I will start with an anecdote in Dutch, it is also translated in English below

Gisteren keek Jonas terwijl hij de trap op liep om naar bed te gaan naar een klerenhanger van hout in de vorm van een gans, met Niels Holgersson erop. Hij vroeg: “Waarom maken de Bob de Bouwers daar zo een gans?”. (Bob de Bouwers is zijn uitdrukking voor iedereen die dingen maakt of repareert voor zijn beroep). Ik dacht: wat een gekke vraag, hij klopt niet. Ik zei zonder er verder bij na te denken “Je bedoelt zeker: “HOE” maken die Bob de Bouwers die gans?”. “Ja, hoe”, zei Jonas. Ah, gelukkig. Nu klopte de vraag wel: HOE maken Bob de Bouwers zo’n gans van hout daar op zo’n klerenhanger? Maar later dacht ik: is het nou toeval dat Jonas zo vaak “Hoe” en “Waarom” door elkaar haalt? Of zegt dat iets over de kunstmatigheid van het onderscheid tussen die twee begrippen? Zijn “Hoe” en “Waarom” eigenlijk varianten van hetzelfde, begrippen die je alleen met veel oefening kunt leren (kunstmatig) te scheiden?

Now in English:

Yesterday Jonas asked me the a question about a wooden goose (wat is klerenhanger?). He said: Why do Bob the Builders make that goose? (All engineers and craftsmen are named Bob the Builders).  I said, without thinking: O, you mean HOW do Bob the Builders make such a goose? He said: “Yes, How do they?”. Later I thought, well, this is an interesting speech error: doesn’t that tell us that the distinction between HOW and WHY is actually artificial, and that the child must *learn* that these words mean different things? Perhaps to him there isn’t really a difference between How and Why and perhaps this is also true of ourselves, we have just learned to think in a Cartesian framework in which these things are different from one another.

I will now elaborate a bit on this idea, because of course I didn’t just think all that all of a sudden, I happened to be reading about it the same evening Jonas asked that question.

For instance I read in a book (Everyday Cognition, ed. Jean Lave) that Aristotle made a strict division between theoretical thinking and practical thinking.  Theoretical thought, according to Aristotle, asks the Why questions, while practical thought asks the How questions. Practical thought is the thought of the craftsmen, the policy-maker, the engineer: how can we make it? How can we change it? It concerns questions asked for which one needs an answer in order to get something done. (So I was wrong in my previous post to think that the tradition conceives of practice as involving no thinking at all: Aristotle for one did belive that practice involved practical thinking. He just thought it wasn’t worth any effort studying it). Aristotle generally looked down on practical people because the real, Royal, Heavenly subject of inquiry was of course Theory (reason, logic, philosophy, fundamental science (which didn’t exist then, and would probably belong to philosophy or something)). And the most enlightened way of spending your time was to think about Why questions and let the How problems be solved by the lower folk. The book I was reading shows that in our everyday lives we hardly ever do ‘theoretical thinking’, we mostly think  practical. As I wrote earlier, most of our knowledge is therefore ‘know-how’: knowledge part of a skillfull coping (as Dreyfus would say). And of course the writers in the book want to show that this is well worth the effort of studying it, if one ever wants to understand anything about what it means to be human.

This priority of practice over theory is totally opposed to the way the tradition has looked on what marks the human being (relative to the animal kingdom, mostly). For example, Descartes also made a strict division between theory and practice, basically in the line of Aristotle’s reasoning, as I understand it. I just read in a book edited by John Haugeland (on Google books). the following passage (by Tim van Gelder) on anti-Cartesian thought (such as Ryle and Heidegger):

haugeland_minddesignii_p447b.png

Of course the anti-cartesians, like Ryle, Haugeland, Heidegger and Dreyfus critically oppose the Cartesian view. Their thoughts on embodiment and embeddedness resonated well within the now blossoming science of embodied embedded cognition, in which practice (let’s see it as a patterned system of continuous acting with your physical body in a (social) environment, supported, but not determined, by the processes in the brain) is the fundamental starting point of all inquiry into the nature of cognition and mind.

As I now come to think, (which basically means: thinking about *how* to put some vague idea into words in this blog) cognitive science has always been an interesting mix of theory and practice. This is because it is one of the few areas within psychology that are at the same time highly theoretical (I mean nobody wanting to be a therapist would first study cognitive science, they would choose clinical psychology or some course like that) and at the same time as seen from the theoretical sciences it is also very practical, because it is a synthetic science, it generates knowledge by making things. (computational models, robots, expert-systems, and so on). The only problem perhaps is that the things that are made by standard cognitive science (cognitive science more in the Cartesian tradition) are often a sort of fake things, revolving around what has been called ‘toy-problems’. [I will not discuss Applied cognitive science, which might look like the most practical part of cognitive science but perhaps is not at all because of the way applied science typically connects to technology and society - I will need to think about this more] In any case this makes the ‘know-how’ of cognitive scientists also a fake ‘know-how’, if it is trying secretly to answer ‘why’ questions by just putting these questions into a sort of ‘how’ disguise, but not really starting any real practice (other than the academic practice, which is the practice of answering Aristotelean/Cartesian fake problems)

PS The current state of our technology-driven, consumerist society is well captured by my answer to Jonas’ question. Because note that I can philosophize all of the above out of the top of my head, but in response to his question I could only say: “Well, they saw it, I guess. With a sawing-machine. I do not know if they put on the paint with a machine as well. Maybe somebody paints the beaks orange all day, very fast, as they pass by in the factory. Or maybe this was actually hand made. You know Jonas, I really do not know how they make these things. We just got it in the store”.

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