Event Title
What Maestra knew
Start Date
27-6-2010 1:00 PM
End Date
27-6-2010 2:30 PM
Description
This presentation is part of the Value and the Body track.
Philosophers are notorious for attempting to elicit philosophical insight in their readers via rather gruesome examples. Sometimes these proliferate beyond the bounds of the point they were meant to bolster. Consider the example Jason Stanley and Timothy Williamson offer as part of their argument against Gilbert Ryle’s distinction between knowing-how and knowing-that. They say: "a master pianist [call her "Maestra”] who loses both of her arms in a tragic car accident still knows how to play the piano. However, she has lost the ability to do so" (S&W 6).
In this paper, I argue that Stanley and Williamson miss some important aspects of Maestra’s piano-playing knowledge. These things tell us something important about epistemically salient aspects of our non-propositional knowledge. These epistemically salient factors, perhaps most visible in something like the loss of limbs formerly used to instantiate a complex self-hood, go far beyond the terms of the debate about the relationship between knowledge-how and knowledge-that. As I show, understanding what Maestra knew before her accident shows something about her embodied world, her affective world, and her social world. Each of these aspects of her lifeworld support different facets of her propositional knowledge and her implicit understanding. I conclude by offering a look at cases in which amputees receive "bionic" artificial limbs that seem to restore more of their seamless interaction with their world than do traditional prostheses (or not receiving a prosthetic at all). These cases have significant political implications for what might otherwise seem to be value-neutral medical science.
I begin, then, from the intuition that Maestra’s case offers us more interesting epistemic terrain than the distinction between knowledge-how and knowledge-that can encompass. Exploring this terrain requires us to think about epistemically salient aspects of Maestra’s knowledge that are not encompassed by the know-how/know-that binary. Maestra, as defined, is a "master pianist." Maestra's relationship to the piano and to herself as a piano player would involve complex habits, affects, tacit knowledge, and so on. It is this complex of things - manifesting at the level of her implicit understanding - that would be thrown into relief in the context of an accident sufficiently violent to cause her to lose her arms. I distinguish five different sorts of understanding at play here and show how each is significant to Maestra’s knowledgeable piano playing.
To illustrate, I consider the exemplar case of Claudia Mitchell. Mitchell is a former US Marine who lost an arm in a motorcycle accident, currently a subject in a $48.5 million Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) project to improve the functionality of upper body prostheses. The DARPA-funded possibilities offer a futuristically integrated prosthetic arm-experience, one which would allow some of the matrix of implicit understanding involved with having arms to remain implicit. This is largely a physical matter: because the nerves that had pertained to various parts of her arm and hand are present, but transferred to new places in her body, Mitchell’s experience of touch on her pectoral muscle is – as experience – an experience of being touched on the hand.
In the process of re-innervation, teaching Mitchell to use her arm again is based in a pedagogy appropriate to the domestic: she trains her “arm,” and is trained in its use, by practicing cooking, ironing shirts, and making salad with it – all in a research lab at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago. That these are the kinds of daily tasks this arm is trained for, and, indeed, required for, is significant: Mitchell’s implicit understanding, disrupted and then partially reconditioned in the use of the bionic arm, is thoroughly gendered, raced, and classed. The very availability of the arm to her is situated in a dense webbing of material conditions, which we might not ordinarily think of as important to the epistemic work of being an amputee.
For example, Mitchell’s life story includes a stint out of high school working in a meat-processing plant, a notoriously difficult and high-injury job. From there, she joined the Marines, a notoriously common path for working-class people of colour in the US to attempt to move away from jobs like meat-packing. There is no whisper in the stories about Mitchell of the sexism reportedly endemic to the US military, nor at which point she left the Marines, or why, or if she would have been subject to the forced re-enlistment that discharged military personal are currently subject to. It is no accident that DARPA is the funding agency for the bleeding-edge research going on it Chicago: soldiers are among the largest world target market for prostheses, second only to the vast numbers of maimed civilians in countries currently subject to invasion and occupation. The difference? Soldiers often have access to medical aid that civilians lack, and increasingly live to need prostheses. And in the US, they have some access to the tremendously expensive new generation of prosthetic technology. As Tom Guth, prosthetist at the RGP Prosthetic Research Center in San Diego, says: “War has been a friend to the science and technology of prosthetics” (http://www.military-medical-technology.com/article.cfm?DocID=1169). Further, the military has an explicit interest in returning amputee soldiers to active duty (http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4176/is_20070531/ai_n19205580/pg_1?tag=artBody;col1).
All of this floats, iceberg-massive, under the ease Mitchell finds folding laundry with the prosthetic arm DARPA funds. What she is able to partially regain involves a complex of feelings, presuppositions, socially-situated embodiment, skills, and propositional knowledge that we need to acknowledge if we are going to do justice to what they knew, and who they are. Inquiring into the epistemic salience of a multi-faceted implicit understanding gives us, I hope, more adequate answers to questions about what Maestra knew – and, indeed, how we all know, even now.
What Maestra knew
This presentation is part of the Value and the Body track.
Philosophers are notorious for attempting to elicit philosophical insight in their readers via rather gruesome examples. Sometimes these proliferate beyond the bounds of the point they were meant to bolster. Consider the example Jason Stanley and Timothy Williamson offer as part of their argument against Gilbert Ryle’s distinction between knowing-how and knowing-that. They say: "a master pianist [call her "Maestra”] who loses both of her arms in a tragic car accident still knows how to play the piano. However, she has lost the ability to do so" (S&W 6).
In this paper, I argue that Stanley and Williamson miss some important aspects of Maestra’s piano-playing knowledge. These things tell us something important about epistemically salient aspects of our non-propositional knowledge. These epistemically salient factors, perhaps most visible in something like the loss of limbs formerly used to instantiate a complex self-hood, go far beyond the terms of the debate about the relationship between knowledge-how and knowledge-that. As I show, understanding what Maestra knew before her accident shows something about her embodied world, her affective world, and her social world. Each of these aspects of her lifeworld support different facets of her propositional knowledge and her implicit understanding. I conclude by offering a look at cases in which amputees receive "bionic" artificial limbs that seem to restore more of their seamless interaction with their world than do traditional prostheses (or not receiving a prosthetic at all). These cases have significant political implications for what might otherwise seem to be value-neutral medical science.
I begin, then, from the intuition that Maestra’s case offers us more interesting epistemic terrain than the distinction between knowledge-how and knowledge-that can encompass. Exploring this terrain requires us to think about epistemically salient aspects of Maestra’s knowledge that are not encompassed by the know-how/know-that binary. Maestra, as defined, is a "master pianist." Maestra's relationship to the piano and to herself as a piano player would involve complex habits, affects, tacit knowledge, and so on. It is this complex of things - manifesting at the level of her implicit understanding - that would be thrown into relief in the context of an accident sufficiently violent to cause her to lose her arms. I distinguish five different sorts of understanding at play here and show how each is significant to Maestra’s knowledgeable piano playing.
To illustrate, I consider the exemplar case of Claudia Mitchell. Mitchell is a former US Marine who lost an arm in a motorcycle accident, currently a subject in a $48.5 million Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) project to improve the functionality of upper body prostheses. The DARPA-funded possibilities offer a futuristically integrated prosthetic arm-experience, one which would allow some of the matrix of implicit understanding involved with having arms to remain implicit. This is largely a physical matter: because the nerves that had pertained to various parts of her arm and hand are present, but transferred to new places in her body, Mitchell’s experience of touch on her pectoral muscle is – as experience – an experience of being touched on the hand.
In the process of re-innervation, teaching Mitchell to use her arm again is based in a pedagogy appropriate to the domestic: she trains her “arm,” and is trained in its use, by practicing cooking, ironing shirts, and making salad with it – all in a research lab at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago. That these are the kinds of daily tasks this arm is trained for, and, indeed, required for, is significant: Mitchell’s implicit understanding, disrupted and then partially reconditioned in the use of the bionic arm, is thoroughly gendered, raced, and classed. The very availability of the arm to her is situated in a dense webbing of material conditions, which we might not ordinarily think of as important to the epistemic work of being an amputee.
For example, Mitchell’s life story includes a stint out of high school working in a meat-processing plant, a notoriously difficult and high-injury job. From there, she joined the Marines, a notoriously common path for working-class people of colour in the US to attempt to move away from jobs like meat-packing. There is no whisper in the stories about Mitchell of the sexism reportedly endemic to the US military, nor at which point she left the Marines, or why, or if she would have been subject to the forced re-enlistment that discharged military personal are currently subject to. It is no accident that DARPA is the funding agency for the bleeding-edge research going on it Chicago: soldiers are among the largest world target market for prostheses, second only to the vast numbers of maimed civilians in countries currently subject to invasion and occupation. The difference? Soldiers often have access to medical aid that civilians lack, and increasingly live to need prostheses. And in the US, they have some access to the tremendously expensive new generation of prosthetic technology. As Tom Guth, prosthetist at the RGP Prosthetic Research Center in San Diego, says: “War has been a friend to the science and technology of prosthetics” (http://www.military-medical-technology.com/article.cfm?DocID=1169). Further, the military has an explicit interest in returning amputee soldiers to active duty (http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4176/is_20070531/ai_n19205580/pg_1?tag=artBody;col1).
All of this floats, iceberg-massive, under the ease Mitchell finds folding laundry with the prosthetic arm DARPA funds. What she is able to partially regain involves a complex of feelings, presuppositions, socially-situated embodiment, skills, and propositional knowledge that we need to acknowledge if we are going to do justice to what they knew, and who they are. Inquiring into the epistemic salience of a multi-faceted implicit understanding gives us, I hope, more adequate answers to questions about what Maestra knew – and, indeed, how we all know, even now.