In a recent blog entry, Laurie Santos and Tamar Gendler very nicely lay out the idea that explicit propositional knowledge is only a small part of the sort of understanding that guides action. As they say “Recent work in cognitive science has demonstrated that knowing is a shockingly tiny portion of the battle for most real world decisions. You may know that $19.99 is pretty much the same price as $20.00, but the first still feels like a significantly better deal. …You may know that a job applicant of African descent is as likely to be qualified as one of European descent, but the negative aspects of the former's resume will still stand out. “ (The post is short and really well written, go read the whole thing.) They then note, “You might think that this is old news. After all, thinkers for the last 2500 years have been pointing out that much of human action isn't under rational control.”
I would add: not only is this a point that one finds in Aristotle, but for the last 350 years it has been central to: Pascal, Marx Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Althusser, Foucault, pretty much every feminist epistemologist and philosopher of science (longino, Harding, Kukla, and on and on), and forcefully developed within mainstream analytic philosophy by Dreyfus, Haugeland, and others. )I sometimes think that the only important philosopher not to accept the point is Jason Stanley. – j/k!)
But even if I am a bit frustrated with the lack of uptake in mainstream analytic philosophy of this point, this is a minor quibble, since Santos and Gendler both acknowledge that the point is not new. What I want to emphasize here is their important meta-point: If their claim is right – that explicit knowledge is far from sufficient for changing practice — then why should we think that knowing this will change the practice of cognitive science, philosophy, and political critique? Just as knowing a fact about bias does not make us lose the bias in practice, knowing this about our misguided practices of changing practice does not make us change them from our habits of pointing out false beliefs to effective engagement with campaigns for change. (This is, of course, not to say that pointing out false beliefs has no role to play.)
So basically, I wish Santos ad Gendler hadn’t quit where they do. Genuinely taking on the lesson of this long tradition, what one would want is precisely not another version of this meta-claim, but a strategy for behavioral conditioning, a sort of project of cognitive behavioral therapy for cognitive scientists, ideologists, activists, and probably above all philosophers. That is, what we need is at least some hypotheses about how to change our habitual ways of reacting to epistemically defective habits, so that we do not habitually respond as if discursive denunciation of their defectiveness will, alone, change anything and, instead, take up practical steps to change the practices and habits of our intellectual peers.
A long time ago I saw a parody of the intellectual radical in the form of a GQ-style profile. At the end it included a “Principle I live by” – or some such – that read: Philosophers through the ages have sought to interpret the world; the goal, however, is to write books about changing it. I take Santos and Gendler to be saying that this is an apt parody of far too much politically minded cognitive science and philosophy. But if that's the case – and I think they would accept this — then me writing a blog post about it really isn’t helping either. Neither blog post is, unless in the comments we can really start developing strategies for turning us from theorists into meta-activists. While I have a few thoughts in that regard, I’d like to hold them for a bit to see if others have anything to say.
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