Abstract
In “Practical Knowledge of Language”, C.-h. Tsai criticizes the arguments in “Swimming and Speaking Spanish” (this issue, pp. 331–341), on the grounds that its account of knowledge of language as knowledge-how is mistaken. In its place, he proposes an alternative account in terms of Russell’s concept “knowledge-by-acquaintance”. In this paper, I show that this account succeeds neither in displacing the account in Swimming and Speaking Spanish nor in addressing Tsai’s main concern: solving the “delivery problem”.
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Notes
Arguably, Tsai’s account of Dummett is mistaken. However, correct or not, it makes Dummett’s position scarcely coherent. In effect, it commits Dummett to the view that an s/h’s performance is “guided”/”controlled” by rules of which the s/h scarcely can be credited with having conscious knowledge of, and may well be utterly unable to recognize as the rules which “guide” his performance even when they are formulated for him. If this is what is built into Dummett’s conception of “implicit knowledge”, it is small wonder that he should find it so very difficult to solve the “delivery problem”, which must, clearly, at this point confront him.
The modern classic discussion of this problem is W. V. O. Quine’s “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” (Quine 1953). Here Quine argues against the reductionism which Russell defends. In this essay, Quine makes it clear that using acquaintance as the basis for knowledge is intended to save epistemology and metaphysics from relativism in any of its forms, including the pragmatism which Quine himself advocates.
Nor does Tsai’s discussion of how rules of language function in language acquisition add to this; indeed one might suspect that he is simply begging the question he charges me with failing to answer.
A speaker has knowledge-by-acquaintance of the rules of his mother tongue, and might have knowledge-by-description of the rules …The speaker’s knowledge-by-description of the rules of his mother tongue …is derived from his knowledge-by-acquaintance of the rules …there is no difficulty in answering the question “How is it possible for a speaker to have conscious, non-propositional knowledge of rules of language? ”, because every competent speaker has such knowledge every speaker has knowledge-by-acquaintance of his mother tongue, the nature of the knowledge is both conscious and non-propositional (PKL 340).
Space limitations prevent my giving this the attention is warrants; I return to it briefly below in “Genuine Knowledge”.
Tsai’s discussion here is somewhat confusing. In the older terminology, the rules of language “generate” sentences, but this does not mean that they function to produce the actual sentences; rather they explain the sentences and how they are understood (see Chomsky 1965). Tsai seems to waiver between this account of the rules of language and an account in which the rules serve to produce the actual sentences used by a given s/h, i.e., that the rules produce the s/h’s performance. This contributes to some of his confusion, but it is beyond the scope of this paper to take account of it.
It’s interesting here to note that this may not be a problem for Russell’s use of knowledge-by-acquaintance of universals or even concepts, depending on exactly what he wishes to accomplish with it.
Elsewhere I argue that feature-placing language is not sufficient to warrant any claim to know or understand a concept. See Hanna and Harrison 2004, 215–223, for a full discussion of this.
Tsai further confuses this issue when he introduces a distinction between consciousness and awareness, and says that we must be need only be aware of the rules “in principle” (see PKL, 337, ftn 7, and 340).
Which seems to be Dummett’s suggestion, rather than the position offered by Tsai. See Dummett 1993, “Preface”, x.
The times we seem to do so are devoted to pondering stylistic rules, the rules that, on Noam Chomsky’s account, don’t make up language as the subject of linguistic or philosophical investigation. These rules are arbitrary and conventional, they vary from one natural language to another and, indeed, vary from one context to another: they cannot explain our acquisition, use and understanding of language, and should not be confused with the proper object of linguistic or philosophical inquiry.
What follows is speculative, and there are places where Tsai seems to deviate from the interpretation offered here. For example, at one point he writes that the “knowledge” I posit as knowledge of language “…if it could be counted as genuine, is at best classified into what Ernest Sosa calls “animal knowledge”, a sort of knowledge that does not require a subject to have a first-person perspective on what he knows” (PKL, 338). This implies that all sorts of things count as genuine knowledge, and if this is so, then it’s difficult to understand why animal knowledge is genuine knowledge, while knowledge-how is not. However, rather than worry over this, I will try to find some characterization of genuine knowledge which doesn’t see quite so capricious and open to varying interpretations.
The title of my paper was inspired by a passage in one of P.G. Wodehouse’s novels where a young man asks a young woman if she speaks Spanish, and her response is “I don’t know, I’ve never tried it”. This is amusing because it’s so absurd: you may not know if that you can swim, but you do indeed know, amnesia and brain damage aside, whether or not you can speak Spanish.
There is a reading of Russell which would support this, however, it’s not clear that it would do Tsai any good. Russell lays out a fundamental principle of his theory of understanding, and, by extension, meaning: “Every proposition which we can understand must be composed wholly of constituents with which we are acquainted” (58). Gareth Evans (Evans 1982) calls this “ Russell’s Principle”; his discussion of this, along with the discussion in Hanna and Harrison 2004, provides a good background for understanding what is at stake in accepting the notion of knowledge-by-acquaintance as used by Russell.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Cinnamon Wurthrich for reading and commenting on an earlier version of this paper. As always, Bernard Harrison’s comments and suggestions have helped me see my way clear on the key issues.
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Hanna, P. Beyond the “Delivery Problem”: Why There is “No Such Thing as a Language”. Philosophia 38, 343–355 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-009-9230-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-009-9230-4