Knowledge Without Knowing
George Kampis
Japan Advanced Institute for Science and Technology
Tatsunokuchi
Knowledge in the representational sense is based on the process of knowing, by which process the outside world is mapped onto a mental state. More importantly, knowledge itself is assumed to be a property of an ensuing mental state. As a consequence, the relationship between knowledge and the external world is generally assumed to be that of reference, that is, the relation of a mental state to some state (or object, and so on) of the world.
By contrast, I consider knowledge differently, in a Wittgensteinian and Sellarsian perspective. Wittgenstein has showed that words and the other products of the mind are based on social habit rather then inherent meaning. The result is twofold. The mind is social rather than individual, and it lacks the tools needed for a Hobbesian or Cartesian internal combination of meanings into thoughts. So how can we think? A possible answser is that thinking is something that just happens. Knowledge may be the result, rather than the underlying basis of the processes of the mind. This view reshapes the concept of mental entities as fundamentally different from representations. Wittgenstein calls them pictures, Sellars calls them theoretical entities. Barsalou considers them perceptual symbol systems. I will speak of them as mental models. A mental model is a world by (and onto) itself, in Goodman's sense. But mental models have functional effects. One of these is the formation of knowledge.
Here we have to take a second radical step. In the first we threw out representations. In the second we consider consequences of mental modeling. Knowledge is evoked by the external world, but it cannot be based on that. As in nineteenth-century physiological constructivism, what’s inside the mind is independent from what’s outside the brain. Is this solipsism? Just the opposite. Biology is the basic science of the mind. For mental models to operate as meaningful, embedded in the organism, it is necessary to possess a pre-wired causal structure put previously into the mind by evolution. Mental content may not be adaptive and may not represent anything but mental models are adaptive in that they repeat the causal structure of the world.
In the paper I examine how this concept of knowledge leads to a new image of cognition. Of the many problems that arise, I will mostly focus on intentionality and agency, which may get an entirely new meaning by the causal internal properties of mental models.