(I guess that when you wrote “piano” you meant “violin”.) I agree: skills are acquired and preserved in a different way from factual knowledge, and there are mental skills as well as physical, and they may be highly relevant to figuring out what’s true and what’s false; e.g., if I present Terry Tao with some complicated proposition in (say) the theory of partial differential equations and give him 15 seconds to guess whether it’s true or not then I bet he’ll be right much more frequently than I would even if he doesn’t do any explicit reasoning at all, because he’s developed a good sense for what’s true and what isn’t.
But he would, I’m pretty sure, still classify his opinion as a hunch or guess or conjecture, and wouldn’t call it knowledge.
I’d say the same about all varieties of mental metis (but cautiously, because maybe there are cases I’ve failed to imagine right). Practice (in various senses of that word) can give you very good hunches, but knowledge is a different thing and harder to come by.
One possible family of counterexamples: for things that are literally within yourself, it could well be possible to extend the range of things you are reliably aware of. Everyone can tell you, with amply justified confidence, whether or not they have toothache right now. Maybe there are ways to gain sufficient awareness of your internal workings that you have similar insight into whether your blood pressure is elevated, or whether you have higher than usual levels of cortisol in your bloodstream, etc. But I don’t think this is the kind of thing jessicata is talking about here.
[EDITED to add:]
I wouldn’t personally tend to call what-a-skilled-violin-player-has-but-can’t-transfer-verbally “knowledge”. I would be happy saying “she knows how to play the violin well”, though. (Language is complicated.) I also wouldn’t generally use the word “ideas”. So (to whatever extent jessicata’s language use is like mine, at least) the violin player may provide a useful analogy for what this post is about, but isn’t an actual example of it, which is why I made the switch above from violinist to mathematician.
This whole discussion might be clearer with a modest selection of, say, 3-5 concrete examples of ideas jessicata has arrived at via epistemic modalities that modernist academic thinking doesn’t care for, and might be tempted to justify via rigorous proof, academic sources, etc.; we could then consider what would happen to those cases, specifically, with a range of policies for what you say about where your ideas come from and why you believe them.
I think a person who has trained awareness about thier own cortisol levels is likely to have some useful knowledge about cortisol.
They might have hundreds of experiences where they did X and then they noticed their cortisol rising. If you talk with them about stress they might have their own ontology that distinguishes activities in stressful and not-stressful based on whether or not they raise their own cortisol level. I do think that such an ontology provides fruitful knowledge.
A decade ago plenty of psychologists ran around and claimed that willpower is about how much glucose one has in their blood. Professor Rob Baumeister wrote his book Willpower for that thesis. If Baumeister would have worn a device that gave him 24⁄7 information about his glucose levels I think he would have gained knowledge that would have told him that the thesis is wrong.
Yes, I agree that there could be genuine knowledge to be had in such a case. But it seems to me that what it takes to make it genuine knowledge is exactly what the OP here is lamenting the demand for.
Suppose you practice some sort of (let’s say) meditation, and after a while you become inwardly convinced that you are now aware at all times of the level of cortisol in your blood. You now try doing a bunch of things and see which ones lead to a “higher-cortisol experience”. Do you have knowledge about what activities raise and lower cortisol levels yet? I say: no, because as yet you don’t actually know that the thing you think is cortisol-awareness really is cortisol-awareness.
So now you test it. You hook up some sort of equipment that samples your blood and measures cortisol, and you do various things and record your estimates of your cortisol levels, and afterwards you compare them against what the machinery says. And lo, it turns out that you really have developed reliably accurate cortisol-awareness. Now do you have knowledge about what activities raise and lower cortisol levels? Yes, I think you do (with some caveats about just how thoroughly you’ve tested your cortisol-sense; it might turn out that it’s usually good but systematically wrong in some way you didn’t test).
But this scientific evidence that your cortisol-sense really is a cortisol-sense is just what it takes to make appeals to that cortisol-sense no longer seem excessively subjective and unreliable and woo-y to hard-nosed rationalist types.
The specific examples jessicata gives in the OP seem to me to be ones where there isn’t, as yet, that sort of rigorous systematic modernism-friendly science-style evidence that intuition reliably matches reality.
Anyway you do science can turn out to be usually good but systematically wrong in some way you didn’t test. Most placebo-blind studies are build on questionable assumptions about how blinding works.
jessicata does according to their profile work in “decision theory, social epistemology, strategy, naturalized agency, mathematical foundations, decentralized networking systems and applications, theory of mind, and functional programming languages”.
In a field like theory of mind there’s not knowledge that verified to standards that would satisfy a physicist. The knowledge you can have is less certain. In comparison to the other knowledge sources that are available increasing your ability of self introspection is a good help at building knowledge about the field.
The whole apparatus of science is about reducing the opportunities for being systematically wrong in ways you didn’t test. Sure, it doesn’t always work, but if there’s a better way I don’t think the human race has found it yet.
If knowledge is much harder to come by in domain A than in domain B, you can either accept that you don’t get to claim to know things as often in domain A, or else relax what you mean by “knowledge” when working in domain A. The latter feels better, because knowing things is nice, but I think the former is usually a better strategy. Otherwise there’s too much temptation to start treating things you “know” only in the sense of (say) most people in the field having strong shared intuitions about them in the same way as you treat things you “know” in the sense of having solid experimental evidence despite repeated attempts at refutation.
(I guess that when you wrote “piano” you meant “violin”.) I agree: skills are acquired and preserved in a different way from factual knowledge, and there are mental skills as well as physical, and they may be highly relevant to figuring out what’s true and what’s false; e.g., if I present Terry Tao with some complicated proposition in (say) the theory of partial differential equations and give him 15 seconds to guess whether it’s true or not then I bet he’ll be right much more frequently than I would even if he doesn’t do any explicit reasoning at all, because he’s developed a good sense for what’s true and what isn’t.
But he would, I’m pretty sure, still classify his opinion as a hunch or guess or conjecture, and wouldn’t call it knowledge.
I’d say the same about all varieties of mental metis (but cautiously, because maybe there are cases I’ve failed to imagine right). Practice (in various senses of that word) can give you very good hunches, but knowledge is a different thing and harder to come by.
One possible family of counterexamples: for things that are literally within yourself, it could well be possible to extend the range of things you are reliably aware of. Everyone can tell you, with amply justified confidence, whether or not they have toothache right now. Maybe there are ways to gain sufficient awareness of your internal workings that you have similar insight into whether your blood pressure is elevated, or whether you have higher than usual levels of cortisol in your bloodstream, etc. But I don’t think this is the kind of thing jessicata is talking about here.
[EDITED to add:]
I wouldn’t personally tend to call what-a-skilled-violin-player-has-but-can’t-transfer-verbally “knowledge”. I would be happy saying “she knows how to play the violin well”, though. (Language is complicated.) I also wouldn’t generally use the word “ideas”. So (to whatever extent jessicata’s language use is like mine, at least) the violin player may provide a useful analogy for what this post is about, but isn’t an actual example of it, which is why I made the switch above from violinist to mathematician.
This whole discussion might be clearer with a modest selection of, say, 3-5 concrete examples of ideas jessicata has arrived at via epistemic modalities that modernist academic thinking doesn’t care for, and might be tempted to justify via rigorous proof, academic sources, etc.; we could then consider what would happen to those cases, specifically, with a range of policies for what you say about where your ideas come from and why you believe them.
I think a person who has trained awareness about thier own cortisol levels is likely to have some useful knowledge about cortisol.
They might have hundreds of experiences where they did X and then they noticed their cortisol rising. If you talk with them about stress they might have their own ontology that distinguishes activities in stressful and not-stressful based on whether or not they raise their own cortisol level. I do think that such an ontology provides fruitful knowledge.
A decade ago plenty of psychologists ran around and claimed that willpower is about how much glucose one has in their blood. Professor Rob Baumeister wrote his book Willpower for that thesis. If Baumeister would have worn a device that gave him 24⁄7 information about his glucose levels I think he would have gained knowledge that would have told him that the thesis is wrong.
Yes, I agree that there could be genuine knowledge to be had in such a case. But it seems to me that what it takes to make it genuine knowledge is exactly what the OP here is lamenting the demand for.
Suppose you practice some sort of (let’s say) meditation, and after a while you become inwardly convinced that you are now aware at all times of the level of cortisol in your blood. You now try doing a bunch of things and see which ones lead to a “higher-cortisol experience”. Do you have knowledge about what activities raise and lower cortisol levels yet? I say: no, because as yet you don’t actually know that the thing you think is cortisol-awareness really is cortisol-awareness.
So now you test it. You hook up some sort of equipment that samples your blood and measures cortisol, and you do various things and record your estimates of your cortisol levels, and afterwards you compare them against what the machinery says. And lo, it turns out that you really have developed reliably accurate cortisol-awareness. Now do you have knowledge about what activities raise and lower cortisol levels? Yes, I think you do (with some caveats about just how thoroughly you’ve tested your cortisol-sense; it might turn out that it’s usually good but systematically wrong in some way you didn’t test).
But this scientific evidence that your cortisol-sense really is a cortisol-sense is just what it takes to make appeals to that cortisol-sense no longer seem excessively subjective and unreliable and woo-y to hard-nosed rationalist types.
The specific examples jessicata gives in the OP seem to me to be ones where there isn’t, as yet, that sort of rigorous systematic modernism-friendly science-style evidence that intuition reliably matches reality.
Anyway you do science can turn out to be usually good but systematically wrong in some way you didn’t test. Most placebo-blind studies are build on questionable assumptions about how blinding works.
jessicata does according to their profile work in “decision theory, social epistemology, strategy, naturalized agency, mathematical foundations, decentralized networking systems and applications, theory of mind, and functional programming languages”.
In a field like theory of mind there’s not knowledge that verified to standards that would satisfy a physicist. The knowledge you can have is less certain. In comparison to the other knowledge sources that are available increasing your ability of self introspection is a good help at building knowledge about the field.
The whole apparatus of science is about reducing the opportunities for being systematically wrong in ways you didn’t test. Sure, it doesn’t always work, but if there’s a better way I don’t think the human race has found it yet.
If knowledge is much harder to come by in domain A than in domain B, you can either accept that you don’t get to claim to know things as often in domain A, or else relax what you mean by “knowledge” when working in domain A. The latter feels better, because knowing things is nice, but I think the former is usually a better strategy. Otherwise there’s too much temptation to start treating things you “know” only in the sense of (say) most people in the field having strong shared intuitions about them in the same way as you treat things you “know” in the sense of having solid experimental evidence despite repeated attempts at refutation.
Yes, I changed the instrument and forgot to change all instances. I corrected it.