The Competitiveness of Nations
in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy
May 2005
Gilbert Ryle
The Thinking of Thoughts
What is ‘Le Penseur’ Doing?
University
Lectures, 18, 1968
http://lucy.ukc.ac.uk/CSACSIA/Vol14/Papers/ryle_1.html
I begin by drawing your attention to a special, but at first sight
merely curious feature of the notion of doing something, or rather of trying to
do something. In the end I hope to
satisfy you that this feature is more than merely curious; it is of radical importance
for our central question, namely, What is le Penseur doing?
Two boys fairly swiftly contract the eyelids of their right eyes. In the first boy this is only an involuntary
twitch; but the other is winking conspiratorially to an accomplice. At the lowest or the thinnest level of
description the two contractions of the eyelids may be exactly alike. From a cinematograph-film of the two faces
there might be no telling which contraction, if either, was a wink, or which,
if either, were a mere twitch. Yet there
remains the immense but unphotographable difference
between a twitch and a wink. For to wink is to try to signal to someone in particular, without
the cognisance of others, a definite message
according to an already understood code. It has very complex success-versus-failure
conditions. The wink is a failure if its
intended recipient does not see it; or sees it but does not know or forgets the
code; or misconstrues it; or disobeys or disbelieves it; or if any one else
spots it. A mere twitch, on the other
hand, is neither a failure nor a success; it has no intended recipient; it is
not meant to be unwitnessed by anybody; it carries no
message. It may be a symptom but it is
not a signal. The winker could not not know that he was winking;
but the victim of the twitch might be quite unaware of his twitch. The winker can tell what he was trying to do;
the twitcher will deny that he was trying to do
anything.
So far we are on familiar ground. We are just drawing the familiar distinction
between a voluntary, intentional, and, in this case, collusive and
code-governed contraction of the eyelids from an involuntary twitch. But already there is one element in the
contrast that needs to be brought out. The signaller
himself, while acknowledging that he had not had an involuntary twitch but (1)
had deliberately winked, (2) to someone in particular, (3) in order to impart a
particular message, (4) according to an understood code, (5) without the cognisance of the rest of the company, will rightly deny
that he had thereby done or tried to do five separately do-able things. He had not both tried to contract his eyelids
and also tried to do a second, synchronous thing or several synchronous things.
Unlike a person who both coughs and
sneezes, or both greets his aunt and pats her dog, he had not both contracted
his eyelids and also done a piece of synchronous signalling
to his accomplice. True, he had
contracted them not involuntarily but on purpose, but this feature of being on
purpose is not an extra deed; he had contracted them at the moment when his
accomplice was looking in his direction, but its being at this chosen moment is
not an extra deed; he had contracted them in accordance with an understood
code, but this accordance is not an extra deed. He had tried to do much more than contract his
eyelids, but he had not tried to do more things. He had done one thing the report of which
embodies a lot of subordinate clauses; had had not done what the report of
would embody several main verbs conjoined by ‘ands’. There are five or more ways in which his
winking attempt might have been a failure, but he was not attempting to do five
things. If he is successful, he has not
got five successes to put on a list, but only one.
Similarly, sloping arms in obedience to an order differs, but does not
differ in number of actions from just sloping arms. It is not a conjunction of a bit of sloping
arms with a separately do-able bit of obeying. It is obeying by sloping arms; it is
obediently sloping arms. This adverb ‘obediently’
does import a big difference, but not by recording any something else, internal
or external, that the soldier also did, and might have done by itself. If the officer had shouted out of the blue ‘Obey’,
he would have given the soldier nothing to do. Obeying is not a separately orderable action,
for all that obediently sloping arms does not reduce to just sloping arms. The verb ‘obeyed’ cannot be the sole verb in a
non-elliptical report of what someone did. It functions, so to speak, in an adverbial
role, and can be replaces by the adverb ‘obediently’ or by the adverbial phrase
‘in obedience to the order’.
Come back to our winker. Perhaps,
being new to the art, he winks rather slowly, contortedly and conspicuously. A third boy, to give malicious amusement to
his cronies, parodies this clumsy wink. How
does he do this? Well, by contracting
his right eyelids in the ways in which the clumsy winker had winked. But the parodist is not himself clumsily
trying covertly to signal a message to an accomplice. He is deftly trying conspicuously to exhibit
something, and he fails if his cronies are not looking, or are not amused, or
mistakenly suppose him to be trying covertly to signal to an accomplice. There is only one thing that he is trying to
do, namely to take off the winker, and he does this just by contracting his
right eyelids. Yet there is now a
threefold internal complexity in his own report of what he has been trying to
do. For he may say, ‘I was trying (1) to
look like Tommy trying (2) to signal to his accomplice by trying (3) to
contract his right eyelids.’ There is,
so to speak, the beginning of a Chinese box of internal subordinate clauses in
the parodist’s report of what he was trying to do - for all that there was only
one thing that he was trying to do, namely to parody the winker; and for all
that the cinematograph-film records only the one eyelid-contraction. We can easily add to this nest of Chinese
boxes. For our parodist, to make sure of
getting his parody pat, may in solitude practise his
facial mimicry. In so practising he is not yet trying to amuse anyone, for he is
alone. He is rehearsing for a subsequent
public performance. So he could report
what he is now doing by, ‘I am trying (1) to get myself ready to try (2) to
amuse my cronies by grimacing like Tommy trying (3) to signal covertly to his
accomplice by trying (4) to contract his eyelids.’ Another box can easily be added. For our winker himself might report that he
had not, on this occasion, really been trying covertly to signal something to
his accomplice, but had been trying to gull the grown-ups into the false belief
that he was trying to do so. So now our
parodist, in practising his parody of this, would
have to be described with the help of five verbs of trying - and still there is
only one thing he is trying to do, and still there is only the one contraction
of the eyelids that, at a given moment, the cinematograph film records. The thinnest description of what the
rehearsing parodist is doing is, roughly, the same as for the involuntary
eyelid twitch; but its thick description is a many-layered sandwich, of which
only the bottom slice is catered for by that the thinnest description. Taking the word ‘only’ in one way, it is true
enough that the rehearsing parodist is, at this moment, only contracting his
right eyelids. Taken in another way,
this is quite false; for the account of what he is trying to effect by this
eyelid-contraction, i.e. the specification of its success-conditions,
requires every one of the successively subordinate ‘try’ clauses, of which I
will spare you the repetition.
Part of this can be brought out in another way. A person who, like
most small children, cannot contract his right eyelids without also contracting
his left eyelids, cannot wink. He must
acquire the nursery accomplishment of separately contracting his right eyelids
before he can learn to send signals by winking. The acquisition of this little muscular
accomplishment is a pre-condition of the acquisition of the ability to wink. Knowing how to wink requires, but does not
reduce to, being able separately to contract the right eyelids. But further. A boy who cannot wink cannot parody a wink. Knowing how to parody a wink requires, but
does not reduce to, knowing how to wink. Further still. A boy trying by private rehearsals to prepare
himself effectively to parody a wink must know what it is to parody well rather
than badly. Else there is nothing for
him to practise for or against. So we might say (1) that voluntary contracting
the right eyelids is on a higher level of accomplishment than an involuntary
twitch, since the former did but the latter did not require some learning or practising; (2) that winking is on a higher
sophistication-level than that of voluntarily contracting the eyelids, since
more, indeed in this case a lot more, needs to have been learned for signalling to be even attempted; (3) that parodying a wink
and (4) that rehearsing the parodying of a wink are in their turn on still
higher sophistication-levels or accomplishment-levels. Learning a lesson of one level presupposes
having learned lessons of all the levels below it. By no pedagogic ingenuities could you teach a
child what stealing is before teaching him what owning is; or teach a boy to parody
a wink before teaching him to wink and to recognize winks; or train a recruit
to obey orders to slope arms before training him to slope arms. For future purposes we should already notice
that, for the same reasons, there can be no question of my being able to direct
you to Larissa before I have learned the way to Larissa; or of my being able to
locate and correct mistakes in my multiplication sum before being able to
multiply. Some lessons are intrinsically
traders on prior lessons. Such tradings can pyramid indefinitely. There is no top step on the stairway of
accomplishment-levels.
It is now time to begin to apply these short ideas. I start at a stage a good long way short of
that which I hope to reach in the end. In the end I hope to be able to throw some
light on the notions of pondering, reflecting, meditating and the thinking of
thoughts, that is, roughly, of what le Penseur looks
as if he is engaged in - in the end, but not straight away.
You hear someone come out with ‘Today is the 3rd of February’. What was he doing? Obviously the thinnest possible description of
what he was doing is, what would fit a gramophone
equally well, that he was launching this sequence of syllables into the air. A tape-recording would reproduce just what he was
doing, in this thinnest sense of ‘doing’. But we naturally and probably correctly give a
thicker description than this. We say
that he was telling someone else the date. He was trying to impart a piece of wanted
calendar-information, so that his attempt was unsuccessful (1) if his companion
did not hear or misheard the noises, or (2) did not understand or misunderstood
what he had heard, or (3) did not believe or already knew what he was told, or
(4) if the speaker had himself got the date wrong. Our natural and probably correct thick
description of what the utterer of the noises was up
to in uttering them has to indicate success-versus-failure conditions
additional to and quite different from the purely phonetic success-conditions
to which the mere vocal uttering was subject. Yet the speaker could not have failed or
succeeded in his attempt to give his companion the calendar-information, if,
owing to catarrh, he had not succeeded in voicing the noises ‘Today is the 3rd of February’. Saying, e.g. giving calendar-information, does
not reduce to voicing; but it requires it or some substitute for it. Nor is saying doing two
things, voicing noises and also doing something else. It is, e.g., conveying information or
misinformation by voicing some noises.
There are, of course, alternative possible thick descriptions of what
the utterer of the noises might have been trying to
do. For he might have been lying, i.e.
trying to get his enemy to accept a piece of misinformation; or he might have
been an actor on the stage, playing the hero’s part of a calendar-informant or
the villain’s part of a deliberate calendar-misinformant.
For him to be trying to do one of these things, he must already know what it is to say things
informatively; and, for that, he must already have got the ability to voice
syllables. Or he may be trying to render
into English a German sentence conveying correct or incorrect
calendar-information. If so, the
translator is not telling anyone the date, right or wrong. If faulted, he can be faulted only for
mistranslation. But to give this English
rendering or misrendering to the German sentence, he
must already know how to tell someone the date in English when the date is the
3rd of February. Or he may be drawing a
conclusion from premisses given him by someone else -
in which case he is not informing anyone else of the date, but arriving himself
at the right or wrong date. He might
regret the fallaciousness of his inference despite the fact that his conclusion
happened to be true. And so on.
Under none of these alternative thick descriptions is what he is doing
just voicing some syllables; yet nor is it doing some things do-able separately
from that syllable-voicing. The handy
umbrella-word ‘saying’ covers a wide variety of different things; the saying
may be on any accomplishment-level above the merely phonetic one.
To give ourselves more material let us notice fairly summarily a whole
run of action-describing verbs which, like the verb ‘to say’, cannot also
function as the verbs of bottom-level or thinnest action-reports or orders.
(a) We have seen that there is no such action as obeying, though
sloping arms in obedience to an order differs importantly from just sloping
arms for fun. Complying with a request
and keeping a promise are obvious parallels. If you just say ‘please’, there is, as yet,
nothing that you have requested me to do; and if I say just ‘I promise’
(period) there is nothing that I have promised to do, so I have not yet even
promised.
(b) Mimicking, parodying, pretending and shamming are also not
lowest-level actions. Our parodist did
mimic the winker, but only by contracting his eyelids in the way in which the
winker had done so. To sham irritation I
have, for example, to utter an expletive and thus sound as swearers
sound. ‘He is shamming (period)’ cannot,
context apart, tell us what he is doing. ‘He is shamming irritation by voicing
expletives’ does.
(c) Doing something experimentally differs from just doing it. Doing it experimentally is trying to find out,
by doing it, whether it can be done, or how to do it, or what will be the
outcome of doing it. So the boy
experimentally jumping the stream is vexed by a helping shove, since this
interfered with his experiment. Notice
that he may jump partly in order to cross the stream and partly in order to
find out whether it is jumpable. So if
he lands in mid-stream he has failed in part, but succeeded in part of his
undertaking. But he was not making two
jumps.
(d) Practising is rather similar. I may converse with a Frenchman just for the
sake of conversation, or just to practise my French. But again I may converse with him with a
sociable intent and also to give myself practice. It may turn out that the conversation was
boring, but the practice was rewarding. Clearly
there is no practising pronunciation without
pronouncing syllables; and clearly, too, pronouncing syllables for practice is
not doing two separately do-able things. I cannot just practise
(period) any more than I can just obey (period). In practising
pronunciation I a pronouncing with a self-drilling intention,
and my pedagogic intention is not a second thing that I am doing, or a thing
that I might be ordered or advised to do by itself.
(e) Sometimes we do things as demonstrations. The sergeant slopes arms in front of the
recruits to show them how to do it. He
demonstrates in vain if they do not look, or look only at his face. He, too, might in one and the same action be
sloping arms, like everyone else, in obedience to the company commander’s order
and also doing it as an instructive exhibition of the manual operation. If he had misheard or anticipated the order,
he would have failed to obey, while still succeeding in demonstrating the
motions.
Not all demonstrations are exhibitions of how to do things. The witness might tell part of his story in
dumb show, i.e. with a narrative intention.
(f) Very many of the things that we do are steps towards or stages in
some ulterior undertaking. I may walk to
the village to make a purchase, or as the first stage of a walk to a second
village. In the one case I have walked
to the first village in vain if the shop is shut; in the other case I have
walked to it in vain if a flood lies between the two villages. But I might walk to the first village with
both ends in view and succeed in both, fail in both, or succeed in one and fail
in the other.
(g) One final specimen. We do
some things in cancellation or correction of other things that we have done. There is such a thing as undoing. We erase or cross out things miswritten,
shelve what had been projected, dismantle what we have assembled, get out of
skids, unsay things that we have said. There
can be no unsaying or withdrawing where nothing has been said, and scrawling a
line across the page is not crossing out unless there was something already
written on that page.
Why have I produced this long, but far from complete series of kinds of
so to speak, constitutionally adverbial verbs - active verbs that are not verbs
for separately do-able, lowest-level doings? Because, if I am right, most of them plus
others that I have not listed, are going to enter into the thick description of
what le Penseur is doing in trying, by reflecting, to
solve whatever his intellectual problem is.
It is often supposed by philosophers and psychologists that thinking is
saying things to oneself, so that what le Penseur is
doing on his rock is saying things to himself. But, apart from other big defects in this
view, it fails because it stops just where it ought to begin. Very likely le Penseur
was just now murmuring something under his breath or saying it in his head. But the question is, ‘What is
the thick description of what he was essaying or intending in murmuring
those words to himself?’ The thin
description ‘murmuring syllables under his breath’, though true, is the
thinnest possible description of what he was engaged in. The important question is ‘But what is the
correct and thickest possible description of what le Penseur
was trying for in murmuring those syllables?’ Was he, for example, murmuring them? And if so, just what would have rendered his
experiment successful or unsuccessful? Or
perhaps he had murmured them in cancellation of something previous; so just
what was he wishing to cancel, and for what defects? And so on.
To say that le Penseur was just saying things
to himself is like saying that our schoolboy parodist was just contracting his
right eyelid; or that the sergeant was just fetching his rifle up on to his
left shoulder; or, if you like, that the helmsman was just twiddling the helm,
or the explorer was just treading on blades of grass.
Incidentally, not only is it quite wrong to say that le Penseur is merely voicing things to himself, in his head or
under his breath, but it is also too restrictive to say that he must be saying
things to himself at all. For just one
example, he might be a musician composing a piece of music, in which case he
might be humming experimental notes and note-sequences to himself. He would then be voicing or sub-voicing notes
but not words - what words are there for him to voice which would further his
work of composition? For him, too, it
would be grossly inadequate to say that he is merely voicing notes. If he is composing a sonata, say, then the
thinnest description of the note-voicing that he is doing would be silent about
the intended musical structure and qualities of the sonata-to-be. It would be silent about what the composer is
trying to accomplish by his tentative, self-critical and persevering note-voicings. It would
say nothing about the composer’s skills, repertoires, purposes or difficulties.
Now, I hope, we are in a position to approach the heart of our question
‘What is le Penseur doing?’ We shall approach him ladder-wise. Suppose there are, in a public park, a number
of people sitting still, chin in hand, each on his
rock. The first man has the job of
making a count of the vehicles travelling in both
directions along the road beneath him. Not
merely are his eyes open, but he is carefully eyeing the vehicles in order to
keep a correct tally of them. He is not
just gazing, but visually keeping a tally, so he is thinking what he is doing. Nevertheless, he does not qualify as a thinker
of thoughts. He is not reflecting,
musing, composing or deliberating - or if he is, he thereby stops attending to
his set task. Why does he not qualify? Because his attention,
intentions and efforts are riveted to things going on in the adjacent outside
world. Like those of a
tennis-player or a car-driver, his tasks are imposed on him from external
circumstances that are not of his choosing.
The occupant of the neighbouring rock is
similarly not detached from external circumstances. He is listening carefully to an unfamiliar
tune that is being played in his hearing by the town-band. He is lending his ears and his mind to strains
of which not he but the town-band is the source. He cannot choose what to hear,
or whether to hear or not.
Compare with these two men the occupant of the third rock. He is going over, in his head or under his
breath or aloud, a perfectly familiar tune or poem. He is humming or murmuring it not
absentmindedly but with some interest and even some degree of absorption. He can, though maybe not perfectly easily,
call his tune or poem to a halt when he chooses; and in going over it he is
fully detached from external circumstances. What he is giving his mind to comes out of his
own resources. Yet he does not quite
qualify as a Penseur. For the tune or poem is not his creation; and
the way it runs is not subject to his choices. He cannot, or cannot easily, put his own
variations into it. It runs in a
rote-groove, rather as the gramophone-needle runs in a groove. Nor can we, after starting to run through the
alphabet, easily insert amendments of our own; or even perfectly easily stop it
at the letter ‘q’.
In contrast with him, and with the occupants of the first two rocks,
the occupant of the fourth rock is composing a tune, song or poem of his own. The notes or words that he voices or
sub-voices are at his own beck and call. Independent of and indifferent to what is
going on around him, he can produce his notes or words, arrange and re-arrange
them, scrap them, shelve them, and rehearse selected sets of them under no
duress either from external circumstances or from rote-channelled
grooves. He is the author of the notes
or words that he voices or sub-voices. He
gives them their existence, relegates them back into non-existence, marshals
them, memorises them, and so on, at his own sweet
will. He is in full control. So he qualifies as at least a candidate for
the status of a thinker of thoughts. For
I suggest first that part of what we require of the momentary occupation of a
thinker is that it is completely or nearly completely detached from what
external circumstances impose; and second, that the obverse side of this
detachment from alien circumstances is the thinker’s uncoerced
initiation and control of his own bottom-level moves and motions, like the
word-voicings and the note-voicings
of a composing poet or musician.
Accordingly we would allow that the man on the next rock, who is pencilling dots and lines on paper, may be engaged in
pondering. For, though he may depend on
circumstances for his possession of pencil and paper, he is free to put down
what marks he likes, which to erase, which to amend and which to connect up, in
which ways, with which others. If he is
trying to design new riggings for his yacht, or drawing from memory a
sketch-map of the foot-paths in his parish, then he is certainly meditating or
pondering just as much as a man who is voicing or sub-voicing words in trying
to compose a sermon or a lecture, or just as much as a man who is humming notes
in trying to compose a dance-tune.
The young chess-player on the next rock may be trying to think out his
next move, or his next three moves, when he is physically waving his knight
some two inches above the alternative squares into which it might go. He is somewhat like the housewife, (for whom I
do not provide a rock) who might try to plan the floral decoration of her
dining-room by shifting and re-shifting vases and bowls to alternative
positions in the room, and by shifting and re-shifting flowers, leaves and
branches to alternative vases and bowls. Momentary circumstances restrict her to these
vases and bowls, to these flowers, leaves and branches, and to these tables,
shelves and window-sills. But
circumstances do not coerce her into this as opposed to that arrangement. Notice that in each case there is a thinnest
description of what the person is doing, e.g. pencilling
a line or dot on paper, and that this thinnest description requires a
thickening, often a multiple thickening, of a perfectly specific kind before it
amounts to an account of what the person is trying to accomplish, e.g. design a
new rigging for his yacht.
However we have a long way to go yet. For the boy on the penultimate rock, trying
for the first time to run through the alphabet backwards from ‘Z, Y, X’ to ‘C,
B, A’, will hardly qualify as a thinker of thoughts just by being free to
nominate what letters he pleases in what order he pleases, and by having a
quite specific objective, together with competence to correct mis-orderings, omissions and repetitions of letters. He is thinking what he is doing, and his
trying is an accomplishment-level higher than that of being able to run by rote
through the alphabet from A to Z. But
its level is not high enough for what we are after. He has mastered a new trick, a trick which may
or may not have utilities, but has no fertility. It is an exercise undertaken just for the sake
of that exercise. Its performance leads
nowhere, save towards the acquisition of a new rote-groove. What le Penseur is
engaged in is more than this. But in
requiring more than this I am not requiring that le Penseur
be an intellectual giant, or that his intellectual problem be one of
history-making dimensions. He may be an
Aristotle, but he may be just one of Aristotle’s students. He may be a
Still en route for our wanted sketch of the thick description or
descriptions of what le Penseur is after in saying or
sub-saying things to himself, let us look at the corresponding thick
descriptions of three other people who are, quite likely audibly, saying things
to themselves. Take (1) the meditating
of the man who is now preparing an after-dinner speech; (2) that of the man who
is preparing a electioneering address, and (3) that of
the man who is preparing a lecture to students.
First of all, all are alike (1) in that they are not merely nattering,
i.e. aimlessly voicing words and phrases; (2) in that they are not merely
trying to think up conversational remarks. Conversational remarks are not
circumstance-detached. What I
conversationally say hinges in some measure on what you have just said; and
your remark was not subject to my choice or control. Roughly, a conversation is an exchange of
remarks (and not paragraphs) between two or more independent speakers. But the successive sentences of a speech or a
lecture or sermon are intended by their single author to be in some measure
internally threaded to their predecessors and successors, of which he himself
is also the author. A remark interjected
by a listener breaks the thread. So what
the composing speaker or lecturer is at this moment saying to himself is meant
to be a development out of and a lead towards other parts of his future speech
or lecture. That it would be a
digression irrelevant, repetitious, redundant or incongruous are scores on which
a meditated phrase or sentence or story is dismissed. So the notion, quite popular among
philosophers, that thinkers in saying things to themselves are therefore
conducting something like inward conversations is not merely insufficient, it
is wrong. Our composing speakers are
trying to compose non-conversational, internally threaded sequences of dicta. In this respect le Penseur’s
task is like theirs. There are not a
thousand things that he wants to be able to propound. There is one thing, even if its propounding
takes 1,000 sentences.
Next, unlike the composing electioneer and unlike the composing
lecturer, the will-be after-dinner speaker does not aim to convert or to
instruct his hearers, or not much. His
speech will be a bad after-dinner speech is it is even a good harangue, lecture
or sermon. It is meant to entertain, or
to move, or to remind or to amuse, etc.; it is not meant to make a difference
to what his listeners think or know. They
are fellow-guests, not members of his congregation, his electorate or his
seminar. In contrast with him the
composing electioneer says what he says to himself as
potential ingredients in a vote-winning harangue. He means to make new converts and to
strengthen the convictions of his more faint-hearted supporters. He is out to persuade; and if sufficiently
fanatical or unscrupulous he may use any persuasively effective tricks that he
can think up. A plausible but bad
argument may suit him better than a good but difficult one. The dominant success-condition of his
undertaking is the winning and retaining, versus the losing, of votes.
In contrast with the electioneer, the will-be lecturer, at least if he
cares about his subject and about his students, intends not to persuade them of
anything, but to instruct them. The last
thing that he wants is that his hearers should vote for his doctrine without
having thought it through. He wants them
to accept it for its merits, or even to doubt or reject it for its demerits. If he is a geometrician,
In this respect le Penseur, if he merits our
respect, is unlike the composing electioneer and like the composing lecturer. He does not want to pull wool over his own
eyes, but to pull the wool from his own eyes. He wants to acquire, what the lecturer wants
to help his students to acquire, a grasp or mastery of something that is not
yet within reach. As what the will-be
lecturer is here and now saying to himself is mooted and examined for its
possible future educative effectiveness, so what le Penseur
is here and now saying to himself is mooted and examined for its chances of
being a contribution to his own conquest of his own problem. He produces a candidate-phrase, but he
dismisses it for being too foggy or too metaphorical for him himself to be
helped by it; or he begins to try to adapt to his own present search a line of
argumentation which has worked well elsewhere, and moots one
candidate-adaptation after another with growing discontentment, since each
adaptation in its turn threatens him himself with new obstacles.
There is, I think, a good deal of promise in this assimilation of the
thick description of what le Penseur is doing in
saying things to himself to that of what the will-be lecturer is doing in
lecture-preparingly saying things to himself. But it will not do as it stands. For there remains this huge difference between
the teacher and le Penseur, that the teacher has
already mastered what he wants his students to master. He can guide them because he is on his own
ground. But le Penseur
is on ground unexplored by himself, and perhaps
unexplored by anyone. He cannot guide
himself through his jungle. He has to
find his way without guidance from anyone who already knows it, if anyone does
know it. The teacher already knows up
which paths and away from which blind alleys to beckon to his students. For him these paths and these blind alleys are
already signposted. But for le Penseur no paths or blind alleys are yet signposted. He does not know in which directions he
should, so to speak, beckon encouragingly or signal warningly to himself. To exaggerate a bit, the teacher is a sighted
leader of the blind, where le Penseur is a blind
leader of the blind - if indeed the very idea of his being or having a leader
fits at all.
We are reminded of Socrates’ puzzle in Plato’s Meno:
How possibly can Socrates, just by asking questions, get the geometrically
innocent slave-boy to think out the right answer to a geometrical problem? Socrates’ obviously unsatisfactory answer is
that the slave-boy must have learned this geometrical truth in a previous
existence, and that Socrates’ questions had served merely as memory-floggers. The slave-boy was just, with Socratic
promptings, resurrecting a piece of already acquired but submerged knowledge;
and Socrates was only doing what the barrister cross-examining a witness often
does, namely retrieving half-forgotten knowledge. Socrates’ answer obviously will not do, since
it merely postpones the question: ‘How was the geometrical
truth originally discovered in that supposed previous existence? Was it thought out then? Or again only resurrected?
Consider this particular pedagogic technique of posing questions in
order to tempt or provoke the students into suggesting their own incorrect or
correct answers. Asking questions and
then critically examining the answers, perhaps by further questions, really is
one way, among many, of inducing students to think, i.e. to make their own
unsteady steps forward. Now le Penseur does, quite likely, some of the time pose questions
to himself in the hope that some of them will tempt or provoke himself into mooting tentative answers of his own for subsequent
critical examination. But the huge
difference between the teacher and le Penseur here is
that the teacher knows, and le Penseur cannot yet
know, which questions to pose, or a
fortiori in what sequence to pose them. There is something of a method or a strategy
controlling the sequence of questions that Socrates puts to the slave-boy;
there can, at the start, be no such method or strategy, or hardly any,
controlling le Penseur’s self-questionings. He does not yet know where he needs to get, or
which paths will lead towards and which will lead away from where he wants to
get, and which will lead nowhere at all.
But perhaps this is too pessimistic. For sometimes, from having been in partly
similar jungles before, le Penseur may, not indeed
know but have some idea which directions look a bit more promising. In any particular case such a faintly
promising look may prove to be a cheat; but it remains a sensible policy to try
out the promising ones before trying out the unpromising ones. If from previous explorations he has acquired
something of an explorer’s eye for country of this general sort, then in the
long run the initially promising-looking ways will have been rewarding more
often that the unpromising-looking ones. Else he would not have acquired anything of an
explorer’s eye for country of this general sort.
So le Penseur, if not an absolute novice,
will, in posing questions to himself, be doing so, certainly not in the teacher’s
knowledge that they are the right ones to ask, but also not entirely randomly. Some of his self-interrogations strike him at
once, occasionally wrongly, as obviously silly questions to ask; others as not
obviously silly. So we can see that the
enquirer’s self-questionings are indeed unlike the pupil-questionings of the
teacher just in the fact that they can be only experimentally posed. His very questions are themselves, so to
speak, questions ‘on appro’ - query-questions. They have no assured heuristic strategy behind
them. But they are also unlike the
absolute novice’s self-questionings, since they really are experimentally
posed. He poses them, anyhow partly, in
order to find out whether or not they are the right questions to pose, that is,
whether they are going to be heuristically rewarding or unrewarding. The enquirer is not saying didactic things to
himself; he is experimentally saying questionable didactic things to himself. All of Socrates’ questions to the slave-boy
were pedagogically well chosen, and asked in a well-chosen order, since
Socrates already knew Pythagoras’ theorem. But Pythagoras himself, in first excogitating
this theorem, had had no such guide. He
got to his destination not by following signposts, but by experimentally and
unconfidently following, often up blind alleys, experimentally planted
signposts of his own, each with its warning question-mark inscribed on it. He had to find out by persevering trial and
frequent error which of his experimental query-signposts would and which would
not be misleading signposts, if read without the queries.
In short, I suggest that at least part of the thick description of what
le Penseur is trying to do in saying things to
himself is that he is trying, by success/failure tests, to find out whether or
not the things that he is saying would or would not be utilisable
as leads or pointers. They are not
pointers, but only candidate-pointers; and most of them will have to be turned
down after examination. Somewhat as my
school-boy parodist was not winking but parodying winking; and somewhat as my
stream-jumper was not trying to get across the stream, but to find out whether
this or that track of his own making would or would not qualify as a guiding,
as opposed to a mis-guiding or non-guiding, track.
Of course in real life the things said by the teacher to his students
will not all or mostly be questions. He
will suggest corollaries, counter-examples and reminders; he will predict
difficulties and diagnose the sources of difficulties; he will reproach,
command, exhort, advise and warn - and all as instructive pointers in what he
knows to be the right direction. So,
while he, the teacher, is, in solitude, preparing his lecture-to-be, he will be
thinking up, and critically thinking about, possible lecture ingredients of
these and lots of other didactically well-qualified and well-directed kinds. Correspondingly, though now a slice higher up
in the sandwich, le Penseur, in saying things to
himself, will be mooting and suspiciously examining not only questions, but
also objections, warnings, reminders, etc., only not didactically as already
certified instructive pointers, but experimentally to find out whether or not
they would be or could be profitably followable
pointers. It is their didactic
potencies, if any, that he is trying to find out, be testing their very
hypothetical promise against their mostly disappointing performances. So he says the things that he says to himself
not, so to speak, in the encouraging tones of voice of the teacher or the guide
who knows the way, but in the suspicious tones of the unoptimistic examiner of
their credentials as potential didactic leads. The pioneer, having no leader’s tracks to
follow, makes his progress, if he does make any progress, by studying the fates
of the tracks that he himself makes for this purpose. He is taking his present paces not to get to
his destination - since he does not know the way - but to find out where, if
anywhere, just these paces take him. The
paces that had taken him to the quagmire would have been a traveller’s
bad investment, but they were, on a modest scale, the explorer’s good
investment. He had learned from their
fate, what he had not previously known, that they
would have been and will be a traveller’s bad
investment. It was for such a lesson,
positive or negative, that he had taken them. He had, so to speak, taken those paces
interrogatively and incredulously. But
when he has finished his explorations, he will then be able to march along some
stretches of some of his old tracks, pacing this time not interrogatively but
didactically. He will be able to pilot
others along ways along which no one had piloted him and delete some of the
queries that he had inscribed on his own, originally hypothetical signposts.
As jumping a stream in order to find out if it is jumpable is on a higher
sophistication-level than jumping to get to the other side so exploring is on a
higher sophistication-level than piloting, which in its turn is on a higher
sophistication-level than following a pilot’s lead. Similarly, Euclid trying to find the proof of
a new theorem is working on a higher accomplishment-level than Euclid trying to
teach students his proof when he has got it; and trying to teach it is a task
on a higher accomplishment-level than that on which his students are working in
trying to master it.
None the less it may still be true that the only thing that, under its
thinnest description,
The Competitiveness of Nations
in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy
May 2005