On the matter of skill and knowledge, I would like to suggest that the essence of skill is that it changes who you are — not what you possess.
Skills are a question of being, not knowing. And while Ryle feels it necessary to argue that knowledge-how is "logically prior" to knowledge-that (1945, p. 225), any pet owner might already intuit that point. In evolution, skilled action had to succeed before the brain could grow large enough to reflect about it intellectually.
Consider the point in terms of Gibson's affordances. An affordance is an action opportunity in the world as perceived by an actor. Designers generally aim to change affordances by creating new actionable features in the world. But you can also change affordances by changing the actor.
This is the point of education. Teach a child to read, and a book that was previously "biteable" to the illiterate baby then becomes "readable." The book is the same, but the affordance has changed.
Literacy may be a particularly interesting skill because it doesn't appear to be reversible. Once automatised, it remains in place.
Literacy is also a perfect example of Ryle's "habituation, the formation of blind habits," (p. 234). Interestingly, the blindness of its habit is in fact essential to intellectual engagement with the ideas spurred by reading, because habituation frees limited human intellect from having to consciously operate the principles of phonological decoding. Only a performance made without any exercise of intelligence can be utterly ignored, and this particular performance is key to modern intellectual life.
I have no sources to cite here -- this is personal reflection. If anyone knows of a similar observation, please let me know.
Best wishes,Heidi
On Sunday, December 5, 2021, 07:51:03 p.m. EST, Derek Lomas <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
In college, I took a course on epistemology and I remember getting all worked up about skill knowledge. It seemed there was a cottage industry of philosophers claiming that all “knowledge how” to do something is really just “knowledge that.”
Sometimes knowledge is defined as “justified true belief.” But that simply doesn’t apply to skill knowledge or “knowledge how.” Skills can’t be evaluated as true or false, like logical propositions. The value of skill knowledge is rather found in the ability of the skill to support success and wellbeing, that is, to promote the fitness of the organism. Even factual knowledge is practically a matter of coherence (Thagaard) and harmony (Rescher) more than a kind of axiomatic construction. That is, it’s more like building a raft out of floating debris than building a pyramid on bedrock.
I find this valuable because it is another reminder that philosophy—classically speaking— isn’t about truth but about living better. And, this is deeply relevant to design because the philosophical core of the discipline has yet to be established.
Thanks for sharing and an interesting discussion.
Derek
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