I’ve spent most of the seminar in Michael Thompson’s course puzzling over the notion of knowledge without observation as it appears in Anscombe. I recently ran across an example in Moran’s Authority and Estrangement that makes matters even more unclear. Only having read the first chapter of Moran’s book, I can’t quite say how similar his use of the concept is to Anscombe’s, but there are obvious connections. Moran writes:
“A person is commonly aware of his own basic movements and bodily position without having to observe anything, internally or externally….At the very least, the burden of proof would be on someone who claims that we must adopt a perceptual model if we are to see self-knowledge as involving a cognitive achievement at all. In this respect, we might compare the awareness one has of one’s bodily position with a case like that of judging what time it is. These are judgments of contingent fact which can, of course, be made on the basic of observation and evidence of various kinds…but in a central range of cases they may involve no such observation at all. You perhaps shut your eyes, consider the question, and deliver an answer.”
The difficulty is that to my mind, I can come up with no plausible sense in which our knowledge of what time it is consists of knowledge without observation. Our knowledge of time seems to rely on the fact that we observe a great many things, and our memory of what has gone by allows us to estimate how much time has gone by (there may be other factors, such as feelings of hunger, perception of lighting conditions, etc, but these are not amenable to Moran).
It is true that we have no immediate observation which tells us what time it is, but this cannot be what “knowledge without observation” consists of, for in that case any sort of knowledge which comes from memory of particular facts would be part of the category of “knowledge without observation.” But it is obviously unreasonable to extend the category so far my belief that Anscombe’s Intention is on my bookshelf counts as knowledge without observation.
I’m a little baffled: perhaps I misread how the case of time is supposed to work, or perhaps it was merely Moran’s error to assimilate it to the cases of knowing the position of one’s own body, one’s intentions, or one’s beliefs that he is centrally concerned with. On the other hand, if there’s a real analogy, I’m quite enthused that in at least one case, the idea of knowledge without observation isn’t making much sense.
2 responses so far ↓
Cosma // 11 November, 2007 at 8:27 am |
Maybe I am just misunderstanding the use of the word “observation”, but there are a whole host of neuropsychological syndromes which would seem to demonstrate that being aware of your own “basic movements and bodily position” requires a lot of internal and even external observations.
hyperpapeterie // 13 November, 2007 at 5:16 pm |
I’m going to stop delaying the “good” response that was forthcoming and just give a lame one. Also, given the level of uncertainty expressed in the post, I’m hardly the ideal person to try and explain this.
Although Anscombe and others do not necessarily spell this out, I think they’re operating with some sort of distinction between observation construed as a personal-level process, and one as a subpersonal psychological process. Anscombe describes one’s knowledge of basic movements and bodily position as not being dependent on sensations. So some sorts of internal monitoring are definitely going to be compatible with the claim, since they are not the sort of consciously available sensations that Anscombe and company are concerned with. Of course setting out this distinction in detail isn’t especially easy.
On the other hand, I suspect you’re right about the weight of the evidence making even the restricted claim implausible (any particular neuropsychological syndromes you’re thinking of, btw?) In particular, I’d think of the sort of experiments where you’re made to misperceive someone else’s hand movements as your own, via the use of mirrors, or the sort of treatment that Ramachandran applied to phantom limb sufferers.
That sort of evidence wouldn’t yet be decisive, though. It could be that in abnormal conditions, perceptual evidence defeats or otherwise messes up our knowledge of basic bodily movements, but that in the ordinary case, that knowledge does not rely on sensations or perceptions.