‘A Shepherd’s Life’: Different types of knowledge

I have made the mistake in the past of thinking of knowledge in terms of bookishness and academic skills. I ought to have realised earlier that there is more than one way of knowing. This reminder was brought home to me as a consequence of reading ‘A Shepherd’s Life’ by James Rebanks. Sheep in a field look much the same to my untutored eye but not to the experienced shepherd who has acquired knowledge from a tradition passed down from parent to child and from personal, outdoor experience.

For example, the shepherd knows about: the nutrition supplied by different qualities of grass, how to train and work alongside a sheepdog, how to choose the right quality of rams for the ewes, who farms which patch of land in his locality, how the farms are run, what livestock are kept there, how to shear a sheep both quickly and carefully (and how to treaty any wounds that might be caused), how to pack fleeces, how to dip sheep and deal with maggots that collect on sheep, haymaking, how to build and repair dry stone walls, selecting stones and knowing which ones to place where, how to assess sheep by, for example, their colour, condition of fleece, legs, head, teeth (‘the art is to judge from the teeth whether they will last several years, or just a year or so’), how to cut and sometimes bend the horns of rams, how to prepare sheep for showing, how to turn the skin of a dead lamb into a ‘waistcoat’ for an orphan lamb to give to ‘grieving’ ewe. As Rebanks tells us, some of the shepherds he had come across in his native Lake District were ‘semi-literate’. Theirs was a knowledge that was deep but not drawn from books.

In a single lifetime it is impossible to acquire more than a fraction of all that there is to know. Once there was natural philosophy which became science; once there were just a few basic sciences, chiefly physics, chemistry and biology. Now there is a wide array of sciences, each one subdivided into smaller specialisations. To master everything within even one of these disciplines is beyond the capacity of any individual. And consider all the languages there are to be learned. And all the arts and crafts. The sum total of all human knowledge is incalculable and staggering. To think of the very narrow range of your own in the context of the totality of human knowledge is a humbling experience. Walk along the non-fiction shelves of a library and be overwhelmed by your own ignorance.

As I thought about the stark contrast between this great accumulation of human knowledge in contrast to the very severely limited range of what each individual can hope to acquire, I started to wonder about priorities. Any attempt to acquire more and more knowledge is, no doubt, laudable. But since a long life devoted to learning can attain such a tiny sample of all that is available, perhaps it makes sense to set out priorities. Are some areas of knowledge more important than others? What is the most important knowledge to gain?

And what about the long-standing difference between ‘knowing that’ and ‘knowing how? The former the sort of knowledge tested on television quiz programmes like ‘Mastermind’ and ‘University Challenge’, factual information: in the latter case think of knowing how to ride a bike, to swim, to improvise on the piano.

What sort of knowledge should we be seeking?

SUPERVENIENCE

1. INTRODUCTION: In recent years the theory of supervenience has attracted considerable attention as a persuasive alternative to both dualism and reductive physicalism. Indeed, it has been called ‘the most influential metaphysical position, not only on the mind-body problem but more generally on the relationship between higher-level properties and underlying lower-level properties in all areas.’[1]
   
   
2. NON-REDUCTIVE PHYSICALISM: Its appeal lies in the fact that, at least in its mainstream form, strong supervenience – I will distinguish strong from weak supervenience later – appears to retain the advantages and avoid the disadvantages of both dualism and physicalism: within a physicalist monism which keeps the mental dependent on the physical, it nevertheless maintains a distance between them by asserting that the mental is not reducible to the physical. For those who reject mind-brain identity but are unwilling to jettison physicalism, supervenience offers a compromise worth exploring.  How is this balancing act achieved and how successful is it as a mind-body theory?

3. ANALOGIES: NEWSPAPER PHOTOGRAPH/PIXELS/PAINTING (MELODY/NOTES)
   The visual smoothness and verisimilitude of a newspaper photograph or a display on the screen of a television or computer is composed of a collection of very many extremely small (and at the level of the newspaper reader, television viewer or computer user, invisible) squares or pixels. The macro level image of, for example, a face in the photograph or on the screen is not, in a sense, reducible to the micro level of minute squares. For if you were to blow up the image to a size at which the pixels became visible, then at that level of focus there is no visible face. The face is a property of the macro but not of the micro level. On the other hand, however, the macro-level face is wholly dependent on and is composed of nothing other than those pixels. Furthermore, in order to manipulate the macro-level image (for example, to change the expression on the face from a frown to a smile), there must be a change at the level of the pixels. Kim reinforces this point in connection with a similar analogy between mind-brain supervenience and the supervenience that subsists between the visual image of a painting and the separate brush strokes or stipples of which it is composed:

To make your painting more beautiful, more expressive, or more dramatic, you must do physical work on the painting and thereby alter the physical supervenience base of the aesthetic properties you want to improve. There is no direct way of making your painting more beautiful or less beautiful; you must change it physically if you want to change it aesthetically – there is no other way.[2]

• STRONG AND WEAK (NECESSARY AND CONTINGENT) SUPERVENIENCE: What exactly is strong supervenience as a mind-body theory? Mental states are held to supervene on physical states in a dependent but non-reducible relationship. This relationship entails the following: that if there are two identical physical states, then there are two identical mental states. Kim gives a helpful explanation:

Mental properties supervene on physical properties, in that necessarily, for any mental property M, if anything has M at time t, there exists a physical base (or subvenient) property P such that it has P at t, and necessarily anything that has P at a time has M at that time. For example, if a person experiences pain, it must be the case that that person instantiates some physical property (presumably, a complex neural property) such that whenever anyone instantiates this physical property, she must experience pain. That is, every mental property has a physical base that guarantees its instantiation. Moreover, without such a physical base, a mental property cannot be instantiated. … Or we can say: any two things that are exact physical duplicates necessarily are exact psychological duplicates as well … Or, as some have put it: no mental difference without a physical difference. [3]

There is an important distinction between strong supervenience (as exemplified in the above examples and particularly reinforced by Kim’s repeated ‘necessarily’) and weak supervenience. An instance of strong supervenience would hold in all possible worlds. If the facts at the lower or base level (e.g., the level of atoms) are identical, then the facts at the higher or supervenient level (e.g., at the level of biology or of mental events) will necessarily be identical. As Chalmers puts it: ‘If there is a living kangaroo in this world, then any world that is physically identical to this world will contain a physically identical kangaroo and that kangaroo will automatically be alive.’[4] If strong supervenience holds in the relationship between brain states and conscious states, then if two brain states are identical, the two conscious states that are supervenient on them must necessarily be identical too and any change in a brain state must necessarily be accompanied by a change in a conscious state. Weak supervenience, by contrast, holds that it is only contingent, a feature of the way the world happens to be, that high-level facts supervene on base-level facts. In other possible worlds this relationship might not subsist. In the relationship between brain states and conscious states, weak supervenience would allow that in other possible worlds (but on empirical grounds not in this world) identical brain states might not be accompanied by identical conscious states. My physically identical twin might experience inverted qualia or not be conscious at all. The distinction between strong (or what Chalmers calls ‘logical’) and weak (or what Chalmers calls ‘natural’) supervenience is neatly captured by Chalmers here:

If B-properties supervene logically on A-properties, then once God (hypothetically) creates a world with certain A-facts, the B-facts come along for free as an automatic consequence. If B-properties merely supervene naturally on A-properties, however, then after making sure of the A-facts, God has to do more work in order to make sure of the B-facts.[5]

Let me place Chalmers’ metaphor in the specific context of supervenience of the conscious over the physical. When God made triangles, he, presumably, did not separately have to create a law whereby the internal angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles. This law necessarily came along with the territory of triangles. Now, if we imagine God first making human bodies, we can ask the question whether, like geometrical theorems and triangles, consciousness came along necessarily with the territory of complex organic systems (strong supervenience) or whether God had, in addition to creating bodies (and realising that they were otherwise zombies), to create consciousness separately (weak supervenience). 

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[1] Mind in a Physical World by Jaegwon Kim (Cambridge, MA, 2000)

[2] ibid.

[3]  Mind in a Physical World by Jaegwon Kim (Cambridge, MA, 2000)

[4] The Conscious Mind by David Chalmers (Oxford, 1996)

[5] ibid.