Ignorant Knowledge

I'm indebted to the Elucidations Podcast of U Chicago interview with Jennifer Lockhart on Ignorant Knowledge.

Ignorant Knowledge is a Kierkegaardism, describing the person who has the words and arguments mastered for a particular skill or role, but in fact is terrible at it, and apparently unable to connect the bad outcomes to incomplete performance of the role. I myself, have been a terrible 'Ignorant Knower' of a lot of things - things about people and leadership and right and wrong, but also about skills and discipline and rationality.  The ignorant knower is in a bind as long as their correction is only available in words - as the discussion on the podcast pointed out, a manager who is terribly inconsistent, and has it pointed out to them, is likely to add 'practising what they preach' to their tissue of litanies, but having no idea how to be unselfish, make a considerate and effective plan, or monitor progress in a motivating way.

Ignorant knowledge (according to Jennifer Lockhart) is a useful problem case for philosophical understandings, like weakness of will.  It forces a confrontation with 'how do we work?'

Learning

My little son is 6 months old tomorrow.  He is on the way to sitting up - he can balance on his rump if he's holding my fingers or leaned against the back of the couch.  One of the interesting things watching him, is that he doesn't know what sitting is.  It isn't a specific thing he does.  When he tips over, there's no event - no change from doing one thing to doing something else.  All he really is consciously doing is seeing things and trying to grab them, and hopefully, put them in his mouth.  He can do that while on his side, and the whole time he's tipping over onto his side.

Heidegger aimed to give an account of our interaction with the world without intentional content, so that we would seamlessly or effortlessly deal with or cope with the world, except in breakdown cases. I think Heidegger is weak on learning: it's obviously necessary, but its necessarily a dynamic process which he wants to find a static structure underneath. And I think if he had thought more about learning, he might have had some trouble, because there is a time when a skill becomes a thing - it puts on a handle and becomes a group or a super-group, that can be called on by the for-the-sake-of-which, which is the ineffable purpose or project that is enough to make use of us and makes us us.  I guess I think there is a faculty of reflection which includes a rationality, and which is linked with our symbolic faculty.  The handling of a pattern of practices is like the inner world's equivalent experience to naming.

My son has no handle on sitting; the first sitting comes before the handle on it.

(I could go on and on:

• about his for-the-sake-of-which at this early stage which is what I think Hegel calls satisfaction in a very raw form.
• about the research I saw the other day about how anaesthetic works by interrupting the interaction between the rear of the brain (where the world is recognized and the body mobilized, controlled and maintained) and the front of the brain (where reasoning and symbolic processing are conducted) and consciousness collapses when you stop the relation (me) between the recognizing and acting parts (me) and the reasoning and symbolising parts (also me). (Kierkegaard reference.)
• enough.)