In so far as we take the ‘organic’ character of language seriously, we cannot accurately describe the first steps towards its conquest as learning part of the language; rather it is a matter of partly learning.

Donald Davidson

In an academic setting, you don’t know something if you can’t participate in a conversation with other knowledgeable people about it. That is of course a very pragmatic requirement and what Davidson says of language learning certainly also applies to learning about the world. We don’t know something or not; we know something to an extent. Likewise, it’s not that we can or cannot talk about something; but we are more or less conversant about it.

But, if conversation can be a test of our knowledge, can it also be a source of it? As I said the other day, my gut says no. If we talk to a knowledgeable person, we can often feel like we have learned something, even a great deal, but when we then go on to either use that knowledge or talk to others about it, we find that there is something crucial we missed. For academic purposes, especially, we don’t really know what we’re talking about until we have checked the sources we have heard about. A conversation may, thus, occasion learning but cannot, in itself, accomplish it. It is not until we have read about or experienced it, or perhaps even just thought very carefully about it, ourselves that we can truly say we “know”. Such is the case, anyway, at university.

I’m writing this post from memory. Yesterday, I was talking to some students and quoted Norman Mailer as saying, “a fact is a compression of nuances that alienates the reality.” Now, as I recall, (and I will check when I get the chance), the actual sentence (somewhere in, I think, The Presidential Papers), says, “…alienate the reality,” i.e., the verb is in the plural, which seems to refer back to “nuances” not “compression”. It’s interesting that such a tiny nuance of language (which may in turn be a typo or misprint) can shift the meaning of a sentence so radically. I’m pretty sure he meant that the compression, not the nuances, alienate(s) the reality, but is there a fact of the matter to settle this question? (Do you see what I did there?)

Your focus seems to be on propositional knowledge but there’s also procedural or embodied knowing (e.g. that underpins skills), tacit knowing (incl. instinct & intuition), collective or distributed knowing (how we operate and negotiate with others and the world) and metacognition?

Tim Fawns

I got a good response on X to my last post. Tim correctly notices that I think of “academic knowledge” mainly as “propositional”, i.e., as knowledge that can be made explicit in sentences whose meanings depend on what could make them true. In whatever way it still makes sense to say so, I’m a logical positivist, a verificationist of sorts. I like Herbert Feigl’s “two humble questions”. I also believe that academics should cultivate what I like to call a “propositional attitude”; they should see themselves as a “stewards of the facts”; they should “know things”. But I completely agree that we can only maintain our system of propositional knowledge because we master a series of underlying skills. Indeed, those skills are what “inframethodology” is all about.

“It’s not the proposition but your intellectual posture that counts,” I once said. It’s not what you believe that matters, but how you hold your beliefs. It is not whether what you are saying is true, but how you respond when someone tells you that you are wrong, that determines whether you’re an academic (or at least what kind of academic you are.) The skills that support your explicit propositional knowledge were called “tacit” by Michael Polanyi because they are often unconsciously exercised after they have been acquired. (Tim is right to call them “intuitive”; indeed, I often get outright Kantian about them.) Like I say, we’re talking about your intellectual posture, here, your attitude.

I want to maintain my focus on our sources of knowledge this week. So my question is — even though Tim is right that there are forms of knowledge (or at least aspects of knowing) beyond the propositional — are there sources of academic knowledge beyond reading, reasoning, and experience? Here “experience” is going to be a very big category — but it is generally where I would locate all the tacit “craft” skills that travel under the banner of “method”. A good question is whether Tim’s “collective or distributed” knowing goes beyond the networks maintained by our literature, i.e., reading. Are our social interactions (living conversations) valid “sources” of knowing? Or are they merely occasions for truly learning something through the same-old reading, reasoning, or experience (e.g., replicating an experiment)?

For today, these will have to remain questions.

This question can be asked at different levels of generality. “It is raining,” you may say; or, “The climate is warming.” You may know it is raining because you have just been outside or you have looked out the window or you have checked your weather app. You may know that the climate is warming because you kept careful records of the daily temperature; have reviewed the scientific literature on climate; or simply because you have kept up with the news. Philosophers ask questions like, “How do you know you are not dreaming?” or “How do you know there is an external world?” Your answers here will be different and will often not satisfy the philosopher anyway. Finally, we may ask my question: “How do you know things?” That is, how do you go about acquiring knowledge. The answer may be, “Through experimentation and observation,” or, “through reading and conversation,” or of course little bit of both.

When you are writing in an academic setting you should mainly be saying things you know. And, as Wayne Booth and Herbert Feigl remind us, you should try to explain to your reader how you know. You should give your reader the same reasons you have to believe, understand, or agree with your claims. That may not immediately work; the reader may not instantly believe you, or understand you, or agree with you. In fact, you should count on that not happening too quickly in most cases, but your job as a writer is to tell the reader what led you to think as you do. Tell your reader what what you’ve read and what you found there; or tell your reader what your data shows; or even just tell the reader how you proceeded from certain premises (that the reader, like you, thinks are true) to your conclusion. Those three sources — reading, experience, reasoning — are probably going to be the main ones. To be honest, at the moment, I can’t think of other ways of knowing at university.

Putting it that way, I think I may just have said something controversial. Maybe I’ll spend this week thinking out loud a little about that.

The tradition they now represent has centered its chief inquiries around the two humble questions, “What do you mean?” and “How do you know?”

Herbert Feigl, “Logical Empiricism”

Christian Frankel sent me this quote the other day knowing it would remind me of Wayne Booth’s mythical Oxford tutorials. As a statement of the underlying attitude of the logical positivists, it’s quite nice, and I remember Steve Fuller once telling me that, whatever we may think of positivism as a philosophy of science, positivists were often excellent dissertation supervisors. Indeed, it’s not difficult to see how it might be helpful if your supervisor patiently and insistently asked you mainly, “What do you mean?” and “How do you know?” Imagine having someone give every single one of your paragraphs that treatment!

I’m going to spend some time this weekend reading Feigl and relating his ideas to the issues I’ve been raising this week. Have a great weekend also!