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Notes on James C Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed -- Scott's multiplicity

Notes on James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (Yale University Press, 2009).

Scott describes a multiplicity with topographical / transport-technological, political-economic, political-organizational, administrative, and violence elements. A multiplicity is a set of interacting processes in which thresholds in the relations of processes produce qualitative changes in the behavior of the system.

For Scott, “state” and “non-state” processes are in “dialectical” or “mutually constituting” relations. The “state” processes (enclosure, enslavement, taxing …) here are orienting limits, with classic, colonial, and post-colonial states with varying capacities to approach the limits and maintain / reproduce those gains. The “non-state” processes (flight, nomadicism, raiding …) also admit of degrees, with well-administered states in times of economic growth sometimes attracting non-state peoples to settle down. States and non-states exchange (at different rates at different times) people, customs, and goods across the “membrane” that frontiers provide, all mediated by smugglers, traders, brokers, peddlers, and so on.

However, the whole analysis is governed by the “last enclosure” thesis whereby post-WW2 “distance-destroying technologies” (roads / cars / ATVs; planes / helicopters / drones; electronic communications) are severely encroaching upon ability to live a self-governing or non-state life. However, again (something Scott underplays), climate change could quite possibly throw a spanner in the works and allow more leeway for non-state living.

I. Topographical / transport-technological (“friction of terrain”)

1. State spaces: valleys and rivers / oceans
   1. military enforcement
   2. administrative “visibility”
   3. economic integration limited by cost per unit weight across distance:
      1. much easier by water
      2. by land, human / animal power constrained by its need for fuel, which it also had to carry with it
2. Non-state spaces:
   1. hills / mountains (in this book)
   2. but generalizable to any zone where state reach is hampered: jungles, deserts, marshes, and so on.

II. Political economy (production)

1. state
   1. coerced by state: sedentary river valley rice agriculture is legible, taxable / appropriateable, and the population is conscriptable into army or into corvée labor
      1. slavery
         1. capture of hill people by raiding
         2. debt bondage
      2. share-cropping
      3. corvée labor for infrastructure and / or monuments
   2. however,
      1. Scott rejects Wittfogel: states did not build irrigation, but took over historical, slow, accretions of it
      2. similarly, you can have terraced rice cultivation in hills and wet-rice w/o states or states w/o wet rice (64-65)
   3. tolerated / encouraged by state
      1. independent urban artisanal production
      2. temple / palace luxury goods (also by trade / gift)
      3. products for trade with hill peoples
         1. fish and other foods unavailable in the hills
         2. manufactured goods (e.g., metal tools and weapons)
2. non-state production
   1. food production / consumption
      1. swidden agriculture / horticulture
      2. nomadic steppe pastoralism
      3. nomadic foraging
   2. trade with states (sale, barter, debt payment, tribute [106])
      1. by land (high density / high value
         1. plants: medicinals / spices (opium, pepper)
         2. animals: birds, feathers, honey
         3. minerals: jewels 
      2. by water (can be bulkier)
         1. timber
         2. cattle
         3. animal products (e.g., furs)
         4. hill agriculture (yams, rice, etc)
      3. slaves

III. Political organization

1. state
   1. concentrated manpower (64)
      1. for agriculture
      2. for military
         1. to squeeze peasants
         2. to hold geographically important positions to collect tolls on trade
         3. but concentration allows famines / epidemics
   2. central command authority with radiating subordinates
   3. military specialization / conscription
   4. taxes
      1. land rents based on “visible” agricultural productivity
      2. tolls / taxes commercial transactions
   5. corvée labor

2. non-state “shatter zones”
   1. egalitarian / acephalic bands
   2. chiefdoms
   3. temporary alliances

IV. Ethnic / kinship / linguistic structures

1. state systems:
   1. need ease of incorporation in order to concentrate populations, even if we see use of ethnicity for stratification
   2. once incorporated, we see tendency to uniformity, fixity, religious orthodoxy (155)
2. non-state peoples: multiple / flexible kinship (“ethnogenesis”)
   1. ethnicity: varying declared identities depending who was asking
      1. p 254: “identities are plural … and systematically structured by relations of power and prestige … a bandwidth of traits or identities that could be deployed or performed as the situation required…. Ethnic identity … would be the repertoire of possible performances and the contexts in which they are exhibited”
      2. nonetheless with states providing constraints
   2. tribes:
      1. often state creations for administration
      2. can become a self-identity for political purposes
   3. kinship:
      1. ease of incorporation of immigrants, captives, in-marrying
      2. ease of creating fictitious lineages to legitimate new aristos
   4. languages: hill peoples tend to multi-lingualism

V. Regimes of violence

1. state
   1. primary violence of statification warfare:
      1. territorial incorporation
      2. population enslavement and resettlement
   2. secondary violence:
      1. tax terrorization
      2. enforcement of conscription and corvée labor
2. non-state
   1. anti-state fighting (state avoiding)
   2. internal state-preventing violence (exile, "capital punishment")
   3. predation on state economies
      1. trade routes
      2. raids:
         1. stealing from produce of valley agricultural slaves
         2. slave-raiding (population is targeted commodity)

Notes on James C Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed -- Scott's dialectical method

Notes on James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (Yale University Press, 2009).

PRINCIPLES OF ANALYSIS

I will rearrange the order of presentation in the Preface to emphasize some connections of principles. Under each of the three main headings there is a dialectic of escape and living free that is a theoretical mirror of the historical process being examined: first, a critical interpretation of state thought (escape) and then a positive project of examining the practices of self-governing peoples (living free).

ANTI-STATE-CENTRISM

CRITICAL INTERPRETATION OF STATE DENIGRATION OF THE OTHER: “My argument is a deconstruction of Chinese and other civilizational discourses about the ‘barbarian,’ the ‘raw,’ the ‘primitive.’ On close inspection, those terms, practically, mean ungoverned, not-yet-incorporated. Civilizational discourses never entertain the possibility of people voluntarily going over to the barbarians, hence such statuses are stigmatized and ethnicized. Ethnicity and ‘tribe’ begin exactly where taxes and sovereignty end—in the Roman Empire as in the Chinese” (Preface, p x-xi).

POSITIVE PROJECT: WRITING THE HISTORY OF NON-STATE PEOPLES AS THE COMPLEMENT OF STATE-CENTERED HISTORY (the original and implicit affirmative universal “all history is that of the state” has to be changed to an explicit pair of particulars “not all history is that of the state” and “some history is that of non-state peoples”): “The huge literature on state-making, contemporary and historic, pays virtually no attention to its obverse: the history of deliberate and reactive statelessness. This is the history of those who got away, and state-making cannot be understood apart from it. This is also what makes this an anarchist history” (Preface, p x).

ANTI-PROGRESSIVISM

CRITICAL INTERPRETATION OF STATE PROGRESSIVISM: From a state perspective, “self-governing peoples” are “living ancestors,” a glimpse of pre-agricultural, pre-civilized life. Here is a politics of anthropology, a way that progressivism or evolutionism is put to work, legitimating incorporation of non-state peoples to allow them access to modernity. Scott argues, on the contrary, “hill people are best understood as runaway, fugitive, maroon communities who have, over the course of two millennia, been fleeing the oppression of state-making projects in the valleys—slavery, conscription, taxes, corvée labor, epidemics, and warfare” (Preface, p ix).

POSITIVE PROJECT OF DESCRIBING “PRIMITIVISM” AS ANTI-STATE CHOICE: “the argument reverses much received wisdom about ‘primitivism’ generally. Pastoralism, foraging, shifting cultivation, and segmentary lineage systems are often a ‘secondary adaptation,’ a kind of ‘self-barbarization’ adopted by peoples whose location, subsistence, and social structure are adapted to state evasion. For those living in the shadow of states, such evasion is also perfectly compatible with derivative, imitative, and parasitic state forms in the hills” (Preface, p x).

ANTI-DETERMINISM

CRITICAL INTERPRETATION OF ECOLOGICAL AND CULTURAL DETERMINISM, OR, PUTTING THE POLITICS INTO “POLITICAL ECONOMY”: “Usually, forms of subsistence and kinship are taken as given, as ecologically and culturally determined. By analyzing various forms of cultivation, particular crops, certain social structures, and physical mobility patterns for their escape value, I treat such givens as political choices” (Preface, p xi).

POSITIVE PROJECT OF DESCRIBING ANTI-STATE PRACTICES: “physical dispersion in rugged terrain, their mobility, their cropping practices, their kinship structures, their pliable ethnic identities, and their devotion to prophetic, millenarian leaders all serve to avoid incorporation into states and to prevent states from springing up among them” (Preface, p x).

Notes on Geroulanos and Meyers manuscript workshop: case studies and organismic integration

Yesterday I had the chance to participate in a pre-publication workshop on a book by Stefanos Geroulanos and Todd Meyers of NYU. The book concerns concepts of integration and individuality in early 20^th century medicine, with special attention to military medicine in World War I.

In this note, I’d like to talk about Chapter 2, on case studies. I’ll talk about the manuscript, but also about what thoughts the ms provoked in me. As a philosopher, I was drawn to this chapter for four reasons. 1) The wide variety of logical relations involving individuals. 2) The epistemological question of a “science of the individual.” 3) The mind / body relation in shell shock. 4) The methodological one; we don’t do very many case studies in philosophy, but I think we should.

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Notes on Columbia Foucault seminar 7/13: "Security, Territory, Population"

FOUCAULT 7/13: RESONANCE WITH DELEUZE

In last night’s seminar Adam Tooze referred to Deleuze’s reading of Foucault. In this note I’d like to propose that we can see elements of Deleuze’s thought in Foucault's lectures in the mid-to-late 1970s. I don’t want to claim anything more than “resonance” here; that is, I’m not going to claim “influence” or “dependence,” though I might be willing to accept a claim of a shared intellectual milieu between Deleuze and Foucault, a mutual suspicion of universals and identities, and a mutual desire to analyze the differential field from which those identities emerge. Further, we have seen in the 13/13 seminar so far a number of references to Deleuze or Deleuze and Guattari in Foucault’s lecture courses, and of course we should note that Foucault reviewed Deleuze’s late-1960s works Difference and Repetition and Logic of Sense as well as providing the Preface to the English translation of Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus.

Deleuze's ontology in Difference and Repetition posits individuation as the integration of a multiplicity. A multiplicity is a distributed and differential system, that is, a system in which multiple processes interact such that qualitative changes in the behavior of the system occur at singular points in the relation of the rates of change of those processes. For a meteorological example, consider how, at a singular point, the relation of the rates of change of temperature, air pressure, air circulation, water vapor concentration, condensation, evaporation and so on will be such that a hurricane forms, an emergent individual worthy of a proper name.

In this note, I'll track Foucault’s use of the concept of integrating a differential field or "multiplicity" to produce an emergent individual.

Notes on Columbia Foucault seminar 6/13: "Society Must Be Defended"

Notes on meeting 6/13 (video), Monday 23 November 2015, on “Society Must Be Defended," of the Foucault 13/13 seminar held at Columbia. 

I’d like to make two comments here.

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First, about the “boomerang effect” (SD 103): seminar participants mentioned several names, including that of Césaire and the Discourse on Colonialism where Nazi genocide is seen as a return from the colonies. Here are some others.

I would point out, following Professor Stoler in discussion after the seminar, the work of Sidney Mintz in Sweetness and Power (also mentioned by Thomas Holt in his selection from the recommended readings), which looks at, among other things, productivity enhancing discipline in New World sugar plantations coming back to European factories.

The connection with biopower is here noticeable, as, following Robin Blackburn’s work, we can point to the awareness of the relation of death rates to work output to purchase and importation rates of “fresh” enslaved people. (See here for remarks on why I've come to believe that “enslaved people” is preferable to “slaves.”)

Another boomerang effect is of course the thesis of CLR James’s The Black Jacobins, the radicalization of the French Revolution by the action of the rebels of Saint-Domingue. (James’s mention of suicide and infanticide as resistance techniques among the enslaved population brings us back to the above point.)

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Second, on the relation to notions in Deleuze and Guattari on two points: the notion of “savage war” in the context of Foucault’s treatment of Hobbes (SD 90), and on the distinction of savage and barbarian in Boulainvilliers (SD 194-199).

-- About the sketch of the “barbarian” presented in indirect discourse as Foucault ventriloquizes Boulainvilliers (SD 194-199). The barbarian is opposed by Boulainvilliers to the “savage” of social contract theory and classical economics, the man of exchange (of rights or of goods, i.e., homo politicus or homo economicus). The savage exists before or outside history (and hence must be opposed by Boulainvilliers's radically historical discourse). For jurists, the savage exists before history and comes to exchange rights to found the social body, while for economists, the savage is without history, motivated only by self-interest in exchange. The barbarian, by contrast, is essentially historical, dominating, and free. He is always in an exterior relation to pre-existing civilization. He is essentially dominating; he takes and enslaves rather than exchanges. And he is essentially free: he never trades freedom for security.

One of the participants mentioned here the tripartite division in Anti-Oedipus of savages, barbarians, and civilized. However, in AO, “barbarian” refers to imperial state formations; the exterior, anti-state forces or “war machine” is not developed until A Thousand Plateaus; the point of highest intensity of the war machine is the steppe nomads (as in the quote from Desnos at SD 198-199).

I don’t want to make any strong claims about influence here, but I’m struck by the resonances between Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the war machine and what Foucault writes about in his brief sketch of the centralization of the power of war in the European State. Foucault writes “what was actually called ‘private warfare’ was eradicated from the social body… gradually, the entire social body was cleansed of the bellicose relations that had permeated it through and through during the Middle Ages” (SD 48). (On the twists and turns in the notion of "war" in Foucault, here is my entry on the subject in the Cambridge Foucault Lexicon.)

-- About the notion of "savage war" in Foucault's treatment of Hobbes, another of the participants mentioned Pierre Clastres, suggesting that his work in Society Against the State [French publication of this essay collection was in 1974, but his articles were well-known before then] could clarify Foucault’s formulation of the reference to the savage peoples of America cited by Hobbes. Foucault writes “First, what is this war that exists before the State, and which the State is, in theory, destined to end? What is this war that the State has pushed back into prehistory, into savagery, into its mysterious frontiers, but which is still going on? And second, how does this war give birth to the State?” (SD 90).

Things are very complex here (I’m confident the seminar participant mentioning Clastres knows all this, so I’m just expanding on what he would have said had he had more time), so I’d like to mention this essay of mine that goes into some detail.

Briefly, however, I can make the following points.

As detailed in a fine recent book by Guillaume Sibertin-Blanc, Politique et État chez Deleuze et Guattari (Paris: PUF, 2013), Clastres can't determine the conditions for the emergence of state; he can only state the conditions of its non-emergence: “savage war” as anti-State mechanism relies on keeping chiefs from becoming kings by trapping them in a prestige-war cycle: to maintain prestige they must wage war from the front lines but in doing so they condemn themselves to high risk of death so they won’t survive long enough to consolidate sovereign power.

Sibertin-Blanc lets us see what Deleuze and Guattari are doing with their notion of the Urstaat and the "auto-presupposition" of the state: it needs a surplus to feed its specialists but it needs specialists to produce and other specialists to monitor and confiscate that very surplus. This is a rewriting of Wittfogel (1957), who himself rewrites the Marxist “Asiatic mode of production.” The state is not the instrument of a pre-existing dominant class: it is itself the direct organization of society enabling surplus production which it then immediately appropriates; it is therefore itself what produces the dominant and subordinate classes. It is to address this problem of auto-presupposition that Deleuze and Guattari have recourse in Anti-Oedipus to Nietzsche's idea of the break into history of the immediately arriving conquerors.

Leaving Sibertin-Blanc to the side, we could contrast Clastres’s anti-State mechanism of inter-group war with Christopher Boehm’s recent ethnography of nomadic foragers revealing intra-group mechanisms of ridicule, exile, and “capital punishment” aimed at maintaining radical egalitarian structures. Boehm’s Moral Origins also speaks of vendetta as an inter-group mechanism that is both anti-State and anti-war. His work can be connected with that of Raymond Kelly, whose Warless Societies and the Origin of War discusses the lack of a “logic of social substitution” that keeps personalized vendetta as inter-group violence below the threshold of “war.” (See here for Kelly's paper upon induction into the National Academy of Sciences.) 

Jesús Navarro, "How to do philosophy with words: Reflections on the Searle/Derrida debate."

Blurb for the English translation of Jesús Navarro's book on the missed encounter of Derrida and Searle (Spanish original is here; the translation will appear with John Benjamins). 

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Jesús Navarro’s fine book stages the non-encounter of Searle and Derrida. With impartiality, care, and precision he explains the misunderstandings and ill will that made this a missed opportunity and reinforced the “analytic / continental divide” that has plagued the professional philosophical scene for decades.

The book proceeds on two levels, a first order recapitulation of theses, and then a second order reflection on the speech acts of the encounter itself, showing that it’s not simply theoretical misunderstanding – of which there is plenty – but also conflicting political visions that beset the encounter.

First, Navarro sketches the traditions of each thinker (Wittgenstein and Austin – but of course he is shared – on the one hand, Saussure, Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas on the other), and establishes the different understandings of key terms such as “intentionality,” “iterability,” and so on. He also pinpoints the difference between the “either / or” logic of Searle and the logic of impurity or contamination of Derrida (in which the condition of possibility of a term or concept is the condition of impossibility of its pure application).

Secondly, the book then, wonderfully, applies speech act theory to see how and why the encounter failed, as each side failed – or refused – to see the philosophical aims for which each side marshaled their theses and arguments: not just the theoretical aims of systematization for Searle and deconstruction for Derrida, but also the political aims of Searle’s denunciation of threats to rationality and Derrida’s denunciation of non-reflective instantiations of the “metaphysics of presence.”

The conclusion then asks what might have been, had the encounter gone otherwise; in so doing it asks whether an encounter on the terrain of “philosophy” in the singular (i.e., without regard to “analytic” and “continental” varieties) would be possible. That is, is there “philosophy” or only “philosophies”? A difficult question which we can thank Navarro for posing.

Notes on Ideology, loosely tied to Eric Swanson's "Slurs and Ideologies"

I recently met Eric Swanson at the conference on Jason Stanley's work in Valladolid (where I presented this paper). We had some very nice discussions about the paper he presented there entitled "Slurs and Ideologies" (latest version here [in PDF]).

I've spent some time since then thinking about the paper and realized that, despite some desultory reading of the classics, I had never really written down my thoughts on ideology. So I thought I'd compose these notes, without doing any re-reading, just trying to let my thoughts crystallize. While these notes were prompted by reading Eric's paper (and Jason's propaganda book), they are largley independent of those works and shouldn't necessarily be seen as a commentary on them.

Comments welcome, of course, here or by email.

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Here's how I think of ideology: it's a set of affective-cognitive dispositions, instilled in people by their participation in practices.* Its implantation starts with kids growing up in an environment in which certain verbal and physical practices are common and once that implantation takes hold actions coming from those dispositions reinforce the ideology. An ideology doesn’t act, but it makes it easier for those who consent to the ideology to act in ways that are consonant with the content of the ideology.

I don’t think practices are part of ideologies; practices are sets of actions that interact with ideologies, implanting and being reinforced by actions that are the components of practices. For instance, mortgage redlining is a practice that is part of, and reinforces, the general practice of racial segregation which is itself part of and reinforces the way of life of white supremacy ("way of life" would be an interacting set of practices and ideologies).

I don't think a practice is like a belief, norm, value, or way of interpreting the world, which all seem cognitive / subjective. Practices are instead ways of acting in the world (but I wouldn't call it a way of interacting *with* the world, since that installs a subject / world split I think). They find their unity in a "script" which brings together affective-cognitive dispositions that guide actions, beliefs, and so on, so that by following a script different iterations of an action become a practice.

"Interests" is another difficult term here. They aren’t parts of ideologies, but they are a principle of explanation of ideology-guided actions and practices. They are more objective than a norm or value. Hence the occasional problem of a mismatch between the "true" interests of someone and their norms, values, and actions.

For example, the practice of mortgage redlining upholds the interests of certain actors who benefit from the way of life of white supremacy (e.g., white homeowners in segregated neighborhoods in which blacks can't get mortgages), and hurts the interests of those denied mortgages by that practice, but I'm not sure it’s in the same ontological class as belief, norm, value, and way of interpreting the world.

Verbal practices: some actions and the supposed motives that produce them, and the characters of people who repeatedly produce those actions, are repeatedly praised or blamed. Exposure to those verbal practices produces affective-cognitive dispositions to believe / feel in certain ways, thus leading to repetition of the actions, thus providing scripts by means of which the actions might congeal into a practice.

The same with physical practices: all the way from facial expressions: smiles, squints, frowns; bodily expressions: shrugs, recoils; social interactions: shaking hands, patting on the back, hugging, kissing, or pushing, shoving, fighting, killing....

Relating slurs to ideology is a socializing move. The power and danger of slurs is not just that they produce a series of internal representations linking words and classes of people; instead they do that *and*, by cueing ideologies, they trigger affective-cognitive dispositions and scripts resulting in thoughts and feelings and actions that conform to practices that reinforce a way of life.

Slurs are on-the-spot psychologically violent, and by cueing / reinforcing ideologies, they increase the chances of further psychological violence (by further slurs, and by internalization), and they increase the chance of physical violence by (on the outside reading) triggering scripts for practices, or (on the inside reading) by triggering the practices directly.

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* In my own work I talk about "bodies politics" in order to mark social and somatic interaction which result in replication of "affective-cognitive structures", as I think including affective dispositions in "ideology" produces a lot of tension in the expanded concept with the traditional (cognitive) components of beliefs, norms, and values. But if we want to use an expanded notion of ideology I think the affective components should be made explicit.

"The writerly attitude" in Alva Noë's "Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature"

Alva Noë, Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature (NY: Hill and Wang, 2015).

In this note, I want to focus on the notion of a “writerly attitude” in the key Chapter 4 of Strange Tools, “Art Loops and the Garden of Eden.”

Let’s recap from the previous posts, where I mostly articulate Noë’s theses, but also flesh out some implications. The key distinction of ST is that between level 1 (“organized activities”) and level 2 (“reorganization practices”).

Level 1 organized activities have 6 features: they are 1) naturally rooted, 2) cognitively demanding, 3) temporally / rhythmically structured, 4) emergent from endogenous dynamics [in the case of breast-feeding neither nurse nor infant is in charge], 5) functional, and 6) potentially pleasurable. Organized activities are bio-cultural; they become habits; and they are complexly interwoven at multiple scales. The resonance of these activities then provide a functional integration to our lives and their dissonance allows for innovative mixing and matching to create new patterns of activity.

Level 2 is that of the practices that provide a “perspicuous representation” of an organized activity, where “the nature of the organization at the lower level gets put on display and investigated” (ST 29). For instance, choreography displays dancing to us, as (bio-culturally informed) organized activity.  

Now, for Noë philosophy is also a level-2 practice: it “stands to our level-1 cognitive undertakings – reasoning, argument, belief formation, and crucially, the work of science – [as] choreography stands to movement and dancing, or painting stands to picture-making activities” (ST 29-30).

So philosophy shows thought as organized in a particular way – as conforming to a particular image of thought, we could say – and in so doing allows for that organization to be shook up and re-organized. I would say here that, as with all activities put on display by arts, working on our thought patterns to de-/re-organize them relies on plasticity and multiple processuality. That is, in order to be organized in the first place, activities presuppose both a capacity to be organized (plasticity) and a capacity to mesh together multiple biological / neurological processes with cultural processes (multiple processuality).

To pick up with Chapter 4 after this recapping, in a key move, Noë will claim that philosophy and art are necessary because organized activities need a supplement of reflective practices. This is because “we may lack a sense of the lay of the land” the meshwork of activities prepare for us, so that art and philosophy are practices of “making sense” (ST 30). (We may also find ourselves not just dis-oriented but in situations of injustice so that art and philosophy can also indicate points of strength and weakness of the meshwork of activities we find ourselves in and hence help us make sense of how to flee or strike.)

Noë follows this with a series of reflections on writing, which for us in literate societies is the “image of language” (ST 32; italics in original). But writing doesn’t represent a pre-existing, independent language; it loops down and informs our language: “The looping doesn’t stop. The result is a dense, historical, many-layered scriptoral-linguistic structure” (ST 36).

Now comes an extremely important move: Noë generalizes from writing in the restricted sense to a general notion of “graphical practices,” such as the cave paintings “that are at least as old as our linguistic capacities (or as old as we have reason to think our linguistic capacities are” (ST 41).

But that’s not all. In an even more radical move, writing for Noë is beyond any physical, empirical graphical practice, even drawing. Let’s follow the steps.

Even before such graphical practices is a need for them based on an irreducible dimension of misunderstanding inherent in social life: “Language began with the possibility of misunderstanding” (ST 41). That is, there could never be language without the need for reflection on whether or not a communication was successful. The possibility of misunderstanding always haunts attempts at understanding, so “there was never a Garden of Eden, and so there never was a language that we carried out and made use of freely, automatically, always without need for reflection” (on whether or not misunderstanding or understanding had taken place) (ST 42).

This ever-present need for reflection on linguistic practice caused by the irreducible or even necessary possibility of misunderstanding is what Noë calls “the writerly attitude” (ST 42). And this writerliness is an essential part of speech: “We had been using speaking to model speech long before we started using drawing (that is to say writing) for this purpose” (ST 42). In other words, our ancestors would have always already adopted the writerly attitude to deal with the necessary possibility of misunderstanding as soon as they had linguistically mediated social life.

What this means is that writing, which in its empirical form comes later, is a transcendental structure interwoven with empirical speech: “My point is that whether we actually invent a way to write down our speech, we do what is, conceptually, at least, the equivalent” (ST 42). This “writerly attitude” is essential: “There wouldn’t be speech without these practices of self-organization… The second order penetrates the first order through and through” (ST 42).

So we have here, under the name of “the writerly attitude,” an interweaving of transcendental condition (universal and necessary normative reflection responding to the necessary possibility of misunderstanding constitutive of social life) and empirical production (everyday speech and writing).

On the notion of philosophy in Alva Noë's "Strange Tools"

Alva Noë, Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature (NY: Hill and Wang, 2015).

In this note, I want to focus on the presentation of philosophy as a “level 2 reorganization practice” in Strange Tools.

Chapter 4 of ST is entitled “Art Loops and the Garden of Eden.” Here Noë lays out many of the most important ideas of the work. (In my next post, I’ll tackle the notion of “writerly attitude” laid out in Chapter 4; here I’ll focus on philosophy.)

Noë begins by recapping the difference between Levels 1 and 2. Level 1 is that of organized activities (see the previous post); level 2 is that of the practice that provides a perspicuous representation of the organized activity, where “the nature of the organization at the lower level gets put on display and investigated” (ST 29). For instance, choreography displays dancing to us, as (bio-culturally informed) organized activity.  

Now, for Noë philosophy is also a level-2 practice: it “stands to our level-1 cognitive undertakings – reasoning, argument, belief formation, and crucially, the work of science – [as] choreography stands to movement and dancing, or painting stands to picture-making activities” (ST 29-30).

So, to fulfill the analogy that Noë leaves implicit, if dancing taps into a “culturally shaped motion bank” that is informed by downward looping of choreography so that our “spontaneous” dancing is “cliché-like,” (ST 31), then we have a culturally shaped thought bank whereby our everyday thoughts are informed by previous philosophical concepts. (Keynes said that the most hard-headed practical business people are ruled by the thoughts of long dead philosophers; Dreyfus diagnosed the Cartesianism of AI; there are many other diagnoses, grist for the mill of cultural critics.)

I would say that these “banks” are virtual or potential or transcendental with regard to the actual / empirical thoughts we think. But that virtual / potential / transcendental realm is not unstructured; far from it. There are lines running through it, lines that make it more or less likely that we will have a certain thought at a certain time. In other words, by being organized in cultural thought activities we become predisposed to have certain patterns of occurring thoughts.

But, and this is the key, those virtual / potential / transcendental lines are not static Platonic Ideas; they are instead experimentally made and remade by the interplay between philosophical re-organization and cultural organization. The transcendental realm of our “thought bank,” in other words, is always in relation with the empirical realm of our reading and writing philosophy. So that philosophy is a practice of de-organizing our thought patterns and thereby alerting us to our having-been-organized in a particular way so that we might undertake a re-organization of our virtual thought bank.

Now, “undertake” might be too voluntaristic, or at least it’s not the whole story; sometimes I think we “undergo” a de- / re-organization, in relation to our “undertaking” it: sometimes you are shocked into incomprehension but then find glimmers you can follow, by a concentrated undertaking, that might lead you into a new set of thought potentials.

The same conditions of plasticity and multiple processuality we talked about yesterday are the conditions for this de- / re-organization of thought that philosophical practice affords us. So we find philosophy here as the art of thinking.

Notes on "organization" in Alva Noë's new book, Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature

Alva Noë, Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature (NY: Hill and Wang, 2015).

In this brief note, I want to focus on the idea of “organization” Noë puts forth here in his wonderful new book.

He opens the book with a discussion of breast-feeding as an activity that “organizes us. The task itself shapes, enables, and constrains us; we find ourselves put together and made up in the setting of the activity” (ST 5; italics in original).

Organized activities have 6 features: they are 1) naturally rooted, 2) cognitively demanding, 3) temporally / rhythmically structured, 4) emergent from endogenous dynamics [in the case of breast-feeding neither nurse nor infant is in charge], 5) functional, and 6) potentially pleasurable.

First of all, I think the example is important, for, following Colwyn Trevarthen, we can see breast-feeding and other infant/caretaker rhythmic interchange as setting up “primary intersubjectivity” which lays the ground for later turn-taking behavior characteristic of “secondary intersubjectivity” in conversation (Noë’s next example at ST 6-7), dance (ST 11), and so on.

For developmental psychology research here, see the essay collection Communicative Musicality (OUP, 2009); for philosophy see, inter alia, Thomas Fuchs & Hanne De Jaegher, Enactive intersubjectivity: Participatory sense-making and mutual incorporation, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 8 (2009): 465–486 and Shaun Gallagher, Two problems of intersubjectivity, Journal of Consciousness Studies 16, No. 6–7 (2009): 289-308.

Next, such organization happens in and enmeshes into the characteristic activities of our culture: “To be alive is to be organized, and insofar as we are not only organisms but also persons, we find ourselves organized, or integrated, in a still larger range of ways that ties us to the environment, each other, and our social worlds” (ST, 6).

Organization, Noë insists, cannot be understood by neuro-reductionism or by hyper-intellectualism, but needs to be analyzed at the “embodiment level,” which is neither sub-personal nor personal; AN refers here not to Merleau-Ponty as might be expected but to Dana Ballard of UT Austin. The point he’s trying to make here is that not all organized activities are social; perception is a case whereby “the environment itself organizes us individually” (ST 8). I’m not sure about this with regard to seeing anything other than just objects; I would think that our concrete perception (“this thing isn’t just a thing, it’s a table”) is irreducibly social.

But leave that be; the interesting thing for me comes next: “Our lives are one big complex nesting of organized activities at different levels and scales… We are always captured by structures of organization…. And crucially, these structures of organization are not of our own making” (ST 10). This is key to our radical historical sociality: our growing up is a process of being organized into evolving structures of organized activity. I’d like to put in a plug here for variation in practices: I don’t think we have a culture, but rather we have cultures, in the plural, and it's the resonance and dissonance of organized activities that lets us achieve both comfortable habits and creative novelty.

In shifting to his discussion of art, Noë distinguishes dancing as organized activity from choreography, which is a practice that “puts dancing itself on display” (ST 13), that aims at producing a “perspicuous representation,” something that “illuminat[es] the ways we find ourselves organized, and so, also, the ways we might reorganize ourselves” (ST 17).

So at this point I want to thematize plasticity and process.

Plasticity has to be as the ground for organization / re-organization. But re-organization implies as well a capacity for de-organization as an intermediary between a state of being organized and a later state of re-organization.

But I also want to inject a process perspective here: aren’t we just always ratios of processes heading toward (re-)organization and de-organization? A fully organized (fully habituated) state is a limit; no one, no thing is ever so locked into repetition without a difference that it just rolls along with no bumps, no variation. On the other hand I fully agree that there’s no life without some degree of organization, some resonance, some habituation: the heart just has to start up again and again and again after each one of its cycles and its rhythm has to get enmeshed with a multiplicity of other processes.

I think this biological necessity for harmony in multiple processes scales up to the level of organized activities: “talking, walking, eating, perceiving, driving” are Noë’s examples (ST 10) but we can extend the list. They have to harmonize to some extent just so we can get through the day, but there’s enough dissonance to open possibilities for experimentation with the interplay of those activities.

I’m tempted to a pun here to conclude. Can we call this experimentation with organized activities – underpinned by plasticity and multiple processuality – and resulting in de-organizing ourselves for novel re-organizations, can we call this the “art of living”? 

Catherine Hall on Edward Long's disavowals

Great talk by Professor Catherine Hall of UCL at CUNY yesterday (Oct 1, 2015). Just a few observations / developments on the theme of disavowal: 

1) Hall pointed out a move by Locke: Africans did the enslaving via right of conquest; Europeans just bought the enslaved. But this makes enslavement into a essential property attributed once and for all to a subject, whereas Hall reminded us that in reality enslaving was a continually re-worked process through countless daily practices of humiliation and torture.

2) In her discussion of a landscape description in Long's History of Jamaica she pointed out how, behind a waterfall, there was a grotto where maroons could hide.

3) The ever-present possibility of flight that is marronage (I've been reading Neil Roberts lately) was one of the reasons for the need for continual enslaving as an ongoing process.

4) Long's continual disavowal of the humanity of slaves was particularly acute in describing the tortuous execution of rebels, whose agonies were disavowed with a claim that they didn't really suffer all that much.

I didn't get to make a comment at the talk, but if I had it would have been this:

5) But this disavowal renders inexplicable the practice of public torture with the aim of terrorizing the gathered slaves: if the tortured didn't really suffer all that much due to their sub-human nature, then what was the use of gathering the others? They could only be terrorized by sharing the pain of the tortured, but that pain is what was disavowed.

Revised paper, "Jason Stanley and the Recovery of Artisanal Knowledge in Plato"

JASON STANLEY AND THE RECOVERY OF ARTISANAL KNOWLEDGE IN PLATO

Download PDF version

SIUCC 2015
University of Valladolid
October 2015

John Protevi
Phyllis M Taylor Professor of French Studies
Professor of Philosophy 
Louisiana State University
Baton Rouge LA 70803 USA
[email protected]
http://www.protevi.com/john

 

FORECAST

The talk has two parts, epistemological and political. I will proceed in the “sympathetic hypothetical” mode. Rather than delve into the linguistics-oriented critical literature on Stanley’s intellectualist thesis on know-how (e.g., Poston 2015), I will instead strive for a charitable exposition of the neuroscientific elements of latest version of that thesis (as presented in his 2013 Frontiers in Human Neuroscience piece with John Krakauer) in order to elucidate the stakes of his work: if we assume his position withstands criticism, what then follows for both our epistemology and our politics?

First I show how Stanley critiques the mental knowledge / manual skill distinction by means of his deflationary sense of (not necessarily verbally articulable) propositional knowledge. Stanley and Krakauer claim non-conceptual “motor acuity” (reduction of variance in movement) is only one part of “motor skill.” Not necessarily verbally articulable propositional knowledge provides a scaffold for the exercise of such acuity, and it’s the combination of knowledge and non-conceptual acuity that constitutes motor skill. Conversely, non-conceptual forms of perceptual ability inhabit manifestations of perceptual knowledge, and it is even the case that prototypical intellectual work such as mathematics involves “neural computations equivalent to those underlying both perceptual and motor acuity.” There is thus a sort of “non-conceptual intellectual acuity” just as there is “factual knowledge in motor skill.” This criss-cross allows us rethink the distinction of mental knowledge and (merely) physical skill or knack. With Stanley’s help we can now see the distinction presupposes an underlying form with elements of both sides; we can call this “artisanal knowledge.”  

Now the mental / manual distinction is not just an epistemological point, but also a political one: “Our society is divided into castes based upon a supposed division between theoretical knowledge and practical skill” (Stanley 2012). The philosophical justification of this political structure can be seen in Plato, to whose foundational status Stanley often refers: “Plato’s Republic is the wellspring from which all subsequent Western philosophy flows, and political philosophy is no exception” (Stanley and Weaver 2014).

So in the second part of the talk I show how the concept of “artisanal knowledge” illuminates a seemingly minor, though in fact key, passage in Plato’s Laws about how the childcare provided by slave nurses provides the emotional basis of moral and political education. Plato denigrates the choice by the slave nurses of the proper lullaby (and by extension other forms of morality-influencing childcare) as mere “guesswork.” So, there are political stakes to Stanley’s epistemological work: although denigrated by philosophers as mere knack, the entire moral / political system of Plato’s Laws rests upon the “artisanal knowledge” of these slave nurses, just as, we could argue, using developmental psychology, the emotional bases of our moral-political system rests upon contemporary childcare.

I will conclude the talk with some reflections on the role of political emotion in Stanley’s recent book, How Propaganda Works.

Notes on Richard Drayton's "European Empires and the origin of modern inequality"

Wonderful talk by Richard Drayton​ at CUNY Graduate Center (the Advanced Research Collaborative, which seems to be as cool as its name) yesterday afternoon. Some notes follow: 

1. Global history looks beyond the spatial and temporal scales of much history-writing: The 10-100 year window into an ethno-national group's activities. Instead, it looks for multiple time scales, up to the "deep history" (see also) Drayton evoked in his discussion of Neolithic state-formation. And it looks to multiple spatial scales, such as the pan-European inheritance of Roman imperial practices. It is not that the local and short-term are not important, Drayton explained, but they can't be our sole focus -- while it is true that you can't see a forest if there are no trees, we do know what happens to our vision when we see *only* trees. 
2. Along with the multiple spatial and temporal scales, Drayton had recourse to a multi-disciplinary matrix of research in archeology, primatology, ethnography, political science, and economics, as well as history from Roman to modern European times.
3. Drayton referenced Christopher Boehm's work on "reverse dominance hierarchies," or the economy of violence that maintains egalitarian social relations. I have a short post here on this aspect of Boehm's work, and he appears in this paper, where I contrast his notion of intra-group anti-state violence to the inter-group violence that Clastres investigated. Drayton noted, correctly IMO, that such pre-state anti-hierarchical practices can be genealogically traced in various contemporary resistance practices.
4. Another Drayton reference was to Susan Ousthuizen's 2013 paper on common property rights (those rights that allow control of what Elinor Ostrom dubbed common pool resources), which, once beset by dominance hierarchies, involve "nested" regimes of exclusive and common control. I have some notes on Ostrom's work here involving the ongoing struggle between collective control and "policies that crowd out reciprocity and collective action."
5. Another theme in Drayton's talk was the stacking of egalitarian levels within hierarchical structures. In the discussion, the topic of "military egalitarianism" came up, the notion that citizenship is extended to the lowest common denominator of the leading military formation: hence -- using Athenian examples -- the "hoplite revolution" taking over from aristocratic calvary and in turn leading to citizenry dropping to the level of the trireme rowers. (Here's a video of a presentation of mine that touches on this notion; here's the power point.)
6. The egalitarian / hierarchical struggle of course brings up "the Spinoza question": "why do people fight for their servitude as if it were their freedom?"
7. Finally, a question that went unasked, but I think might be relevant to Drayton's insistence on repeated practices of violence installing and maintaining dominance relations: Could it be that longue durée domination involves epigenetic transmission of trauma? 

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.

Linda Zerilli on Affect Theory

Linda Zerilli of the Political Science Department at the University of Chicago has a very interesting piece, "The Turn to Affect and the Problem of Judgment" forthcoming in New Literary History. The typescript is here. There's a lot going on here, much of it very well put, but, at the risk of special pleading, I want to offer some nuances to her portrayal of my work in Political Affect (see also here for a summary). I first though want to thank her for the attention to my work; as the old saying goes, "I don't care why my name is in the paper, as long as it's spelled correctly."

Zerilli takes up the deflationary account of conceptual / propositional knowledge (see here and here for my take on Jason Stanley's version of this) in which it need not be linguistically articulable to count as knowledge. This deflationary account is then set up as an alternative to what she sees as the intellectualist account of conceptual / propositional knowledge -- which would require linguistic articulability (here she locates Ruth Leys, whose critique of, and reply to,  William Connolly features in the paper) -- and which serves as the foil to what she sees as the nonconceptuality shared by Dreyfusian phenomenologists, Deleuzian / Spinozist affect theorists (where she counts Nigel Thrift, Biran Massumi, William Connolly, and myself), and Damasio / Panksepp and other affective neuroscientists. For Zerilli, these latter schools are caught in a mirror-image binarism and a "layer-cake" ontology.

It's a rich paper, which, after the scene-setting critique of the intellectualism / affect binary, develops a theory of judgment with Wittgenstein, Kant, and Cavell among the resources.

Here I just want to focus on where Political Affect fits into the picture.

First, I have to admit that parts of Zerilli's diagnosis of affect theory will make me reread some of my stuff now (again, as I do here after reading Stanley) to make sure I don’t fall into the trap of this position: "turn judgment into a kind of post hoc rationalization of primed responses.” That's Jonathan Haidt’s position in “Emotional Dog and Rational Tail” (my notes here), though to be fair, he says that while it holds for most everyday cases, if you’re careful and work at it in a disciplined way, you can eventually pull yourself into a position where reflection and dialogue can get you out of just arguing for the position that came to you at first — or you may end up staying with that position, but with better reasons for it. Having read a lot of Nietzsche early in my life I’m sympathetic to primacy of affect, but again, only in a kind of empirical or statistical way, and not as ruling out, a priori, any kind of judgment with intellectual content. 

That is to say, I think I avoid the intellectualism vs non-cognitive affect opposition Zerilli posits as structuring much contemporary political theory on the question of judgment. I think that in Political Affect I may often have an overly rigid notion of the "rational cognitive subject" as my foil, but I'd say my notion of "affective cognition" takes both elements all the way down, in keeping with the Varela / Thompson Mind in LIfe (my article on that book is here) or enactivism school's notion of sense-making, which is found even in single-celled organisms. So I'm not sure I want to accept being classified as a layer-cake thinker. 

For instance, at Political Affect 55-56 I say: 

Following Freeman and Gallagher then, we can say that a dynamic systems approach to situated cognition enables us to think the actualization phase of sense-making—the adoption of a direction for action—as sometimes encompassing deliberate intention, without compromising our commitment to a materialist, naturalistic, take on the embodied-embedded nature of bodies politic. 

I'd say it's certainly true that I'm fascinated / horrified by desubjectifying experiences of rage and panic and so on, but I think they are pretty rare episodes of complete empyting out of subjects and activation of "affect programs" to use Paul Griffiths's phrase. *Sometimes" I think affect undermines conscious control, but that's pretty rare. Most of the time they are entangled, modulating each other, etc. Affect provides salience (draws cognitive attention) but most of the time doesn't overwhelm / undermine. Desubjectivation is a limit, I suppose we could say, but when we get close to the limit our qualitative analyses should change. I try to do that in my case studies of Columbine, Katrina, and Schiavo (newer versions of those papers are in Political Affect, but these drafts give the essentials). 

Finally, I'm not sure where to put this, but I think it's relevant, so it can go here in lieu of a conclusion: here is my survey article on "Political Emotion."

Rereading _Political Physics_ in light of Stanley and Krakauer 2013

Here are some thoughts as to how the Stanley and Krakauer 2013 article (see here for my notes on the article) intersects my work, and the new directions it gives me in rethinking things.

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In Ch 5 of Political Physics (2001) I talk about the inflated Platonic sense of techne as grasp of form, proved by verbal articulation of first principles, and then used to command the artisan to incarnate the form into passive matter.

I then show that this falls prey to Simondon's objection: such hylomorphism (production as incarnation of form in matter) is just the projection of the master's point of view, and ignores the "somatic knowledge and aesthetic sensitivity" (PP 124) of the artisan, who must detect the traits indicating potentials for self-organization of the matter as well as provide the apparatus by which those traits are actualized (the molds into which the clay is put and the kiln that bakes the bricks for instance).

It's true I think that my emphasis on the somatic and aesthetic teeters on the edge of falling into the false dichotomy S and K diagnose: either knowledge / skill is (Platonically) verbally articulable or it is bodily knack / habit. But I think I can rescue myself, if I'm able to expand on what "artisanship" means.

Yes, there is an element of non-articulable "aesthetic sensitivity" to the detection of traits of material self-organization (the feel of when the clay has the right consistency to be put into the oven so that its colloidal micro-structures will be expressed at the macro-level as the capacity of the brick to bear weight). But there is also considerable propositional knowledge (even if not always verbally articulable) in the construction and operation of the mold and kiln. It's true that I don't emphasize that, but I think it's implicit in "artisanal labour" (PP 124).

See the passage at PP 128, where I say the educational artisan must "choose" the right songs. If I would have expanded on that, I think I could have seen the sort of propositional even if not verbally articulable knowledge S and K 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). (PP 128)

I also include an analysis of what Plato says about teaching of motor skills (how to drive a chariot). Here I think I'm getting close to what S and K say about knowledge as scaffolding for development of motor acuity:

On the other hand, it is chariot driving itself that is the mark of the techne of chariot driving, so we would have to observe Nestor's driving, not his instructions, to judge his skill at chariot driving. Thus there's a double problem with Socrates' demand: techne is judged by production, not teaching, while teaching is not accomplished by commands, but by setting up a regime of somatic training.

Once again, then, in this example we see the hylomorphic emphasis on exterior command in the production of a body politic. Technical teaching is important, but it does not consist of instructions to be obeyed, but in setting up a regime of exercises in which trainees develop somatic skill. Thus the relation of teacher/student is not that of master/slave: a regime of exercises is not an order given on the spot, but an artisanal coaxing that actualizes a certain combination of the virtual potentials of the student's body. The most radical point of our analysis is that somatic skill is more complex than instructions, more precise, more refined. The challenge of contemporary anti-Platonism is to turn around logo-prejudice: it is words that are clumsy, abstract, and so on, not the somatic skills long associated with a brute and stupid 'body'. (PP 132) 

So, yes, here it's too much a simple (Dreyfusian?) inversion of Platonism, when it comes to the actual driving of the chariot, which I'm calling "somatic skill." Certainly part of that is what S and K call motor acuity. But it's true that I neglect what they call the propositional knowledge of the chariot driver (knowing what to do to initiate the action displaying the skill of chariot driving), as well as any selection of the right actions while in the chariot. But I do think that I'm close to giving the coach credit for propositional knowledge in setting up the training regime that allows the development of motor acuity (and, indeed, propositional knowledge) on the part of the driver.

I think there's also the same problem / potential in what I say about Plato's bit about nurses in the Laws. (PP 133-35). If I were to expand on that, I'd stress that the slave women had to have received lots of instruction and / or exposure in order for them to be able to discern and choose the right songs. Again, I juxtapose their intuition (which Plato calls guesswork) to the Platonic demand for verbal articulation as hallmark of techne.

In this more recent paper on the topic I say there is a "singularity of bodily rapport" at work, 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). So while I don't emphasize the propositional knowledge components (the scaffolding as S and K put it) I don't think it's inimical to my analysis: I would just have to widen the lens a bit to include the apprenticeship of the nurses.

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These are just a few quick reactions. I'll be keeping the Stanley and Krakauer paper in mind as I re-read other parts of my work and move ahead in future work.

Notes on Stanley and Krakauer 2013

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

MY TAKE-AWAY POINTS

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

Cognitive neuroscience distinguishes declarative and procedural knowledge. 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 happen when equating these cognitive neuroscience terms with philosophical terms. It is very misleading to equate "declarative knowledge" with the philosophical term "propositional knowledge." Propositional knowledge is knowledge of facts, but that knowledge need not be verbally articulable. Furthermore, one should not equate "procedural knowledge" with "motor skill" for that leaves out the contribution of propositional knowledge to motor skill.

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.

GOING THROUGH THE PAPER, SECTION BY SECTION 

INTRODUCTION

Initial dialectic. Platonism about skill: you must be able to explain principles guiding action; otherwise it is just a habit. Against this extreme position, many now think skill does not involve knowledge of rules. 

Cognitive neuroscience seems to mirror these philosophical assumptions in their concentration on experiments that show that active reflection on principles impedes performance and that retention of knowledge of facts not needed for skill (HM case). 

There are some questionable assumptions at work here involving hasty or indeed wrong identification of neuroscience categories (declarative and procedural knowledge) and mental kinds (propositional knowledge; theoretical vs practical ability). Cognitive neuroscience should not equate procedural "knowledge" (a misnomer; should be "motor acuity" or decrease in error and increase in smoothness of movement) with "motor skill" tout court. And it should not oppose procedural knowledge to declarative knowledge (= verbal articulation) The problem is that "procedural knowledge" has been applied to non-knowledge aspects of skill (motor acuity). But it doesn't follow that skills do not require knowledge of facts. Thus we have made an attribute of a component of skill (that motor acuity is non-knowledge based) into an attribute of the whole of skill.

Note that intellectual ability may involve implicit (non-intentional) abilities.

MOTOR SKILL, PERCEPTUAL DISCRIMINATION AND INTENTION

There are two necessary conditions for belonging to functional category of "skill": 1) Practice-related improvement in goal-directed action and 2) knowing what to do to initiate action manifesting the skill. To have a skill one must know what to do to initiate the action that displays the skill; this is propositional knowledge. S and K do NOT say skills ONLY require know-what to do to initiate actions. But knowledge like that of initiating an action can be injected into course of activity. So they are claiming that skills require SOME knowledge. 

PROPOSITIONAL vs DECLARATIVE KNOWLEDGE

For S and K, propositional knowledge includes the possession of know-what to do to initiate action displaying skill. However, this form of propositional knowledge does not require the ability to verbally articulate that knowledge (even though possession of other forms of propositional knowledge can and often are shown by verbalizing their contents). On the other hand, the cognitive neuroscience category of declarative knowledge does require ability to verbally articulate that knowledge. So the problem is the false identification of declarative knowledge and propositional knowledge.

THE LESSONS OF HM: MOTOR ACUITY, ACTION SELECTION AND KNOWLEDGE

The HM case shows multiple memory systems in brain. This is very important, but has been harmful in that it allowed false mapping of true cog NS distinction of declarative vs procedural "knowledge" onto bad folk distinctions of knowledge vs skill and theory vs practice. 

HM cases show dissociation btw improved motor performance and ability to recall task aspect. However, HM required explicit instruction each day, so the idea that HM had an entirely procedural motor skill is undermined. If you really have a skill, you don't need instruction to start over every day. What is being learned each day is not skill but only a part of skill, motor acuity.

Displaying both propositional knowledge and motor skill involves both propositional knowledge and perceptual / motor acuity, so there is no good distinction between theoretical and practical activity.

CONCLUSIONS

For Dreyfus, skill moves you from guidance by knowledge-based decisions to perception of right action, so that expert performance is a species of perceptual acuity. Further, for Dreyfus, expertise is automatic or habitual and knowledge drops away. But for S and K, the expert uses knowledge of activity to dictate to non-knowledge components, so it is combination of knowledge and acuity that leads to skilled performance. Thus even if initial scaffolding for basic components drops away that doesn't mean you don't need new knowledge to continue refinement of skill and to add new non-knowledge components.