According to legend, inscribed on walls of the temple on the sacred site of Delphi in Ancient Greece were two premier injunctions: NOTHING IN EXCESS, and KNOW THYSELF. This course will be an examination of the latter injunction in an effort to discover what self-knowledge is, why it might be valuable, and what, if any, limitations it might face. What is missing from a person lacking in self-knowledge that makes her less wise, virtuous, or competent in certain areas than others who have this capacity, and what if anything might she do to fill that gap? Historical sources as well as recent research in philosophy, experimental social psychology, and neuroscience will inform our investigation, in the course of which we will become students of our own dreams, and cultivate some meditative practices. Learning Outcomes: Learners will gain familiarity with prominent themes from Western, classical Chinese, and Buddhist approaches to our knowledge of ourselves. In the course of doing so, they will gain an appreciation of the relation of self-knowledge to wisdom, of the value of intellectual humility, as well as of methods of learning about oneself that do not depend on introspection. Learners will also become familiar with contemporary research in experimental social psychology, philosophy, and neuroscience into the emotions, the unconscious, the role of affect in decision making, and self-deception. They will also gain an appreciation of a challenge to the assumption of a coherent, unified self that derives from the Buddhist tradition. --- This course was created by a partnership between The University of Edinburgh and Humility & Conviction and Public Life Project, an engaged research project based at the University of Connecticut and funded by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation.
Embodied cognition
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來自 The University of Edinburgh 的課程
Know Thyself - The Value and Limits of Self-Knowledge: The Examined Life
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The University of Edinburgh
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從本節課中
A re-casting of the Mind/Body problem
Descartes' dualistic picture of the mind-body relation was highly influential for centuries. A vocal minority of thinkers challenged dualism, but only in the Twentieth Century did Gilbert Ryle manage to discern how Descartes' dualistic reasoning went wrong. In understanding Ryle's approach, we will also gain an appreciation of how know-how is a legitimate form of knowledge, and of how one way of gaining self-knowledge is by looking outward rather than looking inward.
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Mitchell GreenProfessor of Philosophy
Dr Simon FoktLearning Technologist
University of Edinburgh
[MUSIC]
So we're beginning to make sense I hope of why Ryle thinks that we can in
good intellectual conscience deny the inclusion of [INAUDIBLE] because we
can challenge one of its premises.
We can in good conscience say, look, the premise that says it's possible to exist
this embodied and say I'm not sure that that's true because I don't have
a clear idea as to what it would be to exist this embodied in so
far as exist this embodied and still being minded.
We do require being able to produce intelligent behavior,
we don't have a clear ideas as to what intelligent behavior would be for
that matter of behavior if you're purely to somebody.
Those of you who have learned philosophy as it what's practiced in the 70s, 80s and
90s, more precisely, will know that more recently,
there's been an objection to Descartes' tail of argument along the following lines
that just because something's conceivable doesn't mean that it's generally possible.
That is in some ways a more subtle and sophisticated argument that requires
going beyond what we have time and capacity to do in this course.
But the idea that conceivability is not a guarantee of possibility is
something that's just more recent version of the same general kind of injection that
Ral wants to raise to Descartes.
In a 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.
And 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 and in some cases,
even expertise.
Knowing how to do something such as, for example, spot a certain species of bird,
or converse emphatically, or ties certain kind of knot.
And again, you can know how to do something even if you're fast asleep, or
if some other reason for not doing it, but
rather you dispose to do that under the conditions.
Well, now Ryle said 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 taking up and
other philosophers in the Western tradition that, it's tempting to say,
well, all knowing how must be the result of some kind of propositional knowledge.
And Ryle talks about what is referred to as the intellectual's doctrine.
That intellectual's doctrine is precisely the view that all intelligence is a matter
of apprehending truth and therefore behaving intelligently is a matter of
applying that apprehension of truths to action to agency.
So the idea for example,
is you might think about cases of [INAUDIBLE] just learning how to drive.
And there are facts about what truths are about how one should
drive when a certain kind of situation, the right thing to do and so and so.
And it might be that you have those before your mind when you
are learning what to do under certain circumstances.
Or perhaps when you learn 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 could acquire these skills by internalizing lots of general precepts,
or you can state them as facts or truth as you want to, and
then apply that in practice, but those are not mandatory.
And 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 is never aware of himself is 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 let's take a more contemporary example, one that became very influential
after the writing of Ryle's book, the example of learning language.
According to a contemporary linguist, at least the majority of linguists,
when you learn a language, you internalize a huge number of rules as to how
grammatical sentences can be constructed that say nothing of what words mean.
And generally speaking, when you internalize those rules,
you're not aware of yourself as doing so.
And 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 factors transformations are perfectly, meaning preserving.
They are synonyms of the original thing that it was transformed.
But you're not aware of the subconscious level of
what of what that you are you doing in the process.
You internalized 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 objection 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'll get to that line of thought,
about unconscious mental states, in a couple of lectures ahead of us.
But for now, 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 practical cases.
And here's why.
What he refers to,
he refers to this as the crucial objection to the intellectulist legend.
The crucial objection goes as follows.
If you are an intellectualist you're going to say whenever somebody behaves
intelligently, they are applying a rule to the particular case at hand, driving,
playing chess, interpreting senses,
behaving politely, thousands of other cases are possibilities.
But Ryle would 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 is a rule.
According to the intellectualist legend,
there would have to be another rule that says, when you've got rule type x,
apply it in a certain to way to action situation type y.
So that you've got to have a meta rule that tells you how to apply the non-meta,
the lower level rule, to the critical 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,
there's something that could be done better or worse.
So Ryle suggest there must be another rule, another 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 the regress that will never stop according to Ryle.
The idea is that, applying a rule according to this intellectualist legend,
to a particular cases of what to do to a particular case of action,
is something that's done better or worse, competently or incompetently.
So it must be governed by according to the intellectualist legend,
some application of another rule.
Which itself requires, self something to be done either better or worse,
recording the applications of the rule and that's the process that will never stop.
So the crucial objection that Ryle offers to the intellectualist legend
is one that says, in order to apply even the simplest rule,
you have to apply unaccountably many rules in the process.
An unlimited number of rules in the process and that seems incredibly
implausible as an account to what happens when a person moves their chess piece
effectively, and within the rules in a game of chess, or speaks grammatically,
or listens emphatically, or distinguishes one bird from another.
That all seems like it puts much, too much pressure on intellectual vibrations
to explain relatively straightforward competencies skills, and
it's on cases, even expertise.
So the idea is that even if there is some,
and Ryle I think is happy to accept that there is 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 what Ryle considers to be intelligence that's right
there in front of you that is not require supposed in that person in question is
applying the rules to the case at hand.
He asks you to think about a clown, for
example at a birthday party, clowning cleverly in such ways 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 are plenty of cases which we say things to ourselves,
we might have to, specially for novices in a certain area that requires skill.
We might have to repeat to ourselves various precepsis as to how to act.
But once we've internalized what to do, they 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,
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 multi-track dispositions,
if we think of minds as large conjures of multi track 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 physicians.
That those gut feelings can often be a very powerful indicators
of how to proceed in deciding about difficult situations in some cases in
which people's lives can depend.
We can think of Descartes position as almost yielding to reductio ad absurdum.
And that reductio ad absurdum is the idea of solipsism,
solipsism being the view that I know that I have a mind.
I know that I exist and have mental states, but the idea that anybody else has
them is going to be at best a conjecture that I can never know for sure to be true.
But Ryle says, look,
if you've gotten yourself into a position that has that as a consequence,
there is probably something wrong with the position that forced you there.
Instead, he writes, I discovered 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, in hearing pickles in my argument,
I'm not inferring to the workings of your mind, I am following them.
So, there that I can follow the workings of your mind, right there and
as the teacher watches the school child goes his Mathematical calculations.
As the violin teachers watches the student
practice her scales on the violin for example.
Those were all going to be cases in which they 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 contemporary experimental psychology,
there's a lot of interest in what's known as embodied cognition.
And I want to suggest that Ryle with put expressing himself here is a bit of a sort
of pressing a glimpse of a view that's becoming widely discussed and
substantiated by a fair bit of empirical investigation that embodied cognition.
If Ryle's right, yes, there's 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.
Their commitment can be intelligence in a childhood behavior right there before
our eyes.
