By that reasoning a native speaker of a language would often have less knowledge of a language then a person who learned it as a foreign language in a formal matter even when the native speaker speaks it much better for all practical purposes.
When we speak about whether Mary understanding Chinese, I think what we care about is to what extend she will be able to use the language the way a speaker of Chinese would.
A lot of most expert decision making is based on “unconscious competence” and you have to be very careful about how you use the term knowledge if you think that “unconscious competence” doesn’t qualify as knowledge.
Again, this seems to me like a pretty consistent way to look at things that also more accurately matches reality. Whether we use words “knowledge” and “ability” or “explicit knowledge” and “knowledge” doesn’t matter, of course. And for what its worth, I much less sure of usefulness of being precise about such terms in practice. But if there is an obvious physical model of this thought experiment, where there are roughly two kinds of things in Mary’s brain—one easily influenceable by words, and another not—and this model explains everything without introducing anything unphysical, then I don’t see what’s the point of saying “well, if we first group everything knowledge-sounding together, then that grouping doesn’t make sense in Mary’s situation”.
By that reasoning a native speaker of a language would often have less knowledge of a language then a person who learned it as a foreign language in a formal matter even when the native speaker speaks it much better for all practical purposes.
When we speak about whether Mary understanding Chinese, I think what we care about is to what extend she will be able to use the language the way a speaker of Chinese would.
A lot of most expert decision making is based on “unconscious competence” and you have to be very careful about how you use the term knowledge if you think that “unconscious competence” doesn’t qualify as knowledge.
Again, this seems to me like a pretty consistent way to look at things that also more accurately matches reality. Whether we use words “knowledge” and “ability” or “explicit knowledge” and “knowledge” doesn’t matter, of course. And for what its worth, I much less sure of usefulness of being precise about such terms in practice. But if there is an obvious physical model of this thought experiment, where there are roughly two kinds of things in Mary’s brain—one easily influenceable by words, and another not—and this model explains everything without introducing anything unphysical, then I don’t see what’s the point of saying “well, if we first group everything knowledge-sounding together, then that grouping doesn’t make sense in Mary’s situation”.