praktôn, is hardly ever used by Aristotle, and certainly not intended by him as a technical term.
The conclusion is the action, not a sentence stating that the action is to be done, nor yet an intention. Practical reasoning that issues only in these kinds of results has gone wrong, for Aristotle, because the whole point of practical reasoning is to lead to action.
On the place of ostension in defining the virtues, cp. Zagzebski 2004: 40–50.
A point which may or may not be helpful when considering Kripke's Wittgenstein's famous paradox about following a semantic rule. Even if there is no further propositional knowledge that can help us know how to follow the rule, there still might be knowledge-how that helps in this way. (Though perhaps to say this is just to endorse the response to the rule-following paradox that Kripke dismisses under the name “dispositionalism”.).
I think I know what it means for me to say, of any two of my own experiences, that they are like each other (and so, that they are relevantly like each other by some criterion of relevance). I think I know what it means for anyone else to say this of her own experiences. I also think I know what it means for me to say that one of my experiences is like (or relevantly like) one of hers. I think that I (and indeed all of us) know all this is just a given. Those who think that Wittgenstein's “private language argument” tells against this given, have to explain why we should accept the argument rather than the given. In any case there are other ways of reading Wittgenstein's argument.
The centrality of objectual knowledge persists throughout the Aristotelian tradition. It is clearly there, for example, in Aquinas, for whom the question utrum Deus cognoscat enuntiabilia (whether God has propositional knowledge) is just one small aspect (article 14) of his 16-article treatise on divine knowledge in ST 1a.14. Indeed, the centrality of the paradigm of objectual knowledge persists, as a kind of heirloom from medieval Aristotelianism, in writers who themselves are well distanced from that tradition. When Descartes wants to think about what it is to know, he is at least as happy to focus on an object like a block of wax as on a proposition (see Meditation 2). Again, for Locke and even for Kant, the basic question for epistemologists is about whether, how, and how much we can know things, not truth.
For more on desire and belief objectual and propositional, see Brewer (2004).
Nor, pace Whitcomb (2011: 86), an “abstract representation” of the tree, i.e. some system of propositions about the tree corresponding in its structure to the tree itself. First, Whitcomb's proposal just seems irrelevant: it's the tree we want to know/understand, not some representation of the tree. Secondly, representations are essentially partial and selective: ex hypothesi not everything that is “there in the tree” can be “there in” the representation.
“So can't we correct the representation as we go along?” Indeed we can—I don't deny that such representations might be heuristically valuable. But what is the norm or ideal by reference to which we correct the representation? The tree itself, of course. Which is a third way of showing that it is the tree itself which is the object of objectual knowledge, not any image of the tree.
Nor is it true, as the classical empiricists argued, that we can know the object only by knowing its (experiential) qualities; we are often far surer of the object than of any particular quality it may have (You can see a tiger in your garden without seeing exactly how many tiger-stripes are in your garden).
For a marvellous discussion of objectual desire and its exploratory nature, see again Brewer (2004).
“Study is a specific kind of experience in which through careful observation of objective structures we cause thought processes to move a certain way. Perhaps we study a tree or book. We see it, feel it. As we do, our thought processes taking on an order conforming to the order in the tree or book.” (Richard Foster, “The discipline of study”, in his Celebration of Discipline (London: Hodder and Stoughton 1980), p. 55; his italics.).
There is a tension between these remarks and my remarks in Sect. II, which were more in line with the usual picture of Socrates as seeking not objectual knowledge but knowledge of definitions. It is, I think, a plausible diagnosis of some of Socrates' difficulties that what he seeks is really objectual knowledge of any thing; but he also thinks that the only way to secure this objectual knowledge—or at any rate to demonstrate that you have secured it—is to be able to state the logos of the thing. We might say that Socrates is inclined to doubt anyone who claims objectual knowledge of a thing, but cannot demonstrate that he has any propositional knowledge about it. But why should objectual knowledge lead anything like automatically to propositional knowledge?
And also, no doubt, in the paradox of Euthydemus 285d7 ff., which we might precis in the question: if we do not have objectual knowledge of the same object, how can we have conflicting propositional beliefs about it?
But only part. Plato, I should say, is engaged in the Theaetetus in a large-scale critique of a view of knowledge. He shares some assumptions with that view, but it is not his own view. For more on this see Chappell (2005).
In a sense, then, my account of this and the following part of the Theaetetus and Catherine Rowett's, in her essay in this volume, run in exactly opposite directions. I think that the problem with the discussion is meant by Plato to be that Socrates and Theaetetus agree on the distinction between propositional knowledge and objectual knowledge, but that they fail to see how propositional knowledge needs to be rooted in objectual knowledge. Rowett, by contrast, thinks that Plato intends us to see the difficulty as this: that Socrates and Theaetetus agree on the distinction between “conceptual knowledge” and “knowledge of particulars”, as Rowett calls them, but fail to grasp fully how empty “knowledge of particulars” is on its own, and without the kind of spelling-out of it that conceptual knowledge makes possible. But on my view of the passage, knowledge of particulars is not necessarily empty of conceptual loading in the kind of way that Rowett has in mind, even if the kind of knowledge of particulars that Theaetetus and Socrates consider often is; proper knowledge of particulars comes with conceptual loading built into it, and so brings conceptual knowledge in its wake.
My translation of this passage follows William Ogle's in the Loeb.
Thanks for discussion to Greg Currie, Stephen Halliwell, Anna Marmodoro, Duncan Pritchard, and audiences in Oxford, Stirling, and Edinburgh.
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Chappell, T. Varieties of Knowledge in Plato and Aristotle. Topoi 31, 175–190 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-012-9125-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-012-9125-z