Science, non-science, and nonsense: on the varieties of knowledge1

Timothy Chappell

In characterising an episode or a state as that of knowing, we are not giving an empirical description of that episode or state; we are placing it in the logical space of reasons, of

justifying and being able to justify what one says.2

As usual, “knowledge” is understood as propositional knowledge.3

Ce besoin de l’immatériel est le plus vivace de tous. Il faut du pain, mais avant le pain, il faut l’idéal.4

Evidently modern science is focused on third-personal propositional knowledge. Indeed, wherever it can, it apparently goes beyond third-personal to impersonal propositional knowledge. As we were taught to write in school chemistry lessons, “A Bunsen was lit”, not “Mr Bloggs the chemistry teacher, or my classmate Bill, lit a Bunsen”.

Analytical philosophy is rather keen on science, and tends to follow it in this focus on third-personal or impersonal propositional knowledge. So for example Duncan Pritchard’s excellent introductory text What is this thing called knowledge? is explicitly focused on propositional knowledge from p.4 on.

An ant might plausibly be said to know how to navigate its terrain, but would we want to say that the ant has propositional knowledge; that there are facts which the ant knows? ...Intuitively not, and this marks out the importance of propositional knowledge over other types of knowledge like ability knowledge, which is that such knowledge presupposes the sort of relatively sophisticated intellectual abilities possessed by humans.5

Later on, in his Chapter 11, Pritchard wonders how there can be moral knowledge, taking it to be a sufficiently problematic case to deserve a special case-study. I suggest these two facts about Pritchard’s book are connected. (Perhaps DP thinks so too: I’m not suggesting he hasn’t thought of this.6) Moral K does look specially 1 Thanks for help of many kinds to Julia Annas, Sarah Broadie, Ephraim Glick, Alec Hyslop, Irene McMullin, Andrew Pinsent, Duncan Pritchard, Matthew Ratcliffe, Mike Wheeler.2 Wilfrid Sellars, "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind," in Herbert Feigl and Michael Scriven, eds., Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Volume I: The Foundations of Science and the Concepts of Psychology and Psychoanalysis (University of Minnesota Press, 1956), pp. 253-329; s.36.3 Timothy Williamson, Knowledge and its Limits (Oxford: OUP 2000), 185.4 Victor Hugo, Les Misérables (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), tome II, 906.5 Duncan Pritchard, What is this thing called knowledge? (London, Routledge, 2009), 4.6 So far as I’m aware, Pritchard hasn’t pursued it anywhere else either—not at least in print. What is evident in his published work (see e.g. his critical study of Ernest Sosa, “Apt performance and epistemic value”, Philosophical Studies (2009) 143:407–416) is that he’s happy, like many other leading contemporary epistemologists, to talk of knowledge as epistemic success or achievement, to say that it involves or presupposes the deployment of epistemic or intellectual skills and/ or virtues and/or abilities (he says this last thing in my main-text quotation), and to describe knowledge using

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problematic if we focus more or less exclusively on propositional knowledge. My question here is whether we can make it look less problematic by thinking about other kinds of knowledge: varieties of non-propositional moral knowledge.

My answer to that question is a cautious Yes. I think there may be—I am going to try and show that there are—kinds of knowledge which are just as much knowledge as propositional knowledge is, but quite unlike it, and which are also equally distinctive of human life (even if we share them with creatures which, like Pritchard’s ant, are quite unlike us). If so then we should not judge these other kinds by the standards of propositional knowledge, any more than we should judge propositional knowledge by their standards. Here as elsewhere my aim is not to analyse things down to the simplest possible theory, but rather to display and explore what Louis Macneice called “the drunkenness of things being various”. My motto will be Chairman Mao’s “Let a hundred flowers bloom”, though my methods may differ from Mao’s in one or two respects.

If the argument comes out right, then there is MK, which is a fairly notable consequence. Another consequence is that metaethicists and others might usefully spend more time than they do examining the non-propositional forms of MK. I don’t suggest that no one has ever had the idea that some MK might be non-propositional. On the contrary, Pritchard’s own colleague Andy Clark is one author among plenty who has written about exactly that idea7; as Clark observes, and as I shall show by exposition, the idea is at least as old as Aristotle’s Ethics. I do suggest that it would be a good idea for contemporary metaethicists to spend a bit more of their abundant energy and resources on this possibility.

And a third consequence: if there is non-propositional moral knowledge, that implies that not all knowledge is scientific knowledge—which unless we are raving reductionist ideologues, we probably knew anyway—but also that we can be fairly precise both about why some K is not scientific K, and also about how very different this non-scientific K is from scientific K. And this, maybe, we didn’t know anyway.

I won’t say that no MK is propositional. I won’t even say that no important MK is propositional. I will say that much important MK is not propositional, and that no one can have the MK that anyone needs to have without having a lot of non-propositional MK. Like Clark 2000, I want to talk both about these non-propositional varieties of MK, and also about the ways that they can combine (with each other, and with propositional MK) to create the sort of rich, flexible, and multi-purpose web of capacities and sensitivities that might be worth calling practical wisdom.

Looking beyond the putative category of moral knowledge to a broader putative category that we might call humane knowledge, I want to explore the possibility that there might be other kinds of non-scientific knowledge in two cases in particular, aesthetics and religion.

images like the archer hitting the target—particularly striking, given that successful archery is obviously a case of knowledge-how. More about this later.7 Andy Clark, “Word and Action: Reconciling Rules and Know-How in Moral Cognition" in R. Campbell and B. Hunter (eds) Moral Epistemology Naturalized: Canadian Journal Of Philosophy Supp. Volume 26 (2000) (University of Calgary Press, Alberta, Canada) p.267-290.

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First, then, we need to know (a) what varieties of knowledge there are, and (b) how they count both as a variety (as genuinely different from each other) and also (c) as knowledge (as genuinely worthy of the name). Once we have these matters as straight as we can get them, both for what I shall call the Probable Candidates and (d) for the Possible Candidates, we can ask (e) what these varieties of knowledge look like in the cases of moral, aesthetic, and (f) religious knowledge.

(a)

Various things might be distinct both from propositional K and also from each other. Call them the Candidates.8 I will put the Candidates in two groups. I do this because there are two cases where I am quite sure that we have distinct varieties of K, and two cases where I am not sure at all that that is what we have. The first two Candidates—call them the Probables—are ability-knowledge and experiential knowledge; the other two Candidates—call them the Possibles—are what I shall call second-personal knowledge and self-knowledge.

The two Probable Candidates, EK and KH, are easy to characterise, at least in broad terms, since both are just as familiar as propositional knowledge.

KH, ability-knowledge, is knowledge how to do things, the kind of K that I have in virtue of knowing, as in fact I do, how to juggle, read Italian, or make an apple pie.

Experiential K is K by experience, phenomenal awareness: as it is sometimes put, it is K “what it’s like”, e.g. K what silk feels like when you rub it, or what woodsmoke smells like, or the taste of apricots. To take a more controversial example, EK is the new relation to red that Mary the colour scientist enters when she finally leaves her monochrome bubble where she’s been doing the physical theory of red and other colours, and actually sees red. We can use the word “acquaintance” for EK if we like, provided we don’t fall into the trap of taking that word to commit us to the specific details of Russell’s famous account of K by acquaintance. (Similarly, we shouldn’t make the mistake of thinking that believing in KH must mean believing specifically in Ryle’s famous account of KH.)

So much for the Probables. The two Possible Candidates, 2PK and SK, are much harder to characterise, and, for that reason and others, much harder to discuss philosophically. But very briefly indeed, what I have in mind when I speak of 2PK is the apparently distinctive kind of cognitive achievement that is involved in responding to another person, say Jane, as another person. And what I mean by SK is the apparently sui generis cognitive achievement of awareness and understanding of oneself.

8 Maybe there are other kinds of knowledge besides my Candidates. With one exception, I don’t discuss other possible candidates simply because it hasn’t occurred to me what they might be, not because I rule it out a priori that there could be any such.

The exception is what I call Objectual Knowledge, and I think it turns out to be an extremely important exception; in particular, it is the case of OK that justifies my saying that modern science is apparently focused on PK. More about OK below.

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Maybe contemporary science uses or depends on some or all of these other candidate kinds of knowledge.9 But even if it does, it does not seem focused on any of them; apparently its focus is on explicit, impersonal, testable propositional knowledge. It looks like science works something as follows: There can be (there is) a scientific study of what EK involves, but the object of such a study is to produce propositional knowledge about EK. Being a competent scientist involves knowledge-how, but the skill you need to earn a living in (theoretical) science is to know how to produce bodies of propositional knowledge. Again, good scientists typically work in teams, and productive team-work with other scientists is impossible, or at any rate difficult, without reasonably high degrees both of awareness of others and of self-awareness. (Witness the widespread mayhem that has been caused down the years by some very famous scientists who were famously lacking in both.10) Nonetheless, it is obvious enough that no scientific knowledge is well categorised in either of the putative kinds second-personal knowledge or self-knowledge. Even when a scientist studies the phenomena I am tentatively grouping into those kinds, her aim, as before, is not to produce either second-personal knowledge or self-knowledge, but structures of propositional knowledge about those phenomena. (Or so it seems, but this appearance will be questioned before we’re finished.)

When I speak, under the heading of 2PK, about “responding to Jane as a person”, I don’t just mean “recognising that Jane exists”. You don’t get 2PK merely by learning the proposition that something in your vicinity is a someone, is another person. What you need for 2PK, to put it in a metaphor that I find almost unavoidable11, is to come face to face with Jane.

As Stephen Darwall has recently argued, second-personal address seems quite different from third-personal or impersonal interaction with what we might, with a nod in the direction of Martin Buber, call “the world of things”. As Sir Peter Strawson famously put it in “Freedom and Resentment”, there seems a pretty fundamental distinction between “interpersonal reactive attitudes” on the one side, and on the other, what he rather ominously called “objective attitudes”. Or to quote a more recent exposition of the idea, consider Shaun Gallagher’s words12, “in ordinary instances of interaction with others, I am not in the observer position; I am not off to the side thinking or trying to figure out what they are doing. Rather, I am responding to them.”

9 Paul Churchland, “Rules, Know-How, and the Future of Moral Cognition," in R. Thomason and B. Hunter, eds., Moral Philosophy Naturalized, supplementary volume 26 of Canadian Journal of Philosophy (2000): 291-306, rightly insists on the importance of knowledge how in science, but to say that science needs KH is not to say that KH is what science is mainly aimed at; no more than endorsing Polanyi-style claims about the importance of tacit knowledge in the doing of science subverts the thesis that explicit K is the scientist’s objective.

If my claim that science aims at PK contradicts not only (some sorts of) instrumentalism about science, but—since it talks about knowledge—scientific anti-realism in general, that’s fine by me. I am happy to be a default realist.10 Bill Bryson’s popular science book A Short History of Nearly Everything (Broadway Books 2003) has an informative and entertaining sub-narrative about the ways personalities and personal factors have affected the history of science. Not always adversely, of course.11 so does Levinas: see Totalité et L'Infini (Nijhoff: La Haye, 1961), p.32.12 Gallagher, S. (2008). Direct perception in the intersubjective context. Consciousness and Cognition, 17(2), 535-543, at 540; emphasis added.

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I share the sense that is evidently felt by Darwall, Buber, Strawson, Gallagher, and many other philosophers—notably including Immanuel Kant and Emmanuel Levinas—that there is something distinctive about second-personal knowledge. One reason why 2PK is only a Possible Candidate is that it’s rather hard to say exactly what is distinctive about it—or indeed whether there is one phenomenon here at all, rather than a whole range of different phenomena that might all be worth calling 2PK for different reasons. Without these clarifications, it’s not easy to be sure that 2PK really is a distinctive kind of K, not reducible to PK, in the way that EK and KH (as I shall argue) pretty obviously are. The interesting possibilities remain open that 2PK might be an amalgam of other types of K, or perhaps even identical with one other type of K. (After all, one very familiar way we use the word acquaintance is to talk about knowing other persons.)

To see how 2PK might be an amalgam of other types of K, consider a further form of K that I have not yet considered: objectual K.13 OK is K of objects, K of particular things. Apparently this form of K was the basic form for the classical Greeks: Aristotle, for example, takes substance to be the primary existent, and so naturally takes K of substance to be the primary K. The three first forms of K that I have distinguished here, PK, KH, EK, are all for the Greeks derivative from OK. It is only by knowing the object Socrates-as-snub-nosed that we come to know the proposition “Socrates is snub-nosed”; it is only by knowing the craft of building that we come to know how to build houses; it is only from experiential knowledge of Achilles (and in particular the colour of his hair) that we come to know what redness is.

It comes naturally to us, then, to say that OK is an amalgam of the three varieties of knowledge that I have distinguished in this paper. As a matter of fact I think Aristotle at least would deny even this; he would say, I suspect, that OK is what Tim Williamson calls “prime”, i.e. that it is not factorisable into PK, EK, and KH, even though all three forms of K naturally flow from it—just as belief, according to Williamson, flows naturally from PK without being an ingredient of PK. (Perhaps Plato would agree with Aristotle about this, though it is harder to situate him relative to this question.)

Without getting into an argument with Aristotle,14 I think we can at least see what it would be for OK to be factorisable into PK, EK, and KH. Knowing an object, we could say, means knowing what propositions are true of it; and it means being directly acquainted in experience with the object; and it means knowing how to interact with the object. If these three kinds of knowledge are all there is to OK, and if they can be neatly separated out from each other, in principle at least, then OK is just an amalgam of PK, EK, and KH. If 2PK is similarly structured, then it too is no more than an amalgam of other more basic kinds of K. But then, presumably, 2PK should

13 For more about OK and its relation to PK see Chappell, Reading Plato’s Theaetetus (Boston: Hackett, 2004), pp.37-8.14 There might even be some advantages to looking at things Aristotle’s way, and taking OK to be primary. For instance, this theoretical outlook makes the modern problem of “moral truth”, in its characteristically propositional form, either secondary or perhaps almost invisible. Of course, whether you think this is an advantage of Aristotle’s approach interdepends with whether or to what extent you think the modern problem has something fishy about it, the kind of fishiness that arises from stating a philosophical problem the wrong way round or in the wrong terms. However, I can’t pursue this interesting issue here.

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not appear on our list of these basic kinds—no more than OK should by the parallel argument.

Analogous problems and more apply in the case of the other Possible Candidate, SK. When philosophers today talk about “self-knowledge” they can have a whole variety of different things in mind. One thing they mostly don’t have in mind is the famous Greek saying that Socrates liked to quote—“Know thyself”;15 which is a pity, perhaps. In any case, with SK as with 2PK, it isn’t entirely obvious which of the various phenomena that we could call SK is the central phenomenon. There does seem to be something sui generis about my own awareness of what I am thinking, feeling, and doing now; about my own relation to my own memories of the past and my own intentions about the future; and so on. (It’s tempting to ask: how could there not be something sui generis about all this?) But here too we face the possibility—a possibility taken very seriously by contemporary writers on self-knowledge such as Fred Dretske and Alison Gopnik—that what seems, at least experientially, to be another distinctive kind of K is really, on analysis, no more than an amalgam of other kinds of K.

There is also a rather intriguing, but again elusive, thought about the Possible Candidates that, at least since the late nineteenth century, has been swimming in and out of focus in both analytic and continental philosophy. This is the thought that 2PK and SK are constitutively interrelated, that I cannot know myself without knowing others, or others without knowing myself. Or again, you can hear it suggested that it is only within the context of a prior relatedness that either SK or 2PK can emerge, as two poles of the same axis. Or that K of the external world presupposes K of myself and of others. You may even hear people say that any other knowledge at all always depends on a prior 2PK, or a prior relatedness.

The preconditionality of second-personal knowledge seems to be asserted in Edmund Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations: “A priori my ego… can be a world-experiencing ego only by being in communion with others like himself: a member of a community of monads”16. Slightly differently, it is also quite often suggested, for example by Heidegger and perhaps by Buber, Wittgenstein, and Levinas as well, that there can be neither objectivity nor subjectivity unless there is intersubjectivity first: to be is to be in relationship, and it is only out of relationship that knowledge of ourselves, of other persons, and of the world of things can ever arise.

Such claims are attractive for a number of reasons. But at least in the phenomenological form in which they are usually presented, they are not compelling. One reason why not is because such claims seem not to have the anti-sceptical bite that Heidegger in particular evidently thinks they have. That (what we call) awareness of other people is a logical precondition of knowledge of anything else seems too strong a thesis to be plausible. That (what we call) awareness of other people is a causal precondition of knowledge of anything else does not give us a sound argument to the conclusion that there are certainly other people; perhaps (what we call) awareness of other people is an Eden from which we get expelled as, on the basis of

15 The saying is attributed by a number of sources to a number of sages, including Thales and Solon. See DK, and Plato, Protagoras 343b.16 Husserl, Fifth Meditation, para.60, 139.

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that putative awareness, we come to learn more—for example, as we come to learn the sceptical arguments that put in doubt the existence of those other people.

Moreover, these claims about the primordiality of intersubjectivity sound very much—at least in their more-plausible causal versions—like a posteriori not a priori claims. Now phenomenology—self-examination, introspective analysis of what is revealed in consciousness—is certainly a way of making some a posteriori discoveries. Is it a way, or a good way, of making the discovery that intersubjectivity is primordial in the required sense? I doubt it. The thesis that awareness of other people is a causal precondition of knowledge of anything else sounds to me like a thesis about child development. I therefore recommend that we take the research programme of trying to establish whether or not this thesis is true as a research programme, not in phenomenology, but in experimental child psychology. I look forward to seeing results from that programme. (For all I know, there already are such results.)

I don’t myself intend to argue, or even to imply, any such theses; for instance, that 2PK is a magic bullet to kill off the problem of other minds. We can no more solve the problem of other minds by positing a mental faculty with the specific role of detecting other minds than we can solve the problem of moral scepticism by positing a mental faculty with the specific role of detecting moral properties. (Why couldn’t such faculties exist, yet have nothing to detect?) Of course the thesis that 2PK is a distinctive kind of K is relevant to the problem of other minds. It’s just relevant in subtler and more interesting ways than this.

No doubt part of the bite of the problem of other minds comes from the fact that the problem is usually set up in as impersonal a way as possible, with an almost exclusive focus on the scientific paradigm of PK. If 2PK is irreducible to PK, then it will hardly be surprising if the philosophical presentation of impersonal propositional-knowledge claims feels us leaving that something crucial has been left out—something essential to the existence of other minds as other minds. Come to that, no doubt moral scepticism too gets at least part of its bite from the fact that it likewise is usually set up in a PK-focused way. Still, diagnosing the source of a philosophical anxiety is not always, pace some Wittgensteinians, the same thing as answering the corresponding philosophical question.

The difficulty and unclarity of all of these thoughts generates a difficulty and an unclarity about characterising SK too; they all add to our reasons for treating SK only as a Candidate.

Given the difficulty and obscurity of the Possibles, I shall start with the easier and clearer case—but not that easy or clear!—of the Probables. My argument in (b-c) will be that there are things that are not PK, but which are nonetheless worth calling K; hence, that there are varieties of K. However, (b-c) will only try to show that there are three varieties of K, viz. PK plus the two Probable Candidates, EK and KH. Because 2PK and SK are more problematic, only possible not probable varieties of K, I won’t come back to them until section (d).

(b)

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As Probable Candidates, we have three varieties of K to consider: PK, EK, KH. What I am arguing for is the thesis—I would say, the highly intuitive thesis—that these three varieties are genuinely distinct from each other. So what I need to argue against is any thesis of the form—I would say, the highly counter-intuitive form—that any of them can be reduced or otherwise assimilated to one of the others.

In a diagram:

PK

EK KH

As the arrows indicate, there are six possible reductive theses here. A monist about knowledge—someone who thought there was only PK, or only EK, or only KH—would presumably have to defend a conjunction of two of these reductive theses: for example, someone who thought all knowledge was propositional would presumably have to defend some suitable pair of theses picked out of {EK PK, KH PK} and {KH EK, EK KH}. (Alternatively, someone who believed, e.g., only in PK could just deny the existence of one or both of EK and KH: more about the eliminativist options in (d).)

One phenomenon which is real enough, but does nothing to help the reductivist, is that EK and KH both tend to entail PK, but not vice versa. When I have some experience F, that is apt to lead to my knowing propositionally something like “I am having experience F”, and when I know how to φ, that is apt to lead to my knowing propositionally something like “w is a way to φ”. By contrast, having any item of PK does not typically even tend to entail having any item of KH or EK. These points might seem to help the project of reducing KH and EK to PK, but they don’t really. We can agree that both EK and KH tend to entail corresponding PK without admitting that either EK or KH is PK.17

Such distractions aside, the denials of all six reductive theses are intuitively appealing, because all three kinds of K are intuitively distinct.

PK is intuitively distinct from EK: you can have a more or less complete propositional understanding of sentences that express experiential knowledge without having the experiential knowledge that they express. If I hear Joe say to Paul “You are just like Doug” then—at least at one level—I can understand this sentence perfectly well without knowing anything at all about Doug. Similarly, if I hear Joe say to Paul “It feels just like crushed silk” then—at least at one level—I can understand this sentence perfectly well without knowing in the least what crushed silk feels like. The relevant experiential knowledge, if I had it, would add something to my propositional knowledge. This is prima facie evidence that experiential and propositional knowledge are different things.17 See Akeel Bilgrami, as cited below, for the different thought that this tendency for my EK and KH, and for that matter my PK, to lead me to further PK is an essential part of the correct analysis of SK.

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PK is intuitively distinct from KH: you can have a more or less complete propositional understanding of sentences that express knowledge-how without having the knowledge-how that they express. If I hear Joe say to Paul “You do X like this”, where “this” ostends a way of doing X, then—at least at one level—I can understand this sentence perfectly well without knowing how to do X, even in this way. The relevant knowledge-how, if I had it, would add something to my propositional knowledge. This is prima facie evidence that experiential and propositional knowledge are different things.

KH is intuitively distinct from EK: one can understand the claim that, for example, knowing how to ride a horse involves a great deal of experiential knowledge—the feel of balancing in the saddle, the texture of the reins in the hand, the unsettling swell and dip of the animal underneath you, the good rider’s natural sensitivity to her horse’s moods, and the rest of it. None of this amounts to the thesis that knowing how to ride a horse consists in this experiential knowledge. (Why couldn’t I have all those experiences, yet be absolutely hopeless at horse-riding?)

It’s also intuitive that you can have a more or less complete propositional understanding of sentences that express second-personal knowledge without having the second-personal knowledge that they express. And perhaps something parallel can be said for SK. However, since I am leaving consideration of the Possibles till (d), I won’t develop these intuitions here.

Besides these intuitions of the distinctness of the three kinds of K, notice that they show up as different according to three ordinary-language tests.

First test: It is natural to say that PK and EK are both all-or-nothing: there are no degrees of knowing that p or experiencing Fness, either you do or you don’t. KH seems less clearly all-or-nothing, and does seem to come in degrees. It’s not true that you either know how to φ or you don’t: it can be true that you know how to φ to some degree but not completely. Since KH behaves differently from PK and EK on this first test, it shows KH as something distinct from PK and EK.

Second test: It makes clear good sense to speak of experiencing Fness, knowing Fness experientially, for exactly an hour. It is less clearly proper to speak of propositionally knowing that p for exactly an hour. We can think of circumstances where it might be said, most obviously those where p is only true for exactly an hour: “For 60 minutes precisely, I knew I was in position to take the maillot jaune—and then Mark Cavendish overtook me on points.” Even then, “I [knew for exactly an hour] that p” is an oddity; “I knew that [p for exactly an hour]” is really much more natural. It seems to make even less sense to speak of knowing how to φ for exactly an hour—though it might make more sense if the period were longer and less exact. Whatever the details, on any plausible account of them KH, PK, and EK all behave differently on this second test. So the test shows all three as distinct from each other.

Third test: Learning that p is instantaneous (with no clear exceptions): there is always a first moment at which you know that p. Coming to experience Fness can equally well be instantaneous or not: there may be a moment at which you suddenly first experience Fness, or, over time, Fness may “fade in” over the indiscernible boundary

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of the discernible. Learning how to φ is hardly ever instantaneous except in cases where what seems to be KH is really PK (I give two examples on p.11 below), and certainly not in the central cases of KH, where what is learned is a complex and skilled accomplishment. “At 11 am I learned that ballet-dancing involves five positions” is a perfectly proper remark, “At 11 am I learned how to ballet-dance” is an absurdity. Since KH, PK, and EK all behave differently on this third test, the test shows all three as distinct from each other.

Philosophers do not always heed intuitions or ordinary-language arguments like the ones I have just detailed, and sometimes they are right not to. It may seem (though as we’ll see, it isn’t quite true) that at least five of the six possible reductive theses have, despite their counter-intuitiveness, been defended in philosophy.

KH EK, the reduction of knowledge-how to experiential knowledge, is the one of the six that so far as I know has certainly not been defended, perhaps because it is just too counter-intuitive.

PK EK, the reduction of propositional knowledge to experiential knowledge, seems to be what Carnap is up to in Der Logische Aufbau Der Welt, and what Russell is up to in Lectures on Logical Atomism (“every proposition which we can understand must be composed wholly of constituents with which we are acquainted”). It may be what Hume and Locke were up to in their expositions of “the way of ideas”; I have argued elsewhere18 that it is what Plato’s “empiricist” opponent, who may or may not have been Protagoras, was up to in the Theaetetus. The project fails, and Kant’s famous tag about emptiness and blindness says something about why it fails. On the one side, experiences do not, in themselves, have anything like a rich enough propositional articulation to be the right sort of things out of which to build propositions; on the other side, any grouping of experiences into sets, types, or kinds that is rich enough to give them this articulation is not really a reduction of propositional knowledge to anything—it is just a non-reductive theory of propositional knowledge.

PK KH and EK KH are, arguably, the defining theses of behaviourism; for the behaviourist, the ability to produce apt performances is all there is to mentality and cognition. Behaviourism is now pretty well universally agreed to be false, for good and familiar reasons.19 If behaviourism is false, then so are its defining theses. These days, functionalism does rather better than behaviourism in roughly the same “ecological niche” in philosophy of mind precisely because it isn’t necessarily committed to these defining theses: functionalism can say that experiential knowledge and propositional knowledge are defined by their functions, by their places in what we can see as a system of abilities or capacities, without having to say that EK and PK are nothing but the functions that define them.

Another form of EK KH, the reduction of experiential knowledge to knowledge-how, might seem to be the upshot of the Lewis-Nemirow “ability argument” against Jackson’s Mary the Colour Scientist thought-experiment. In fact, it isn’t. The point of equating knowing what it is like to see red with knowing how to imagine seeing red

18 Timothy Chappell, Reading Plato’s Theaetetus, Hackett 2005.19 See Section 7 of George Graham’s Stanford Encyclopaedia article on behaviourism for a summary of these reasons: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/behaviorism/

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—which Lewis and Nemirow certainly do—is not to support the claim that experiential knowledge is really nothing different from knowledge-how. On the contrary. Imagining means summoning up experiences, so if you know how to imagine red, presumably you must be capable of experiential knowledge of red. The point of the Lewis-Nemirow argument is not an anti-EK point. Rather it is to block Jackson’s route to the claim that Mary’s new experiential knowledge entails new propositional knowledge. So their argument has absolutely no need to deny the existence of experiential knowledge. (Though of course they might admit the existence of experience, yet deny that it counted as K: more about that in (c).)

One pretty clear case of something very like EK PK, the reduction of experiential knowledge to propositional knowledge, is found in the selection from David Armstrong’s: “Perception is nothing but the acquiring of true or false beliefs concerning the current state of the organism’s body and environment”20. Armstrong’s thesis is obviously false, because there are so many ways of acquiring such beliefs: for a start, there is clairvoyance, guesswork, inference from perception, and the testimony of others. One way of acquiring such beliefs is, certainly, perception. But then we want to know what distinguishes this way from all the others. And this just brings us back to the question that Armstrong claimed to be answering in the first place: What is perception?

Turning to the more recent literature, it may also be that there are versions of the phenomenal concept strategy in the philosophy of mind that entail something effectively equivalent to EK PK, the reduction of experiential knowledge to propositional knowledge. Usually, the point of that strategy is not to say that there is no experiential knowledge. The point is rather to say that it’s no surprise that Mary the colour scientist, while still in her monochrome bubble, cannot yet know what she comes to know on entering the technicolour world. It’s no surprise, because the only way she can get the phenomenal concept RED is by having the relevant experiential knowledge; but then, the fact that there are phenomenal concepts shows nothing against physicalism. However, a stronger version of the phenomenal concept strategy seems at least a possibility. This would say that the content of Mary’s experience of redness is exhaustively given by her coming to grasp the phenomenal concept RED. In fact, there is nothing to her grasp of redness beyond her grasp of that phenomenal concept; and grasping it is, as with any other concept, no more and no less than a matter of being able to propositionally manipulate it. By the end of this sequence of manoeuvres, EK seems largely to have disappeared from the picture. Whether that is because EK has effectively been assimilated to PK, or because the existence of anything worth calling EK has been denied altogether, is something of a judgement call. In any case, to repeat a point I started with, there is something basically implausible about assimilating EK to PK—intuitively, the two just don’t seem to be the same thing. There is not much more plausibility to denying EK’s existence outright. More about the latter point in (c). That only leaves KH PK, the thesis that knowledge-how can be reduced to propositional knowledge. Something like this thesis—intellectualism, as it is sometimes called—has received a sophisticated and interesting defence from Timothy Williamson and Jason Stanley in “Knowing How”, Journal of Philosophy 98 (8):411-

20 David Armstrong’s, A Materialist Theory of the Mind (1968) reprinted in Dancy’s collection Perceptual Knowledge, OUP 1988, 127

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444 (2001); as I write, I am waiting to see Jason Stanley’s book-length defence of intellectualism, Know How. For now, however, I shall focus my comments on the 2001 paper.21

Williamson and Stanley’s paper rewards attention as a case study; it is the most sophisticated attempt I know of to argue for one of our six reductive theses. Since, as I shall argue, even their attempt fails, an argument a fortiori against the other five theses too is clearly in the offing.

“Something like this thesis”: strictly, SW do not (they say) argue for the reduction of KH to PK. But they do argue for something fairly close to that, namely the thesis that ability knowledge is a species of propositional knowledge. To quote their own definition of KH:

∀s∀φ: s knows how to φ just in case(1) there is some way w which is a way for her to φ and(2) she knows that w is a way for her to φ

and(3) she entertains the proposition that _w is a way for her to φ_, under a practical mode of presentation.

The notion of a PMP that (3) deploys is a little obscure, but I assume that for me to entertain a proposition about how to φ under a PMP is, roughly, for me to grasp it in some sort of way that puts me in a position to deploy that proposition in my practical reasoning aimed at φing.22

There are cases of what seems to be KH that look very amenable to intellectualist treatment. Here are two:

LIFT. I ask you “How do I stop the lift?” and you show me which button to press. GREENFLY. I ask you “How do I get rid of the greenfly in my roses?” and you say “Spray them with water with a little washing-up liquid and a little vinegar in it”.

In LIFT and GREENFLY it seems pretty clear that, thanks to you, I now know how to stop the lift (/kill the greenfly), just as SW’s definition says. (1) There is a way w for me to stop the lift (/kill the greenfly), which you tell me; (2) I know, thanks first to

21 The most detailed and the most perceptive critique of SW I’ve read is in Ephraim Glick’s MIT PhD thesis, available online at http://web.mit.edu/ephraim/www/research_files/FINAL.pdf . As I discovered when I read him, much of what I say here about SW is said in greater detail and depth by Glick.22 My assumption seems to be confirmed by SW when they write: “Thinking of a person as oneself entails being disposed to behave in certain ways, or form certain beliefs, given relevant input from that person. Similarly, thinking of a place as here entails being disposed to behave in certain ways, or form certain beliefs, given relevant input from that place. Analogously, thinking of a way under a practical mode of presentation undoubtedly entails the possession of certain complex dispositions. It is for this reason that there are intricate connections between knowing how and dispositional states. But acknowledging such connections in no way undermines the thesis that knowing-how is a species of knowing-that. For example, such connections are also present in the case of first person thought. But, pace David Lewis, this in no way threatens the thesis that thought about oneself is genuinely propositional. It is simply a feature of certain kinds of propositional knowledge that possession of it is related in complex ways to dispositional states. Recognizing this fact eliminates the need to postulate a distinctive kind of non-propositional knowledge.”

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your testimony and then to my trying it, that w is a way for me to do this; and (3) I entertain this K under a PMP: this time and on future occasions, when I deliberate with a view to stopping a lift ((/killing some greenfly), I will involve this K in my practical reasoning.

But now, what about TIGHTROPE and MATHS?

TIGHTROPE. I ask you “How do you tightrope-walk?” and you get on a tightrope and show me. MATHS. I ask you “How do I prove Goldbach’s conjecture?”, and you spend three hours in front of a blackboard going through every step of your proof. (Let’s assume, contrary to what’s currently known in maths, that your proof genuinely is a proof.)

In the first of these cases it looks as if SW’s intellectualist account wrongly entails that, thanks to you, I now know how to tightrope-walk. For (1) there is a way w for me to tightrope-walk, namely23 to move my body as you do. And (2) I know that w—to move my body as you do—is a way for me to tightrope-walk. And (3) if I have a go at tightrope-walking, I will entertain this K under a PMP: I will try to move my body as you did. Does it follow that I will even come close to tightrope-walking? It does not. Without any sort of link to success, the thing to say about my aptitude relative to tightrope-walking does not seem to be that I know how to tightrope-walk. It might be that I know what I need to do in order to tightrope-walk; but that is not the same thing as knowing how to tightrope-walk.24

Similarly, it seems that SW’s intellectualism wrongly entails that, thanks to you, I now know how to prove Goldbach’s conjecture. For (1) there is a way w for me to prove Goldbach’s conjecture, namely to repeat for myself the mathematical steps that you took when you proved it. And (2) I know that w is a way for me to prove Goldbach’s conjecture. And (3) if I have a go at proving Goldbach, I will entertain this K under a PMP: I will try to repeat the mathematical steps that you took. Does it follow that I will even come close to proving Goldbach’s conjecture? It does not; maybe you lost me at step 4 out of 1004. Without any sort of link to success, the thing to say about my aptitude relative to proving Goldbach does not seem to be that I know how to prove Goldbach’s conjecture. It might be that I know what I need to do in order to prove Goldbach—though it won’t even be that, not at least in any detail, unless I am an extremely good mathematician. But here too, knowing what I need to do in order to prove Goldbach is not the same thing as knowing how to prove Goldbach. 23 A different line of objection to SW is to point out that the content of w might, for all they say to the contrary, be entirely trivial and uninformative: I might know that w is a way to kill greenfly where w = merely “doing whatever you need to do to kill greenfly”, or that w is a way to prove Goldbach where w = merely “doing the right maths”. I think SW’s account as it stands is indeed vulnerable to this objection, but also that their best response is pretty obvious: they should just revise their condition (1) to (1*) “There is some relevantly specific way w which is a way for her to φ”. 24 In line with my general picture of a spectrum of cases of KH, there are certainly cases where knowing what you have to do in order to φ is not clearly distinct from knowing how to φ. Consider Harry Potter, who four times now has confronted a Hungarian horntail dragon in duel and been beaten back. As he lies in bed in the Hospital Wing, nursing his burns and awaiting the fifth encounter, Sirius Black gets a message to him tipping him off about a Hungarian horntail’s secret key weakness. Thanks to Sirius’ tip, Harry now knows what he needs to do in order to defeat the dragon; as we can equally say, he knows how to beat the dragon. Notice, too, that both these knowledge-claims can be true, even if Harry does not in fact beat the dragon fifth time round.

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Why is there this distinction between MATHS and TIGHTROPE on the one hand, and LIFT and GREENFLY on the other? The answer must lie in what knowing-how is in these different cases. In LIFT and GREENFLY you count as knowing how by having mastered some very specific knack, trick, or technique—pressing a particular button, using a particular mixture to water your roses: something, as we might also say, very stand-alone and atomistic. In MATHS and TIGHTROPE, by contrast, to know how is something much less specific and knack-like, and also much more holistic. You don’t know how to prove Goldbach’s conjecture unless you understand the proof—and you almost certainly won’t understand the proof unless you are a pretty good mathematician all round. Likewise, you don’t know how to tightrope-walk unless (roughly) you can, reliably and non-accidentally, get on a tightrope and walk it without falling off or wobbling too much—and you almost certainly won’t be able to do that unless your coordination and motor skills in general are pretty good.

Our talk of KH covers a wide spectrum of cases, from holistically-defined abilities at one end to highly modular and atomistic knacks at the other end. This spectrum tends to coincide with another spectrum, from uncodifiability/ inarticulability at one end (the holistic end) to codifiability/ articulability at the other (the atomistic end). The further you go towards the holistic end of the spectrum, the closer you typically get to pure ability, into which KH in fact shades off at this end: consider, for example, “She knows how to think” and “He knows how to swim”. The further you get towards the atomistic end, the closer you typically get to what is really not KH at all, just PK redescribed. Consider, for example, “She knows how to spell NECESSARY”, which is straightforwardly paraphrasable into the propositional knowledge claim “She knows that NECESSARY is spelled N-E-C-E-S-S-A-R-Y”, or “He knows how to say ‘Channel Islands’ in Spanish”, which is25 straightforwardly paraphrasable into the propositional knowledge claim “He knows that the Spanish for ‘the Channel Islands’ is las Islas del Canal”.26 (To see this paraphrasability into PK terms, consider the instantaneousness test mentioned on p.7 above: these are ostensible cases of KH where you can learn how instantaneously. That is a reason for doubting that they are really cases of KH at all.) Hence a further gradation: the closer you get towards the atomistic and articulable end, the easier it is to teach the relevant instance of KH by words; whereas the closer you get to the holistic and inarticulable end, the more you will need something other than words to teach the relevant instance of KH. You won’t teach people to swim by using words in the lecture hall; and if you do teach people to think by using words in the lecture hall, that will be more a matter of teaching by example than of drilling them in tricks and techniques.

Another difference between the two ends of the spectrum is this: the further you go towards the ability end, the more obvious it becomes that there is nothing in Stanley and Williamson’s notion of a “way of doing” to secure the kind of non-accidentality and counterfactual robustness that we need for at least some cases of KH. Knowing 25 On one reading. On another, “knowing how to say” something in Spanish does not mean knowing what the relevant words are in Spanish; it means knowing how to pronounce those words with a good Spanish accent. And this is genuinely a matter of KH.26 Come to that, sometimes what is grammatically a KH claim is actually an EK claim: “I know how to recognise my father’s voice”, “I know how to tell a corked wine”—which we can paraphrase as “My father’s voice sounds like this” and “Corked wine tastes like that”. More evidence that we shouldn’t be too quick to infer from a KH surface grammar that we really are dealing with a case of KH.

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even the exact sequence of muscle-movements involved in an actual way of tightrope-walking does not entail knowing how to tailor muscle-movements so as to produce tightrope-walking, not just in this actual situation, but in the indefinitely many others that for one reason or another might soon arise; nor does it entail knowing anything about the sub-sequences of muscle-movements that the tightrope-walker would need to deploy if, during her walk, the wind or a spectator or some other cause were to shake the rope, in the indefinitely many different ways in which they might do that.

Similar remarks apply to MATHS. Someone who really knows how to prove Goldbach’s conjecture will not only know what each of the steps involved is, but also—at least to some extent—why. She will know how to tailor such steps in order to produce that proof; she will also know when a line in her proof has gone wrong, and how to correct it. In virtue of being able to prove it she will be able—again, at least to some extent—to respond to an indefinitely large range of possible alternative situations, just as the person who knows how to tightrope-walk will know not only what physical movements (at least roughly) are required for this performance, but also at least something about how to adjust them to deal with an indefinite variety of possible disruptions of it.

This indefiniteness spells the end of any attempt to articulate completely the contents of any ability, in a list of fully-detailed propositions predicting what response that ability will generate in any possible circumstances. And what goes for the project of spelling out abilities in this sort of full propositional detail goes for the project of a similar spelling-out of ability knowledge. Ability knowledge is not the same thing as ability, but—as Katherine Hawley27 has suggested—it is constitutively connected with ability: if someone knows how to φ, then under favourable circumstances,28 if he tried to φ, he would typically29 be able to φ. Just as the notion of ability generates an indefiniteness that resists complete propositional itemisation, so too, and for closely related reasons, does the notion of KH, ability knowledge.

It is this resistance to propositional itemisation that most deeply motivates my arguments against the subordination of knowledge how to propositional knowledge. (That, and a very basic intuition that they are simply different things.)

The upshot is that while some cases of KH are amenable to the intellectualist analysis, not all are. In cases from the holistic and ability-like end of the spectrum, such as “She knows how to think” and “He knows how to swim”, it just seems hopeless to suggest that all that is needed for these claims to be true is (1) that w should be a way of thinking or swimming, (2) that the agent should know that w is such a way, and (3) that the agent should entertain this K under a PMP. For such cases of KH, the SW account is clearly not a sufficient condition. (It may not be a necessary condition

27 APQ 2003.28 “Favourable circumstances” here should be given a fairly wide reading; since a cyclist may still know how to cycle even after he has been paralysed by a careless driver, it can include things like the paralysed cyclist’s counterfactually getting the use of his legs back.29 “Typically” because ability is not omnipotence. To say that someone can tightrope-walk is not to say that nothing can ever prevent him from succeeding if he tries. (Cp. Hawley, “Testimony and knowing how” Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science Part A, 41.4 December 2010 (special memorial issue for Peter Lipton, edited by Anjan Chakravartty): 397-404, and “Success and knowing how”, American Philosphical Quarterly, 40.1 (2003), 19-31.)

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either: plausibly, I can have all sorts of KH without doing any explicit entertaining of ways to do the things in question. With Danto-style basic actions, for instance, it seems very plausible to say that I know how to do them, but don’t ever think about ways to do them.) These cases at least show that KH is something more than a mere species of PK.

Why, in any case, did SW want to show that KH was just a species of PK? They give two reasons. One is a point about semantics. The standard treatment of the semantics of “I know how to make a fire” parses it smoothly in line with other embedded-question sentence-frames, such as “I know where he is hiding”, “I know when the train comes”, and the like. All of these can be quite easily explicated by supplying a proposition which answers the embedded question: “He is hiding in the coal-shed”, “The train comes at five”, and so on. So why shouldn’t e.g. “You make a fire by rubbing sticks together” be a parallel explication of “I know how to make a fire”? We don’t need to deviate from standard embedded-question semantics to make full sense of knowledge-where or knowledge-when; so neither, Stanley and Williamson suggest, do we need to deviate either in semantics or in philosophy to make sense of knowledge-how. This argument appeals to the presumption that philosophical theory should shadow semantic theory. But that presumption, while real enough, is only a presumption: one which I have argued is overturned.

Stanley and Williamson’s other motivation for arguing against the distinction between KH and propositional knowledge is that they think it “impoverishes our understanding of human action, by obscuring the way in which it is informed by intelligence”. I am not quite sure how SW think their own account clarifies what they say any anti-intellectualist account must obscure; but in any case, the question whether intellectualism or anti-intellectualism is true is prior to the question which of them really has light to cast on how action is informed by intelligence.

(c)

So much for the differences between PK, KH, and EK. What about the commonalities? In particular, do KH and EK have enough in common with PK to make them genuinely, non-metaphorically and literally, knowledge—not just ability and experience respectively, but ability-knowledge and experiential knowledge?

A merely verbal answer to this question is possible, but unsatisfactory. Obviously, at the level of ordinary language, we call KH and EK knowledge. That may prove something, but it doesn’t prove enough, for familiar reasons having to do with the inconclusiveness of actual linguistic practice as a proof of anything. To return to the examples just cited, at the level of ordinary language we talk of knowing how to say “Channel Islands” in Spanish or spell NECESSARY; but really both are cases of PK, not of knowing how. A more satisfactory answer needs to go deeper than linguistic usage. It needs to show that KH is not really just a fancy way of talking about ability, and EK not just a fancy way of talking about experience. The way to do this, presumably, is to show how the essential features of K are present in KH and EK as well as in PK.

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Obviously this would be next to impossible to do, if K was essentially what the traditional formula says it is—justified true belief. That formula (along with the many extant patched/ updated versions of it) is tailored to fit PK, so naturally reinforces our inclination to think that PK is the only kind of K worth considering. Maybe this fault is no less important than the fault most usually pointed out in K = JTB, namely its vulnerability to Gettierisation.

Timothy Williamson30 proposes a different understanding of the essential nature of knowledge: he characterises K as the most general factive mental state operator. This proposal too is tailored for PK, since TW’s proposal is that where “φs” stands for an FMSO, “‘S φs that A’ entails ‘S grasps the proposition that A” (36); also, “‘S φs that A’ is required to have ‘A’ as a deductive consequence” (35).

How then to characterise K in a way that reveals its essential features, but is not thus tailored to the specific case of PK? As an initial move in what will no doubt need to be a long and complex debate, most of it to be conducted outside this paper, I suggest this: K is any aptitude-based and non-accidental cognitive success.

In this formula, something is a cognitive success if it is, as we might put it, a genuine contact of mind with reality. (With objective reality, if you like, and if you think that tricky word adds much more than emphasis to our talk of reality.) This part of the formula picks up the risk to which all candidate K is exposed, that it should only seem to make this contact between mind and reality. (Contrast: the archer does actually hit the target—and he hits the real target, not some mere hologram of an archery butt, barn cunningly disguised as a butt, etc.)

A cognitive success is non-accidental if it is better than merely lucky—if it or something like it would happen in any other close possible world. This picks up the risk facing all candidate K, that it should be modally wafer-thin, should only be present at all because of freak or fluke circumstances here in @. (Contrast: the archer hits the target, and not because he aims with his usual wild inaccuracy but this time a freak wind-gust takes his arrow where he wants it to go.)

Finally, a cognitive success is aptitude-based if the reason why it is non-accidental is because it arises from some aptitude that properly belongs to the epistemic subject. This condition excludes the possibility that a cognitive success should happen in a wide range of possible circumstances, yet nonetheless not be caused by anything that, intuitively, is at all relevant to the specific standards of cognitive success. (Contrast: the archer hits the target, and he hits it because he is a good archer and not because the target is powerfully magnetised and his arrows are iron-tipped, nor yet because Ernst Stavro Blofeld has built a secret missile-guidance system into his arrows.)

Here is how PK fits these three conditions: when I know that p, this is cognitive success because p is indeed true—my belief that p “makes contact with” the reality that p; and non-accidental, because I did not get to believe p by a mere guess or a mutual cancelling-out of false lemmas or anything like that; and aptitude-based, because, instead, I believe p for reasons that I have grasped by the exercise of my relevant epistemic aptitudes or virtues.

30 Timothy Williamson, Knowledge and its Limits (Oxford: OUP 2000), 34-37.

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Here is how EK fits these three conditions: when I have EK of, say, the colour red, this is cognitive success because (and insofar as) my experience of red makes contact, in the way that standard observers’ experience makes contact, with the real presence of redness in my visual environment; and it is non-accidental, because I did not get to experience red by a deviant causal route of some sort; and it is aptitude-based, because I experience red by way of my aptitude for colour experience, i.e. my correctly-functioning ability to see.

Experiencing red, as normal observers experience red, when red is around to be experienced, may count as a success of a kind, but why call it a cognitive success? Because, in the first place, it involves a real contact of mind with reality—see my remarks about “cognitive” above; because, secondly, of the place that that sort of success can take in our wider success in engaging in an aware and skilful way with the world around us. To experience red is to be aware of a feature of the world; such kinds of awareness are invaluable as part of our broader cognitive engagement with the external reality that we have to negotiate. The supposed reasons for not describing experiencing red as a cognitive success really boil down to reasons for not describing it as a cognitive success in the way that propositional knowledge is a cognitive success. To insist that that is the only true form is just to beg the question against the thesis that EK is K too.

And here is how KH fits the three conditions: when I have KH of, e.g., how to juggle, this is cognitive success because (and insofar as) my attempts to juggle correlate with what common practice counts as successful juggling, or if they don’t so correlate, fail to do so only because of extraneous factors (factors outside me); and it is non-accidental, because if I try to juggle and succeed, it won’t be an accident or a fluke that I succeed; and it is aptitude-based, because my juggling (or, if extraneous factors stop me, my attempted juggling) is based on my ability to juggle.

Juggling may count as a success, of a kind, but why call it a cognitive success? Because, in the first place, to succeed in juggling is in its way another kind of contact between mind and reality: to succeed in juggling is to really juggle, not just approximate what juggling really is. And because, secondly, of the place that that sort of success can take in our wider success in engaging in an aware and skilful way with the world around us. To know how to juggle is to know how to interact skilfully with certain features of that world; such kinds of skilful interaction are invaluable as part of our broader cognitive engagement with the external reality that we have to negotiate. The supposed reasons for not describing juggling as a cognitive success really boil down to reasons for not describing it as a cognitive success in the way that propositional knowledge is a cognitive success. To insist that that is the only true form is just to beg the question against the thesis that KH is K too.

Objectivity in PK correlates with really knowing how to do something in KH, and with really “knowing what it’s like”—that is, with experiencing standardly—in EK; factivity in PK correlates with there being a way to φ in KH, and with there being “something it is like” in EK. These structural correlations are, of course, analogies between the three cases. It does not follow that EK and KH are only analogously knowledge; not unless, as before, we beg the question against the thesis that they are as much K as PK is.

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(d)

In (b) I argued that both KH and EK are irreducibly different both from each other and from PK; in (c) I argued that KH and EK are both nonetheless worth describing as K. So much for the Probable Candidates, as I called them in (a). What about the Possible Candidates that I identified there, 2PK and SK? Is it possible to do the same with them—to show that these are two further independent genera of K alongside the first three I have identified?

There seems to be a very good case for answering this question with a “No”. All that is distinctive about self-knowledge and second-personal knowledge is—it might be said—that they are knowledge, respectively, of, well, self and others. But we shouldn’t distinguish any x and y as different kinds of knowledge merely because they have different objects; K that “the cat is on the mat” and K that “if p, then p” are still both PK, despite the fact that the latter is knowledge of an a priori, analytic, and necessary proposition and the former is knowledge of an a posteriori, synthetic, and contingent proposition.31 Nor, if this is how we like to put the issue, should we count any x and y as different kinds of K merely because they occur in different modes of presentation. Is there any more to 2PK or SK than their distinctive objects, or the distinctive modes of presentation that they involve? That apart, aren’t these two Possible varieties of knowledge really just amalgams or variants of the first three Probable varieties? If so (the objection may be), then in the interests of ontological economy, we should not speak of either 2PK or SK as kinds of K on the same footing as PK or KH or EK.

On the other hand, the intuition is strong that there is something irreducibly different about both 2PK and SK. All sorts of distinguished thinkers have argued, explicitly or implicitly, for something in the area of these intuitions. Here are four examples, one each of 2PK and SK, one each from within and from outside analytic philosophy:

I perceive something. I am sensible of something. I imagine something. I will something. I feel something. I think something. The life of human beings does not consist of all this and the like alone. This and the like together establish the realm of It. But the realm of Thou has a different basis. When Thou is spoken, the speaker has no thing for his object... he has indeed nothing. But he takes his stand in relation.32

These notions—second-personal authority, valid claim or demand, second-personal reason, and responsibility to… comprise an interdefinable circle; each implies all the rest. Moreover, I contend, there is no way to break into this circle from outside it. Propositions formulated only with normative and evaluative concepts that are not already implicitly second-personal cannot adequately ground propositions formulated with concepts within the circle.33

[W]hen we consider the mind; when I consider my selfbeing, my consciousness and feeling of myself, that taste of myself, of I and me above and in all things… is more distinctive than the taste of ale or alum,

31 Cp. Chappell Reading Plato's Theaetetus (Boston: Hackett 2004), 37-8.32 Martin Buber, I and Thou, p.12.33 Stephen Darwall, The Second-Personal Standpoint (OUP 2006), 12.

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more distinctive than the smell of walnutleaf or camphor, and is incommunicable by any means to another man… Nothing else in nature comes near this unspeakable stress of pitch, distinctiveness, and selving, this selfbeing of my own. Nothing explains it or resembles it, except so far as this, that other men to themselves have the same feeling… But to me there is no resemblance: searching nature I taste self but at one tankard, that of my own being.34

These two presumptions [Authority, the presumption that if I believe I am in mental state x, then I am in x; and Transparency, the presumption that if I am in mental state x, then I believe that I am in x] make for the non-independence of mental states from self-knowledge of them, and that is the special character of self-knowledge. Special, because no such presumptions hold for any other kind of knowledge, in particular, not for the kind of knowledge we have set up as a contrast, i.e. perceptual knowledge.35

Buber and Darwall alike see deep differences between the second-personal and the third-; Bilgrami and Hopkins alike see something—to paraphrase Hopkins—“unspeakably distinctive” about our self-knowledge. However, Buber’s further idea that the second person is a no thing, and hence a nothing, does not seem a helpful addition; and Darwall spells out the differences between the second- and third-personal more as a point about our reasons than our K. Meanwhile Bilgrami’s account spells SK out as solely a matter of special epistemic access to items of propositional knowledge; whereas Hopkins apparently spells it out as solely a matter of special epistemic access to items of experiential knowledge. What our four authors have to say here about 2PK and SK is of the very greatest interest and importance. But none of it, cautiously considered, gives much encouragement to the thought that 2PK and SK are distinct kinds of knowledge in the same way as PK and KH and EK are distinct kinds of K.

The right response to these reservations is to proceed with caution—but still, to proceed. We needn’t give up altogether on the idea that 2PK and SK are kinds of K; we just need to keep it in mind that they appear to be different (and less basic) kinds of kinds from PK, KH, and EK.

A little more evidence that SK and 2PK have some sort of autonomy as kinds of K comes, in the case of SK, from the simple fact that it constitutes a distinctive problem in philosophy of mind (though that of course is consistent with SK’s involving a special mode of access).

In the case of 2PK, there is evidence to consider from both physiology and cognitive psychology. As Ratcliffe 2006: 34 notes, Simon Baron-Cohen (1995, Chapter 4) has suggested that our brains’ software includes three devices that facilitate a prepropositional awareness of others: (a) A perceptual ‘intentionality detector’; (b) an ‘eye direction detector’ that, amongst other things, triggers arousal and affective response when somebody else is looking at you; and (c) a ‘shared attention mechanism’ that enables an appreciation that one is looking at the same object as somebody else. The idea that 2PK is in such ways physically underwritten by the way 34 Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Comments on the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius Loyola” [1880], in Gardner 1953: 145-635 Akeel Bilgrami 2006: 30-31

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our brains are structured does tend to suggest, though of course it does not prove, that there is something physiologically modular—something special and distinctive—about 2PK.

That there is, by contrast something phenomenologically modular—something experientially special and distinctive—about 2PK is surely not something that we need science to prove; it is a matter of observation.

[W]e certainly believe ourselves to be directly acquainted with another person’s joy in his laughter, with his sorrow and pain in his tears, with his shame in his blushing, with his entreaty in his outstretched hands. . . And with the tenor of his thoughts in the sound of his words. If anyone tells me that this is not ‘perception’, for it cannot be so, in view of the fact that a perception is simply a ‘complex of physical sensations. . . I would beg him to turn aside from such questionable theories and address himself to the phenomenological facts.36

It also seems pretty evident that there is something cognitively wrong with someone who misses out on 2PK. To be incapable (to whatever degree) of 2PK is a distinctive cognitive defect, and as is well known it is closely associated with autism.

I really didn’t know there were people until I was seven years old. I then suddenly realized there were people. But not like you do. I still have to remind myself that there are people.37

It is hard, when reading this, not to be reminded of some of the things that one comes across in analytic philosophy of mind:

According to [Theory theory] other people are objects in our environment, and the task of understanding them is no different, in principle, from the task of understanding the behaviour of other, more inert, objects . . .38

Perhaps our concentration on impersonal propositional knowledge has sometimes put us, as theorists, almost in the position of the autistic. And perhaps the best way to remedy this self-disadvantaging tendency is for us to try and recover within our theories a place for the distinctive kind of knowledge that the autistic distinctively lacks: 2PK.

Mention of autism in connection with 2PK brings us to a phenomenon that has recently attracted a good deal of interest from psychologists and philosophers. This is the phenomenon of joint attention.

Just as the object you see can be a constituent of your experience, so too it can be a constituent of your experience that the other person is, with you, jointly attending to the object. This is not to say that in a case of joint attention, the other person will be an object of your attention. On the contrary, it is only the object that you are attending to. It is rather that, when there is another person with whom you are jointly attending to the thing, the existence of that other person enters into the individuation of

36 Max Scheler, 1954, pp. 260–261; quoted in Gallagher 200837 An autistic adolescent quoted in Hobson 200838 Stone and Davies 1996, pp. 126–127; quoted in Ratcliffe 2006: 44

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your experience. The other person is there, as co-attender, in the periphery of your experience.39

Each subject is aware, in some sense, of the object as an object that is present to both subjects. There is, in this respect, a ‘meeting of minds’ between both subjects, such that the fact that both are attending to the same object is open or mutually manifest.40

For me to be capable of joint attention with you, I have to be capable, not only of attending to some object in the world, but also of co-attending to that object, with you as a second co-operating subject. A capacity for second-personal knowledge in something like the sense I am giving the phrase—roughly, awareness of you as a subject rather than as an object—is therefore a prerequisite of joint attention. One striking result from psychological experiments with autistic people is that they seem to be either partially or wholly incapable of joint attention. Andrew Pinsent reports further experimental evidence that supports the hypothesis that the reason why is that autistic people, while perfectly capable of appreciating the fact that other people are agents from what we might call a detached perspective, nonetheless tend to lack the capacity for second-personal knowledge:

the children with autism did follow the instructions given by the experimenter, so they responded to other persons insofar as they were to respond to claims on their conduct made by another person… they were also able to perceive and copy the actions and goals of the experimenter, so they understood that a person was doing something and were able to imitate it… what the children did not do was to copy the styles of these actions. They had particular difficulty in copying self-orientated actions by the other person. As Hobson interprets this finding, the children did not identify with the other person, failing to appropriate his psychological orientation as well as his external actions.41

This sounds to me very much like evidence that what autistic people lack is a capacity for what I am calling second-personal knowledge. A reader might want to object that it is, rather, evidence of an incapacity for empathy, or for identification with others, or for “a theory of mind”. But what unifies these somewhat scattered phenomena is, precisely, the awareness of another person as another person: and just that is what I mean by second-personal knowledge.

So it looks as if 2PK (fairly definitely) and SK (quite possibly) are distinctive kinds of knowledge in some sense of “kind”, even if not the same sense of “kind” as the first three varieties of K, PK, KH, EK. With that thought before us, let us now go on, as promised, to look at the roles that these varieties of K might play in particular applications. In (e) I consider their possible applications in ethics and (less extensively) aesthetics.

(e)

39 . John Campbell, “Joint Attention and Common Knowledge,” ibid., 288.40 . Eilan, “Joint Attention,” Eilan et al., Joint Attention, 5.41 Pinsent, pp.89-90

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1. KH in ethics

Consider two related puzzles about Aristotelian ethics. One is a puzzle about why Aristotle is so elusive about the content of his normative ethics; the other is a puzzle about what an Aristotelian should say about how a virtue, as a causal power, relates to action and voluntariness.

That Aristotle is elusive about what, in concrete detail, he prescribes and proscribes can hardly be denied, in the light of passages like the following:

The one who stands his ground against or runs away from those things, and for the sake of those things, that he should, and in the way and at the time that he should, and who likewise, in respect of confidence, acts as he should—that man is the courageous one.42

The temperate man desires what he should, as he should, when he should, which is also what reason requires.43

Thus the man who gets angry about the things and with the people he should, and in the way he should, and when he should, and for as long as he should, is praised… Those who do not get angry about the things that they should are thought to be ineffectual, as are those who do not get angry in the way they should, or when they should, or with the people they should.44

What, we might ask, can possibly be the point of such remarks? How is it supposed to be helpful as practical guidance, to be told merely that, to reveal these various virtues, you should act “as you should”, hôs dei?

The best answer, I think, is that it’s not supposed to be helpful, except in the sense of eliminating the distracting thought that guidance, in the sense of a list of explicit instructions about what to do in various contingencies (“If A, then do P; if B, do Q; if A and B, do R”, and so on) is either available, or what we should be looking for in any case. Aristotle’s point is that if we want to know exactly what to do in explicit, detailed words and definitions, then hôs dei, “as it should be”, is all there is to say. Right action (and similarly right reason, orthos logos) cannot be precisely captured in a proposition or formula—or at any rate, it can’t be precisely captured in a useful formula. Hôs dei is the only precise formula available; but that is, as noted, unhelpful.

If we were trying to describe skilful bike riding, we might at a certain point fall back on remarks like “He rides his bike just so.” Hôs dei is like “just so”; it is helpful only insofar as it ostends something particular. Part of the point of repeating such a phrase is to do that ostension; the point is also to guide us away from the misguided hunt for verbal formulae or definitions that will characterise or codify right action completely and exactly. What we need to do instead is look for examples of good performance, and learn from them whatever they have to teach us.

[I]t is not easy to define how and with whom and why and for how long a man should be angry… Nor is it easy to fix exactly by reason how far and

42 NE 1115b17-1943 NE 1119b1644 NE 1125b30-33, 1126a4-6

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how much a man should be blamed, either. For indeed nothing else that is perceived is easily defined. Such things are among particular matters, and the judgement on them lies in perception.45

If you want to see exactly what competent bicycle-riding is, you need to look not at a verbal definition of competent bike-riding, but at actual examples of it. The only place to find complete determinacy about what counts as good bike-riding is, unsurprisingly when you think about it, in the principal actualisation of the skill of bicycle-riding: i.e., in examples of good bike-riding. Just likewise, if you want to see exactly what virtue is, no definition of virtue or prescription for virtue can tell you that; what you need to do is look at the principal actualisation of virtue, which is of course some actual example of a good person. Practical truth, which is what Aristotle says characterises ethics, lies in action, not in words (where else could it lie?); to put it another way, knowing how to do the right thing is for him an instance (principally) of KH, not of PK.

The other puzzle about Aristotelian virtue arises from the fact that each Aristotelian character-virtue is a disposition of voluntary and deliberate choice (hexis prohairetikê, NE 1106b36), a power of acting which does not force or compel the agent, but does shape his actions. Thus, temperance being a virtue, the explanatory “He did it (or didn’t do it) because he is temperate” is a kind of claim that can be true, and so is the predictive “He will do it (or won’t do it) because he is temperate”; and similarly for the vice of intemperance.

The fact that the virtues are in this way causal powers raises an obvious and rather delicate question. How does their being causal relate to their being voluntary, which Aristotle also says they are? The question is delicate because we often think of dispositions not as subserving voluntariness, but as opposed to it. If an object has a disposition to poison humans, that means that in the right circumstances the object is bound to poison humans, not free to poison them. So if I have a disposition to be just (or for that matter unjust), won’t that mean that, in circumstances where justice is called for, I will have no choice but to be just (or unjust)?

The best answer to this understands the virtues and the vices as what we may, in a metaphor of Aristotle’s own, call ways of seeing circumstances and actions (NE 1143b5, b14, 1144a30). To be temperate involves perceiving another glass of wine as a glass too many, and hence not-to-be-taken; to be just involves perceiving an expedient political murder as an outrage, and hence to-be-deplored-and-punished; to be gentle involves perceiving your new pupil as nervous, and so to-be-put-at-her-ease… and so on indefinitely.

Understanding a virtue as a way of seeing—a disposition to frame situations and to deliberate about them in a particular way or ways—clarifies how actions can be caused by that virtue and yet also be voluntary and deliberate. It also sheds further light on my thesis that KH is of central importance in ethics: as we may say here, having a virtue means knowing how to see situations in the light of that virtue.

This is ethical KH, and it is irreducible to ethical PK. From Plato to Hursthouse and Aristotle to Anscombe authors on virtue ethics have claimed that virtue is impossible

45 NE 1109b14-24

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to codify; the thesis that virtues are or involve46 KH helps us to see why. There is no finite list of propositions that captures completely what it is to have the ability to act according to a virtue, or to see things under the aspect of that virtue, than there is a finite list of propositions that captures completely what it is to be able to ride a bicycle. KH in ethics is not superior to PK; but it is different.

2. EK in ethics

Experiential knowledge has an important role to play in ethics too. To see its role, consider a familiar question in contemporary applied ethics: “What is wrong with murder?”. As Rai Gaita points out, there is something very unsettling and unsatisfactory about the way this sort of question is commonly handled by analytic philosophers:47

Any explanation of what Rawls calls our “moral capacities” must clarify the attunement of moral response to the kind of seriousness that is internal to our sense of good and evil… theories that fail to meet this requirement will either be unashamedly reductive or yield parodies of moral seriousness… When we turn our attention… to our sense of the terribleness of being an evildoer, then it seems as though the Kantian must say that the terribleness of being an evildoer is something like being a traitor to Reason. That is manifestly a parody of moral seriousness. Remorse… is trivialised if we try to express a murderer’s horrified realisation in… “My God, what have I done? I have been a traitor to reason. I have violated rational nature in another!” It is not only Kantian accounts that invite such parody: “My God, what have I done? I have violated my freely chosen and universally prescribed principle that one shouldn’t kill people under circumstances such as these!” (Raimond Gaita, Good and Evil: an absolute conception48

From Socrates on, ethicists have sought to base ethics on verbal formulae: their idea is that once we have hold of the proposition that gives the definition of justice, or the reason why murder is bad, or why persons are morally significant, or what’s so worth preserving about ancient British oak woods… , then we will have got hold of a form of words which conclusively and definitively settles matters, which explains the value at stake in ethics, or in this fragment of ethics, so fully and lucidly as to complete our inquiry into that value, in just the sort of way that the discovery and elucidation of the chemical notion of H20 completes our inquiry into the essence of water. Even if such approaches were convincing, and they hardly ever are, they seem to leave out something crucial about value, in rather the way that something crucial is left out if someone understands the complete physics of colour and yet has no idea what’s it’s like to experience red.

Compare aesthetics, where it seems to be a key part of understanding to get hold of certain experiences: you don’t know what makes Jan Brueghel the Elder’s Eden such a great picture unless you have some kind of grip on what it is like to visually 46 Of course, as Julia Annas stresses in her Intelligent Virtue, a fully competent ethical agent will have both the relevant PK and the relevant KH. More about that later.47 If we said, as we almost might, that analytical philosophers tend to handle such questions with too much clarity, we could certainly add that continental philosophers tend to the opposite fault.48 London: Routledge 1991), 33.

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experience that picture. I propose that something similar is true in ethics. To understand any value properly, e.g. to grasp properly what is so important about justice or persons, or so bad about murder, or so precious about ancient British oak woods, you need to have had some relevant experiences of value.

Which experiences of value are those? There probably isn’t any one experience which can be guaranteed to give you all the experiential knowledge you need relevant to the four examples of value I mention; there are lots of different possible routes to getting “all the experiential knowledge you need”. (Which is how much, exactly? For present purposes let’s say: enough to be passably competent as an understander of the value in question.) But if you are going to chair a committee which is deciding whether to run a new road straight through an ancient British oak wood, then before you start your deliberations, perhaps you and the rest of your committee ought at least to have walked in that wood yourselves. (And moreover walked in it, if you’ll forgive the Aristotelian turn of phrase, at the speed that you ought (slow) and in the frame of mind that you ought (calm and receptive).) If you want to understand the value of justice, the most revealing experiences you can have may well be experiences of gross injustice; perhaps you should visit the Gaza Strip, or some of the women of Saudi Arabia. If you want to understand the value of persons, you need experience of, acquaintance with, persons—in fact, you need some 2PK. And if you want to understand the value or rather the disvalue of murder you need—what? Experience of being a murderer? Experience of being murdered?

Fortunately not. Travel, as Simon Blackburn likes to observe, broadens the mind. It is also true that the mind can broaden our travels. The key to this, as Percy Bysshe Shelley says, is imagination:

Man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others. The pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause... Poetry strengthens the faculty which is the organ of the moral nature of man, in the same manner as exercise strengthens a limb.49

Shelley argues that art has a key moral role, because art involves our imaginations. Art enables us to feel for ourselves the moral texture of a million situations that we have never been in ourselves, and (with any luck) never will be. And by “moral texture”, it is the phenomenal quality of those situations that I mean. An artist can feel himself under a compulsion to capture these phenomenal qualities, or even see his work as being driven by a kind of obligation to do so; he can see his work as being about ostending and exploring just such samples of experience. As another poet no less different in almost every conceivable way from Shelley than Philip Larkin puts it:

…you write because you have to. If you rationalise it, it seems as if you’ve seen this sight, felt this feeling, had this vision, and have got to find a combination of words that will preserve it by setting it off in other people. The duty is to the original experience… [a poet’s writing must] be born of the tension between what he non-verbally feels and what can be

49 Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry

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got over in common word-usage to someone who hasn’t had his experience.50

Our experiences in life have phenomenal quality, and these phenomenal qualities come in broad kinds. Just as there is something it is like to feel red, there is also (though of course these cases are far more complex) something it is like to be a child or a parent or a friend or a lover, to feel affection or jealousy or hope or suspicion, to see someone born or die, to achieve an ambition or fail to, to get married or divorced, to be lonely or to be convivial, to betray or be betrayed, and so on. These and things like them are the paradigm events or experiences of human life.

Victor Hugo tells us in Part III of Les Misérables, in a loosely autobiographical scene set in about 1828, how the young Marius Pontmercy arrives, through his grandfather’s negligence, too late at his Bonapartist father’s death-bed. His father lives alone, because after his wife’s death some years before, his financial position forced him to surrender his son to her royalist parents—though he has watched him grow up secretly from a distance. Marius resents his father’s apparent neglect and has been taught to despise his father’s politics. Yet by chance he discovers shortly after his father’s death that his father loved him even though he apparently abandoned him, and also that he was a military hero who fought at Waterloo, there recognised as such and decorated on the battlefield—with a certain grand futility—by Napoleon himself. For Marius, these discoveries change everything he knows.

We know how to respond to Hugo’s narrative, how to enter into it emotionally: who to pity and who to blame, how things feel for Marius, for his father, and indeed for his grandfather. How do we know these things? Briefly, because we are human too. Less briefly, we know them because we recognise the paradigm experiences of human life that Hugo is talking about, and also understand the variations on those paradigms that Hugo is creating.

Imaginatively exploring such experiences, and their indefinitely many variations and permutations, gives us a kind of knowledge that is crucial to aesthetics: such experiential knowledge is what most narrative and a lot of depictive art is all about. It’s what experiential moral knowledge is all about, too. Someone who has no experiential grasp of these paradigm experiences, based either on what has happened to her “in the real-world” or on what has happened to her in imaginative experience (whether produced by art or by other means), does not understand what life is all about. In which case she does not understand what ethics is all about, either. If we want to know what is really wrong with murder, perhaps we should stop fishing around for a Socratic definition, and read Macbeth or Crime and Punishment instead.

“But what difference could such experiential grasp make to anything proper to philosophy, i.e. anything to do with the arguments? Surely normative ethics could be exactly as it is, surely we could determine the very same theory of the good and the bad, the right and the wrong, and indeed of what’s wrong with murder, without the slightest attention to all this flaky stuff about what ethical experience is like.” On this objection I have two comments.

50 Philip Larkin, Required Writing 58, 82.

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First, even if this could be so, I doubt very much that it would be so. We have all heard such quips as “One man’s ponens is another man’s tollens”, and “The conclusion is the point in the argument where you decide to stop thinking”. As with most jokes, there is a certain amount of truth in these quips. When is right to accept a conclusion as what your argument forces you to accept even if you don’t like it, and when is it right to say instead “Well, if that’s the conclusion, there must be a hole in the argument somewhere even if I can’t see it”? Which reductiones are ad absurdum, and which bullets are to be bitten? How do we know when a disjunctive syllogism starts from the right disjunction? Which universal generalisations, of all the ones we could subsume particulars under, are the ones that we actually should subsume things under? The normal answer to all such questions is that it’s a matter of judgement, and the normal answer is right—but a bit delphic. To spell it out a bit, we can say that part of this “judgement” comes, in moral cases, from our experiential grasp of value. That grip will sometimes tell us that the argument has not gone far enough, as when we sense—I think it is quite a common experience when you’re trying to do philosophy—that there is something in the moral life that your argument has failed to capture, acknowledge, or take proper account of. On other occasions it will tell us that the argument has gone too far. To borrow an example of Edward Harcourt’s, consider a town council which is trying to reach a satisfactory resolution of the problems, or perceived problems, caused in the town by a group of “travellers”. If the proposed solutions that the council soberly considers include shooting all the travellers, selling them into slavery, or burning them out of their caravans, then something has gone seriously wrong. These options are certainly means to the council’s end of resolving their problem. For all that, they should never have come up for deliberation, and if they do, the argument has, as I put it, gone too far. There is, no doubt, no one thing that stops arguments going too far in this kind of way; but a vivid imaginative sense of what it is like to murder people, sell them into slavery, or burn them out of their homes is one such thing.

In this sort of way, I think appeals to the imagination in ethics, and to what we directly experience, can be critically salutary. So I think it’s pretty unfortunate—and this is my second comment on the objection above—that in contemporary moral philosophy such appeals are so often austerely frowned on as merely “sentimental” or “emotive”.

In thinking about this matter [viz., killing babies] we should put aside feelings based on the small, helpless, and – sometimes – cute appearance of human infants... If we can put aside these emotionally moving but strictly irrelevant aspects of the killing of a baby we can see that the grounds for not killing persons do not apply to newborn infants.51

Singer here dismisses as mere sentimentality what in fact seems like a pretty robust datum of a lot of people’s experiential moral knowledge: that so far from it being, as Singer argues in this passage, morally permissible, in itself, to kill newborn babies, there is something peculiarly awful about killing them. Given that Singer—presumably—wants like the rest of us to get at the truth in ethics, his dismissiveness about other people’s very strong imaginative rejection of what he finds so innocuous seems self-defeating, and possibly dangerous. We may compare here some remarks

51 Singer 1993, 170–171.

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of Bernard Williams’ on Michael Tooley’s advocacy of the same proposal. Williams notes

the sheer frivolity of such proposals, which lies in their refusal to engage with the only two things that matter: the politics of trying to make rules for such situations, and the experience of people engaged in them. Because of this refusal, the philosophy that produces such proposals is, in the bad sense, deeply “academic”. It would be comforting to believe, with Hume, that it was therefore merely ridiculous.52

An understanding of ethics that worked just fine without experiential ethical knowledge would be like an understanding of colour that made no reference to what it’s like to see colour. It would be radically defective; if you like, it would be a zombie ethics. If we find ourselves not only developing such ethics, but actually getting ourselves into the position where we can no longer even see what they lack, perhaps it is time to worry a little.

If all this is correct, then there is a place in ethics for both KH and EK. Part of what it is to have ethical knowledge is, in a very literal sense, to know how to act. The good person characteristically attempts—and attempts successfully—to deploy the ways of looking at practical situations that we call the virtues; in so doing, the good person displays what can without any kind of metaphor be called ethical knowledge. Likewise, part of what it is to have ethical knowledge is, as we say, “to have seen life”: a good person needs to know something about what it’s like to be in the paradigmatic life-scenarios, and no one can have a full appreciation of right and wrong, good and bad, in ethics without a deep imaginative grasp of the distinctive phenomenologies of such scenarios. This too is, in a perfectly literal sense, ethical knowledge. (And given the imaginative engagement that art demands of us, it is aesthetic knowledge too.)

In general, KH is objective just insofar as someone who knows how to φ really can φ; ethical knowledge-how fits this criterion, with “φ” = “act in accordance with the virtues”. And in general, EK is objective just insofar as the experience of Fness that one grasps really fits the paradigm of experience of Fness—insofar as it accords with what Fness “has been like” for other people. Ethical EK fits this criterion, since “Fness” can stand for the pardigm experiences of the ethical life.

So there can be moral KH and moral EK; and both can be objective. There is plenty, then, for moral objectivity to be besides the kind of objectivity that PK can have. I am not here claiming that moral knowledge is not PK, but EK and KH. On the contrary: though I haven’t addressed the case of PK here—that has been done plenty of times elsewhere, by me e.g. in Philosophy 2008—I think all three kinds of MK exist, and I also think (in this following Julia Annas) that a fully virtuous agent will need all three kinds of MK. What I am saying is that there is more for metaethicists to talk about than PK—and I have tried to indicate some of the ways in which these other kinds of MK might be talked about.

If correct, my argument so far shows that all three of the Probable Candidates are involved in MK (and at least PK and EK seem also to be involved in aesthetic K).

52 Altham and Harrison, edd., World, Mind, and Ethics (Cambridge UP 1995), p.221, n.10.

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What about the Possible Candidates? If we set aside the question that I raised in (d), as to what kind of kinds of K they are, might SK and 2PK have a role to play in MK? I turn to that suggestion in (e)3-(e)4.

(e)3. SK as MK

As I remarked in (a), modern philosophers do not usually concentrate on the potential moral importance of SK. Instead they concentrate on fairly banal and basic instances—the thought being, perhaps, partly that it isn’t their concern because they are philosophers of mind not ethicists, and partly that the simple cases of SK will involve fewer distractions from the phenomenon of SK itself. As Bilgrami (Self-Knowledge and Resentment (Harvard University Press, 2006), 1-2) nicely says when he notes the usual emphasis:

There is bound to be the expectation that a book on… self-knowledge… will focus on the particularly interesting states of mind—the ones that reflect depth of character or strength of will; the ones that motivate heroic striving or evil deeds… [but] much of [this] book will be about our knowledge of far less interesting states of mind… there are often very interesting reasons why we must sometimes spend a lot of time on the uninteresting aspects of a subject. A good deal of philosophy is defined by this mildly paradoxical method.53

Even if he notes the point only to set it aside, Bilgrami is surely right that at least some instances of SK constitute important moral achievements. In fact I am sure that there is more than one way in which SK is morally important, but I will restrict myself for now to the one that I have already noted, which is captured by the famous Greek saying gnôthi sauton, “know thyself”. To a modern ear the saying suggests authenticity, the ideal that Nietzsche called “becoming what you really are” and which Shakespeare’s Polonius expresses in his words to his son Laertes:

This above all: to thine own self be true,And it must follow, as the night the day,

Thou canst not then be false to any man.54

No doubt authenticity is an important ideal, and part of what matters morally about SK. However, it is not what gnôthi sauton suggested to the Greeks: to them it was a reminder to be humble, to recognise one’s own limitations, to avoid hybris and over-reaching ambition. Humility has been much mistreated as a topic in moral philosophy—thanks at least in part to Hume’s diatribe against the “monkish virtues” in Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals s.9.55 If Davidson is right, as he surely is, to say

53 54 Hamlet 1.3.78-80. There is a well-known problem about the context of these wise-seeming words, given that Shakespeare puts them on the lips of the “tedious old fool” Polonius, 23 lines into a speech which Polonius opens by urging Laertes to hurry off at once to catch his ship. Did Shakespeare mean us to take them as sententious cliché? I think so, but not just as sententious cliché. As usual in Shakespeare, even the jokes are no accident. The self-knowledge of the young is, after all, a key theme in Hamlet, just as the self-knowledge of the old is in King Lear.55 “Celibacy, fasting, penance, mortification, self-denial, humility, silence, solitude, and the whole train of monkish virtues; for what reason are they everywhere rejected by men of sense, but because they serve to no manner of purpose; neither advance a man's fortune in the world, nor render

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that Hume’s use of “pride” “does not correspond to any use the word has in English”,56 the same seems true of what Hume has to say about humility. Pace Hume, humility is no more a displeasure caused by self-examination than pride is a pleasure caused by self-examination, and it seems an extraordinary distortion of both so to characterise them.

The source of the distortion is a familiar one: it lies in the demands of Hume’s wider systematic claims about what virtues and vices generally are and involve. But Humean distortions aside, it is not hard to see why humility is indeed a virtue, and pride indeed a vice. The reason is that humility is a matter of wisely correcting for our inbuilt bias towards over-estimating our own abilities and our own importance. Skill in so correcting undoubtedly is constitutively a matter of SK, just as the failure so to correct, or to correct enough, that constitutes pride characteristically involves a failure of self-knowledge.

A second and more speculative suggestion about the moral usefulness of SK arises from considering the etymology of “conscience”. Conscientia in Latin is, literally, knowledge-together-with; if one did not already know that word and was looking for a way of translating the English phrase “reflexive/ reflective self-awareness” into Latin, conscientia would be a very natural term to coin to play this role. As examination of its NT origins makes clear, the root idea of the word conscientia/ synderesis is the idea of looking honestly at one’s own inborn, inbuilt, or at any rate ingrained sense of what is and is not moral, and assessing what can and what cannot pass muster by that standard. If the moral law is inscribed upon every human heart, as St Paul suggests it is in Romans 2.12-15, then moral knowledge will be self-knowledge, and self-knowledge will be moral knowledge. To call this idea influential in the history of western thought would be a severe understatement. Christians have been known to complain about the cult of sincerity in contemporary culture—the rather woolly popular idea that “it doesn’t matter what you do provided you’re sincere”; they should at least recognise that they started it, or at any rate started the tradition of which this woolly thought is a debased but perfectly recognisable descendant.

So whatever kind of kind of K SK may be, its importance for MK seems obvious.

(e)4. 2PK as MK

When we turn to 2PK, the same seems true there—and true in spades. For a whole variety of ethical writers, saying that 2PK is important seems like a gross understatement; for these writers, awareness of the second-personal changes everything. Recall the Buber quotation on p.16 above. Buber puts a world of difference between perceiving the other things around us, as things, and perceiving the other persons around us, as persons; so too, as I noted on p.3, does Strawson, whose famous proposal in “Freedom and resentment” is that there is a basic and

him a more valuable member of society; neither qualify him for the entertainment of company, nor increase his power of self-enjoyment? We observe, on the contrary, that they cross all these desirable ends; stupify the understanding and harden the heart, obscure the fancy and sour the temper. We justly, therefore, transfer them to the opposite column, and place them in the catalogue of vices.”56 Donald Davidson, “Hume’s cognitive theory of pride”, Journal of Philosophy 1978, p.278.

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almost categorial difference between “objective” and “interpersonal reactive” attitudes. I will quote Strawson at some length, given the interest of what he has to say about this distinction:

I want to insist on… the very great importance that we attach to the attitudes and intentions towards us of other human beings, and the great extent to which our personal feelings and reactions depend upon, or involve, our beliefs about these attitudes and intentions. I can give no simple description of the field of phenomena at the centre of which stands this commonplace truth; for the field is too complex. Much imaginative literature is devoted to exploring its complexities; and we have a large vocabulary for the purpose… [We need] to emphasize how much we actually mind, how much it matters to us, whether the actions of other people—and particularly of some other people—reflect attitudes towards us of goodwill, affection, or esteem on the one hand or contempt, indifference, or malevolence on the other. If someone treads on my hand accidentally, while trying to help me, the pain may be no less acute than if he treads on it in contemptuous disregard of my existence or with a malevolent wish to injure me. But I shall generally feel in the second case a kind and degree of resentment that I shall not feel in the first. If someone’s actions help me to some benefit I desire, then I am benefited in any case; but if he intended them so to benefit me because of his general goodwill towards me, I shall reasonably feel a gratitude which I should not feel at all if the benefit was an incidental consequence, unintended or even regretted by him, of some plan of action with a different aim… The object of these commonplaces is to try to keep before our minds something it is easy to forget when we are engaged in philosophy, especially in our cool, contemporary style, viz. what it is actually like to be involved in ordinary interpersonal relationships, ranging from the most intimate to the most casual.57

Strawson’s example of two ways of having your hand trodden on is taken up and beautifully elucidated by Stephen Darwall, in his remarkable book The Second-Personal Standpoint:

[C]ompare two different ways in which you might try to give someone a reason to… remove his foot from on top of yours. One would be to get him to feel sympathetic concern for you in your plight, thereby leading him to want you to be free of pain. Were he to have this desire, he would see your being in pain as a bad thing, a state of the world that there is reason for [anyone] to change… Alternatively, you might… say something that asserts or implies your authority to claim or demand that he move his foot and that simultaneously expresses this demand… The reason [that you would then give] would not be addressed to him as someone who is simply in a position to alter the regrettable state of someone’s pain or someone’s causing pain… It would be addressed to him, rather, as the person causing gratuitous pain to another person, something we normally assume we have the authority to demand that persons not do to one another… A second-personal reason is one whose validity depends on presupposed authority and accountability relations

57 Peter Strawson, “Freedom and Resentment”, pp.75-77 in G. Watson, ed., Free Will (OUP 1997).

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between persons and, therefore, on the possibility of the reason’s being addressed person-to-person.58

For there to be, as Darwall argues there is, a fundamental and irreducible difference between second-personal and third-personal reasons, it seems to me that there needs to be a similar difference between the second-personal and the third-personal standpoints. If so, then the second-personal knowledge for which I am arguing is a presupposition of the second-personal standpoint for which Darwall is arguing.

In a different tradition and a different style, Emmanuel Levinas insists as much as Darwall and Strawson do that being presented with another person is a sui generis experience, quite unlike being presented either with just another thing in the world, or with just another experience, and uncategorisable in the terms of such other experiences:

The manner in which The Other presents itself, which goes beyond the idea that is in me of The Other—we will call this the visage. This fashion [façon: Levinas is pointing up the pun on face] of presentation does not consist in being taken as a type of object under my inspecting gaze, or in being displayed as a collection of qualities which together form an image. The visage of Another destroys at every moment, and it overturns the malleable image that it leaves behind in me, the idea of it which suits me, the idea of it which suits conceptualisation—the idea “fitted to its reality”. It does not manifest itself by its qualities, but itself by itself. It expresses itself.59

It is this absolute difference between encountering things and encountering “The Other” that, for Levinas, grounds the absolute difference between the demand of The Other, which he takes to be infinite, and any other kind of finite demand that we might experience.

Often when “analytic” and “continental” philosophers say the same thing in different ways, it’s a case of cherchez le Kant. And so here:

In the kingdom of ends, everything has either a price or a dignity. If it has a price, something else can be put in its place as an equivalent; if it is exalted above all price and so admits of no equivalent, then it has a dignity. What is relative to universal human inclinations and needs has a

58 Darwall, Second-Person Standpoint pp.5-8. Darwall (19-22) interestingly points us towards the language of “recognition” in ethics, a language inaugurated by Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1815) in his Grundlage des Naturrechts (1796). Clearly those moderns—in many cases Kant-inspired—who talk of a “politics of recognition” can also be seen as working with something like a notion of second-personality. I am thinking in particular of Juergen Habermas and Paul Ricoeur, though the phrase itself seems to originate, at least in its English form, in the work of Charles Taylor, and in particular his 1994 edited collection Multiculturalism: Examining The Politics of Recognition (Princeton University Press).59 Emmanuel Levinas, Totalité et l’Infini (Kluwer: Livres de poche, 1971), 43, my own translation: La manière dont se présente l’Autre, dépassant l’idée de l’Autre en moi, nous l’appelons, en effet, visage. Cette façon ne consiste pas à figurer comme thème sous mon regard, à s’étaler comme un ensemble de qualités formant un image. Le visage d’Autrui détruit à tout moment, et déborde l’image plastique qu’il me laisse, l’idée à ma mesure et à la mesure de son ideatum—l’idée adéquate. Il ne se manifeste pas par ces qualités, mais kath’ hauto. Il s’exprime.

Darwall too references Levinas at his p.21, n.44.

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market price… but that which constitutes the sole condition under which anything can be an end in itself has not merely a relative value—that is, a price—but has an intrinsic value—that is, dignity.60

Act in such a way that you always treat humanity, whether in your own person or somebody else’s, never merely as a means, but always at the same time as an end.61

It is because it is possible for humans to be both givers and receivers of second-personal address that they can ask themselves how to act in a context where they are surrounded by other givers and receivers of second-personal address, all of whom are equally capable of asking themselves the same thing. This reflexive capacity to think of others as possessing that same reflexive capacity is “the sole condition under which anything can be an end in itself”. It is because we can deliberate in this way that we, the persons, are so sharply distinguished both in our nature and in our value from everything that is not a person, but a thing; from everything that is not an end in itself, but a (potential) means.

Kant himself famously denies that his rationalistic ethics has anything to do with the Golden Rule of Matthew 7.12, and it is not hard to see why. On the face of it, versions of the Golden Rule that talk like the original version about “Not doing to others what we would not want others to do to us” do seem pretty obviously couched in terms that refer to our desires and wishes, and as such give ethics a foundation that, in Kant’s terms, is blatantly heteronomous. But if we take things a little deeper, it is not so clear any more that Kant was right to see the Golden Rule as incompatible with his own ethics. Perhaps asking yourself “Would I like it if he did this to me?” is no more than a prompt, a heuristic that helps you to see that your interaction is, after all, with another person. And/ or: perhaps seeing what I am doing from the viewpoint of the person I am doing it to would make it impossible for me to suppose that what I am doing is consistent with respect for that person of the kind that Kantian ethics rightly requires.

Perhaps the point is also, to go back to experiential knowledge, about understanding what it is like to be a person on the receiving end of the treatment I am currently dishing out. That, of course, is not a Kantian thought. Kant does not, so far as I can see, have anything to say about experiential knowledge in ethics: he wants to do everything with second-personal knowledge. But that may well seem no better than a wasted opportunity to those of us whose motto is “Let a hundred flowers bloom”, and think that there is a place in ethics for experiential and for second-personal knowledge.

One last example of the importance of second-personal knowledge is—or so I’ll argue—Bernard Williams’ famous case of Jim and Pedro (UFA: 97–99), in which, if Jim refuses to shoot Pedro, then someone else will shoot Pedro and nineteenth other people. A great deal has been written about this case, and about what exactly it was that, according to Williams, made the simple utilitarian verdict on the case—that Jim should minimise the net number of deaths in the “obvious” way, by shooting Pedro—problematic. I want to add to this literature the suggestion that on one useful way of

60 Kant, Groundwork p.96.61 Kant, Groundwork, p.91

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understanding Jim’s problem, the problem has something essential to do with second-personal knowledge.

“One useful way”: there may well be other ways, of course, and some of them may well invoke—as well, or instead—the notion of authenticity that I briefly mentioned in the last section, on the moral importance of self-knowledge. Certainly authenticity was a notion that Williams made clear he greatly valued in ethics: “If there's one theme in all my work it's about authenticity and self-expression… It's the idea that some things are in some real sense really you, or express what you and others aren't…. The whole thing has been about spelling out the notion of inner necessity”62

On the other hand, the fast-accumulating literature about Jim and Pedro which takes the case to present an “integrity objection”—a reading which Williams explicitly rejected—and to be about an alleged virtue of integrity, for the most part makes discouraging enough reading for it to be worth trying something else.

Here then is my alternative suggestion. Very simply, the problem arises when Jim looks into Pedro’s eyes. It is one thing to tot up a deliberative balance-sheet and act accordingly. It is quite another thing to shoot another person. It is still quite another thing, even when shooting this other person is no more than acting as the balance-sheet tells you to act. Cost-benefit analyses of alternatives can and do make perfectly legitimate practical demands upon us. The awareness of what Jim is doing to Pedro that he shares with Pedro as he shoots him makes a quite different kind of demand on Jim. The conflict, or one of the conflicts, at the heart of the Jim and Pedro story is the conflict between these different kinds of demands. As I would put it, it is a conflict between propositional ethical knowledge and second-personal ethical knowledge.

It is true that Williams’ own remarks about the case, phrased as they are not in this way but in terms of “integrity”, more tend to suggest a point about the first-personal perspective than about the second-. That is the most obvious line to pursue in order to understand the case; on the other hand, as noted above, it has not always been terribly fruitfully pursued. Without denying the differences between the two lines, we should not miss their commonalities. At the simplest level, there is the question of what the utilitarianism that tells Jim to shoot Pedro is asking Jim to do to himself by shooting Pedro—and taking it to be obvious and unproblematic that he should shoot Pedro. What is it to become a person who does this, and who finds it obviously and unproblematically the right thing to do? Williams might say that to become such a person is to become no more than a janitor for the universal utility system (see UFA 118); I might say that to become such a person is to become deaf to second-personal reasons. But then there is a slightly subtler point: perhaps to become deaf to second-personal reasons as they arise from other persons is to become deaf to them as they arise from your own person. I have already made the point that what I call second-personal knowledge and second-personal reasons are not to be thought of as tied exclusively to the grammatical second-person: just as I can talk to myself, so I can also know myself second-personally, and see myself as a source of second-personal reasons. The same point is made by Darwall when he says that “the second-person stance is a version of the first-person standpoint” (SPS 9), and also by Kant, when he requires us to treat humanity as an end in itself “whether in your own person or somebody else’s”.

62 Interview with Bernard Williams by Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian, November 30 2002.

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Williams was at pains to stress that the point about Jim and Pedro was not that it was a case where utilitarianism gave the wrong answer: “If the stories of George and Jim have a resonance, it is not the sound of a principle being dented by an intuition” (WME 211). The problem is rather—we might almost say—that utilitarianism gives any answer at all. Jim and Pedro involves a deep and intractable conflict of values. The fact that utilitarianism finds it perfectly straightforward to resolve this conflict is not a merit of utilitarianism, but a symptom of its superficiality. It is a symptom of how little of what really matters to us it is capable of registering.

It is… a question of what sort of considerations come into finding the answer… Over all this, or round it, and certainly at the end of it, there should have been heard ‘what do you think?’, ‘does it seem like that to you?’, ‘what if anything do you want to do with the notion of integrity?’”63

Understanding the Jim and Pedro case as raising—among other things—a conflict between impersonal and propositional ethical knowledge of the kind that is typified by utilitarianism, and second-personal knowledge of the kind that I am trying to spell out here, is thus a fruitful way of understanding that case.

Having reviewed these possible uses in ethics (and, to some small extent, aesthetics) for the notions of KH, experiential knowledge, SK, and 2P knowledge, in section (f) I turn to another area where there I believe there are significant uses for these kinds of knowledge: the philosophy of religion.

(f)In the moral case, then, there seems to be a whole variety of kinds of knowledge. (Or of alleged knowledge: I am not going to add the qualification every time, but that does not mean that I am taking moral objectivity for granted.) Is there a parallel variety of kinds of religious knowledge (or alleged knowledge—same qualification)? I think there is.

The variety of kinds of K that show up in ethics leads us, I have been wanting to suggest, to an importantly heretical thought about the way ethics is typically done by academic analytic philosophers. In ethics my heresy is this: that we miss a lot by focusing on the type of ethical knowledge that can be encoded in propositions. It’s not that there is no propositional moral knowledge; of course there is. But propositional MK is only a part of MK. Focusing on that and that alone skews the picture. We miss out on a great deal of what matters in MK, and we make the whole matter of MK look unnecessarily problematic, by focusing only on the part of MK that is PK. (Not that MK, of whatever sort, isn’t problematic at all—of course it is.)

I think a closely parallel heresy about religious knowledge is worth our adherence. (In a sense this is an exceedingly familiar point, but it is not less worth making for that reason.) Philosophers focus on marshalling propositions about God; on deductive or inductive arguments that establish or probabilise his existence; on reasons, expressed in sentences, as to why the existence of evil might be grounds for saying that there cannot be a God, or probably isn’t a God, or that at any rate if there is a God, it is

63 Utilarianism: For and Against (Cambridge UP 1972) p.99, World, Mind, and Ethics (Cambridge UP 1995), p.211.

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clear that he does indeed—in the words of the hymn—move in mysterious ways. Here too my heresy is to question this propositional way of looking for knowledge about religion. And the point is precisely not (as many have thought) that if we don’t look for PK then we can’t be looking for K at all, and are bound to become “religious anti-realists” of some sort. Rather, the point is that, since there are other kinds of K besides PK, the possibility is at least open that there might be significant RK in these other categories of K. The position is not anti-realist, because I am not claiming that religious discourse doesn’t involve knowledge at all. (I’m not even saying that religious discourse doesn’t involve PK at all: of course it does.) Rather, the position is simply that a lot of significant RK is not propositional K. Just as with MK, propositional RK is only a part of RK. We skew the picture, we miss out on a great deal of what matters in RK, and we make the whole matter of RK look more problematic than it is, by focusing only on the part of RK that is PK. (Not that RK, of whatever sort, isn’t problematic at all—of course it is. We’ll come on to these problems in due course.)

So what is RK like that is not PK? Answering that question anything like fully would be a simply enormous task. Here is a quick review of a few tiny shreds from a huge fabric of evidence.

1. EK in religion The claim that there is such a thing as distinctively religious experience is given its canonical formulation by Rudolf Otto in his classic The Idea of the Holy: “If there be any single domain of human experience that presents us with something unmistakably specific and unique, peculiar to itself, assuredly it is that of the religious life” (IH p.4). The holy, Otto argues, “is a category of interpretation and valuation peculiar to the sphere of religion”; we may talk about “the holy” in the moral realm as well—Otto has in mind Kant’s talk of the holy will—but the religious sense of “the holy” is primary, and sui generis.

Religious experience is of course not all of one kind; but Otto notes some central and unifying features. Above all, there is the feature that he calls mysterium tremendum, the sense of a fearful mystery:

The feeling of it may at times come sweeping like a gentle tide, pervading the mind with a tranquil mood of deepest worship. It may pass over into a more set and lasting attitude of the soul, continuing, as it were, thrillingly vibrant and resonant, until at last it dies away and the soul resumes its “profane”, non-religious mood of everyday experience... It has its crude, barbaric antecedents and early manifestations, and again it may be developed into something beautiful and pure and glorious. it may become the hushed, trembling, and speechless humility of the creature in the presence of—whom or what? In the presence of that which is a mystery inexpressible and above all creatures.64

In his closer analysis Otto picks out, within the sense of “mysterium tremendum” that he takes to be focal to religious experience, three particular elements, which he calls the elements (i) of “awefulness”, (ii) of “overpoweringness”, and (iii) of “energy”.

64 Otto pp.12-13.

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(i) Even when the worship of ‘daemons’ has long since reached the level of worship of ‘gods’, these gods still retain as numina something of the ‘ghost’ in the impress they make on the feelings of the worshipper, viz. the peculiar quality of the ‘uncanny’ and ‘aweful’, which survives with the quality of exaltedness or sublimity or is symbolised with it… this element, softened though it is, does not disappear even on the highest level of all, where the worship of God is at its purest… The ‘shudder’ reappears in a form ennobled beyond measure where the soul, held speechless, trembles inwardly to the farthest fibre of its being.65

(ii) We come upon the ideas, first, of the annihilation of the self, and then, as its complement, of the transcendent as the sole and entire reality… one of the chiefest and most general features of mysticism is just this self-depreciation… the estimation of the self, as something not perfectly or essentially real, or even as mere nullity… And on the other hand mysticism leads to a valuation of the transcendent object of its reference as that which through plenitude of being stands supreme and absolute…66

(iii) There is, finally, a third element comprised in those of awefulness and majesty, and this I venture to call the ‘urgency’ or the ‘energy’ of the numinous object. It is particularly vividly perceptible in the [notion of] the ‘wrath’ [of God]; and it everywhere clothes itself in symbolical expressions—vitality, passion, emotional temper, will, force, movement, excitement, activity, impetus…. We have here the factor that has everywhere more than any other prompted the fiercest opposition to the ‘philosophic’ God of mere rational speculation, which can be put into a definition.67

In all these ways and more, Otto tells us, the experiential content of the religious life is entirely different from anything else in human experience. What, then, can anyone make of it who has no religious experience? To anyone in that position—and of course there are plenty—there is indeed a mystery here; Otto’s only plea to such people, delivered perhaps a little patronisingly, is that they should not try to reduce religious experience to something else.

We do not blame such an one, when he tries for himself to advance as far as he can with the help of such principles of explanation as he knows, interpreting ‘aesthetics’ in terms of sensuous pleasure, and ‘religion’ as a function of the gregarious instinct and social standards, or as something more primitive still. But the artist, who for his part has an intimate personal knowledge of the distinctive element in the aesthetic experience, will decline his theories with thanks, and the religious man will reject them even more uncompromisingly.68

A certain sort of overspill is becomes evident in the three passages quoted above: the notion of distinctively religious EK begins to morph into the notion of distinctively religious 2PK. There is the sense, not only that the mystic is confronted with a special kind of experience, but also that she is confronted with a special kind of personal presence.

65 (17)66 (21)67 (23)68 (9)

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This sense of the “overspill” of the religiously mysterious into the mysteriously personal, of course, is an absolutely pervasive sense in reports of religious experience; it can be paralleled in literally thousands of other such reports. Here I restrict myself to three examples:

And Jacob awaked out of his sleep, and he said, Surely the LORD is in this place and I knew it not. And he was afraid, and said, How dreadful is this place! This is none other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven. (Gen 28.16-17)

THOU mastering me            God! giver of breath and bread;        World’s strand, sway of the sea;            Lord of living and dead;    Thou hast bound bones and veins in me, fastened me flesh,         

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    And after it almost unmade, what with dread,        Thy doing: and dost thou touch me afresh?Over again I feel thy finger and find thee.69

And I have feltA presence that disturbs me with the joyOf elevated thoughts; a sense sublimeOf something far more deeply interfused,Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,And the round ocean, and the living air,And the blue sky, and in the mind of man, A motion and a spirit, that impelsAll thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things.(Wordsworth, Tintern Abbey)

In these and many other passages, what the pioneer of such experience reports is that, at the very limits of comprehension, in the midst of the mystery and the ineffability, a presence is sensed that—if it has to be described at all—can only be described as personal.

In other places in the documentation of religious experience, the personal element gets a good deal more marked and definite than this, and the mysterious, though still present, decidedly less so. God, to give him that name, becomes a figure who has moods, a figure who can be loved and even argued with: a fugitive, contrary, and unpredictable object (and source) of love, but a loved and loving person nonetheless.

Spem in alium nunquam habui praeter in te, Deus Israel, qui irasceris, et propitius eris, et omnia peccata hominum in tribulatione dimittis. Domine Deus, Creator coeli et terrae, respice humilitatem nostram.

69 Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Wreck of the Deutschland, stanza 1.

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I have never put my hope in any but thee, O God of Israel, who wilt grow wroth and who wilt be kindly, who holdest all the sins of men in tribulation remitted. Lord God, maker of heaven and earth, look down upon our lowliness. (Matins response to third reading during fifth week of September, from the Sarum Rite)

Ubi ergo tunc eras et quam longe? Et longe peregrinabar abs te, exclusus et a siliquis porcorum, quos de siliquis pascebam… quibus gradibus deductus in profunda inferi, quippe laborans et aestuans inopia veri, cum te, deus meus—tibi confiteor, qui me miseratus es et nondum confitentem—cum te non secundum intellectum mentis, quo modo praestare voluisti beluis, sed secundum sensum carnis quaererem. Tu autem eras interior intimo meo et superior summo meo.70

Vere tu es Deus absconditus. (Isaiah 45.15)

For I greet him the days I meet him, and bless when I understand.71

At the extreme, this sense of God as someone who can be loved can even become a sense of God as something like a disembodied or ghostly lover:

When the Bridegroom comes to me, as He sometimes does, He never signals His presence by any token, neither by voice nor by vision nor by the sound of His step. By no such movement do I become aware of Him, nor does He penetrate my being through the senses. Only, by the movement of the heart, as I have said, do I come to realize that He is with me.72

I asked one of the monks how he could sum up, in a couple of words, his way of life. He paused a moment and said, “Have you ever been in love?” I said, “Yes.” A large Fernandel smile spread across his face. “Eh bien,” he said, “c’est exactement pareil…”73

Throughout history, in every kind of society and culture, in famous people and obscure alike, this sense that the God of heaven and earth can in some sense, however hard to grasp, both love and be loved by human beings—a sense based not on doctrine, but experience—has been extraordinarily persistent. To document it fully would be to write a history of religion. For now, the main point to take from these examples is simply this: that a distinctive form of second-personality is as well established in the records of what people have counted RK as anything could be.

This much on what EK and 2PK might look like in the case of religion. What about the other two Candidates I have discussed, KH and SK? One clue to the possible place of SK in RK is that here at any rate it most certainly has been thought true that knowledge of God brings knowledge of self along with it: before God, as St Paul puts it in 1 Corinthians 13, we know even as we are known; or in Augustine’s words above, God is not only at the furthest extreme of distance above us, but also at the closest extreme of intimacy within us—Tu autem eras interior intimo meo et superior summo meo. In many writers, such as Meister Eckhart, this even becomes the idea 70 Augustine, Confessions 3.671 Gerard Manley Hopkins, Wreck of the Deutschland, Stanza 4.72 St Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermons on the Song of Songs, 7473 Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time to Keep Silence (London: Penguin, 1957), 39.

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that there is some kind of identity between God and the depths of my own being: that there is in my soul a spark, the scintilla animae, which is God. Differently inflected, the idea can become the idea of conscience already touched on (p.30): the idea that God’s standards are naturally present in us.

As for KH, there is a simple sense in which, if my argument about MK was right, then this is bound to be present in religious ethics, simply because religious ethics is ethics. If ethics involves the cardinal virtues, and hence ability-knowledge, then so will Christian ethics, since it recognises theological virtues. At a closer level of detail it is, for instance, a central part of Christian ethics to see people as made in the image of God. So seeing them is surely a disposition—and after all, in (e)1 I classed virtues in general as ways of seeing. There is then a place in Christian ethics for knowledge how, simply because there is a place in ethics for KH.

A second and less obvious place for KH in religion may be indicated by a notorious passage in Pascal:

You would like to attain faith, and do not know the way; you would like to cure yourself of unbelief, and ask the remedy for it. Learn of those who have been bound like you, and who now stake all their possessions. These are people who know the way which you would follow, and who are cured of an ill of which you would be cured. Follow the way by which they began; by acting as if they believed, taking the holy water, having masses said, etc…74

Pascal is often attacked for suggesting in this passage that knowing how to live the religious life is a way into propositional assent to the doctrines of religion. If we are sensitive to the possibility of RK that is not PK but KH, if indeed we reflect a little on the familiar platitude that “religion is not a dogma but a way of life”, we may see that what Pascal is saying can be read as at least suggesting something much more plausible than that.

Compare someone who would like to believe in the possibility of MK, but, for sceptical reasons—perhaps he has spent too much time reading Mackie or Ayer—finds it impossible to be sure what basis if any there could be to the alleged propositions of MK; he is not one of those people who thinks (mistakenly in my view) that a metaethics that says that all first-order normative propositions are false, or alternatively are meaningless, is entirely inert and innocuous at the level of practice. Such a person might well nonetheless find it important to behave certain ways; we might say of him that, even if he doesn’t have any very fixed beliefs about metaethics, still he knows how to act well. But then, if we think that MK is KH as well as PK, that itself may look like a reason to say that he does have some MK. (Such people, by the way, seem far from imaginary; I think lots of professional philosophers whom I’ve known fit this description pretty well exactly.)

Just likewise, then, in religion, someone who knows how to engage in religious and spiritual practice, even though s/he is quite unsure what s/he thinks about the doctrines of religion, can equally count as someone who does have some RK, since not all RK was PK in the first place. Pascal’s advice about what to do to make

74 Pascal, Pensées s.233, tr. Trotter.

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yourself a believer is perfectly sound advice, if you think75 that there is more to being a believer than holding particular doctrines; and if you think that some RK is not PK but KH, then of course that is exactly what you will think.

That completes my answer to the question what the different kinds of RK might look like. I have of course ducked what may seem to the reader like the most obvious and important question about them: how are they knowledge?

Well, if there is no God, of course they are not knowledge. Does that mean that we’re back at questions about propositional knowledge—that we have to establish that God exists by propositional means before we can even start talking about these other sorts of knowledge as knowledge? No, it does not—for at least two reasons.

The first is that, since these other modes of knowing are genuinely different from the propositional mode, they therefore have evidential weight in genuinely different ways from the propositional way. It is possible in principle—it may even be actual in practice—that, so far from arguing that these other forms of “K” can’t really be K because the evidence of PK goes against them, we might argue in the other direction: since the evidence of these other forms of K points in a different way from the evidence of PK, that is a reason for reassessing our attitude to the PK evidence.

Secondly, and connectedly, we can say this: the believer has evidence (of non-PK sorts) that is different from the evidence that confronts the unbeliever. That can make it perfectly rational, even when we are dealing arguments that are entirely conducted in the terms of PK, for the believer to weight the evidence very differently from the unbeliever.

As an example of what I have in mind here, take the problem of evil. The critic of theism quite often notices that she makes little or no impression on theists by simply announcing a list of worldly mishaps, be they never so dire. The critic may conclude that theists just display a mulish imperviousness to empirical evidence. For the theist, however, this sort of evidence is irrelevant. Pace John Stuart Mill,76 theists do not arrive at their theism by doing a “value-audit” on creation: totting up the net balance of good and evil in creation, inferring that the net balance of good and evil in any Creator would have to be just the same, and concluding either that there is a universally good Creator and the discordant partial evil in the world is only “harmony not understood,” or that there is no such Creator, or that the Creator is either morally ambiguous or just plain evil. Their theism was, so to speak, already there before they even considered how things stand with the world. And it rests upon quite a different ground from any calculus of good and bad fortune in the world that might be devised; the ground of experience, of EK.

75 Admittedly the passage of Pascal I quote above fairly definitely implies that Pascal does not think this; he sees ways of acting as ways into believing in the propositional sense. That does not stop the view I am proposing from being interesting and possibly correct; it just stops us from attributing that view to Pascal himself.76 J. S. Mill, “Essay on nature,” at http://www.lancs.ac.uk/users/philosophy/texts/mill_on.htm : “If a tenth part of the pains which have been expended in finding benevolent adaptations in all nature had been employed in collecting evidence to blacken the character of the Creator, what scope for comment would not have been found . . .” Thanks for the reference to Peter Cave.

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Hence theists see the problem of evil too from a quite different epistemic position from their critics. It is not that theists—unless they are intolerably naïve, smug, and callous—do not see evil as a problem. But it is that theists see evil very differently, because their whole outlook is coloured by their experience-based conviction that there is a good God, no matter what evil there may be in the world. In particular, I suggest, they see evil as a problem in time: a diachronic problem.77

Suppose you have a friend whom you trust deeply, on the solid evidential basis of your long and vivid experience of that friend’s care for you. One day you find very strong evidence that that friend has betrayed you in some fundamental way. Is there only one rational response to this new negative evidence: to weigh the new negative against your past positive evidence and decide which counts for more?

You might think so if you were considering the question in abstraction from time, as a straight inconsistency in the propositions that constitute your evidence. But suppose you look at your evidential problem about your friend, as of course you in fact will, as a diachronic problem, a problem in time. Then you will immediately see that you have two further salient options besides insisting on reaching a verdict, right now, on nothing but the present balance of evidence. One option is to wait and see how things turn out. If you just hold off a little, then maybe a good explanation of your friend’s apparent betrayal will soon become clear to you. The other option is to confront your friend. Track him down, explain how things look to you, see what he has to say for himself. In short, have a good moan at him, and see how he takes it.

Both these responses to a trusted friend’s apparent betrayal seem just as rational as insisting on reaching an immediate verdict about that apparent betrayal without waiting or looking for more evidence. Indeed in imaginable particular cases, they will often be far more rational. Their rationality depends, broadly speaking, on how good are your antecedent reasons for trusting the friend.

It can be just likewise with the theist’s response to the problem of evil. Hers too need in no way be an irrational response to the epistemic conflict confronting her as a result of that problem. She does not find herself atemporally confronted with the raw propositions “There is a morally perfect and omnipotent creator God” and “There is evil in the world,” and challenged to find a way to reconcile them or weigh them off against each other in the abstract. Rather, the problem of evil typically comes to the theist within the time-series of her experience and her life. First there is her experience of God; then there is the fact that she is confronted by some particular evil, perhaps by horrifying evil. But the time-series does not stop there. It goes on, and that gives the theist her chance to wait and see what God might do about the evil that confronts her—and indeed to moan at God about it.

In this sort of way, evidence from non-propositional sources can bear vitally upon what it makes sense (epistemic sense and moral sense) for us to think about even such purely propositional problems as Epicurus’ Riddle. Knowledge comes in varieties—in more varieties than the single propositional variety on which so much of analytic philosophy’s attention is usually so quasi-autistically fixated. It is only by knowing

77 I think it is a narrative problem too. I do not have space to pursue this here, but see Eleonore Stump, Wandering in Darkness (OUP 2010), especially her distinction between “Dominican” and “Franciscan” philosophical reasoning at the beginning.

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how to combine those varieties that we can come to real overall understanding—to an understanding of the world and our place in it which will certainly have scientific knowledge as a part, but only as a part. What happens, on the other hand, when we try to eliminate non-science from our knowledge, and to insist that the only real knowledge that there is is scientific knowledge, is that we get nonsense.

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