I have proposed that there are at least three or four distinct modes of understanding. I now turn to the familiar thought that among these varieties of expression of conceptual understanding, only one—the judgemental mode—is genuine. The other modes, according to this idea—that is, the perceptual, the active, the personal—are expressive of understanding only derivatively, thanks to the fact that they are guided or controlled, from outside as it were, by true understanding in the judgemental mode.
I will call this view intellectualism. Intellectualism, as I am defining it, is the view that one modality of conceptual expression is basic, namely, the judgemental, and that the others are domains where understanding finds expression only derivatively.[9]
Plato and Descartes seemed to have believed something like this. For them, a mere sensation rises to the level of perception, and a mere movement to the level of action, only if it is subject to guidance by reason. The soul is divided against itself and it achieves integration only when it is controlled in the right way from above.
Intellectualism is probably the establishment view in cognitive science. When you see the Pole Star, for example, as Fodor & Pylyshyn (1981) insist, you represent whatever it is that you really see—a pattern of irradiation of the retina, perhaps—as the Pole Star. To suppose otherwise is to suppose that vision could be, as Gibson (1986) had claimed, a direct pick up of what there is around us. But Pole Star-hood, like the third dimension, is not something that gets projected onto the retina. The what-ness of things, their nature, no less than the third-dimension itself, are not, strictly speaking, visible. We need judgement, the application of concepts (in this case perhaps automatic and implicit) in the building-up of mental representations, to get something like the world into our experience.[10]
Jason Stanley, in a series of writings (Stanley & Williamson 2001; Stanley 2011; Stanley & Krakauer 2013), defends what I am calling intellectualism. You perform a skilful action, according to Stanley (2011), only when your action flows from your knowledge of true propositions. He elaborates:
[t]here are all sorts of automatic mechanisms that operate in a genuine sense sub-personally. The human (and animal) capacity for skilled action is based upon these mechanisms. What makes an action an exercise of skill, rather than mere reflex, is the fact that it is guided by the intellectual apprehension of truths. (Stanley 2011, p. 174)
Is intellectualism right? Should we be intellectualists?
It is important that we notice, right away, that intellectualism is right about something. It does justice to the fact that there is understanding, and there is conceptuality, at work wherever we think and perceive and act and talk, as we have been considering. Conceptuality, understanding, and knowledge pervade not only the mental, but our lives and our being. Certainly, it is in evidence wherever we can speak of agency. Stanley insists (in the quotation above) that we can only speak of skilful action where there is understanding at work. He perhaps ought to have said that we can only speak of action at all, as opposed to mere reflex, or mere movement, where there is also understanding.
The question I would like us to consider is this: do we need intellectualism to secure this undoubted intellectualist insight, as I will dub the recognition of the pervasiveness of understanding in our perceptual, active, as well as emotional lives? It’s crucial that we notice the distance between the insight and the thesis. It’s one thing to say that there is understanding at work in perception and action, and another to think that what makes this true is that perception and action are grounded on acts of judgement. Do we need to think that what guarantees and secures the involvement of understanding is the fact that our seeings, doings, and feelings are guided by judgements?
There are, right off the bat, two obvious grounds for suspicion regarding the intellectualist thesis. For one thing, intellectualism at least threatens to obscure the differences to which I have been directing our attention among what at least appear to be authentically distinct ways of exercising one’s knowledge and understanding. And so, it seems, it gets things wrong. Seeing and acting and dynamically reacting, most of the time at least, don’t look or feel anything like bringing objects under concepts in judgement.
For another, intellectualism smacks of the arbitrary. Couldn’t we maintain that perception is the basic form of understanding and that judgement, even in cases of pure reasoning and mathematics, rests on a kind of perceptual insight? Or that it is understanding in the active mode that is truly basic? Judgement itself depends on the mastery and exercise of conceptual capacities which are in the first instance practical. You need to know how to use concepts, after all, in order to use them in judgement.
In any case, let us ask again: are there reasons to endorse intellectualism? Why think that judgement is the primary and singular authentic modality of real understanding? Why be an intellectualist?