What you find below is my two posts in the online Wittgenstein course that Lois Holzman of the East Side Institute (http://eastsideinstitute.org/) in New York coordinated.
You may find them interesting if you're interested in the issue of mind and body in our action.
November 24, 2014
Hi,
everyone. This is Yosuke in Hiroshima,
Japan.
Please
forgive me for making a new thread because I really don’t know which thread I
should choose.
The
following is my (rather long, forgive me again) response after I read the first
four chapters of the Overweight Brain and
Monk’s essay.
IMPROVISATIONAL
CONVERSATION
I'd
like to tell you first of all that I really love the method of improvisational
conversation that is summarized below.
This is what my mentors did and I'm always trying to conduct my classes
in university in this way.
>
Fred's
questions were never about knowing. He didn't ask, "What do we know about
that?" He asked, "What did we see? What did we do? What can we build?
What can we create? What can we organize? How can we grow?" As a therapist,
he asked clients how he could be of help; he didn't-he couldn't possibly-know.
They'd have to create their helping relationship and the help. And so began an
improvisational conversation. As a teacher and trainer, he asked students how
he might be of help to them learning whatever they had come to learn; he
didn't-he couldn't possibly-know. They'd have to create the environment to
learn and the learning. And so began an improvisational conversation. As a
community and political organizer, he asked the community what they should do
in response to a specific situation; he didn't-he couldn't possibly-know.
They'd have to discover that together. And so began an improvisational
conversation.
>
So
with this spirit of improvisational conversation, I'm going to write below my
thoughts that emerged, inspired by the first four chapters of the Overweight
Brain and Monk's essay.
THE THIRD PERSON
KNOWLEDGE
I
concur with the critical stance that is expressed in the quotation below and in
Monk's essay on scientism, toward the (ab)use of 'scientific knowledge' in the
areas where its application is not appropriate.
>
Knowledge
became “king” with the birth of the scientific era and it helped humankind
accomplish incredible things, many of which have been of invaluable benefit
(extending life, curing disease, advancing agriculture, sharing information,
discovering and preserving cultures…the list almost never ends). But the depth
and breadth of scientific and technological discovery has come with a price,
which is that “knowing” has become ideological. An ideology is a worldview, a
way of looking at things, a set of ideas that underlies beliefs and
understandings and guides actions --that’s become “how things are” so we’re
usually not even aware of it. The knowing ideology is simply this: human life
and growth, solutions to social problems, and world progress require and depend
on knowing.
>
However,
as I'll elaborate later, I'd like to retain the use of the words like 'to know'
and 'knowing.' What we need to abandon
is the ideological scientism, not the word 'to know' altogether. It is, then, a good idea probably to
distinguish different aspects of knowing.
In fact, Wittgenstein wrote in Section 78 of Philosophical Investigation as follows:
>
Compare
knowing and saying:
how
many meters high Mont Blanc is –
how
the word “game” is used –
how a
clarinet sounds.
Someone
who is surprised that one can know something and not be able to say it is
perhaps thinking of a case like the first.
Certainly not of one like the third.
>
I’d
like to describe the aspect of knowing that is the target of the criticism of
scientism as the third person knowledge,
and distinguish it from the aspect of knowing that we use in our creative
behaviors, which I call the first person
knowing.
THE THIRD PERSON
KNOWLEDGE
The
third person knowledge is a typical form of knowledge in science. This is ‘objective’ knowledge that is attained
and confirmed by the ‘neutral’ observers.
The ‘neutral’ or ‘objective’ observers are not real persons who are
embodied and contextualized in specific ways, but the ideal notion of the third
person that we conceptualize. They have
no body living in nowhere (They are indeed nobody
and nowhere man).
However,
because of this idealization, the third person knowledge has abstract
generalizability and has the widest scope of application among types of
knowledge we have. It is not the truth,
though. The truth, as imagined in the
image of the omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent God, does not need to be
applied. It is just here, there and
everywhere. The knowledge of science is
not this ultimate truth. It has its
limited area of application (and margin of errors). Scientism, then, is probably a mistake to
regard the third person knowledge as truth.
One
of the most useful features of the third person knowledge of science is its
claim of liner causality. The linear
causality is a great way of approximation to predict, plan or make things, and
the products of the approximation is generally hailed as the achievement of ‘science
and technology.’ Sure enough, science
and technology are not truth, and therefore things can ‘go wrong’,
contradicting our third person knowledge, but usually we comfortably leave our
lives on approximated safety of the gigantic structure that we call an airplane
in our flight. Our idealized conception
of the linear causality is great to that extent, at least.
A
great thing that happened to the third person knowledge since the 20 century is
that it began to be applied to itself and became self-critical. One of the basic achievements of that
self-reference is the theory of complexity.
It is found that the linear causality can only be assumed when we limit
the system of operations. Only when we
conceptualize a very simple, bounded system in which things happen and interact,
do we predict according to the linear causality (and disregard the ‘aberration’
that discords with the linear causality).
But
the world we live in and are interested in is not that simple. It is an evolving complex system that keeps
changing. As Vygotsky says in Fred’s
play (see below), even when we tap dance, we’re not talking about a simple
system where the first move of the right foot causes another part of the
body. In tap dance (I’m not a dancer
myself. Please pardon me if I make a
stupid description), different parts of the body (including the brain) interact
with each other, and if you think you've picked up the part that moves first
among others, it is only because you've limited the area of attention and observation
(after all, our consciousness is not powerful enough to capture the multitude
of interactions in our body at one time).
And as you move, the interactions multiply and the dancing body
(including the brain, again) self-organizes itself (autopoiesis, as Luhmann call the process). (Incidentally, there’s no part of the body
that moves first in martial arts, either.
If you pick up one part and move it deliberately, the movement will be
unnatural, redundant and too slow to be called the movement of martial arts.)
>
Vygotsky:
Aha! To me nothing moves first. Everything moves at once; the body -- not just
the feet --taps. Our obsession with stages --with what comes first-- distorts
history where there is no beginning and no end.
>
But
let’s suppose there’s a super, super computer that identifies the billions of
interactions of your dance. It gives you
a (huge) report of what you did as you danced.
Would this third person knowledge help you (or anybody else) dance
better? ‘It must!’ someone may say, ‘It
is scientific, objective descriptions of what you actually did. How can it NOT be helpful when it is
scientific and objective!?’ To counter-argue
with someone like this, I should probably have to introduce another term, the first person knowing, to explain how
what you know as you do something (as the first person) is qualitatively
different from what you know as you observe something (as the third person).
THE FIRST PERSON
KNOWING
When
you do something, you apparently know something, or at least this is how we use
the words like ‘do’ and ‘know.’ But that
knowledge or knowing (to emphasize the difference, I say ‘knowing’ for the
knowledge of the first person, following the way Michael Polanyi used the term ‘tacit
knowing.’) is embodied in your body, unlike the third person knowledge that is
disembodied (and decontextualized). So
the talk of your first person knowledge must involve the conditions of your
body (emotions and feelings as well as all other things that happen in your
body), that are affected by the environment (context) in which your body live.
It’s
not just that your mind is not powerful enough to deal with a great amount of
information that the super, super computer gives you, but that the third person
knowledge of the super, super computer is disembodied and decontextualized, and
for that reason qualitatively different from your first person knowing.
On
top of that, there is not a predetermined boundary of your action. You’re an evolving system that interacts with
your environment (including other people) and the environment (i.e., something
that is not you which affects you) will change as you act. The boundary of your action of the past may
temporarily be described as such, but you keep changing as long as you live. You’ll never know what you’ll do until you do
it, and you keep doing something new all the time.
Take
the case of the description of language.
We have the third person knowledge of language in the form of school
grammar and scientific linguistics. But
it is decontextualized and disembodied knowledge, and it describes the idealized
concept of language (Competence or I-language for Chomsky, for example),
not the actual language you use in your body at a particular moment with
particular persons in a particular context.
School grammar or scientific linguistics is certainly a type of knowledge
(the third person knowledge), but it is not your first person knowledge. If we mean the first person knowing by the
expression ‘understanding’, the following Wittgensteinean passage from the Overweight Brain concurs with what I’m
trying to say in this essay.
>
How
we understand what language is has everything to do with how we use language,
how we talk to ourselves and to one another, and --and this may surprise you--
how we think and what we think about.
>
HOW CAN THE THIRD PERSON KNOWLEDGE HELP OUR ACTION?
Does
the third person knowledge NOT help us in our action at all? As a teacher-educator in the field of
teaching English as a foreign language, and a clumsy learner of martial arts,
this is a very crucial question. Our
common sense tells us that that the third person knowledge can be of some help
in a limited way, but if you begin to rely on it, it may be abused by your
belief of (a mild version of) scientism and harmful. It is important to realized the third person
knowledge in whatever form is not only qualitatively different from your first
person knowing, but also an extremely reduced version of knowledge in terms of
quantity, disembodiement and decontextualization. Knowing the limit of the third person
knowledge (which seems brilliant and indeed is very useful in dealing with
impersonal objects) is essential when you deal with the knowledge (or rather,
knowing) concerning your action.
I
should write in detail, but my time is running up, so let me just quote from
Dewey’s Democracy and Education, a
master piece written about one hundred years ago.
Dewey
who values thinking in experience is critical of knowledge and theory. For Dewey, thinking in experience is about
the future that is coming, whereas knowledge and theory is about the past that
is gone and fixed.
>
Hence
the deluge of half-observations, of verbal ideas, and unassimilated
"knowledge" which afflicts the world. An ounce of experience is
better than a ton of theory simply because it is only in experience that any
theory has vital and verifiable significance. An experience, a very humble
experience, is capable of generating and carrying any amount of theory (or
intellectual content), but a theory apart from an experience cannot be
definitely grasped even as theory. It tends to become a mere verbal formula, a
set of catchwords used to render thinking, or genuine theorizing, unnecessary
and impossible. Because of our education we use words, thinking they are ideas,
to dispose of questions, the disposal being in reality simply such an obscuring
of perception as prevents us from seeing any longer the difficulty. (Dewey,
1916. pp. 138-139)
>
Knowledge
and theory, then, becomes useful only when it is regarded as a small hypothesis
that may potentially be relevant in a new situation. You may want to turn your (mostly unsayable)
first person knowledge into a kind of third person knowledge, but that may be
more harmful than helpful for future action of yours and others’, for the third
person knowledge is of the past and the future may be very different from the
past (and you may not be what you used to be).
>
While
all thinking results in knowledge, ultimately the value of knowledge is
subordinate to its use in thinking. For we live not in a settled and finished
world, but in one which is going on, and where our main task is prospective,
and where retrospect -- and all knowledge as distinct from thought is
retrospect -- is of value in the solidity, security, and fertility it affords
our dealings with the future. (Dewey, 1916. pp. 145-146)
>
Probably
I should have finished this small essay not with Dewey’s passage that is not
very easy to read, but with Michael Polayni’s that is more readable. But I didn't have time to find the book in my
office or the time to write my original argument. Yet, as I said at the beginning, this is part
of my improvisational conversation, and I didn't mean it to be a piece of
writing that finishes all the arguments in the future (no one should be
arrogant to try to write such a thing).
So, unable to find a clever sentence to finish this essay, I just say,
that’s all for now.
Thank
you.
Yosuke
November 25, 2014
Hi,
Steve, Jim, Yuji (or Moro-san, as we'd say in Japanese), and Paola
Thank
you for your comments which improvised my thoughts further.
AUTOPOIESIS
My
understanding of autopoiesis is through Luhmann who expanded the theory of
Maturana and Varela. What the concept
amounts to, I'd say, is the claim that all you are, do, and experience is only
made by you, not by other things, which Luhmann describes as the environment.
Jim
said:
>
Our senses function as they do in relation to
material reality and yet they do not transmit to us through our nervous systems
what we take to be actual reality. As best as I can determine (I'm not a
biologist) what we get is a bio-chemical response to reality, not reality
itself.
>
As
you read this passage now, the understanding that you construct is based on
your prior denotations and connotations that you've associated with words,
phrases, ideas and whatever that come with this passage. The standardized
dictionaries may give you an idea that as long as the same words are shared
between you and me, the same ideas must be shared as well. Wittgenstein rejected this notion, and
Luhmann may say that because the words are not the 'input' (i.e., something
that comes straight to you as a material) but the 'perturbation' (i.e., something
that may trigger some reactions in you but does not have direct control of
you), the claim that the 'same ideas' will be reproduced in you as a reader is
most unlikely.
On
top of that, you experience a lot as you read.
The room may be rather cold, and you may be hungry, slightly irritated
by frequent phone calls, worrying about the meeting you’re to have in an
hour. All these things affect your
reading. It’s not surprising at all that
you react quite differently to the same text on different occasions. Your cognition and action cannot be separated
from the conditions of your history, body, context and other things that make
you.
In
this sense, my first person knowing could only be known by me in my body (including
the brain), my environment and my history. But I only say that it 'could be known'
because this knowing can only be theoretically assumed. As soon as I know what I know, that knowing
changes 'I', and the knowing becomes something of the past. The first person knowing, or maybe knowing in
general, is always in the process of recursion.
So,
in terms of embodiment, embedding in time and space, history, and process in
me, my first person knowing is not accessible to anyone else either in the form
of the third person knowledge or in other forms.
HOW THE FIRST
KNOWING OF A MASTER AFFECTS THE DISCIPLES
Yuji's
question in this regard is very interesting for me.
>
My
question is how first person knowledge is related to this socialness of
knowing.
>
Apparently
there is such a relationship as master/disciple or teacher/student, as distinct
from information transmitter/information receptor (as in machine). A master (or
a teacher) does influence the disciples (or students) and let them develop in a
way that is not conceivable without the master (or teacher). We assume that there's a 'social' relation
between the master and her disciples.
But
first of all, we have to remember that there's no direct transfer of knowledge
from the master to the disciple (or from a person to another, in general) because
we're autopoietic beings (autopoiesis systems).
What even the best master can do is to affect you, not mold you as he or
she wishes -- if you're a teacher or a parent, I assume you know what I mean. A disciple can only become what he can
become. As Dewey said, a teacher can
educate somebody only indirectly by means of the environment. What a teacher
can do is to arrange the environment (including the teacher him/herself) for
the students.
Yet,
this does not mean that there's nothing a master can do to better influence the
disciples. In traditional settings, a
master and the disciples spend most of their time together, and the disciples
learn the way of life (or the form of life, as Wittgenstein would say) of the
master. At the same time, the master
learns how the disciples perceive, feel, think and act. They probably become more similar than before
by spending time together.
A
general principle (or tenet) a master gives occasionally to the disciple makes
the best advantage of the experience of living together and learning who they
are with each other. The master and
disciples probably become similar enough as to make communication between
without much trouble.
In
martial arts, occasional teaching from mouth to ear ('kuden' 「口伝」) is preferred
to systematic teaching of the third person knowledge. A master prefers to teach verbally only when
an appropriate occasion emerges for that teaching. The oral teaching is more effective than
teaching according to a predetermined curriculum because the embodiment, embedding
in time and place, histories and processes, all these elements that are
essential in the first person knowing, can become asymptotic (closer than anything
else, but not identical) between them.
Teaching
the third person knowledge, typically through books, often disregards
embodiment, embedding in time and space, histories and processes -- if only for
brevity, I may describe them altogether as 'contingent elements'--. A lesson learned from a book can misguide a
reader because of the lack of similarities of the contingent elements. A lesson to be taught should be selected by a
teacher who is familiar with the contingent elements of the student.
CAN KNOWLEDGE BE
PRIVATE?
As
I've written so far, I found Paola's comment.
>
Is
this "first person knowledge” then, as Yuji is describing it, a ‘private’
knowledge? In either case, how can ‘knowing’ be private if we are social
beings? I like the Russian offer better. Another example of how meaning changes
in different languages....
>
As
Paola says in the last sentence, this is probably a matter of how different
persons use the same language differently.
But I may defend my use of the terms by saying that whereas the first
person knowing (I prefer 'knowing' to 'knowledge' for the first person knowing,
as I want to emphasize that it is more of a process than of a product) may be
'private' in that it is only accessible to the first person alone, the third
person knowledge is not private but public.
(Some of you may recall Wittgenstein's argument about 'private language'
here and you’re absolutely right).
The
third person knowledge about objects can be transmitted quite easily and that
is why science and technology have drastically changed the surface of the earth
over the last few centuries. The third
person knowledge as a product can be transferred, stored, added, and combined
quite objectively. We test its validity
by experiments that are publicly observable.
But
if you want to apply the third person knowledge to your personal skills, you
need to adapt it as your contingent elements demand. This is where a good teacher comes in. A good teacher is someone who understands not
only the third person knowledge, but also the students (their style of the
first person knowing). But a good
teacher can only 'help.' In order to
acquire the first person knowing, the student must change him/herself to create
a new self that accommodates the first person knowing.
To
change our perspective, let's think how we build the third person
knowledge. It was of course not given by
God once and for all. We all started
from our first person knowing.
Attempting to convey the first person knowing to other people, people
have invented ways of expressing the first knowing, sophisticated language use,
and increased its generalization and abstraction. The print culture which enabled communication
between people in different time and place promoted the generalization and
abstraction, and our verbal behavior changed so much as to produce a lot of the
third person knowledge, and it led the prosperity of science and technology of
modern times.
To
sum, the first person knowing is private, but, as Dewey says, it can be
communicated (but not directly transferred).
It may further turn into the third person knowledge when it achieves
sufficient generalization and abstraction, but then it becomes so remote from
the first person knowing. In other
words, the first person knowing can become social, although it is inherently
private. The first person knowing can be
socially communicated, but as it is inherently private, it cannot be directly
transmitted as in the case of the third person knowledge.
Well,
that's all for now. Thank you.
Yosuke
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