Ch11 The Tyranny of Science: The Discovery of Tacit Knowledge

1. Ch11 The Tyranny of Science:The Discovery of Tacit Knowledge By Jeu-Jenq YUANN 台灣大學哲學系 【本著作除另有註明外，採取創用CC「姓名標示－非商業性－相同方式分享」台灣3.0版授權釋出】

2. What did the sophists do to impress the Athenians? • 1. The background is Parmenides who says that what is, is and what is not, is not. • 2. This means that whoever says ‘something’ which cannot be ‘nothing’ as it is ‘something’. • 3. Then this implies that even two men in dialogues are conflicting what they say, none of them says ‘nothing’ as what they say must be ‘something’.

3. What did the sophists do to impress the Athenians? • 4. This makes conflict becoming impossible as they both say ‘something’. • 5. Therefore, they need to look at each other from a relativistic view. • 6. This is the logic of Parmenides fully exploited by the sophists.

4. What kind of science the sophists offered? • The sophists brought this art of rhetoric and logic in the time when Athens was a direct democracy. • This means that the Athens needed this art in their law courts. • The sophists made a science out of this art and examined the nature of language.

5. What progress did the sophists make? • The sophists led people out of a religious approach to knowledge into a more mundane approach. • Why? • Because when Parmenides derived his ideas from Xenophanes’ monotheistic view, the sophists brought the idea back from the world beyond to the world.

6. In eyes of Plato, what went wrong here? • Plato despised three points from the sophists: • 1. they lacked commitments to anything. • 2. they charged money when teaching people virtues of rhetoric. • 3. they wrongly believed that their ingenuity can help them defending any position rationally.

7. Not everything can be done by rational arguments. • Rational arguments cannot achieve everything that the sophists expected to achieve. • There were other factors whose uncover turns out to be Plato’s philosophy. • Plato chose dialogues to show his philosophy.

8. The function of dialogues: • Dialogues tell us the conversation which unveils the difficult problems. • Whoever reads the dialogues will be reminded of what happened – which is much more than can ever be written down. • They are like scores of music performances lacking information about the instruments. • They are dead letters we can revive.

9. What did Plato do with his dialogues? • Plato was an unusual author who often changed his views without indicating that he had done so. • However, his idea soon took on a life of its own, inspiring scientific work, creating philosophical movements and lubricating many enterprises. • The idea has to do the way in which concepts are introduced, changed and justified.

10. What should Plato do with his idea? • Take a concept of a human being. • This concept arises in rather intuitive fashion, as a result of having encountered, observed and acted upon many different individuals. • The word (human being) associated with them and the simple explanation in which they occur convey only part of their content.

11. What should Plato do with his idea? • The remainder resides in the senses which have either adapted to the relevant features or have been trained to perceive them, in the memory which recognizes the features; it resides in body that understands the concept. • The way to conceive this concept is very much in common with the knowledge of athletes, pianists and circus performers.

12. What should Plato do with his idea? • It resides in their body or this parts of their mind that activate the body and it must be communicated by examples and actions – words do not suffice. • M. Polanyi called such knowledge, “tacit knowledge”. • The tacit knowledge cannot be replaced by “something more systematic”, but this is what the theoreticians want to do.

13. What did Plato actually do? • Plato does not pay specific attention to this tacit knowledge. • His principle is this: • Not uncontrollable changes of the body but clear directives of the mind constitute knowledge and \decide about truth and falsehood. • This is Plato’s ideal of science!

14. What is the real situation of science? • Science proceeds with experiments. • Experimentalists rely on an enormous amount of tacit knowledge. • Experiments are pushed to their limits and then made intuitive judgments about the reactions obtained. • Then the report issues by a team are frequently the result of delicate negotiations between its members.

15. The nature of knowledge we possess is: • The knowledge we claim to possess is an intricate web of theoretical principles and practical, almost bodily abilities and it can not be understood by looking at theories exclusively. • So, most popular accounts of science are simply wrong as they are distorted image of the true nature of science.

16. The nature of science is more complicated than a simple and systematic view • Galileo is a good example. • He was a mathematician confronting troubles of being a pure mathematician (the separation between proof and reality). • The church was not monolithic as it recognized the sphericity of the earth in the 12th century. • The Pope’s attitude.

17. The nature of science is more complicated than a simple and systematic view • He need to choose among various kinds of rules. • He used the argument of rhetoric type. • He got a bad temper. • Many factors, not a single clear train of thought, shaped the final product. This is what happens when an intelligent and imaginative person, making use of past knowledge and trying to stay close to standards thought to be important, produces a theory, a work of art, and experiment, a movie or what have you.

18. What does philosophy have anything to do with this? • Philosophical ideas are a kind of food which scientists consume, digest, throw up occasionally again, but often change into material of an entirely different kind – into the unrecognizably beautiful body of a theory, an experiment, a new kind of medicine, a building or a symphony. • They are not worse for that except when they start believing that their way is the only way there is!