Michael Luntley

Training and Learning

Some philosophers of education think that there is a pedagogically informative concept of training that can be gleaned from Wittgensteins later writings: training as initiation into a form of life. Stickney, in ‘Training and Mastery of Techniques in Wittgensteins Later Philosophy: A response to Michael Luntley’takes me to task for ignoring this concept. In this essay I argue that there is no such concept to be ignored. I start by noting recent developments in Wittgenstein scholarship that raise serious issues about how we should handle the translation of Arbrichtung and arbrichten. I then concentrate on the substantive philosophical issues about the very idea that training can have a pedagogically productive role in education. I show that what work training does is a function of the prior skill set of the trainee. This means that we have to endorse some form of rationalism and acknowledge that the learner can only respond to training if they already possess sufficient mental equipment to generate the appropriate responses.

What do nurses know

This paper defends an epistemic conservatism - propositional knowing-that suffices for capturing all the fine details of the knowledge of experienced nurses that depends on the complex ways in which they are embedded in shared fields of activity. I argue against the proliferation of different ways of knowing associated with the work of Dreyfus and Benner. I show how propositional knowledge can capture the detail of the phenomenology that motivates the Dreyfus/Benner proliferation.

Learning, Empowerment and Judgement

Here is a distinction that appears very simple, looks compelling and seems to be deeply rooted in our reflections on learning. The distinction is between activities of learning that involve training and those that involve reasoning. In the former, the pupil is a passive recipient of habits of mind and action. The mechanism by which they acquire these habits is mimesis, not reasoning. In contrast, learning by reasoning involves considerable mental activity by the pupil who has to work out what to think and do. The very mechanism by which the pupil learns is her own capacity to reason, to things work out for herself. In this paper I argue that there is no basis for this distinction. I argue that, contrary to the dominant empiricist thinking about such things, learning by reasoning is the only credible form of learning. I start with a brief characterisation of the distinction and an account of why it seems so compelling. In §2 I review the empirical evidence from developmental psychology for a rationalist account of language learning as learning by reasoning. In §§3 and 4 I provide a philosophical argument against the place of training and in favour of a rationalist model of learning by reasoning.

Patterns, Particularism and Seeing the Similarity

Abstract I argue for a form of particularism from a reading of Wittgensteins critique of the idea that word use is governed by rules. In place of the idea that word use is driven by rules, I show how the patterns of word use, in virtue of which we express our reasons, emerge from our ongoing practice, including our practice of seeing things as similar. I argue that the notion of seeing the similarities is primitive for Wittgenstein. The remark, ‘this and similar things are called “games”’ does not signal a form of ignorance. It signals the constitutive role that speakers, as judges, have to play in the metaphysics of the patterns of word use.

The Character of Learning.

In this paper I propose a contrast between learning as the acquisition of theories and learning as the development of insight. I then suggest that, in a great many cases, the cognitive achievement by which we come to organise behaviour rationally is the development of insight, where this is independent of the acquisition of knowledge regimented in theories. The distinction is between a model in which a subject rationalises behaviour by appeal to knowledge of particulars rather than general theoretical knowledge. By ‘insight’ I mean a capacity for cognitive states with a singular content by which the subject fits, or couples with, the environment. This is achieved by attention. The contrast is between two answers to the question, ‘What is it to act rationally in the light of learning?’. One answer is to see the learning that shapes rational behaviour as grasp of the theories that articulate the conceptual patterns of word use and the patterns of that word use that figure in the giving and taking of reasons for what we do. My preferred answer is that the character of learning is the subject with capacities for attention that shape the patterns of concepts and of the things we trade as reasons. The subject with attentional capacities that couple them to the world is a subject who is a responsible author of the patterns of concept use and thereby what counts as acceptable reasons for acting.

Forgetski Vygotsky: Or, a plea for bootstrapping accounts of learning

Abstract This paper argues that sociocultural accounts of learning fail to answer the key question about learning—how is it possible? Accordingly, we should adopt an individualist bootstrapping methodology in providing a theory of learning. Such a methodology takes seriously the idea that learning is staged and distinguishes between a non-comprehending engagement with things and a comprehending engagement. It suggests that, in the light of recent work in psychology (Carey) with insights from Wittgenstein, there is rich scope for a bootstrapping account of learning. The paper also argues that sociocultural approaches when pushed, either require some such bootstrapping account, or they collapse into an obscure Ficthean metaphysics in which individual abilities are ‘summoned into being’ by the attitudes of others.

Wittgenstein and the Path of Learning

In this essay, I defend an individualistic reading of Wittgenstein on learning . Many scholars (Williams, Stickney, Simpson) read Wittgenstein as endorsing a broadly social initiation model of learning (see also, Derry and Bakhurst for a Vygotskian spin on this). The social initiation model looks inevitable if you endorse the orthodox assumptions about Wittgenstein’s treatment of linguistic regularity. The key assumptions are as follows: (i) linguistic regularity involves a normative practice with words; (ii) normativity is socially constituted; and (iii) learning involves acquiring these normative practices. Developing arguments started in my Wittgenstein : Opening Investigations (2015), I deny all three assumptions. Wittgenstein’s treatment of linguistic regularity is naturalistic, not normative; it involves users engaging with words in ways that are patterned, patterns in which words fit, but the concept of ‘fit’ requires no more than ‘primitive normativity ’ (Ginsborg 2011). What this amounts to is the following: learners ’ first encounters with things from which they acquire concepts are encounters shaped by the syntactic patterns that render things salient, patterns of rhythm, rhyme and repetition. These patterns are not the patterns of conceptual order, let alone a normative pattern; they are the patterns characteristic of aesthetic experience; they are the patterns of play and of games. In short, individuals learn by playing with the forms of aesthetic experience—playing with sounds and symbols is the basis for these things coming to bear content. This is not to deny that there is a transition from such patterns to conceptual patterns, but challenging the orthodoxy of assumption (i) leaves conceptual patterns inheriting much of the contingency of the shape of aesthetic patterns. In the Big Typescript , Wittgenstein compares a rule to a garden path. We walk paths with a sense of allegiance to the way to go, but without any prescriptive sense that we have to go this way rather than that. We are, in part, authors of the paths we take. Understanding Wittgenstein on learning involves coming to learn how to share his sense of being comfortable with the contingencies of word use and to stop looking for any sense that there are prescriptive norms governing what we learn to do with words.

Attention, Time & Purpose

Abstract Action explanations that cite dynamic beliefs and desires cannot be modelled as causal explanations. The contents of dynamic psychological states cannot be treated as the causal antecendents to behaviour. Behavioural patterns cannot be explained in virtue of the patterns of operations performed upon the intentional antecedents to behaviour. Dynamic intentional states are persisting regulatory devices for behaviour that provide couplings with the environment. Behavioural patterns emerge from choice couplings rather than being produced by patterns for operating upon intentional antecendents to behaviour in cognition.

The ‘Practical Turn’ and the Convergence of Traditions

Abstract This paper explores the idea that the structure of intentionality is fundamentally the structure of a practice, not the structure of a language, or some quasi-linguistic system of representational entities. I show how and why neo-Fregean theory of content is committed to this practical turn. Mis-representation is often thought to be problematic for the neo-Fregean, but I show not only that it accommodates the phenomena better than the representationalist position, but also that the idea of error that the representationalist wants with empty singular terms is redundant, for it has no role to play in explaining the systematicity of thought.