The posts on the Duhem-Quine Thesis and on the Power of Science pointed to the standardization of performance and of tools as the basis for engaging consistently with the world. The examples about how to measure scientifically the color of an object or determine the species of an animal highlighted the role played by training in bringing about this standardization. We are of course all familiar with training, with the instruction, repetition and practice, with the supervision and the checking and cross-checking that goes into achieving mastery of a performance. For example, the scientific determination of the color of an object depends on the rigorous training of the individuals who carry out the measurements, training that ensures consistency of performance and results.
Of course, this process of training is not limited to the scientific ways of doing things; it is how we learn virtually all of what we do on a daily basis. This is how I learned the use of chopsticks, by watching my friends, then trying on my own under their guidance, kept on practicing, and finally managed to eat successfully using them. This is how we learn a language, listening and speaking, reading and writing, with others who already know it correcting us, and eventually using it to communicate successfully. The standardization of perception and behavior through training is at the basis of our socialization into a community: from learning the language, to using eating utensils and exhibiting proper table manners, to following dress codes and traffic rules when driving… Similar standardization underlies the socialization into a community of people with specialized abilities, such as doctors, nurses, teachers, soldiers, pilots, lawyers, or farmers. Guilds of course come to mind. A scientific community is but one example of people with specialized abilities acquired through training.
We are all familiar with this process of training, with how we get to acquire abilities and skills, with how we learn. It takes discipline, discipline of perception and of behavior. Ability and knowledge involve the development of a disciplined performance through the patterning of perception and behavior. It is on the basis of this patterning that we foreground particular features of our environment, recognize and manipulate objects, behave in a certain way, so that a stable, consistent interaction with our environment can come about.
Of course, as we are all aware, socialization is not the only way that we develop stable and consistent interactions with our environment: we also do it individually, on our own. Sometimes during play, or while we are going about doing something else, we become aware of a novel pattern, a pattern that we pursue; sometimes, while tinkering, trying to solve a problem, things fall into place and new, unexpected configurations of actions emerge. Then we fashion these novel patterns and actions into a stable interaction with the world by standardizing our performance, essentially by training ourselves on our own through individual direct engagement with our environment. A newly developed ability can then be communicated and shared with others, who might adopt or modify it, pick it up or ignore it. All stable interactions with the world, whether learned through socialization or de novo through self-learning, are based on a consistency of performance, a consistency that we achieve through discipline. The disciplining of performance, of perception and action, is at the basis of any ability.
Knowing amounts to perceiving certain patterns and acting in particular ways. It is the assimilation of these specific patterns and actions, this patterning of our perceptions and behavior that constitutes our abilities. At the same time, this patterning is exactly us, amounts to what we are. In other words, in order to develop a stable interaction with the world, we have to perceive the world and conduct ourselves in specific ways, we have to be in a certain way. The abilities that underlie our knowledge are constitutive of who, of what we are. We are what we know, we are what we do. And we make frequent use of this connection, as when we note the way a soldier carries himself, a lawyer talks, or a farmer looks at a garden. This connection further means that by virtue of having acquired knowledge in a particular domain, other domains of human knowledge would not be readily accessible to us. I have previously used the rabbit/duck image to point to this sense of mutual exclusion; a more compelling real-life example was the case of somatization of marital problems among Hindus, a somatization that would not occur in the same way among, say, Christians. So, being able to perceive and do something entails being unable to perceive and do something else. Knowing certain things also means not knowing – not having the ability to know – other things.