1
Ryle and Oakeshott on the “Knowing-How/Knowing-That” DistinctionLeslie MarshThe
Social
Nature of Rationality
Politics make a call upon knowledge. Consequently, it is not irrelevant to inquire into the
kind
of knowledge which is involved.
1
— OakeshottGilbert Ryle’s “Knowing How/Knowing That” distinction (KH/KT) gave crisparticulation to a long-standing epistemological concern that Michael Oakeshott had: that is,what is the epistemic status of the area that comprises our waking lives, the domain ofpractical reasoning, of which political practice, on Oakeshott’s account, is but one aspect.
2
This concern is set against a much broader purview: that of the nature of rationality, or moreaccurately the
social
nature of rationality.
1
Oakeshott,
Rationalism in Politics and other essays, new and expanded edition,
ed. Timothy Fuller(Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1991), 45. Hereafter:
RIP
.
2
Ryle’s “Knowing How, Knowing That” essay was first published in the
Proceedings of the AristotelianSociety
, New Series, Vol. 45 (1944 – 1945): 1-16. The terms “rationalism” and “knowledge of” and“knowledge about” make an appearance some thirty years earlier than the celebrated formulations of
Rationalism in Politics
in Oakeshott,
Experience and its Modes
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press,1933), 23, 25, 53, 318. Hereafter:
EM
. The original essay “Rationalism in Politics” appeared in the
Cambridge Journal
, Vol. 1 (1947-8): 81-98, 145-57.
2
Though Ryle’s KH/KT distinction has been taken to be primarily an epistemologicaldistinction, it is as much a claim about the operations of the mind. Ryle’s
The Concept of Mind
3
was a work in philosophical psychology; and though Oakeshott couldn’t beconsidered a philosopher of mind, his work is replete with concerns about the bipartiterelationship of mind to world and of the bipartite relationship of theorizing to action.Oakeshott’s concern with the KH/KT distinction is coextensive with a concern with“unconsidered actions” supposedly “irrational” conduct and reflective consciousness, thelatter supposedly the spring of rational conduct. On Oakeshott’s account the former is not
irrational
(where tradition is the only reliable resource,
its disregard is
irrational
); the latter isillusory and hardly
rational
. The contrast is a spurious one; all there ever is, is a sociallyembedded intelligence – “intelligibility is contextual” – to use what might be considered anOakeshott slogan. This said, Oakeshott does not subscribe to the Marx-Mannheim line (andtheir intellectual heirs comprising the sociology of knowledge movement) that humanconduct can merely be explained as being subject to ‘‘false consciousness’’ or a distortive
mis
cognition.Oakeshott rejects the prevailing Cartesian orthodoxy across cognitive science, thephilosophy of mind, epistemology and metaphysics: an orthodoxy that has systematicallyoverlooked not only the location of thinkers in their physical environments, but has alsooverlooked the interactions amongst thinkers in the ambient socio-cultural soup:You do not first have a mind, which acquires a filling of ideas and thenmakes a distinction between true and false, right and wrong, reasonableand unreasonable, and then, as a third step, causes activity. Properlyspeaking the mind has no existence apart from, or in advance of, these
3
Gilbert Ryle,
The Concept of Mind
(1949; reprint, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990).
3
distinctions. These and other distinctions are not acquisitions; they areconstitutive of the mind. The whole notion of the mind as an apparatusfor thinking is I believe an error and it is the error at the root of thisparticular view of the nature of “rationality.” (
RIP
, 109-13)For Oakeshott, a tradition or practice implies the social situatedness of the self andthe rejection of focal individualism, the idea that human drives and behavioralcharacteristics are socially and historically invariant: individuals draw their self-understanding and their conceptions of the good, their “constitutive” ends, from what isconceptually to hand in historically specific societies or civilizations. Society is in somesense antecedent to the individuals that compose it. Mind does not merely respond to a
given
world; mind is
enacted
4
through a particularized history of socio-environmentalcoupling: perception is an
act
of interpretation and the generation of meaning, a self that isembedded and has coherence in a matrix of practices and traditions. Situatedness, forOakeshott, is captured in the following:(i) Manners of behavior which are meaningless when separated fromtheir context (
RIP
, 63);(ii) “Politics may be said to be the activity of responding to conditions ofthings
already
recognized to be the product of choices” (
RIP
, 70, italicsadded);
4
The terms “enacted” or “enactive,” coined by Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson & Eleanor Rosch,
The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience
(1991; reprint, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,2000), here implies sense-making, embodiment, emergence, and experience. Enacted in this sense isnot co-extensive with Oakeshott’s term “self-enactment.” Oakeshott,
On Human Conduct
(Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1990), 70-8,
passim
. Hereafter:
OHC
.
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Ryle and Oakeshott on the “Knowing-How/Knowing-That” Distinction
Do note cite - this is a draft. Final published version can be found in: http://www.amazon.com/Meanings-Michael-Oakeshotts-Conservatism/dp/1845402189
Gilbert Ryle’s “Knowing How/Knowing That” distinction (KH/KT) gave crisp articulation to a long-standing epistemological concern that Michael Oakeshott had: that… (More)
Gilbert Ryle’s “Knowing How/Knowing That” distinction (KH/KT) gave crisp articulation to a long-standing epistemological concern that Michael Oakeshott had: that… (More)
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