In the second chapter, Ryle focuses on the relationship between knowing how and knowing that. As I mentioned before, Ryle's one of the philosophers in the 20th century, who emphasizes not just the importance of propositional knowledge, but knowing how, what's sometimes referred to as ability knowledge. Remember that, while knowing that, is a matter of having justified true belief that a certain proposition is the case. Knowing how, is more like a skill, competence, in some cases even expertise. Knowing how to do something such as, for example, spot a certain species of bird, or converse empathetically, or tie a certain kind of knot. Again, you can know how to do something even if you're fast asleep, or for some other reason not doing it, but rather you're disposed do that under the right conditions. Ryle will now say, after distinguishing between knowing how and knowing that, that it's tempting especially for those that he considers to be part of the Platonic and Cartesian tradition that's also taken up by many other philosophers in the western tradition. That it's tempting to say: "All knowing how must be the result of some kind of propositional knowledge." Ryle talks about what he refers to as, The Intellectualist Doctrine. That Intellectuals Doctrine, is precisely the view that, all intelligence is a matter of apprehending truths. Therefore behaving intelligently, is a matter of applying that apprehension of truths to action, to agency. You might think about cases in which, suppose you're just learning how to drive, and there are facts about how one should drive when the certain kind of situation the right thing to do with so-and-so. It might be that you have those before your mind when you're learning what to do under certain circumstances, or perhaps when you're learning to play chess, you've got certain rules, such as, when this is moved in a certain way, you have to move two forward, and one to the right, or one to the left. When this other piece is moved, it can only move one space forward at a time, etc. Those are truths we might say, that govern the playing of chess. But Ryle wants to suggest that, these are ways which you could learn these skills. You can state them as facts, or truths if you want to, and then applying them in practice, but those are not mandatory. The reason is that, he asks us to imagine a child who just watches lots of chess games, watches people playing chess for many years, and gradually absorbs the game without ever paying attention to the question, whether there are any particular rules. He learns the rules, but he's never aware of himself as doing so, and certainly couldn't tell you what the rules are in the course of playing the game and he could become a very good chess player in the process. Or to take a more contemporary example, one that became very influential, after the writing of Ryle's book, The example of learning language. According to contemporary linguists, at least majority of linguists, when you learn a language, you internalize a huge number of rules as to how grammatical sentences can be constructed, to say nothing of what words mean. Generally speaking, when you internalize those rules, you're not aware of yourself as doing so. In fact, when you take a linguistics class, you might be surprised to learn that, there are lots of rules that govern how you transform one sentence into another for purposes of efficient communication. You're aware of the fact, those transformations are perfectly meaning preserving, they are synonyms of the original thing that was transformed. But you're not aware at least at the conscious level of, what was it that you were doing in the process. You internalize these grammatical rules that is, but never at least explicitly, or consciously formulate them in terms of propositions that then are applied to practice. Now, you can imagine objections to Ryle's position here that says, "Well, maybe these are unconscious. They're internalized, but we're not conscious of the fact that we're doing so." We will get to that line of thought about unconscious mental states in a couple of lectures ahead of us. But for now, Ryle thinks that, I suspect that Ryle would say, "Even if we could respond to these examples, by positing unconscious rules." He'll want to say, "Nevertheless, it couldn't be that all intelligent behavior, is due to the application of rules to particular cases, to particular practical cases." Here's why. What he refers to, he refers to this as the crucial objection to the intellectualist legend. The crucial objection goes as follows, if you are an intellectualist, you're going to say, whenever somebody behaves intelligently, they're applying a rule to the particular case at hand. Driving, playing chess, interpreting sentences, behaving politely, thousands of other cases are possibilities. But Ryle will say, "The application of a general precept, or rule, or a bit of propositional knowledge that you take yourself to have, to the particular case in hand, is something that you can do either better or worse, well, or poorly, or somewhere in between. But that means that, applying the general precept, to the action in question is itself something that is intelligently done or not. But when it's intelligently done, that must be because there's a rule, that says, when you've got rule type X, apply it in a certain way to action situation type Y. So, that you've got to have as it were a meta rule that tells you how to apply the nonmeta, the lower-level rule to the particular action question that's confronting you. But wait, the application of that meta rule, to tell you how to apply this rule, to this particular action situation, is something that can be done better or worse. So, Ryle suggests, there must be another rule, A meta meta rule that you have to invoke in order to apply the meta rule, to the first level rule, to the action and that's a regress that will never stop according to Ryle. So, the crucial objection that Ryle offers to the intellectualist legend, is one that says, "In order to apply even the simplest rule, you'd have to apply uncountably many rules in the process." That seems incredibly implausible, as an account to what happens when a person moves their chess piece effectively within the rules, or speaks grammatically, or listens empathetically, or distinguishes one bird from another. That all seems like, it puts much too much pressure on intellectual operations, to explain relatively straight forward competencies, skills, and in some cases, even expertise. So, the idea is that, even if there is some, and Ryle is, I think, happy to accept that there's plenty of propositional knowledge, that can't be all the knowledge that there is. There must also be some know-how, that is not itself backed up by propositional knowledge. Again, take more examples of what Ryle considers to be intelligence that's right there in front of you, that does not require, supposing that the person in question is applying rules to the case at hand. He asks you to think about, a clown for example at a birthday party. Clowning cleverly in such way as to make the children giggle. That clever clowning is something that's right there in the behavior itself. You don't need to suppose that the clown is applying rules to the particular case. The clown is just doing what comes naturally to him or her. Likewise, there're plenty of cases in which we say things to ourselves. We might have to especially, if we're novices in a certain area that requires skill. We might have to repeat to ourselves, various precepts as to how to act. But once we've internalized what to do, there no longer has to be the application of general rules to particular cases of action. After a while, we have what Ryle will refer to as second nature competencies that are fairly automatic, that don't require a great deal of cognitive labor, but that still allow us to behave in quite competent ways. So, getting back to this notion of multitrack dispositions. If we think of minds as large conjuries of multitrack dispositions, we're going to say many of those dispositions are relatively high level and might be the result of a fair bit of rigorous, painstaking, long-term training. Some authors have said for example, that to be an expert in something, you have to have spent about 10,000 hours acquiring that expertise, that might be true. But once you've got that expertise, there's no reason to think that you have to have before your mind, general precepts or rules, or propositions that guide your behavior. So, even for very high level types of skill, sometimes somebody can just follow, if they have the appropriate skills, just follow their gut, and make judgments that require a great deal of sophistication. That doesn't mean that if I don't have that skill, that my gut feeling is going to be worth very much. But for the gut feeling of an expert art historian, or forensic scientist, or jurist, or physician, those gut feelings, can often be a very powerful indicators of how to proceed in deciding about difficult situations, and some cases in which people's lives might depend. We can think of Descartes' position as almost yielding to reductio ad absurdum. That reductio ad absurdum, is the idea of solipsism. Solipsism being the view that, I know that I have in mind, I know that I exist and have mental states, but the idea that anybody else has them is going to be at best to conjecture that I can never know for sure to be true. But Ryle says, "Look, if you've got yourself into a position that has that as a consequence, there's probably something wrong with the position that forced you there." Instead, he writes, "I discover that there are other minds in understanding what people say and do, in making sense of what you say and appreciating your jokes, in following your arguments and hearing you pick holes in my argument. I'm not inferring to the workings of your mind, I am following them." So, the idea that I can follow the workings of your mind, right there as a teacher watches the school child go through some mathematical calculations, as the violin teacher watches the student practice her scales on the violin for example. Those are all going to be cases in which the expert can see the intelligent behavior right there in the action. Doesn't have to infer anything about the mind that brought it about. This is an important insight on Ryle's part, it seems to me. Nowadays, in contemporary experimental psychology, there's a lot of interest in what's known as embodied cognition. I don't want to suggest that Ryle's way of expressing yourself here, is a bit of a sort of prescient glimpse of a view that's becoming widely discussed, and substantiated by a fair bit of empirical investigation. The idea of embodied cognition. If Ryle's right, yes, there's a lot of cognition that's right there in the behavior, and we don't need to suppose that it's the result of anything internal. It could be, but the important thing is that, it doesn't have to be. There can be intelligence and intelligent behavior right there before our eyes.
