Читать книгу A Companion to Arthur C. Danto - Группа авторов - Страница 47

Let me remind readers how Danto defines basic actions. His initial definition is negative: when we perform a basic action there is nothing else that we do in order to cause it. But he also specifies, more positively, that a basic action is something we do just like that, at will. Two correlative claims about non-basic actions follow: when we perform a non-basic action, there is something else that we do in order to cause it; in such cases, we do one thing, the non-basic thing, by doing another thing, which may or may not be basic.

Danto claims that each agent has a repertoire of basic actions, which roughly speaking is a set of capacities to perform various kinds of basic actions. He claims further that agents know that they are able to perform the various kinds of basic actions that belong to their repertoires, but they do not know how they are able to perform them. Thus I know that I can raise my arm directly at will, just like that, but I have no idea how I am able to do this.

It is clear that Danto conceives the sort of knowledge-how in question, which he says agents don’t need in order to perform basic actions, as a kind of practical knowledge – knowledge from which agents act, as opposed to the sort of knowledge about themselves that they might acquire when they view themselves as objects, as scientists might. I take it that, in Danto’s view, agents need to exploit such practical knowledge-how when they perform non-basic actions – to be able to do one thing by doing another involves knowing how to do the one thing by doing the other.

It is also clear that Danto conceives the sort of knowledge-that which agents possess concerning their repertoire of basic actions – knowledge that they can perform them directly at will – likewise, as practical knowledge. This comes through when he clarifies that such knowledge-that cannot be inductive knowledge. The point is not entirely obvious. After all, we are not born knowing what we can do at will, so how else could we possibly learn this other than through observation and induction? But if we consider the matter more closely, it is easy to see that there is a difficulty for the idea that our practical knowledge is based on induction. In every case, either what we observe is a case of doing something at will, or it is not. If it is, then we must already know that we can do it at will – for you can’t unknowingly do something at will. And yet, if what we observe is not a case of doing something at will, then our observation is not relevant to learning what we can do at will.

When Danto registers this point about how an agent’s knowledge of its repertoire of basic actions cannot be arrived at inductively, he registers a profound distinction between the first-person point of view from which we act and the third person point of view from which we observe and predict. It may seem as though this is only an epistemic point, about two different ways of knowing – first personal ways and third personal ways. But we shall see that, ultimately, it brings in train a metaphysical point about the nature of what can be known from these two different perspectives.

Descartes famously argued along these lines, from the special nature of first-person knowledge to a metaphysical dualism of mind and body. Most readers of Descartes presume that they find in his work an emphasis on the nature of consciousness as an attribute of an immaterial soul that is distinct from the material body. Danto is no Cartesian. He is interested in agency, not consciousness; and unlike Descartes, who also emphasized agency in his account of the mind, Danto’s interest in agency is an interest in directly embodied agency. Nevertheless, because his conception of embodied agency is a conception of something that can be known only from a first-person point of view, it leads him to posit a duality of the me and the not-me. Danto’s non-Cartesian dualism poses a problem of other bodies, which he claims is a much more important philosophical problem than the problem of other minds that is alleged to follow up on the nature of consciousness.

I will explain below why I do not think there is a problem of other bodies. But first I want to clarify that if Danto thinks there is one, then it is not open to him to embrace a purely biologistic conception of the agent and its capacities to perform basic actions. Admittedly, that conception does seem to fit many things he says. He says, for example, that an agent’s capacities to perform basic actions are capacities to directly control its body, and also that these capacities are a gift. I take this to mean that they are, somehow, metaphysically given. It may seem plausible that they are biologically given – that they are motor capacities through which an organism directly controls its biologically given body. This is not Danto’s view. He defines the agent’s body much more abstractly, as that over which the agent exerts direct intentional control when it performs basic actions. And he goes out of his way to point out that not every part of the human organism belongs to an agent’s body in this sense – hair, teeth, and so on do not. This point might not seem fatal to the equation of an agent’s capacities with biologically given motor capacities to control a biologically given body – after all, no biologist would say that an animal with motor capacities has motor control over all aspects of its animal body. But note that if we did equate an agent’s capacities for basic actions with biologically given motor capacities, then surely a biologist could study how agents are able to perform basic actions in a scientific way. And Danto would surely be right to point out that even if an agent were to learn such a scientific account of how motor capacities work, this would not supply the agent with the sort of practical knowledge that it needs in order to exercise its own agency, for agency is exercised from the first-person point of view, and not from the third person point of view from which scientific investigation is conducted. Were this not true, it would be impossible for Danto to so much as intimate that there might be a problem of other bodies.