John Schwenkler on knowing yourself Biblically

Prof. John Schwenkler has a series of articles on 3 Quarks about his conception of Philosophy.

The first  post in the series 'explained how philosophy can aim to help us become articulate about things we already understand at a practical or intuitive level, much as drawing a map makes explicit the knowledge we have in being able to find our way around a certain place.'

The problem with this view is that this aim is fulfilled when we learn a language and get better and better at using it. But improving linguistic performance is not what Philosophy is about. Notoriously, the opposite is the case.

As for making maps, training in cartography and orienteering and so forth is what will make you better at it. But you'd still need to keep checking and updating the map because landscapes change and, in any case, initial intuitions turn out to be faulty or not fine-grained enough.

Language is at ease with ontological dysphoria- the feeling of being in the wrong universe- and can easily convey meanings which Graph theory would struggle to capture. Why? The answer is that 'Paradigmatic' substitutability is itself paradigmatic of the 'Syntagmatic' spatial relationism. What sort of configuration space undergirds, or is the hypokeimenon for, the claim- 'Thous wast not born for death, immortal bird'? The answer is one which has an orthogonal, ontologically dysphoric, dimension, which, however, has an incompossible, impredicative, ditopology. When I put it in such brute terms, the poet says- 'D'uh, Captain Obvious! Everybody knows Keats has to die to become an immortal nightingale but the nightingale doesn't. Fuck is wrong with you? Anyway, the ditopology is not impredicative at all if Evolution is true. Co-evolved processes solve Djikstra deadlock or livelock, though there may only be zero-knowledge proof that this happens.' Meanwhile, the philosopher has either run away or started babbling on about Trump and Hitler and the epistemic rape involved in permitting gendered toilets or some such shite.

Because Language can have a Graph Theoretic description only at the price of rendering Semantics meaningless or 'anything goes', drawing a map is a poor metaphor for 'becoming articulate about things'. It would be a mistake to treat this figure of speech as a concrete fact about the world. Even worse, were we to construct a second metaphor on top of the first- for example were we to speak of Language as having an aim in the manner of a person who is using a map to get where she wants to go- and take that meta-metaphor to be a fact about the world, we would, by ex falso quodlibet, have fallen off the cliff edge of sense in order to babble nonsense of an increasingly egregious and inutile sort. Rather than simply shit higher than our arsehole in a Kantian manner, we would render ourselves a comic sort of cretin- like Chidi in the Good Place. But Chidi was ripped. The guy was pure beef-cake. But beef-cake with a heart. So, at the end of the day, not a philosopher at all.

Philosophy of an armchair sort is all very well if it has no map and no aim- Truth is a pathless land and all that- but if it is entrapped by a meta-metaphor then it can only aim to stop being itself so as become some other discipline which can actually see the target at which it aims and correct itself on the basis of trial and error.

The trouble is Philosophy won't be able to correctly identify the sort of profession it ought to turn itself into. Why? It makes you bad at using language. Thus, a project which started off- with Plato's 'Lysis'- with the aim of being a more successful child-molester ended up as this virtue signalling business of being an underpaid child-minder to shitheads in their Twenties and Thirties- or even older. I sometimes toy with the idea with signing up for a Post Grad degree in Philosophy. I mean, not being actually homeless, I need some other way to signal my manic protestation of abject loserdom to an indifferent world.

Schwenkler writes-

There are lots of things that we know about the world that we cannot easily put into words.

Surely this depends on how exacting a standard we apply to our linguistic performance? Poetry can use meta-metaphors to say anything with great compression. But precisely because its ditopology exceeds any 'univalent foundations' within our grasp, its cohomologies defeat intensional definition. But Tarski covered all this long before I was born. The world bottoms out, not as atomic propositions, thank Goodness, but as primitive notions. That's good news. We ourselves are as yet undefined.

By “the world” as I use it here, I mean not only the spaces we inhabit or the wider physical world that they are part of, but also ourselves, our society, and our nature as human beings—including a great deal of what, as human beings, is good and bad for us. It’s these last few categories that are the most interesting to me here, since they concern things that are the usual subject matter of philosophy.

If we evolved by natural selection on an uncertain fitness landscape then we don't, can't, shouldn't know what is good or bad for us.

To argue otherwise is an exercise in stupidity. Like the following-

I’ll start with a simple example, drawn from the philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe.

Who was as stupid as shit. Being Witlesstein's fag hag took its toll. 

Imagine that a friend tells you that she’s about to fail a test.

You tell her she doesn't know that for certain. The test may be cancelled. The College may burn down. We don't know what will happen in the future.

If you don't take this sensible course, you will make a fool of yourself.

Surprised by what she said, you answer “Surely you aren’t that bad at the subject!”—at which point your friend tells you that, indeed, she isn’t bad at the subject at all, but this isn’t why she is going to fail. It’s rather that she wants to get back at her parents for all of the pressure they have been putting on her.

This girl is a narcissistic nutjob. You tell her she has had plenty of opportunities to get back at her parents. Clearly, she hasn't taken them. What's to stop her bottling out once again? Weak people say they will do things in the future which they haven't done in the past. That's why sensible people tune them out when they start talking.
Sadly, philosophers- at least in their professional capacity- aren't sensible at all.

If your friend has managed to get her point across, her response will get you to draw an important distinction. You will realize that, in saying “I am going to fail this test,” your friend was telling you of her intention to do this—and that, if indeed she goes on to fail the test, then she’ll have done so intentionally or on purpose.

You don't know that at all. She may fail because she is stupid. She was only pretending to have a plan to fail intentionally.

Having realized this, you’ll be in a position to respond to her appropriately: for example, by trying to persuade your friend that this really isn’t a good way of getting back at her parents, rather than by offering to help her memorize a couple of key formulas.

If she can pass a test by 'memorizing a couple of formulas', then she can only fail intentionally. Either her intention was to fuck with her parents or her intention was to be a lazy cunt.

You’ll try to convince your friend not to fail the test rather than trying to help her not to do so—since the latter thing isn’t something she needs your help in at all.

How do you know that is what you will be doing? It may be your true intention is to waste your own time or to virtue signal of to sublimate your lesbian crush etc. etc. 

Everything above is the sort of thing you’ll come to know about your friend’s situation, and will be able to bring to bear in responding to it, just in virtue of having grown up in human society. But it is far less easy to say what it is that you know, when you know what it is to express a plan or intention, or to do something intentionally or on purpose. 

But that's exactly what the above expresses. It doesn't seem difficult at all.

What is the difference between planning or intending to do a certain thing, and simply thinking that this is something one is going to do?

There is a plan or an intention. Simples.

What is the difference between doing something intentionally or on purpose, and simply having it happen that one does it?

Having an intention or a purpose. That's the difference. This stuff can be important if you are accused of a crime or a tort.

If you take these questions seriously and try to answer them, then you are doing philosophy—in this case, thinking philosophically about the nature of action and intention.

You may be a lawyer or a defendant in a law-suit and thus have an incentive to take the question seriously. If you are 'doing philosophy' your incentive may be to be as stupid as possible. It is doubtful that this is a 'serious' discipline. It appears to be mere play-acting.

Notice, however, that this thinking will take its bearing from something you knew already, namely what it is to have an intention and then act on it.

We don't know this. We do know, to some degree or other, when it is helpful for us to use the word intention. But familiarity with the pragmatics of a word does not mean one has an intensional definition of it. Knowing how to use a thing for one or two purposes doesn't mean you really know it. This is certainly true of my mobile phone.

To gain or impart utility is not the same thing as to gain or impart knowledge. One may, as a metaphor, a figure of speech, speak of a utilitarian exchange as a knowledge exchange.  The problem with metaphors is that we get into trouble when we treat them as facts and erect fresh metaphors on their basis. It is this sort of meta-metaphoricity which is going on here-

After all, if you didn’t know this, then you couldn’t have known what your friend was trying to tell you when she said that she wanted to get back at her parents.

You don't know anything at all. That's not what this type of language game is about. Your friend gains utility by whining about her parents and you gain utility by showing you care thus imparting utility. There is a coordination game here. Your first response stroked her ego by telling her how smart she is. Your second shows you care about her difficulties with her parents while at the same time believing she is destined for great things because she is so smart and will do well in the test. If she suddenly breaks down and says 'Actually, it's not my parents. They are great. And it isn't the test. The thing is...I'm pregnant!', you won't necessarily be greatly shocked. You understand that what actually happened was her saying 'My life is over' which translated into 'I'm going to fail the test'. Then she said 'I've let down my parents' which translated into 'its my parents fault. They should have known I'm a screw up. This will teach them!' Only then was she finally able to put the enormity of what had happened to her into words. But that isn't the end of the story. Plans and purposes and intentions don't begin to capture the maiuetic dialogue that follows. But that's not philosophy, it is Life.

We fail language, we fail life, if we mistake our limited pragmatics for anything intensional. Consider the following sophistry-

If you didn’t know what it was to have the intention to fail a test, then you couldn’t have known that this is what your friend was trying to tell you of.

So either 'intention to fail' is innate knowledge or you could never have learned it. By contrast to say you have good enough pragmatics to grasp 'intention to fail a test' means you could develop sufficiently good pragmatics to guess that what your friend wants to say has nothing to do with tests or her parents. Something else is going on. Suppose this isn't the case. Still, your friend needs to recognize that something else really is going on. Intentions relate to a Hegelian life-project. She needs a better one.

If you don't get this, you can still talk to your friend but you are doing so in a manner which, as A.Is evolve, might fail a Turing test.

If you didn’t know that, then you might have responded to your friend by telling her that she was good enough at the subject that she could pass the test in spite of how she was feeling about her parents.
But of course you wouldn’t have said such a thing. You knew full well what your friend was trying to tell you. What you didn’t know was what it was that you thereby knew.

You did have a Structural Causal Model. She wants to piss off her parents. So the game is now about pissing off her parents without her hurting her own prospects. She should have them SWATted.

You couldn’t make your knowledge explicit, or put it into a map-like form.

Yes you could. This is the sort of thing Alexa will soon be able to do.

In trying to do that you would be doing philosophy, where this means reflecting on something that you already know well enough to apply this knowledge in various real-life contexts, in the hope of becoming articulate about the knowledge that you are thereby able to apply.

That's not doing philosophy. It is learning to write or speak well. But communication is about utility, not knowledge.

Schwenkler concludes his first post thus-

In doing philosophy, sometimes we think we are articulating how things themselves are, when in fact our vision is distorted by a false or inaccurate way of thinking. This is a possibility that philosophy has to take seriously. I will return to it in a future post.

When people articulate 'how things themselves are', they do so only in a particular context where there is a convention in that regard. If thinking weren't 'false and inaccurate' with respect to 'how things themselves are' then it can't be the case that at least one aspect of our cognitive faculties evolved by natural selection. It could be a Chomsky type language instinct. It could be some type of intuition. But whatever it is, it didn't need to evolve. Howsoever it appeared, it was perfectly adapted. Thus a type of philosophy which is about 'articulating' what is already known is a type of Occassionalist theology or else nakedly hinges on something miraculous or ineffably mysterious.

The problem with saying 'philosophy could be about making us better at thinking' is that 'thinking about x' is best improved by studying the subject called 'x'. It may seem that philosophy is 'thinking about thinking' but it isn't really. That's cognitive science. It is an experimental science which requires a high level scientific background. If you are doing it, you could- at a lower tariff of academic attainment- be making big bucks saving people's lives as a Specialist Doctor. Nobody with a philosophy degree is smart enough to engage in any such thing.

There is no point aiming at what something else aims at better because it alone can see the target. Yet this is what Schwenkler, in his third post, proposes-

The aim of 'Knowing Our Limits' is to describe, and begin to work out the details of, a regulative epistemology whose aim is not to describe what knowledge is, but to make people into better thinkers who are more aware of their cognitive limitations.

So Schwenkler thinks philosophy should aim to do a bit of filing and general admin- 'regulative epistemology'- for cognitive science because it has a worthwhile aim- viz. making us better thinkers.
The problem here is that cognitive science may not want stupid philosophers anywhere near its files. It may itself be driven by 'speculative epistemology' but it has no need for anything 'regulative'. Why? Because regulations don't matter, only results do. No doubt, there may be protocols to be observed but you want a smart guy, already a leader in the field, to specify them. Philosophers aren't smart.

Here is how Ballantyne sums the project up:
'Regulative epistemology’s broad-based research program is prompted by a concrete problem: our intellectual imperfections. The problem is an old one, but regulative epistemology aims to attack it in a special way. Three perspectives normally disconnected must be joined together: descriptive, normative, and practical. Corresponding to each perspective is a general question. What are inquirers like? What should inquirers do? How can inquirers do more of what they should? The research program involves describing inquirers, understanding what they should do, and figuring out how they can better reach their epistemic goals.'

This sounds like the gobbledygook middle Managers speak when they haven't a clue what to do next.

As I have indicated, it’s essential to Ballantyne’s regulative project that the inquirers he’s concerned with are human inquirers,

as opposed to what? Dogs?

and that the description of what these inquirers are like take its bearing from what we know of human nature.

We can't know anything about human nature because we evolved on an uncertain fitness landscape.

Ballantyne argues that this demands attention to what psychologists and cognitive scientists have discovered about the various forms of bias and unreasonability that make us prone to put too much trust in our own thinking and fail to respond appropriately to the controversial status of many of our deeply held beliefs.

But, if we pay attention to psychologists we discover that their statistical methodology is faulty and so their vaunted discoveries are junk. Something similar happens when we look closely at any 'cognitive scientist'. Still, our imagination may be fired in a speculative manner. But a 'regulative epistemology' would kill off precisely the things we find interesting. Why? Because their Structural Causal Models are still pretty basic. Once they reach a stage where we can all get cortical implants for Kung Fu fighting and speaking Mandarin and being able to prove the abc theorem, sure, then we'd say there is 'knowledge' here. But we are a long way away from any such happy event.

Recognizing these facts about ourselves should lead us to decrease our confidence in many of these beliefs and take a more tolerant and open-minded attitude toward those who disagree with them.

But we'd also be recognizing this same fact about those who disagree with us. This won't make us more tolerant. After all, we all have to wipe our own bum. Why should we wipe everybody else's bum? The fact that my brain and my anus produce shit does not make me tolerant of the shit inside other people's heads or the turds emanating from their anus.

Another of the most interesting elements of Ballantyne’s book is his discussion of what might make it possible for the principles framed by a regulative epistemologist actually to do any real work in guiding the way a person thinks. He situates this discussion in the context of the distinction drawn by many psychologists between two “systems” that work to shape our judgments. One of these systems is fast, automatic, and unconscious, generating the “snap” judgments that facilitate quick recognition and unreflective decision-making. The other is slow, deliberate, and conscious, requiring us to “stop and think” before making up our minds about how things are. Given how much of our thinking is unreflective and outside the reach of consciousness, what is hope is there that philosophical principles could make a difference to it?

This shit is pop psychology. In practice, we crowd source or employ Tardean mimetics. Still, if you are a middle manager and your company is going down the tubes, you may want to explain your decision making in some such terms to some other guy in the same boat but lower down the totem pole.

Ballantyne’s answer is promising. He argues that what’s needed for a philosophical framework to make a difference to actual human inquiry is that the framework be mirrored in what he calls a picture that can come easily to mind and make a difference to our subsequent thinking.

In other words, lets cobble some cheap shite together and sell it on Amazon by calling it a 'philosophical framework'. If that doesn't sell, we can always fall back on writing books titled 'Sex Secrets of the Pythagoreans' or 'Metaphysical guide to better Micturation'.

And his task in Knowing Our Limits is to give us such a picture of ourselves and our cognitive limitations, in order that we might take this picture to heart and thereby come to reason better.

Yes, yes, take picture to heart and learn to be better person. Also, get a proper job you fucking retard. Your cousin is a Doctor. Not a PhD, an actual Doctor. Such naches his mother he gives!

As I have indicated, it is not just in the subfield of epistemology that the pressures of professionalization have led philosophers to do our work in a way that is largely detached from the aim of guiding human life.

The good news about the 'pressures of professionalization' is that it keeps the hoi polloi in the dark about your collective cretinism. By contrast if your masterwork is 'Better Orgasms through Berkleyan Ontology', your Mom reads it and says sadly 'I think it's time we had a little talk about...well, the birds and the bees. You really aren't supposed to put them up there. It isn't sanitary.'

 Schwenkler ends by asking if
there is any distinctively philosophical form of self-understanding. In the case we imagined, your knowledge that you are spilling sugar on the floor is something that you come to in the same way as you could come to know such a thing about anyone else: seeing the trail of sugar reveals to you that someone is making a mess, and a bit of further investigation gets you to the discovery that this someone is you. You learn something about yourself through a combination of observation and inference, much as you might come to recognize in yourself some of the human traits that are described by social scientists.

You are not spilling anything on the floor. You are pushing a shopping trolley. A bag of sugar in the trolley got torn and started leaking sugar. You have not learned anything about yourself. You have merely learned that a defective bag of sugar was in your trolley. You complain about this to the manager.

It seems the 'philosophical form of self-understanding' is analogous to permitting a clumsy conjuror to force a card on you so as to mime astonishment as the shithead proceeds to waste your precious time.

What’s needed to get us beyond this picture is the recognition that there is also a way of understanding ourselves that is internal to many human activities and social practices. 
Why recognize something that is garbled nonsense. There is only way of understanding ourselves. It is our way of doing so. It is internal to us. It isn't internal to 'human activities', 'social practices', or 'economic forces'. How do we know? Inanimate objects participate in human activities. They don't understand themselves. Conscious beings may understand themselves. But they do it in a manner internal to themselves. No doubt, some people give and receive pleasure by pretending that they are helping each other to understand something about themselves- viz. what a special little snowflake one is- but something similar happens when they help each other to see God or Satan or the tears at the heart of things.

When we form friendships, start families, play games, exchange ideas, create works of literature and art, and so on, what we do is not something that can be characterized sufficiently from the outside as a suite of behaviors with certain observable consequences.
How do we know? It may be that is the case. What is certain is that a guy with a better Structural Causal Model of what is happening can help us improve our performance in each of these areas.
 Rather, our actions aim at ends, and respond to normative demands, that can be understood only from within the perspective of one who does these very things.
But the moment we speak of ends or demands or aims, our conatus is being translated into a Structural Causal Model of an objective, external, type.
 In his recent book The Exchange of Words, the philosopher Richard Moran calls this the characterization of a “participant’s perspective”, and he contrasts it with a “third-personal” or “outsider’s” perspective on human phenomena. 
The trouble here is that if a 'participant's perspective' can be said to exist then the person in question is seeing herself from outside. Why? To be bored shitless is one thing. To truly participate in a boring exercise is to yourself actively engage in boring others shitless. Seen from this perspective, a spirit of emulous stridency seizes you. You start raising points of order or whatever boring shite the others are getting up to.
As understood “from within” in the way that a philosopher will approach it, human nature is not just a set of tendencies, but also a source of norms–not just who we are, but also what we are to be. 
Boring shitheads laboriously forcing cards upon each other so as to mime mutual amazement that such Magic should exist.
To recognize the first of these things in light of the second is to engage in philosophy: to explore and thereby ennoble the self.
or, indeed, to play with yourself and thereby contribute to a circle jerk of mutual congratulation.