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Practising to Know: Practicalism and Confucian Philosophy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 June 2012

Stephen Hetherington*
Affiliation:
University of New South Wales
Karyn Lai*
Affiliation:
University of New South Wales

Abstract

For a while now, there has been much conceptual discussion about the respective natures of knowledge-that and knowledge-how, along with the intellectualist idea that knowledge-how is really a kind of knowledge-that. Gilbert Ryle put in place most of the terms that have so far been distinctive of that debate, when he argued for knowledge-how's conceptual distinctness from knowledge-that. But maybe those terms should be supplemented, expanding the debate. In that spirit, the conceptual option of practicalism has recently entered the fray. Practicalism conceives anew the nature of knowledge-that, as being a kind of knowledge-how. In this paper we enlarge upon this conceptual suggestion. We draw from an ancient Chinese text, the Analects of Confucius, explaining how it lends some support to practicalism.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 2012

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References

1 For explication of them, see Fantl, Jeremy, ‘Knowing-How and Knowing-That’, Philosophy Compass 3(3) (2008), 451470CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hetherington, Stephen, How To Know: A Practicalist Conception of Knowledge (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), sec. 2.2CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For their original presentations, see Ryle, Gilbert, The Concept of Mind (London: Hutchinson, 1949)Google Scholar, and ‘Knowing How and Knowing That’, in his Collected Papers, Vol. II (London: Hutchinson, 1971), 212–225.

2 Stanley, Jason and Williamson, Timothy deny so: ‘Knowing How’, The Journal of Philosophy 98 (2001), 411444CrossRefGoogle Scholar. But we will not engage with their argument. Here, we will travel along a quite different philosophical path.

3 See Hetherington, How To Know, op. cit., ch. 2

4 There can be correlative complexity in the knowledge-how which is the knowledge-that. That complexity may be differently manifested, too, by different epistemic agents or by a single epistemic agent at different times. On different occasions, for instance, your knowledge that you are sitting in front of a table could be constituted as different composites still amounting to some knowledge-how. Today, you know how to describe your situation in visual terms. Tomorrow, you would not – when in a darkened room.

5 And this would not be an insufficiency akin to the one putatively discovered by Edmund Gettier: ‘Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?’, Analysis 23 (1963), 121–123.

6 That could be an inferentialist conception of the epistemic order; as to which, see Brandom, Robert, Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994)Google Scholar, and Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000)Google Scholar.

7 For more on the ins and outs of practicalism, see Hetherington, How To Know, op. cit. John Bengson and Marc Moffett call practicalism radical anti-intellectualism: ‘Two Conceptions of Mind and Action: Knowing How and the Philosophical Theory of Intelligence’, in Bengson, J. and Moffett, M.A. (eds), Knowing How: Essays on Knowledge, Mind, and Action (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 355CrossRefGoogle Scholar. They provide a useful taxonomy of the surrounding logical space.

8 Bruce Brooks, E. and Taeko Brooks, A. offer an interesting translation of the Analects based on their understanding of events in the lives of the early Confucian followers: The Original Analects (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998)Google Scholar. For a discussion on reading the Analects, see Lai, Karyn, ‘Understanding Confucian Ethics: Reflections on Moral Development’, Australian Journal of Professional and Applied Ethics 9 (2007), 2127Google Scholar.

9 For an authoritative discussion of the text's history, see Anne Cheng, ‘Lun yü’, in M. Loewe (ed.), Early Chinese Texts: A Bibliographical Guide, Early China Special Monograph Series No. 2 (Berkeley: The Society for the Study of Early China and the Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, 1993), 313–323.

10 The dominant tendency was to propose systems comprising standards and their implementation in aspects of life, including especially those in the administration of government and everyday behaviours. The Confucians proposed a model of government based on exemplary moral leadership (ren 仁) that were encoded (zhengming 正名) in normative practices (li 禮) for the common people (min 民). The Mohists proposed the standardisation (fa 法) of moral concern as an extension of the application of standards in craftsmanship, their area of expertise. The Mohist standard of equal concern of each person for everyone else (jianai 兼爱: see Graham, Angus C., Disputers of the Tao: Philosophical Argument in Ancient China [Chicago and La Salle, IL: Open Court Publishing, 1989], 41Google Scholar) was in part a criticism of the Confucian emphasis on loyalty in particular relationships (e.g. Analects 13.18). The Legalists sought to impose conformity through a system of penal law (fa 法) propped up by severe punishments (xing 刑) for those who failed to comply with them: see Lai, Karyn, Introduction to Chinese Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 172198CrossRefGoogle Scholar. A group of thinkers known collectively as the Daoists were the most prominent objectors to the institution of standards: Wong, David B., ‘Zhuangzi and the Obsession with Being Right’, History of Philosophy Quarterly 22 (2005), 91107Google Scholar; Lai, Karyn, ‘Philosophy and Philosophical Reasoning in the Zhuangzi: Dealing with Plurality’, Journal of Chinese Philosophy 33 (2006), 365374CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Rošker, Jana S., Searching for the Way: Theory of Knowledge in Pre-Modern and Modern China (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2008), 9Google Scholar.

11 Few thinkers during the Warring States period expressed their views of knowledge and knowing discursively. The notable exception would be a group of thinkers dubbed the Later Mohists who sought explicitly to clarify the terms of inquiry, for example, through making clear distinctions (bian 辨), defining similarities and differences (tong-yi 同-異), what was so and not-so (ran-buran 然-不然), and so on. See Lai, Introduction to Chinese Philosophy, op. cit., 111–141, and Graham, Disputers of the Tao, op. cit., 75–95.

12 We make this point with some caution because, although zhi is the primary epistemic term in the text, it does not on its own provide a comprehensive picture of Confucian epistemology. In any case, it is not the aim of this paper to present such a picture. But let us consider what is required, if we were to take on such a task, as it involves important methodological issues. There is a need to avoid the oversimplification of semantic investigations of Chinese philosophy by equating the notion of a concept with single Chinese (character) terms. Christoph Harbsmeier presents an authoritative analysis of a large number of terms in early Chinese philosophical discourse that do not in themselves (i.e. as single terms) contain epistemic connotations, or whose referents are not clearly associated with knowledge or knowing: ‘Marginalia Sino-Logica’, in Allinson, Robert E. (ed.), Understanding the Chinese Mind: The Philosophical Roots (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 5983Google Scholar. For example, the notion xin (信) is normally translated as ‘trustworthiness’. In Analects 7.37, Confucius refers to a particular saying and then asserts that it is ‘xin’. Harbsmeier suggests that, although the concept ‘truth’ is not referred to, xin in this passage expresses the notion of semantic truth, that is, it is to be believed or accepted (ibid., 131).

13 Analects 12.22 is one of those occasions where an interlocutor asks about zhi, without reference to its subject matter. There are a few conversations where the subject matter is not specified (e.g. Analects 2.12) although there is a placeholder, zhi (之), which may function as a pronoun or an auxiliary word, i.e. ‘of x’.

14 Contemporary literature on this topic bears out this point. Cua, Antonio S., Dimensions of Moral Creativity: Paradigms, Principles, and Ideals (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1979)Google Scholar; Cua, Antonio S., ‘The Conceptual Framework of Confucian Ethical Thought’, Journal of Chinese Philosophy 23 (1996), 153174CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kupperman, Joel, ‘The Indispensability of Character’, Philosophy 76 (2001), 239250CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kupperman, Joel, ‘Virtue in Virtue Ethics’, Journal of Ethics 3 (2009), 243255CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Yao, Xinzhong, Wisdom in Early Confucian and Israelite Traditions (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2006)Google Scholar.

15 Knowing Words: Wisdom and Cunning in the Classical Traditions of China and Greece (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 33Google Scholar.

16 13.5 in The Analects of Confucius, (trans.) Ames, Roger T. and Rosemont, Henry Jr. (New York: Ballantine Books, 1998), 163Google Scholar.

17 The Concept of Mind, op. cit., 42.

18 Lao, Sze-Kwang, ‘On Understanding Chinese Philosophy: An Inquiry and Proposal’, in Allinson, Understanding the Chinese Mind, op. cit., 265–293.

19 Ibid., 290.

20 多聞擇其善者而從之,多見而識之. From Analects 7.28: ICS Lunyu, 7.28/17/6 (A Concordance to the Lunyu (論語逐字索引), (eds.) D.C. Lau, Ho Che Wah, and Chen Fong Ching. ICS series. Hong Kong: Commercial Press, 1995).

21 This is not to deny that there are some discussions in the early Chinese texts that refer to a notions that correspond roughly to the abstract concept ‘truth’ or its epistemological cognate, belief. Harbsmeier's analysis demonstrates, however, that ‘there is often little obvious difference between “truth” as the “property” of a sentence that makes it true, and “reality, the facts of the matter”’: ‘Marginalia Sino-Logica’, op. cit., 140. Nevertheless, Harbsmeier contends that ‘Chinese philosophers would not place emphasis on the notion of scientific objective truth’ (ibid., 141).

22 See, e.g., Ames, Roger T., ‘Meaning as Imaging: Prolegomena to a Confucian Epistemology’, in Deutsch, E. (ed.), Culture and Modernity: East-West Philosophic Perspectives (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1991), 227244Google Scholar; A. S. Cua, ‘The Conceptual Framework of Confucian Ethical Thought’, op. cit.; Chong, Kim-Chong, Early Confucian Ethics: Concepts and Arguments (Chicago and La Salle, IL: Open Court Publishing, 2007)Google Scholar.

23 Lai, Karyn, ‘Li in the Analects: Training in Moral Competence and the Question of Flexibility’, Philosophy East and West 56 (2006), 6983CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 子曰:‘不知命,無以為君子也。不知禮,無以立也。不知言, 無以 知人也。' ICS Lunyu, 20.3/58 /3-4 (A Concordance to the Lunyu, op. cit.)

25 Analects 3.22; adapted from the translation by Ames and Rosemont, op. cit., 87.

26 Analects 7.31; adapted from the translation by Ames and Rosemont, op. cit., 117–118.

27 The Original Analects, op. cit., 86.

28 Ames and Rosemont suggest that the person who poses the question – the Minister of Justice – may perhaps be the one who offends against ritual propriety (li) as he should be aware that one is not ‘free to speak ill of a superior’: see their translation of the Analects, op. cit., 242n. 116.

29 Analects 3.15; adapted from the translation by Ames and Rosemont, op. cit., 85–86.

30 Bill Haines (in personal communication) has suggested two other possible interpretations of this passage. We adapt his comments here: In the first interpretation, zhili (知禮) means ‘knowledge that’ and, in that light, Confucius' response is a cheap trick. (This reading seems implausible as it would be strange that Confucius is remembered in this way by his followers). The second reading is that perhaps the problem with Confucius' questions was not that he was asking for information but asking questions in the temple was inappropriate. In that case, Confucius' reply was a counter-assertion. The charge against him was that he did not know how to behave in a temple, and not because he did not know some specific rule such as is at issue in 3.22 and 7.31.

31 See Hetherington, How To Know, op. cit., ch. 2.

32 But like what is found in pre-Socratic philosophy. On how knowledge is discussed – non-theoretically – by Xenophanes, Heraclitus, Parmenides, and Empedocles in particular, see Lesher, J.H., ‘Early Interest in Knowledge’, in Long, A.A. (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Early Greek Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 225249CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33 ‘Conceptions of Knowledge in Ancient China’, in Lenk, H. and Paul, G. (eds.) Epistemological Issues in Classical Chinese Philosophy, SUNY Series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1993), 1133, at 18Google Scholar.

34 ‘Conceptions of Knowledge in Ancient China’, ibid., 11.

35 There are explicit comments in another Confucian text of around the same period on the manifestation of knowledge as opposed to its accumulation: ‘The point in knowing (zhi) is not quantity, it is in carefully examining what one knows’ (Xunzi 31.10; cited in Harbsmeier, ‘Conceptions of Knowledge in Ancient China’, ibid., 18. The text Xunzi is attributed to the Confucian thinker, Xunzi (310? BCE – 219? BCE).

36 For comments on an earlier version of this paper, we are grateful to the audience members in a 2011 UNSW workshop on knowledge-that and knowledge-how.