Jason Stanley and the Recovery of Artisanal Knowledge in Plato

JASON STANLEY AND THE RECOVERY OF ARTISANAL KNOWLEDGE IN PLATO

ABSTRACT: In this paper I first lay out the way Jason Stanley deconstructs the mental / manual labor distinction by way of insisting on his deflationary (because not requiring verbal articulability) notion of propositional knowledge occurring as a scaffolding for motor skill. I then show how this allows us to recover a sense of “artisanal knowledge” in what Plato had denigrated as mere “knack” or “guesswork,” even as the supposedly purely manual labor of slave nurses caring for the children of citizens occupies a crucial role in the Laws.

In Stanley and Krakauer 2013 the authors affirm that motor skill requires both motor acuity and propositional knowledge. Via philosophical analysis, and via analysis of the HM case, the authors undermine the folk distinction between practical and theoretical activity. The paper emphasizes that despite common belief, cognitive neuroscience findings do not support that distinction.

The authors note that cognitive neuroscience distinguishes declarative and procedural knowledge. However, while declarative knowledge is verbally articulable knowledge, "procedural knowledge" is a misnomer; it is not really knowledge, but is better termed "motor acuity" (= decrease in variability and increase in smoothness of movements). 

Many problems arise when equating these cognitive neuroscience terms with philosophical terms. First, it is very misleading to equate "declarative knowledge" with the philosophical term "propositional knowledge." The authors affirm that propositional knowledge is knowledge of facts, but in a deflationary move building on Stanley 2011, they further contend that propositional knowledge need not be verbally articulable. On the other hand, one should not equate "procedural knowledge" with "motor skill," for that leaves out the contribution of propositional knowledge to motor skill.

Not-necessarily verbally articulable propositional knowledge provides a scaffold for development of motor skills in three areas: 1) acuity of selected action components; 2) new actions (e.g., new techniques of running, jumping, etc); 3) ability to select the right action from a repertoire.

In Propaganda (Stanley 2015), Stanley builds on Stanley and Krakaeur 2013 to deconstruct (in a fairly rigorous use of the term) the mental / manual labor distinction. (That is to say, Derrida thematized a form of critique that can be used outside his particular applications.)

Schema of deconstruction: (1). Identify what is presented as an opposition as a hierarchy (diagnosis of false neutrality). (2a). Show that the terms of the opposition are found on both sides (recognition of failure of purity), and in particular, (2b) that the terms of the denigrated are essential to the privileged (overturning). (3). Show that the hierarchy depends on a “general economy” in which the terms circulate freely (reinscription).

So, in Stanley 2015, propositional knowledge, which had formerly been thought to be exclusively “mental labor,” is to be found in what had been seen as the mere knack side of “manual labor.” Stanley aligns this with Gramsci saying that there is never any purely mechanical or physical labor, there is always some skill or even "creative intellectual labor" involved (cited at Stanley 2015, 271).

On the other hand – and though this might be slightly underplayed in Propaganda I think it's at least implicitly there -- there is also the intuitive, the knack in mental labor. Here, you just see or feel that an argument has something going for it, even before its conclusions can also be, later "proven": here I'm thinking of Lee Braver's work in Groundless Grounds (Braver 2012) on Heidegger and Wittgenstein.

In Propaganda this "intuitive" aspect of intellectual work would have to teased out of Jason's work on ideology's prevention or insertion of certain concepts into one's conceptual scheme as well as the cognitive penetration of the perceptual.

If we can find then the intuitive or even "perceptual" in the intellectual (not just what you see when you look at the world -- do you see exploitation at McDonald's? do you see racism in mass incarceration? -- but what you "see" when you say "I see what you're saying" that is, the feeling of being convinced by an argument), then not only are the properties of the privileged also found in the denigrated ("manual" labor includes propositional knowledge, formerly seen as the exclusive property of "intellectual" labor), but vice versa ("skill" or "knack" inhabits the "intellectual").

That latter bit is the key to the overturning phase of a deconstruction: the properties of the denigrated are to be found – indeed to be essential to – the privileged.

The final step is the important one: the distinction is only possible on the basis of a “general economy” in which both sides are embedded. This is often named with a term based on the denigrated: “arche-writing” is the prime example. So what is new term to be here for the general economy in which properties of "knack" and "reason" freely circulate? I will propose “artisanal knowledge” here.

 

Let me shift now to an extended analysis in which we recover “artisanal knowledge” in what Plato says in the Laws about the “guesswork” of slave women acting as nurses for citizen children in choosing the right song to soothe agitated children or energize slothful children.

First, let us recall that for Plato the educational artisan must "choose" the right songs. To expand on this, we can see the sort of (deflationary / not necessarily verbally articulable) propositional knowledge Stanley and Krakauer require, even though Plato denigrates that as "happy gift of nature":

Here the harmonized soul is the goal of musical education; the philosopher sets forth the criterion of a harmonized soul, but it is left to the artisanal labour of craftsmen set to work under philosophic direction to choose the exact components of the musical regime that will produce the harmonious soul. 'But we must look for those craftsmen who by the happy gift of nature are capable of following the trail of true beauty and grace . . . ' (Republic 401 c). (Protevi 2001, 128)

There is a singularity of bodily rapport at work in the Laws treatment of the nurse – child relation, but I think that fits into the perceptual / motor acuity side of things: the nurses have to sense how hard the baby is crying (perceptual acuity) and then they have to perform the lullaby in the correct way (motor acuity: not too much force, not too little, etc). The propositional knowledge components (the scaffolding as Stanley and Krakauer put it) appear not only in the “artisanal knowledge” of the nurses (they know many facts about music, children, and their intersection), but also in the apprenticeship of the nurses (the facts known by their teachers).

The reason that a Stanley-inspired recovering of the artisanal knowledge of the slave nurses is important is that Plato insists on the emotional core of character development and on the shared emotional dispositions of people raised under one political regime or another. For Plato, ethical development entails an emotional reaction prior to any rational justification ("he will rightfully object to what is ugly and hate it while still young before he can grasp the reason": Republic 402a).

For Aristotle as well the ethical virtues are constituted by the right disposition of emotions, and such dispositions are attained by consistent training of children's emotional relation to pleasure and pain (Nicomachean Ethics 2.3.1104b10-13). The widest context for the habitual development of ethical virtues is the customs and laws of the city, such that the character of the citizens is the most important task of the legislator (NE 2.1.1103b2-5; Politics 8.1.1337a10). 

Let's look at musicality in Plato for a look at such "political physiology" (Protevi 2009). Book 7 of the Laws begins with the Athenian saying that despite its importance the nurture and education of children can only be a matter of advice to heads of household rather than law (788b-c), even though habits of transgression from petty misdeeds can ripple up to bad effect in a polity (790b; 793c). So it can be hoped that citizens will take the advice to them on these matters as a law to them and to their households (790b). Political affect is of the utmost importance to Plato, but he must describe rather than prescribe its genesis. 

The reason why Plato must describe, though he cannot prescribe, is two fold. First, in the Laws he foregoes the blank slate he gives himself in constructing the ideal city in the Republic. So he has to describe child rearing that is realistically constrained by real geography and custom; he can't just prescribe what should happen. Second, he cannot prescribe in detail the singular inter-corporeal rhythms that lie at the root of emotional moral development; he can only describe the irreducible singularity of relation between nurse and infant rhythms that blocks rational description.

Now the concern with reproduction begins before pregnancy. The matrons engaged by the State supervisors can investigate marital sexual relations – presumably frequency, timing, and so on – and what tips them off is the denunciation of a married but childless couple who is "paying regard to aught else than the injunctions imposed amid the sacrifices and rites of matrimony" (784a-d). Once pregnancy occurs, the Athenian recommends that pregnant women take walks so that the external shaking of the fetus help its body grow into robust health (789b-790b). And with regard to the soul we must pay the same sort of attention to imposed movement; analogous to the way dancing prescribed by priestesses will help those afflicted with "Corybantic troubles" (see Dodds 1951, 78-80, for a social and somatic functionalist / cathartic reading of this passage), so too will rocking and singing calm an infant (790d).  

Continuing the discussion, the Athenian explains that "fright is due to some morbid condition of soul. Hence, when such disorders are treated by rocking movements the external motion thus exhibited dominates [kratei] the internal, which is the source of the fright or frenzy" (790e). The lawgivers must rely on custom for the most efficacious selection of these songs and on the caregiver's sensitivity and skill in delivering them at the proper time, with proper intensity, and with proper rhythm. The lawgiver can set the context for their use, but cannot discuss the details of the lullaby or its somatic/psychic effects. Now why is the Athenian so concerned here? It's because temper (the proper relation to fear) and moral excellence are so closely connected (791b-c). But then comes the admission at 792a that the harmonizing of the soul of the infant with regard to the placidity of its temper must rely on the "guesswork [tekmairontai]" of nurses, who are able to discern the proper course of action -- the right rocking motion, the right lullaby -- in placating a screaming child. 

Once children are born, there is also supervision of the collective games of children in the public setting of the "local sanctuary" between the ages of three and six (794b-c). But note the difference between recommendations by officials to citizens for the citizens to oversee the lullabies of the nurses of infants at home and the direct supervision by public officials of nurses as they accompany the public games of children. The key point is that in the lullaby there's a singularity of bodily rapport between nurse and infant that is resistant to hyper-intellectualist rational supervision, so that the nurses must resort to guesswork. But that guesswork had to be developed and deployed in a scaffolding of Stanley-style (deflationary intellectualist) propositional knowledge.

And the total package of knowledge and sensitivity of the slave nurses is of fundamental importance to the corporeal development of proper emotional balance and hence moral intuition. Again, political affect is of the utmost importance to Plato, and the lynchpin of the system described in the Laws is the “guesswork” or better, “artisanal knowledge” of slave women.

WORKS CITED

Aristotle. 1984. The Complete Works of Aristotle. 2 vols. Edited by Jonathan Barnes. Princeton University Press.

Braver, Lee. 2012. Groundless Grounds: A Study of Wittgenstein and Heidegger. MIT Press.

Dodds, E.R. 1951. The Greeks and the Irrational. University of California Press.

Plato. 1961. The Collected Dialogues of Plato. Edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. Princeton University Press.

Protevi, John. 2001. Political Physics. Athlone Press.

Protevi, John 2009. Political Affect. University of Minnesota Press.

Stanley, Jason. 2011. Know How. Oxford University Press.

Stanley, Jason. 2015. Propaganda: How It Works. Princeton University Press.

Stanley, Jason and Krakauer, John. 2013. Motor skill depends on knowledge of facts. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 7 (Article 503), 29 August. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2013.00503 

Comments

[Joe Neisser]

Thanks for posting this very interesting blog. I appreciate your reconstruction of the deconstruction. When I heard Stanley's take-down of the philosopher's fiction "know how" several years ago at SSPP, it struck me as a very powerful idea. As you point out, one of the key moves is to distinguish the analysis of the propositional structure of knowledge from (a) cognitive neuroscience and (b) linguistic ability. But what follows? I suspect that Stanley's work is far more devastating and destructive to enactivist/embodiment philosophers than might be thought from reading this blog. You seem to suggest that deconstructing this distinction will show how it operates to privilege intellectualism/Platonism. But the philosopher's fiction of "know how", traceable directly to Ryle's (anglophone version of Heidegger's) post-Cartesian subjectivity, is at the very core of enactivism and the so-called "sensory-motor" theory. Your point that even intellectual labor requires savoir fare is well made and significant in its own right. But without the distinction between knowing-that and knowing-how, it starts to like a whole cottage industry is tilting at windmills. I write that it *looks like* this might be the case - I am interested in whether it is so. What do you think? What does Stanley think?

[John Protevi]

Hi Joe, thanks, that's a good, tough question. I'm going to have to think about it for a while. But I wanted to let you know I've seen it.

[Joe Neisser]

Sorry for the typos. Ugh.

[Jason Stanley]

Joe - I think what you think. I think it undermines the enactivist program.

[John Protevi]

I wouldn't go so far as to say that Jason’s work undermines enaction, which is, after all, a large, multifaceted, and ongoing research framework.

Now Jason’s work has certainly led me to question the way some of my previous formulations about human skills were caught in a bad binary between (1) the hyper-intellectualist or let’s say classical (Platonic / Aristotelian) position that knowledge requires verbal articulation of principles and (2) an inverted image in which bodily skills inhere in a non-verbal “artisanal sensitivity.” (Here is a blog post in which I look at some of the formulations in my 2001 book, Political Physics [http://proteviblog.typepad.com/protevi/2015/01/rereading-_political-physics_-in-light-of-stanley-and-krakauer-2013.html]; the current post is basically a rewrite of one of the analyses in the Plato chapter of that book; there’s a Heidegger reads Aristotle chapter in there that would need some nuancing as well.)

Bringing Jason’s deflationary sense of propositional knowledge as scaffolding motor acuity to allow motor skill to bear on traditional representations of the division of labor in human societies makes us emphasize the knowledge aspects of “artisanal” work. That’s a great achievement and lets us intervene in all sorts of contemporary political debates.

Now as I see it, the main target of enaction is the sensory input – cognition (as manipulation of symbols) – motor output schema. If the middle part is close enough to hyper-intellectualism then enaction and Jason share a common target: they both want to dethrone the idea that human skill performance comes about from consulting verbally articulable principles.

Enaction aims then to replace that schema with one in which cognition is the direction of action of an organism in its “enacted” or co-constituted world. So the question becomes whether such directed action is just the inverted image of non-knowledge-based "bodily sensitivity" that is Jason’s other target. It's anti-(hyper)-intellectualist, to be sure, but does fall prey to Jason's critique by excluding non-verbally-articulable propositional knowledge?

Here's a very important wrinkle though. One of the most interesting things for me about enaction as a framework is the “mind in life” or “continuity thesis” which locates cognition in the “sense-making” operations even of single-celled organisms (this is basically Francisco Varela’s autopoiesis plus Ezequiel Di Paolo’s adaptivity).

So one question would be, how far down the phylogenetic trail does Jason's deflationary sense of propositional knowledge go? Although I'm probably willing to accept that primates have non-verbal propositional knowledge, I have a hard time thinking that single-celled organisms do.

Of course, enactivists recognize the immense labor necessary to discuss the qualitative changes in cognition we see in the evolution of multi-cellulars, all the way to human skill, where I think Jason’s work resides.

The 2010 MIT collection Enaction, edited by John Stewart, Olivier Gapenne, and Di Paola, lays out some of the directions of research the enactive framework encompassed 7 or 8 years ago; there’s a lot more of it now, for instance this collection in Frontiers: http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00234/full

[Aaron Zimmerman]

Thanks for this. I've been working on the nature of belief for 15 years or so (I'm currently updating the view I published as "The Nature of Belief" which incorporates distinctions between procedural knowledge, declarative knowledge and affective knowledge) and it's typical among those writing on this topic to say that cognitive "flexibility" (and stimulus independence) marks the transition from instinct and habit to belief. Lots of people question this: e.g. Dennett attributes phototropism in plants to their beliefs about the direction of light, but it seems to me to be the standard conception among those (who remain in the majority) who allow inarticulable beliefs. I.e. it is standard to think that belief precedes language. (Dennett even calls articulable or language-dependent views "opinions" and explicitly says they are not beliefs.) But I'll have to read Di Paolo and those who read belief (or knowledge) into single celled organisms. (Is this part of the recent movement of many philosophers toward panpsychism that I've been seeing?) BTW: I was with the Stanley/Krakauer piece up until they say, "at some point, all such knowledge will rest on knowledge of basic actions, such as grasping an object or lifting one's arm. These activities are not skills; they are not acquired by or improved upon by training in adult life. Their manifestation is nevertheless under our voluntary control." This seems wrong to me. Infants learn to control their limbs (i.e. adjust movements in adaptive ways to environmental feedback) and some adults must do so when recovering from stroke etc. Why not just say this is a basic skill?

[John Protevi]

Thanks, Aaron. I don't think Di Paolo would use the terms "belief" or "knowledge" for the sort of sense-making he sees at work in single-celled organisms. They don't show up in the papers of his I know. Here are two papers of his.

This is on "adaptivity," which he sees as a necessary adjunct to autopoiesis: http://users.sussex.ac.uk/~inmanh/adsys10/Readings/DiPaolo_-_Autopoiesis_adaptivity_teleology_agency_-_PhenCogSci_2005.pdf

This one is about modeling the behavior / metabolism connection in E Coli: https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/titles/alife/0262290758chap42.pdf

[Joe Neisser]

Hi John & thanks for the reply. I certainly agree there is an I an interesting convergence in the ideas. The "psychologistic" notion that knowledge requires explicit internal sentences in propositional form is rejected. But now one threat is that embodiment reverts to "mere implementation" of functional architecture... I don't think that's right. Embodiment does male a difference somewhere along the line ...