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Outline
1. Conditions for moral personhood (Dennett)
2. In an attempt to deepen our understanding of
these conditions: An Aristotelian argument:
moral personhood depends on both embodied
and social aspects of human existence which
give us the capacity for phronesis.
3. The Dreyfus-Collins debate on expertise
4. Expertise and phronesis
5. Revisiting the conditions for moral personhood
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
Rationality
Intentional stance
Recognition
Reciprocity
Communication
Self-consciousness
Dreyfus: phenomenological
account of the embodied
basis for expertise
Phenomenological background
Merleau Pontys notion of the lived body and the
concepts intentional arc and maximal grip -practiced activities controlled by body schematic
adjustments that operate as the basis for expert
practices
Heideggers emphasis on pragmatic contexts as our
primary way of engaging in the world -- just those
contexts in which expertise is practiced.
Higher order reflection on how one does what one
does only occurs when things or procedures fail to
work effectively (Heideggers hammer)
QuickTime and a
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Harry Collins:
The social explanation of expertise
Vs both Dreyfuss emphasis on
embodiment and Lenats emphasis on
propositional knowledge
Dreyfuss explanation remains asocial.
In an account that takes social dimensions seriously,
expertise is thought of as distributed -- embedded
in social practices, particular settings (laboratories
and social networks), standardized in technologies,
and promoted in specific rhetorical means of
recruiting professional experts (Mialet 1999)
For Collins, expertise constituted in language or languagegames, and does not depend on embodied practices.
He cites Wittgensteins example of a talking lion -- an animal
that divides up the world in a different way.
For example, for us, a chair is a different kind of affordance
(Gibson) than for the lion -- we have a body that can use a chair
to sit -- so chair if in the lions vocabulary, would mean
something different.
Collins claims that if the lion hung around and communicated
with humans long enough, the lion would come to know the
meaning of chair, despite differences in embodiment.
In summary:
Lenat rules out any important role for embodiment
and emphasizes a cognitive - computational model
consistent with traditional views of expertise as a
mentalistic or intellectual phenomenon.
Collins also rules out any important role for
embodiment and emphasizes a socially contextualized
model of expertise. This model is primarily a
linguistic-communicative one.
Dreyfus critiques traditional and computational models,
but ignores social/intersubjective dimensions and
emphasizes pre-reflective embodied skills as the
basis for expertise.
Developmental Psychology
Trevarthans notions of primary and secondary
intersubjectivity
Primary intersubjectivity: the infants ability to
perceive meaning in the others gestures, movements,
facial expressions, intentional actions.
Action
Preparing to
imitate
QuickTime and a
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Conclusions:
In opposition to Collins and Lenat: It is not feasible or
necessary to eliminate embodiment in order to make room for
social and/or even what appear to be purely cognitive
dimensions of expertise (cf. embodied cognition; Mark Johnson)
As a supplement to Dreyfus: Nor is it necessary or feasible to
eliminate intersubjective dimensions in order to make room for the
role played by embodiment
To the extent that expertise depends on the grasping of the
intentions and meanings of others -- on acting, observing others
act, imagining ourselves act, imitating -- it also depends on
embodied resonance processes that are simultaneously
intersubjective.
To suggest that expertise depends only on embodiment without the
intersubjective dimension (Dreyfus), or only on the social without
embodiment (Collins) is to give an incomplete account of
expertise.
Aristotle : phronesis
The good person, the person with
phronesis, like the person with expertise,
sees what to do in an immediate way, and
does the good thing in a close to automatic
way, as if it were second nature.
But, in regard to acquisition, Aristotle
takes a position that is similar to Collins on
expertise: one acquires phronesis through a
good upbringing, and this means hanging
around with the right people good people
who provide good examples of good
actions.
You dont get phronesis by taking an
ethics course (vs Lenat).
Merleau-Ponty
Insofar as I have sensory functions I am
already in communication with others .
No sooner has my gaze fallen upon a living
body in the process of acting than the
objects surrounding it immediately take
on a fresh layer of significance
Intersubjective contexts cannot be reduced to or
encompassed by purely instrumental ones -- the social
aspects of experience transcend the purely pragmatic.
Evidence from recovery after brain injury (Gallagher and
Marcel 1999)
Evidence from studies of gesture in cases of
deafferentation (Cole, Gallagher, McNeill 2001)
More on acquisition
In every case (for expertise and for phronesis) Dreyfus
outlines a multi-step acquisition process: novice to
advanced beginner to competence to proficiency to
expert.
In each case the novice stage starts like this: Normally,
the instruction process begins with the instructor
decomposing the task environment into context-free
features that the beginner can recognize without benefit
of experience. The beginner is then given rules
(Dreyfus and Dreyfus 2004).
Seemingly we start with rules and/or theory and work our
way out of dependency on these mentalistic beginnings to
non-mentalistic expertise through practice. This may
work for learning to drive or play chess. But what about
learning first language or learning to walk?
More on acquisition
Language: we learn the rules (grammar) after we learn to
speak; Walking -- are there any rules? -- these are things
we learn by pure practice.
How do we learn our everyday coping skills? Not by
working our way through theory or a set of rules.
How do we come to understand others and gain our
people skills-- not by theory -- we are not given rules.
We are given people and we start to interact with them and
imitate them (primary and secondary intersubjectivity). In
the longer term we learn by narratives. Not theories, not
rules, but pure doings.
Driving? Rules or practices?
A possible objection
Phronesis is much more like the kind of expertise
had by a marriage councilor than by an oil drilling
expert (techne); my expertise as a marriage
councilor can not be easily summarized in a set of
rules or propositional statements,it requires
intuition, etc.
Okay, but an expert marriage councilor will attempt
to see the entire situation in objective terms, and at
the same time not get personally involved -- its not
her marriage after all -- and the situation is really
someone elses situation.
(4) It is also clear that normal infants (and some nonhuman animals) emotionally reciprocate --emotional
interaction shapes our sense of self in an
intersubjective mirroring that forms a necessary basis
of social life and the possibility of moral practice
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Conclusions
It is possible, then, to define moral personhood by
the capacity for phronesis.
On this definition, moral personhood depends on an
embodied and intersubjective existence in which the
rationality at stake is practical rather than theoretical,
and is characterized by a pre-reflective selfconsciousness emotionally informed by shared
reverberations endogenous to our own action
systems.
One's capacity to act as a moral agent (that is, to act
morally or immorally, responsibly or irresponsibly)
is just this capacity to act on an intuitive insight into
one's own self in a way that is not divorced from but
rather fully implicated in our relations with others.
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