The Ordinary Ambiguity of 'Knowing'

[apolliana]

"[T]he capacity to understand and competently answer everyday questions is essentially the capacity to see and properly respond to their point; and I shall also argue that the theorist's question [about knowledge] has no point, in the relevant sense. The point of an everyday question guides us in answering it and in assessing our own and other people's answers.... [N]either our everyday employment of 'know that' and cognates nor anything else, with the exception of theorizing within the prevailing philosophical paradigm, ever requires that we answer the kind of question that we are here invited [by the traditional epistemologist] to answer" (Baz 14/16).

The only currently practicing ordinary language philosopher argues that when epistemologists ask about knowledge, they are asking questions divorced from any practical purpose, and therefore from any way of determining what 'know' means in the theoretical context. But it does not seem to me that we ordinarily know what 'know' means; far from it--particularly in the context of the knowledge-acquisition that goes on in schools.

My last post turned on an ambiguity in our ordinary use of 'knowledge': when do we count someone as knowing or as having learned something? What is required of them? Perhaps this is less ambiguous in reference to one specific fact or other than it is to the entirety of one's education. But I don't think it's clear in any of our minds just in what sense we are supposed to 'know' the things we learn in school--the primary arena in which we become familiar with the idea of knowledge.

Cognitive psychologists distinguish recall from recognition: to recall is to reproduce the thing you learned, while to recognize it is to judge that you've seen it before. (It's delightful to see G. Evans talking about this distinction in ch. 8 of Varieties of Reference.) If recall is our standard--as expressed by final exams of all sorts--we probably fall quite short of our standards for knowledge of what we have 'learned' in school; what we are able to recall decays quite quickly. Perhaps, at best, we will be able to recognize something we've learned when we see it again. Perhaps 'knowledge'--in the school sense--is closer to 'knowledge' in the sense of knowing people or places; being 'familiar' with them (French, 'connaitre'). Quite a lot of my undergraduate education is like this, for me; it's a matter of personal familiarity. My old friend, Palestrina!

This is all to say that, as students and teachers, we don't always know what sort of knowledge we're supposed to be acquiring or instilling. On both sides, the ideal of total recall never quite goes away; it hovers above us as the standard no one will ever be able to meet. But it is not the case, either, that there must be some point to what we learn and study. Sometimes, when what we learn is a skill, there might be a point ('to be able to reason critically in the future,' 'to know how to take the derivative of something'), but it is--importantly--an abstract point. My freshman math discussion about whether Euclid was selfish in pursuing knowledge for its own sake looms nearby.

Not everything we do has a very particular point, however much we might be tempted to assume there should be. But to do that is to infer intentions where none were; to try, desperately, to understand why we're undergoing something long and arduous and confusing. But there isn't always an explanation, less one in terms of someone's intentions. Sometimes we endure suffering (Ptolemy, difficult relationships) for which there is no justifying reason. (Okay, Ptolemy is a bit more justifiable.) I was constantly, as an undergraduate, trying to figure out what the rationales for the various peculiarities of the Program were, trying to understand why--if there was any reason--speaking was valued above writing; it turned out there were no reasons of the caliber I had in mind. This is a sweet, very human tendency to hallucinate purpose where none exists; but it is not the case that because we are given to it, the purposes we hallucinate are there. We do not ordinarily, in the realm of education, operate as if there is a particular 'point'--like an individual person's aim or end--to what we learn. And most of the time we don't know what it means to know what we've learned, either.

These may be failings of education, but I suspect they're unavoidable. If someone comes up with a set of things they believe it would be good for young people to learn, that set will be quite general. It's hard to say exactly how much background knowledge is required for any field or skill. Perhaps someone can do quite well with less. Perhaps what the person will go on to do is only tangentially related to what they have learned; this is expected to happen. Many will only remember what was interesting, or relevant to something else they find interesting--apart from any 'point' the teacher had in mind in constructing the course. And this is fine. Perhaps the idea is that the student integrates what she has learned into her overall worldview, her mental map of human knowledge. Is that a 'point' in the everyday sense? I rather doubt it.

For the 'propositional' (or declarative) knowledge we learn in school, the point of knowing it is rarely something students are aware of, if indeed there is a point. And what counts as knowing it is likewise vague. Need the student just be able to repeat the fact? Do they need to understand what the words mean? Do they need to understand more about the people, places, substances or forces named in the proposition that composes the fact? Do they need to have read the first source in which the fact appears? Do they need to have understood what they read?

I think we, as students, know this is a hopeless task. But the ideal--of having full recall and recognition of everything knowable--haunts everyone who is a student or a teacher. And so does the vagueness of 'know.' Our questions about knowledge and the traditional epistemologists' ("theorists'") questions are not so remote from each other. The theorists are us.

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