![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
The Meno Problem and Knowing What to Do
Nov. 30th, 2005 10:07 amHow is our knowledge of what to do special? For one thing, the specifics recede into the background. What's left is a sense of familiarity, a sense that the action has a certain character, and that one knows how to do it. But the details may be missing: one does not need to consciously think of them if one can execute the action without doing so. For everything we know in this way, we know it as--I want to say--a way of seeing the world, as something that can be done with the world. This is the kind of knowledge McDowell's virtuous person has of what to do: he just sees situations as offering certain possibilities and acts on them. But he cannot explain how he does so in much detail. I had wanted to say: for changes in aspect to come about, we may need to focus on the details.
We know more things in this way than we ordinarily think. If it is even a matter of knowledge. But why is this significant for philosophy? I want to say this shift that occurs when we know how to do something--so that we don't see the details--is the reason why looking at things from only a third person point of view does nothing to address philosophical worries. If we want to know what something is, that we know in the sense of knowing-how, we cannot say simply by looking at the specifics of the situation--: the sense of the thing that we are familiar with may be lost. But neither can we only look at it from the point of view of someone who knows and acts on that knowledge; her point of view may be too unenlightening in that it has little to say for itself. Rather, we need something in between. We need to have things to say for ourselves in justification of seeing things, speaking and acting as we do; and these justifications may or may not succeed in making us intelligible to others. Perhaps the question of how we can seek what we don't already know isn't about knowledge at all: it's about intelligibility--how we can be intelligible (to others or to ourselves) when, at a certain stage of familiarity, the arguments and instructions that make things rational drop out of our experience.
I would almost like to say that the subject matter of philosophy is just the ability to see things from different perspectives, under different aspects, with no new equipment at all. Not that new concepts or methods of analysis cannot help us see things in new ways; of course they can. But it doesn't take much, and that's important. And I feel it is the strangeness of things snapping in and out of focus when we see things in different ways that is the source of most philosophical problems.
It is for related reasons that philosophy must concern self-knowledge--in the sense of telling us something about our own concepts, or what we might say, or how we might justify ourselves, or what makes others intelligible to us.
We know more things in this way than we ordinarily think. If it is even a matter of knowledge. But why is this significant for philosophy? I want to say this shift that occurs when we know how to do something--so that we don't see the details--is the reason why looking at things from only a third person point of view does nothing to address philosophical worries. If we want to know what something is, that we know in the sense of knowing-how, we cannot say simply by looking at the specifics of the situation--: the sense of the thing that we are familiar with may be lost. But neither can we only look at it from the point of view of someone who knows and acts on that knowledge; her point of view may be too unenlightening in that it has little to say for itself. Rather, we need something in between. We need to have things to say for ourselves in justification of seeing things, speaking and acting as we do; and these justifications may or may not succeed in making us intelligible to others. Perhaps the question of how we can seek what we don't already know isn't about knowledge at all: it's about intelligibility--how we can be intelligible (to others or to ourselves) when, at a certain stage of familiarity, the arguments and instructions that make things rational drop out of our experience.
I would almost like to say that the subject matter of philosophy is just the ability to see things from different perspectives, under different aspects, with no new equipment at all. Not that new concepts or methods of analysis cannot help us see things in new ways; of course they can. But it doesn't take much, and that's important. And I feel it is the strangeness of things snapping in and out of focus when we see things in different ways that is the source of most philosophical problems.
It is for related reasons that philosophy must concern self-knowledge--in the sense of telling us something about our own concepts, or what we might say, or how we might justify ourselves, or what makes others intelligible to us.
