"And, for that matter -- why isn't there a philosophy of plumbing or long-distance bus driving? "

A post from Understanding Society:

"When philosophers do their thinking within a field called "the philosophy of X", there is always a natural question that arises: how will philosophical reflection about X be helpful or constructive for the practitioners of X? For example, how might the philosophy of science be helpful for working scientists? How can the philosophy of biology or economics be helpful to biologists or economists? And, for that matter -- why isn't there a philosophy of plumbing or long-distance bus driving?

As for the last question, there seem to be two separate reasons for this gap in the spectrum -- a dearth of difficult conceptual problems and a lack of potentially useful consequences. First, philosophy finds traction when it deals with subject matter that raises difficult conceptual or inferential issues. Philosophers are particularly good at untangling unclear concepts; they are experienced at the task of formulating problems clearly and logically; they are ready to unmask the hidden presuppositions underlying a particular formulation. This is the kind of work Wittgenstein describes as "letting the fly out of the fly bottle"; it is what J. L. Austin does so well in "Three ways of spilling ink" (link). Drawing distinctions and formulating ideas clearly -- these are core intellectual tools, and they lie at the root of philosophy.( I AGREE )

Another core intellectual tool is the commitment to providing justification for the things we believe, and raising reflective questions about the nature of rational justification. What is the evidence that supports a given belief? What degree of warrant does this evidence create? Why do statements like these make it more likely that P is true? Questions like these too are foundational for philosophy -- from Plato to Locke to Quine. And philosophers have a developed and nuanced set of frameworks and vocabularies in terms of which to interrogate them.( YES )

Both these types of intellectual work are doubly cognitive. They represent cognitive effort directed at examples of cognitive effort -- efforts to explain the workings of nature, the behavior of other people, or the workings of social institutions. Putting the point very simply -- philosophers are good at helping us think clearly about thinking. And, at their best, they can help us think more clearly and coherently.( I AGREE )

So now we have part of an answer for why there is no philosophy of plumbing( I DISAGREE ): plumbing is a routine activity( ROUTINE ACTIVITY IS A PHILOSOPHICAL QUESTION, AS IS EXPERTISE ) with few conceptual puzzles and a secure base of practical knowledge( PRACTICAL KNOWLEDGE IS A PHILOSOPHICAL TOPIC. FOR EXAMPLE, HEIDEGGER'S "BEING AT HAND ", AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF PROGRAMMING COMPUTERS. WITTGENSTEIN ALSO CONSIDERS THIS QUESTION. EMBODIMENT IS ALSO A PART OF THIS DISCUSSION. OLIVER SACKS CONSIDERS EMBODIMENT AND PRACTICAL KNOWLEDGE AS WELL. ). There just isn't any room for philosophical analysis in this realm. And, second, there is the pragmatic point: it is very hard to see how the plumbers( THERE COULD BE A ZEN OF PLUMBING. THERE ARE CERTAINLY PHILOSOPHICAL QUESTIONS ABOUT THE ABILITY TO PERFORM MUSIC. ) might benefit from philosophical analysis( WALKING BENEFITS FROM PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS ). If Deleuze were to write a treatise on plumbing, how could that possibly enhance the practical discipline of plumbing? The plumbers' effective ability to control the water and waste systems( WHAT ABOUT THAT OLD SYSTEMS THEORY APPROACH ? I NEVER FOUND IT VERY USEFUL, BUT SOME PEOPLE DO. ) of our buildings would not be enhanced by conceptual or epistemic analysis. Their conceptual and theoretical problems are well-mapped; all that remains is to discover( HOW HE DISCOVERS THINGS IS A PHILOSOPHICAL QUESTION. AGAIN, HOW WOULD YOU CONSTRUCT A ROBOT TO DO PLUMBING? WHAT DOES THE PLUMBER ASSUME ABOUT THE TASK FACING HIM? ) the source of the leak. And this does not require philosophy.

Why, then, do we need other philosophies of X's? What is it about economics, evolution, or the mind that makes it intellectually and practically valuable to have a philosophy of economics, biology, or psychology? The answer proceeds along the lines sketched here. All these disciplines confront huge problems of concept formation, theory construction, and inference and justification. The most basic questions remain unsettled: does capitalism exist? How are theories and models related to the empirical world? Is there such a thing as group selection? How do emotions intersect with reasoning? What is consciousness? And in all these fields, there is the problem of inference and method -- again, unresolved. So there is ample room for philosophical thinking in these fields.( TRUE )

But more importantly, philosophy can help to improve the intellectual practices of the cognitive-empirical disciplines. By working productively in tandem with creative scientific researchers, with a focus on the conceptual and methodological problems that matter the most, philosophers can help contribute to real progress in the disciplines( TRUE ). This requires the philosopher to engage with the discipline in depth. But the fruits of this sort of synergy can be highly productive. It is sometimes complained that philosophy brings only "logic chopping" and dry conceptual analysis. But this is a caricature; the conceptual issues faced by the special sciences are deeply challenging, and sustained dialogue with philosophers can potentially lead to meaningful progress in the science( HERE I NEED SOME EXAMPLES ). And reciprocally, quite a few traditional concerns of philosophy --in ontology, epistemology, and the theory of the mind, for example -- can be significantly deepened( SOMETIMES ) through close engagement with current scientific work. There need not be a sharp line of demarcation between philosophy and empirical research.( TRUE. SORT OF. FEYNMAN, FOR EXAMPLE, THOUGHT THAT PHILOSOPHY WAS USELESS. )

Posted by Daniel Little at 12:01 PM

A good book on Practical Knowledge is "The Craftsman" by Richard Sennett. To the extent that a Plumber can be a craftsman, many philosophical issues do arise. For example, can plumbing be learned from a manual? My type of philosophy is very interested in these kinds of questions. One should also remember Titchmarsh's Two Truths, the second of which is the following:

"2) "The question what numbers are has been much debated by philosophers, and they do not seem to have reached any agreement about it. There is nothing particularly surprising or distressing about this. It has been said that mathematicians are happy only when they agree, and philosophers only when they disagree. Philosophic doubts about the nature of number have never prevented mathematicians from getting on with their calculations, or from agreeing when they have got the right answer. So perhaps the situation is satisfactory to all parties. "

"Maybe our memory is in our body as well as in our cranium. "

Here's one of my favorite quotes, which is on my blog:

Man can embody truth but he cannot know it. W.B. Yeats

Now, from a wonderful post on The Times:

"How do actors memorise their lines?
Are their brains bigger than ours? In a public discussion held at New York’s Columbia University this month, the RSC’s Michael Boyd and Dr Oliver Sacks compared notes:

( I'm going to simply note my favorite quotes. Anyone who's interested should read and listen to the whole thing:)

MB:" And there was a further improvement when they were not only together on stage, but also together with an audience. Then they became absolutely pitch-perfect and word-perfect, with an urgent need to communicate. I think that says something about where we keep our memory. Maybe our memory is in our body as well as in our cranium."

MB: "It goes side by side with something I just came across. I was invited to the Royal Academy to talk about space, on a panel that included a neurologist. I was galvanised by his account of some research he’d done on London taxi drivers that examined their hippocampi - the part of the brain associated with memory. Not only were their hippocampi unusually enlarged after taking the Knowledge, and further enlarged after a year or so of actually doing it, it was again clear that these taxi drivers remembered places and destinations through the physical sense of turning left and turning right.

They could not remember where a street was unless they “physicalised” mentally the journey to that street. So this neurologist was interested in our sense of space being an important part of the process of how we remember."

OS: "I have written about a striking example of this with a musician and musicologist, Clive Wearing, who had his hippocampus systems wiped out by an encephalitis 20 years ago. He can’t remember anything much for more than seven seconds. But this man is able to conduct a choir, conduct an orchestra, play the piano or sing long, complex pieces of music. His abilities to perform musically are entirely spared. If you ask him in terms of knowledge, “Do you know such and such a Bach prelude and fugue?”, he will look blank or say no. But put his hands on the piano, sing the first note and he’s off.

And this sort of preservation of procedural memory may apply not only to music. I know an eminent actor who has also had damage to his hippocampi and has lost the memory of much of his past. But all of his acting skills, all his enormous repertoire, from Euripides to Beckett, is all there. So the sort of memory that is involved in acting involves much more of the brain than just the hippocampi."

MB: "There is definitely a moment for every creative artist when there is loss of self. It’s not even just creative artists. I think everyone can remember those moments when you are “in the zone”, when you’re not aware of what you’re doing, when you’re not consciously trying to recall what you should be doing, you are simply in the act of doing it."

MB: "There’s a valve in a brilliant actor that is “deficient”. They’re good at embodying emotion, but they’re not very good at shutting it out. I think that’s why there is something inherently unstable about the condition of being an actor that’s also creative. Brilliant actors who survive to have a career manage that “deficiency” extremely well and lead perfectly normal lives."

OS: "Let’s connect this with embodiment. I watched De Niro and Robin Williams when they were taking on characters from Awakenings [the 1990 film about his work]. In particular with De Niro, sometimes when we had dinner after a day’s filming, I would observe that his foot was turned inwards, or that he had some postures which belonged to Leonard L, the character he’d been portraying and embodying, and these fragments were still in him. I actually got a little frightened of the literalness of embodiment with him. Somehow he seemed to be becoming too much like Leonard L, and I feared Leonard L might be taking over.

On one occasion he asked me to advise him a little bit on how people with Parkinsonism might fall if they had no postural reflexes. And in the middle of my explanation, just as I said that such people might fall heavily backwards without warning, he fell heavily backwards - on me. And at that moment I thought: he’s not acting, he’s got it. He’s actually become Parkinsonian through acting it so well."

"Audience Q: You gave the example of when you sat around with your actors and tried to get them to remember their lines first, versus physically going through the motions. What’s the difference between a speech act and a physical embodied act?

MB: Speech is the most physically intimate act possible. It comes from the wet bits inside you. The air I’m using is coming from way down inside, even though I’ve got bad posture, and just the pure boring business of retrieving these lines is hard to do when you are not engaged in the entire act. I would say they are best unseparated.

OS: I imagine it’s similar with music in a way - although you have to learn the notes first, you then have to forget the notes to play the music. Otherwise you remain a virtuoso, and not a musician."