Welcome to Cognitive Questions (CQ): Teed Rockwell's graduate internship for
the Union Institute Ph.D. program. CQ is basically an interactive classroom with
dozens of teachers (you) and one student (me). The coursework for my Ph.D. program
consists of writing papers on a variety of topics related to Philosophy and
Cognitive Science. As I continue to work on those papers, questions will
inevitably come up for me, and when they do I will send them to you via email, and
you will each send me whatever responses come to mind (if any). I will then edit
your responses and send them back to everyone on the list with my comments and
replies, then you will comment on my comments, and so on.
So much for the preliminaries. Now the first formal post begins:
TWO CONCEPTS OF EXPERIENCE: EMPIRICISM VS. PRAGMATISM
In Chapter 20 of "Democracy and Education" (pp.306-323) Dewey talks about two
different concepts of experience, one dating back to Ancient Greece, and the other
to the British Empiricists. The Greek concept of experience was something that was
necessarily concerned with the practical, as Dewey put it, "ways of doing and being
done to". (p.312) This kind of knowledge was contrasted with the intellectual world
of pure reason and knowledge, which supposedly had no commerce with anyone's goals
and desires. Experience in this sense was bound to culture and tradition, and was
by nature not particulary amenable to progress. It It is this concept of experience
which is at the root of the expression "an experienced technician." A person who
had experience in this sense of the word has done an activity in the world over an
extended period of time, and has consequently acquired a certain kind of skilled
knowledge. She thus has a kind of "knowing-how" which may or may not include the
ability to generate sentences describing the domain she is experienced in. But even
if she can't verbalize what she knows, her knowledge still enables her to move
skillfully through the world.
The British Empiricist view, which Dewey calls sensationalistic empiricism,
sees the acquisition of experience as a passive affair; a response to the world as
it impinges on the sense organs. According to this view, it is our passivity in
relating to experience that gives it its' epistemic worth; it tells us about the
world only in so far as we add nothing to it. Dewey calls Sensationalistic
Empiricism "a thoroughly false psychology of mental development" (p.316), and
indeed this kind of empiricism forms the basis of the theory of education that
Dewey is most actively critiqueing. It makes possible the idea that knowledge is a
collection of facts (sentences in the head a la Fodor?) which can be shoveled into
a passive mind, without requiring the mind or body of the person to interact with
them.
James also critiqued what he called Sensationalism in his "Principles of
Psychology" which he defines as the mistaken belief that "Thought is not a
continuous current, but a series of distinct ideas". (p.245) James believed that it
is this view of consciousness which creates almost all of the problems of
epistemology, because it presupposed a need to unify something which was never
divided in the first place. In some passages, it appears that James sees
consciousness as a homogeneous mush that is destroyed by any atempt at analysis.
But in his descriptions of how the self is structured (especially chapter X of the
"Principles") it is clear that James, like Dewey, sees our experience as
constituted by our activities in the world.
My question is: Is it really possible to eliminate this sensationalistic kind
of experience and still have a viable epistermology? Can Dewey's and James' concept
of experience really do everything necessary that was done by the empiricist
concept of experience? More specifically, could their concept of experience provide
something like A FOUNDATION FOR KNOWLEDGE. I 'm virtually certain that Dewey or
James didn't believe that their kind of experience could do *everything* that the
empiricists wanted from an epistemic foundation. They believed that most
epistemologies overestimated what knowledge can do, and therefore any pragmatist
epistemic foundations had to be less solid and reliable than an empiricist or
rationalist one. But the pragmatists still believed that certain theories were
better than others, and that one evaluated theories by determining how effective
they were at making sense out of experience. This leaves us with the question of
how a theory, which is traditionally assumed to be a structure made out of "knowing
that" sentences, can relate to a set of (neurological?) structures which have
evolved into a constellation of "knowing-how" abilities. Most discussions I have
seen on these two kinds of knowing have simply stressed their differences. If we
are to make "knowing-how" the foundation for "knowing-that", we need a theory that
explains how they are related.
It is now widely believed, thanks to Quine and Sellars, that the concept of
immediately given perceptual knowledge is a dogma of empiricism that no longer has
any right to be taken seriously. Once we have rejected this dogma, however, we no
longer have anything like a foundation to support our conceptual systems, and
apparently no way of telling a good theory from a bad one except by determining
internal coherence. Rorty claims that Pragmatism was an attack on the very idea of
epistemic foundations, but I think that this misinterpretation is the main reason
that Rorty is a a skeptical nihilist and Dewey and James were optimists with great
admiration for science. Rorty admits that the main difference between the
historical Dewey and his hypothetical Dewey is that " My alternative Dewey would
have said that we can construe 'thinking' as the use of sentences" ( pp.46-68 in
Ross 1994). When sentences have no comprehensible relationship to experience,
skepticism will obviously follow. If we wish to have a modern pragmatism that gives
a clear picture of science's virtues, restoring the importance of experience looks
like a good first step.
From those of you who are familiar with classical pragmatism, any references
to texts that deal with this subject in Dewey, James or Pierce would be a great
help. I would also appreciate anything relevant in the modern pragmatists (Quine,
Putnam, Rorty etc. ) the Continental Pragmatists (Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty), or
anyone else whose ideas might be relevant. For those of you who are not
philosophically trained in this area, I would appreciate some gut common sense
reactions and/or relevant experiences from your area of specialization. Are you
personally willing to give up the idea of sense data as a foundation for knowledge?
What would you loose by doing this? If you did give up this idea, would something
like the pragmatist concept of experience be an effective substitute? For those of
you who are trained in Neuroscience, which concept of experience seems more
biologically plausible?
And that's all I have to say about that, at least for the moment. Any responses
would be greatly appreciated. Teed Rockwell
REFERENCES
Dewey, J (1916 )*Democracy and Education.* New York, Macmillan
James, W. (1890) *Principles of Psychology* New York Henry Holt
Rorty, Richard 'Dewey between Hegel and Darwin' pp.46-68 in Ross 1994.
Ross, D. (ed.) (1994) *Modernist Impulses in the Human Sciences 1870-1930*
(Baltimore)
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