Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Volume 104, Issue 3, Page 606-622, May 2022.

Contemporary philosophers have contributed to the development of the skill model of wisdom, according to which practical wisdom is practical skill. However, the model appears to be limited in its explanatory power, since there are asymmetries between wisdom and skill: A person with practical wisdom can and should deliberate about the end being pursued; by contrast, a person with a particular practical skill cannot deliberate about the end of the skill, and even if she can, she is not required to (...) do so. In this paper, I undermine these widely held asymmetries by elucidating the unnoticed nature of skill. (shrink)

The skill model of wisdom argues that practical wisdom can be best understood in terms of practical skill or expertise, and the model is thought to have the characteristic of focusing on how wise people think rather than how wise people feel. However, from the perspective of Kunzmann and Glück, “it is time for an ‘emotional revolution’ in wisdom research, which will contribute to a more balanced view on wisdom that considers emotional factors and processes as equally typical of wisdom (...) as are cognitive and reflective factors” (Kunzmann U, Gluck J [2019] Wisdom and emotion. In: Sternberg R, Gluck J (eds) The cambridge handbook of wisdom. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp 575–601). Kunzmann and Glück’s appeal for this emotional revolution is significant and intriguing because the inclusion of an explanation of the role of emotion in wisdom can contribute to developing the skill model of wisdom into a more comprehensive framework that recognizes the intricate relation between wisdom and emotions. In this paper, I shall propose and develop a skill account of the emotions of the wise to serve as a supplement to the skill model of wisdom. According to this account, first, at the critical level, having emotions and emotional competence as elements is not essential to wisdom; second, at the theoretical level, a wise person feels an emotion E if and only if E is strategically rational for the wise person; and third, at the metatheoretical level, the primary aim of the skill account is to explain why wise people feel in a particular way rather than to describe how wise people feel. (shrink)

What is wisdom? What does a wise person know? Can a wise person know how to act and live well without knowing the whys and wherefores of his own action? How is wisdom acquired? This Element addresses questions regarding the nature and acquisition of wisdom by developing and defending a skill theory of wisdom. Specifically, this theory argues that if a person S is wise, then (i) S knows that overall attitude success contributes to or constitutes well-being; (ii) S knows (...) what the best means to achieve well-being are; (iii) S is reliably successful at acting and living well (in light of what S knows); and (iv) S knows why she is successful at acting and living well. The first three sections of this Element develop this theory, and the final two sections defend this theory against two objections to the effect that there are asymmetries between wisdom and skill. (shrink)

According to Dreyfusian anti-intellectualism, know-how or expertise cannot be explained in terms of know-that and its cognates but only in terms of intuition. Hubert Dreyfus and Stuart Dreyfus do not exclude know-that and its cognates in explaining skilled action. However, they think that know-that and its cognates (such as calculative deliberation and perspectival deliberation) only operate either below or above the level of expertise. In agreement with some critics of Dreyfus and Dreyfus, in this paper, I argue that know-that and (...) its cognates are constitutive of rather than external to know-how and expertise. However, unlike those critics, who argue for this point only from a phenomenological point of view, my argument adopts a (telic) normative point of view. (shrink)

Phronesis, or practical wisdom, is a capacity the possession of which enables one to make good practical judgments and thus fulfill the distinctive function of human beings. Nir Eisikovits and Dan Feldman convincingly argue that this capacity may be undermined by statistical machine-learning-based AI. The critic questions: why should we worry that AI undermines phronesis? Why can’t we epistemically defer to AI, especially when it is superintelligent? Eisikovits and Feldman acknowledge such objection but do not consider it seriously. In this (...) paper, we argue that there is a way to reconcile Eisikovits and Feldman with their critic by adopting the principle of epistemic heed, according to which we should exercise our rational capacity as much as possible while heeding a superintelligence’s output whenever possible. (shrink)

Anti-intellectualists in epistemology argue for the thesis that knowing-how is not a species of knowing-that, and most of them tend to avoid any use of the notion “knowing-that” in their explanation of intelligent action on pain of inconsistency. Intellectualists tend to disprove anti-intellectualism by showing that the residues of knowing-that remain in the anti-intellectualist explanation of intelligent action. Outside the field of epistemology, some philosophers who try to highlight the nature of their explanation of intelligent action in certain fields, such (...) as ethics, tend to classify themselves as intellectualist simply because they appeal to the notion of knowing-that in their explanation. In a word, the idea of knowing-that is harmful to the anti-intellectualist explanation of intelligent action, whether from an insider or outsider perspective. In this paper, I argue that these tendencies are unjustified because they are based on an unclear conception of anti-intellectualism. I shall use Gilbert Ryle’s anti-intellectualism as a paradigm with which to describe anti-intellectualism and to illustrate why the notion of knowing-that is not harmful to but is, on the contrary, beneficial to the anti-intellectualist explanation of intelligent action. If my explication of Ryle’s anti-intellectualism is correct, then most anti-intellectualists in the literature blindly worry about the notion of knowing-that, most intellectualists fire into the wrong flock, and some philosophers outside epistemology mischaracterize their own position. (shrink)

Human excellences such as intelligence, morality, and consciousness are investigated by philosophers as well as artificial intelligence researchers. One excellence that has not been widely discussed by AI researchers is practical wisdom, the highest human excellence, or the highest, seventh, stage in Dreyfus’s model of skill acquisition. In this paper, I explain why artificial wisdom matters and how artificial wisdom is possible (in principle and in practice) by responding to two philosophical challenges to building artificial wisdom systems. The result is (...) a conceptual framework that guides future research on creating artificial wisdom. (shrink)

In “Knowing How”, Jason Stanley and Timothy Williamson (2001) propose an intellectualist account of knowledge-how, according to which all knowledge-how is a type of propositional knowledge about ways to act. In this article, I examine this intellectualist account by applying it to the epistemology of language. I argue that (a) Stanley and Williamson mischaracterize the concept of knowledge-how in the epistemology of language, and (b) intellectualism about knowledge of language fails in its explanatory task. One lesson that can be drawn (...) from this case study is that Stanley and Williamson's intellectualism is limited in its explanatory scope and power insofar as it cannot explain the knowledge of language, which is usually conceived as knowledge-how and as non-propositional in character. Their intellectualist claim that all knowledge-how is knowledge-that should be withdrawn. (shrink)

Knowing-how is currently a hot topic in epistemology. But what is the proper subject matter of a study of knowing-how and in what sense can such a study be regarded as epistemological? The aim of this paper is to answer such metaepistemological questions. This paper offers a metaepistemology of knowing-how, including considerations of the subject matter, task, and nature of the epistemology of knowing-how. I will achieve this aim, first, by distinguishing varieties of knowing-how and, second, by introducing and elaborating (...) the concept of hybrid knowing-how, which entails a combination of a ground-level ability and a meta-level perspective on that ability. The stance I wish to advocate is that the epistemology of knowing-how is a normative discipline whose main task is to study the nature and value of human practical intelligence required to do things in a particular manner. (shrink)

Tennis champion Maria Sharapova has a habit of grunting when she plays on the court. Assume that she also has a habit of hitting the ball in a certain way in a certain situation. The habit of on-court grunting might be bad, but can the habit of hitting the ball in a certain way in a certain situation be classified as intelligent? The fundamental questions here are as follows: What is habit? What is the relation between habit and skill? Is (...) there such a thing as intelligent habit? In this paper I expound the nature of habit by developing and defending a Rylean conception of habit, according to which an acquired disposition is a habit if and only if the manifestation of the disposition is repeated, automatic, and uniform. One implication of this conception is that there is no such thing as intelligent habit. A practical application in athletic expertise is that sport coaches can help athletes go beyond repeated, automatic, and uniform dispositions in sport. (shrink)

Recently virtue ethicists, such as Julia Annas and Matt Stichter, in order to explain what a moral virtue is and how it is acquired, suggest modeling virtue on practical expertise. However, a challenging issue arises when considering the nature of practical expertise especially about whether expertise requires articulacy, that is, whether an expert in a skill is required to possess an ability to articulate the principles underlying the skill. With regard to this issue, Annas advocates the articulacy requirement, while Stichter (...) denies. Stichter raises two objections to Annas’s requirement: first, Annas provides no argument for the requirement; second, there exist counterexamples in which there are experts who cannot articulate what and why they did in skilled performance. In this paper I shall show that Annas did provide an argument and can respond to the counterexamples; however, her argument and response are not convincing. Instead, I construct a new argument for the articulacy requirement by which I call the argument from success-conduciveness. The main idea involved in this new argument, i.e., articulacy is success-conducive, supports further that ethical expertise requires articulacy due to the seriousness of morality. (shrink)

Given the widespread acceptance of computational thinking in educational systems around the world, primary and higher education has begun thinking about how to cultivate students' CT competences. The artificial intelligence of things combines artificial intelligence and the Internet of things and involves integrating sensing technologies at the lowest level with relevant algorithms in order to solve real-world problems. Thus, it has now become a popular technological application for CT training. In this study, a novel AIoT learning with Augmented Reality technology (...) was proposed and explored the effect of CT skills. The students used AR applications to understand AIoT applications in practice, attempted the placement of different AR sensors in actual scenarios, and further generalized and designed algorithms. Based on the results of the experimental course, we explored the influence of prior knowledge and usage intention on students' CT competence training. The results show that proposed AIoT learning can increase students' learning intention and that they had a positive impact on problem solving and comprehension with AR technology, as well as application planning and design. (shrink)

Urban streetscapes are outdoor areas in which the general public can appreciate green landscapes and engage in outdoor activities along the street. This study tested the extent to which the degree of awareness of urban street trees impacts attention restoration and perceived restorativeness. We manipulated the degree of awareness of street trees. Participants were placed into four groups and shown different images: (a) streetscapes with absolutely no trees; (b) streetscapes with flashes of trees in which participants had minimal awareness of (...) the content; (c) streetscapes with trees; and (d) streetscapes with trees to which participants were told to pay attention. We compared the performance of 138 individuals on measures of attention and their evaluations of perceived restorativeness. Two main findings emerged. First, streetscapes with trees improved the performance of participants on attentional tests even without their awareness of the trees. Second, participants who had raised awareness of street trees performed best on the attentional test and rated the streetscapes as being more restorative. These findings enhance our knowledge about the role of an individual's awareness of restorative elements and have implications for designers and individuals who are at risk of attentional fatigue. (shrink)

How can we acquire understanding? Linda Zagzebski has long claimed that understanding is acquired through, or arises from, mastering a particular practical technê. In this paper, I explicate Zagzebski’s claim and argue that the claim is problematic. Based on a critical examination of Zagzebski’s claim, I propose, in conclusion and in brief, a new claim regarding the acquisition of understanding.

The truth table method, natural deduction, and the truth tree method, the three validity proving methods standardly taught in an introductory logic course, are too clumsy for the battlefield of real-life. The “short truth table” test is handy at times, but it stumbles at many other times. In this paper, we set up a general method that can beat all the methods mentioned above in a contest of speed. Furthermore, the procedure can be step-by-step paraphrased in a natural language, so (...) that, unlike the other methods, a real-life logical problem can be analyzed and explained in a real-life language too. (shrink)

Regulative virtue epistemology argues that intellectual virtues can adjust and guide one’s epistemic actions as well as improve on the quality of the epistemic actions. For regulative virtue epistemologists, intellectual virtues can be cultivated to a higher degree; when the quality of intellectual virtue is better, the resulting quality of epistemic action is better. The intellectual virtues that regulative epistemologists talk about are character virtues (such as intellectual courage and open-mindedness) rather than faculty virtues (such as sight and hearing), since (...) they don’t think that faculty virtues could be cultivated. This article refers to Xunzi’s philosophy, explaining how a regulative faculty-based virtue epistemology is possible. If this explanation works, on the one hand, a new branch of contemporary virtue epistemology is shown, and, on the other hand, a clear theoretical framework of Xunzi’s epistemology is constructed. (shrink)

This commentary is a critical appraisal of Gil-Pérez et al.'s (2002) conceptualization of constructivism. It is argued that the following aspects of their presentation are problematic: (a) Although the role of controversy is recognized, the authors implicitly subscribe to a Kuhnian perspective of `normal' science; (b) Authors fail to recognize the importance of von Glasersfeld's contribution to the understanding of constructivism in science education; (c) The fact that it is not possible to implement a constructivist pedagogy without a constructivist epistemology (...) has been ignored; and (d) Failure to recognize that the metaphor of the `student as a developing scientist' facilitates teaching strategies as students are confronted with alternative/rival/conflicting ideas. Finally, we have shown that constructivism in science education is going through a process of continual critical appraisals. (shrink)

Epistemology of language, a branch of both epistemology and the philosophy of language, asks what knowledge of language consists in. In this paper, I argue that such an inquiry is a pointless enterprise due to its being based upon the incorrect assumption that linguistic competence requires knowledge of language. However, I do not think the phenomenon of knowledge of language is trivial. I propose a virtue-theoretic account of linguistic competence, and then explain the phenomenon from a virtue-semantic point of view.

One of the main challenges in the philosophy of language is determining the form of knowledge of the rules of language. Michael Dummett has put forth the view that knowledge of the rules of language is a kind of implicit knowledge; some philosophers have mistakenly conceived of this type of knowledge as a kind of knowledge-that . In a recent paper in this journal, Patricia Hanna argues against Dummett’s knowledge-that view and proposes instead a knowledge-how view in which knowledge of (...) the rules of language is a kind of practical knowledge, like an agent’s non-propositional knowledge of counting. In this paper I argue, first, that Hanna misunderstands Dummett’s conception of knowledge of linguistic rules, and, second, that Dummett’s considerations of practical knowledge of language pose a problem for Hanna’s knowledge-how view. At the end of the paper, I briefly sketch an account of practical knowledge of language that meets the requirements set by Dummett. (shrink)

The use of technology in elite sports is becoming increasingly widespread, but its use is not without limits, especially considering factors such as fairness and health. This paper aims to explore under what condition the use of technology in elite sports should be restricted, particularly focusing on the concept of “achievement”. Delving into such a question is practically beneficial as we can justifiably maximize the use of technology in elite sports within the boundary set forth by the condition. Focusing on (...) the concept of “achievement” is advantageous as it helps determine the appropriate extent of technology use from the perspective of the essence of sports. To achieve this aim, we develop and defend an argument against performance-enhancing technology in sport, called the Weaken and Illusory Athletic Achievements Argument (WIAAA), the conclusion of which states that for any athlete S, ceteris paribus, S ought not attain athletic aims that could have been attained by S without enhancement or athletic aims that could not have been attained by S without enhancement, with enhancement. Based on the WIAAA, the use of technology in elite sports is justified if and only if it does not diminish or nullify athletic achievement. (shrink)

What is the nature and structure of phronesis or practical wisdom? According to the view widely held by philosophers and psychologists, a person S is wise if and only if S knows how to live well. Given this view of practical wisdom, the guiding question is this: What exactly is “knowing how to live well”? It seems that no one has a clear idea of how to answer this simple but fundamental question. This paper explores knowing how to live well (...) (or “life know-how”) by showing how its nature and structure can be understood through contemporary epistemology of knowledge-how. I will achieve this by doing the following. In Section I, I highlight the two as-yet unanswered “integration questions” about life know-how. In Section II, I explain why the epistemology of knowledge-how has good potential to address the integration questions. In Sections III and IV, I construct two positions—intellectualism and anti-intellectualism—for the epistemology of life know-how and show how they address the two integration questions. In Section V, I show how the epistemology of life know-how established in the previous sections can be used in the philosophy of wisdom and the psychology of wisdom. (shrink)

In this paper, I propose a virtue-theoretic approach to semantics, according to which the study of linguistic competence in particular, and the study of meaning and language in general, should focus on a speaker's interpretative virtues, such as charity and interpretability, rather than the speaker's knowledge of rules. The first part of the paper proffers an argument for shifting to virtue semantics, and the second part outlines the nature of such virtue semantics.

Volume 46, Issue 6, November 2020, Page 658-675.

According to the universality thesis, the epistemic properties referred to by the English epistemic verb “know” contained in the expressions of the form “S knows that p” or “S knows how to φ‎” are shared by the translations of the epistemic verb in all other languages such as Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian, and so on. Some doubt that there is reason to think the universality thesis is true because little or nothing is shown about the meanings and uses of the (...) epistemic terms in languages other than English. Critics of the universality thesis find counterevidence to the thesis; that is, the evidence demonstrates that translations of the epistemic verb “know” are used differently in some languages from the way “know” is used in English. In this chapter, the authors examine the effectiveness of such counterevidence. (shrink)

A Leibnizian semantics proposed by Becker in 1952 for the modal operators has recently been reviewed in Copeland’s paper The Genesis of Possible World Semantics (Copeland in J Philos Logic 31:99–137, 2002 ), with a remark that “neither the binary relation nor the idea of proving completeness was present in Becker’s work”. In light of Frege’s celebrated Sense-Determines-Reference principle, we find, however, that it is Becker’s semantics, rather than Kripke’s semantics, that has captured the true spirit of Frege’s semantic program. (...) Furthermore, for Kripke’s possible world semantics to fit in Frege’s framework of senses , worlds and referents , it will have to be thoroughly reformulated. By introducing the notion of a hi-world into the picture, we manage to keep the key ingredients of Becker’s semantics intact, while at the same time solve a fatal problem that used to shadow Becker’s original semantics—it had not been able to make sense of inhomogeneous modality. The resulting generalized Beckerian semantics provides, in effect, a Beckerian analysis of the Kripkean possible worlds. It reveals the subtle hierarchical internal structure of a Kripkean world that has not been discovered before. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is twofold: First, to generalize Quine's epistemology, to show that what Quine refutes for traditional epistemology is not only Cartesian foundationalism and Carnapian reductionism, but also any epistemological program if it takes atomic verificationist semantics or supernaturalism, which are rooted in the linguistic/factual distinction of individual sentences, as its underlying system. Thus, we will see that the range of naturalization in the Quinean sense is not as narrow as his critics think. Second, to normalize Quine's (...) epistemology, to explain in what sense Quinean naturalized epistemology is normative. The reason I maintain that critics miss the point of Quinean naturalized epistemology is that they do not appreciate the close connection between Quine's naturalistic approach and his holistic approach to epistemology. To show this I shall reconstruct Quine's argument for naturalizing epistemology within his systematic philosophy, and focus specifically on his holism and its applications, on which Quine relies both in arguing against traditional epistemology, and in supporting his theses of underdetermination of physical theory and indeterminacy of translation. This is the key to understanding the scope and the normativity of Quine's epistemology. In the conclusion I will point out what the genuine problems are for Quinean naturalized epistemology. (shrink)

In ‘What Makes Killing Wrong?’ Sinnott-Armstrong and Miller make the bold claim that killing in itself is not wrong, what is wrong is totally-disabling. In ‘After-Birth Abortion: Why Should the Baby Live?’ Giubilini and Minerva argue for allowing infanticide. Both papers challenge the stigma commonly associated with killing, and emphasize that killing is not wrong at some margins of life. In this paper, we first generalize the above claims to the thesis that there is nothing morally wrong with killing per (...) se, so long as it is instant and unannounced. Then, from the perspective of social evolution, we explain why people refrain from killing others, the general guideline being that it is unadvisable to kill someone with whom you associate a Second Person Perspective (SPP). Finally, drawing from a seminal paper of Press and Dyson on the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma, we stress that an SPP without an SP (Second Person), or the other way around, can both lead to unwelcome results. (shrink)

It is commonly held that killing is morally wrong and that the killers need to be punished, and in marginal cases where killing seems justifiable, we are advised to resort to the ethics of killing for general guidance. It is also commonly held that the notion of killing per se is accountable in terms of ‘causing death’, which is a metaphysical (or even physical) issue, having nothing to do with ethics. However, this dichotomy – between the ethics of killing and (...) the metaphysic of killing – is questionable and we claim that the notion of killing itself presumes a social norm, which generally involves ethical considerations. This explains why there has been much debate concerning the distinction between killing and letting die. According to the account of killing that shall be proposed in this article, the distinction is based on a social norm rather than a metaphysical reality. Likewise, there is no metaphysical ground for an active-killing/passive-killing distinction. With the help of a value-time diagram that captures a key feature of a genuine act of killing, six classic scenarios in the ethics of killing are analyzed within the same framework. The prominent feature of this approach is that no physical action is an act of killing before the imposition of a social norm. (shrink)

This article aims at developing a phronesis-oriented philosophical counselling, with a focus on the idea of semantic sentiment. In Section 1, we elucidate the characteristics of phronesis-oriented approach to philosophical counselling and state our reason for adopting this approach. In Section 2, we consider three visions of phronesis-oriented philosophical counselling, i.e., the Socratic vision, the Platonic vision, and the skill-based vision, and argue for the third vision. In Sections 3 and 4, we show how to practice such phronesis-oriented philosophical counselling (...) by introducing, exploring, and applying the idea of semantic sentiment. (shrink)

In The Logical Basis of Metaphysics, Dummett argues at length that Geach has been wrong in taking the sense of a predicate to be a function that sends the sense of a proper name to that of a sentence, and claims that it should instead be a means to determine the referent of the predicate, as is suggested by Frege’s sense-determines-reference (SDR) principle. This disagreement between Dummett and Geach calls for a serious investigation into two of Frege’s sense-related principles, namely (...) the Compositionality thesis and the SDR thesis. By making precise both theses in terms of supervenience, we pin down a preferable sense of compositionality for senses, and resolve the debate in question. (shrink)

In Lowe (1995), instead of endorsing a Stalnaker/Lewis-style account of counterfactuals, E. J. Lowe claims that a variation of C. I. Lewis’s strict implication alone captures the essence of everyday conditionals and avoids the paradoxes of strict implication. However, Lowe’s approach fails to account for the validity of simple and straightforward arguments such as ‘if 2=3 then 2+1=3+1’, and Heylen & Horsten (2006) even claims that no variation of strict implication can successfully describe the logical behavior of natural language conditionals. (...) By incorporating the German logician O. Becker’s modal intuition with the insight of Ramsey’s Test, we show that there does exist a unified, strict-conditional based account of everyday conditionals, which withstands all attacks previously raised against truth-conditional accounts of conditionals. Furthermore, a subtle distinction between autistic and realistic readings of the indexical ‘I’ involved in a conditional helps us resolve a recent debate concerning the Thomason conditionals. (shrink)

This study aims to disclose how the magnetic resonance imaging neuroimaging approach has been applied in education studies, and what kind of learning themes has been investigated in the reviewed MRI neuroimaging research. Based on the keywords “brain or neuroimaging or neuroscience” and “MRI or diffusion tensor imaging or white matter or gray matter or resting-state,” a total of 25 papers were selected from the subject areas “Educational Psychology” and “Education and Educational Research” from the Web of Science and Scopus (...) from 2000 to 2019. Content analysis showed that MRI neuroimaging and learning were studied under the following three major topics and nine subtopics: cognitive function, science education, and brain development. As for the type of MRI neuroimaging research, the most frequently used approaches were functional MRI, followed by structural MRI and DTI, although the choice of approach was often motivated by the specific research question. Research development trends show that the neural plasticity theme has become more prominent recently. This study concludes that in educational research, the MRI neuroimaging approach provides objective and empirical evidence to connect learning processes, outcomes, and brain mechanisms. (shrink)

Michael Dummett has long argued that we should ascribe implicit knowledge of a meaning-theory to speakers, and that the task of a theory of meaning is to tell us what such knowledge consists in. But he also sees it as a problem that how implicit knowledge is actually used, that is, how a speaker's metalinguistic knowledge of a meaning-theory issues or delivers the speaker's knowledge of meanings of utterances (the delivery problem). In this paper 1argue that Dummett's instrumental construal of (...) implicit knowledge does not and cannot solve the delivery problem. However, I do not suggest Dummett to modify or abandon his instrumental construal; rather, I think he can dissolve the delivery problem by recognizing that knowledge of semantics for a language is not a necessary condition for mastering a language. 1 shall argue this point through Davidson's attitude towards the role of linguistic knowledge and his thesis in his (in)famous paper "A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs.". (shrink)