Abstract: Sousa discussed two Platonic questions about the nature and value of knowledge, but knowledge not only concerned the third Platonic problem that Sosa did not discuss, but also left this third Platonic problem, and the first two Platonic problems discussed by Sosa could not be truly solved. This third Platonic problem is the question of the influence of knowledge: whether one's knowledge is intrinsically driven. The sound moral convictions produced by Sosa's cognitive faculties are not morally motivated. In order to solve the third Platonic problem, we can draw on Wang Yangming's conscience and examine the three characteristics of conscience. In Yang Ming's view, moral knowledge is a kind of knowledge that motivates people to act. In this way, the knower in the sense of Sosa does not have a perfect knowledge, because his knowledge does not prompt him to act accordingly.
Keywords: Sosa; Plato; Wang Yangming; Conscience; Knowledge of Motivation; Knowledge of Integrity
About author:Yong Huang is a professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Chinese, Hong Kong; an alumnus of the Class of 1977 majoring in philosophy at East China Normal University.
Ernest Sosa's monograph Knowing Full Well discusses two Platonic problems, one for the composition of knowledge (chapter one) and the other for the value of knowledge (chapter three), and offers its contemporary solutions. This article introduces the third Platonic problem, the question of the influence of knowledge. This is not because the two issues addressed by Sousa are not important, but because the third is not only important in itself, but also helps to clarify the first two. In order to solve the third Plato problem, the author will draw on the philosophical insights of the Ming agent Wang Yangming. Yang Ming believes that true knowledge is a kind of knowledge that triggers people's actions. Accordingly, the knower in the sense of Sousa does not have a perfect knowledge, because his knowledge does not provoke the holder of this knowledge to act accordingly. Or, if such a person has a perfect knowledge in the sense of Sousa, then the knowledge of Wang Yangming in the sense is better than the knowledge of integrity in the sense of Sousa.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="17" > the third Platonic problem that Sosa should face</h1>
The first Platonic question discussed by Sousa is found in the Teated, which is primarily concerned with the nature of knowledge. Socrates asked "what is knowledge," and Teateides first gave a few examples of knowledge, but Socrates argued that they were neither sufficient nor necessary to define knowledge. He then proposed to define knowledge as perception, but this was refuted by Socrates for various reasons (such as animals also have perception; if so, no one is smarter than anyone, because everyone has the same perceptual faculties; if so, anyone who perceives the expression of a language can assume that he knows that language; and that part of knowledge does not depend on perception; etc.). Finally, Thasted replied that knowledge is true belief or true judgment. Socrates retorted: "Imagine a juror correctly believing something that can only be known through witnesses and not by other means, and the juror decides on these things by hearing and speaking, and forms a true judgment." Well, the jurors made their judgments without knowledge. But if judged properly, what they believed would be correct. ”
Therefore, knowledge is not just true judgment. Thus Thasted adds: "True judgments with logos (accounts) are knowledge, and true judgments without reasoning are things outside knowledge." "The question is exactly what is reasoning. Tai Artede discusses three but none of them are satisfactory. "The first possibility is to reveal one's thoughts through a language of verbs and names, that is, to project beliefs into the air that emanates from the mouth—like a mirror or water." However, this is not enough, because "this is something that everyone can do sooner or later, as long as they are not deaf or dumb from the beginning". In other words, one can do this as long as one has the right judgment, and therefore the correct judgment can become knowledge itself. The second "possibility is that when asked what a thing is, be able to enumerate its elements and answer the questioner." This is ridiculous because to answer what something is, we can't just list all the parts that make up that thing, especially when parts of one thing may be exactly the same as parts of another thing, such as the letter "t" being both the part of "Theaetetus" and the part of "Theodorus". The last is "a certain identity that can say that the thing asked is different from everything else." The possibility of such reasoning is excluded because it is superfluous, because the true judgment must be a judgment that has distinguished one thing from the other.
The Tyated conclusion about the nature of knowledge is completely negative: "Knowledge is neither a feeling nor a true judgment, nor a true judgment with reasoning attached to it. "But it is reasonable to think that knowledge must be a true judgment or a true belief, even if true judgment or true belief is not necessarily knowledge. Thus, Sosa argues that the "post-Getil form" of this Platonic problem is that "a true conviction becomes knowledge of what conditions must be further satisfied, whether attached to or substituted for the fact that faith must be held by virtue of ability". To solve this Plato problem, Sosa elucidates what he understands as a fully apt belief in three steps. First, a belief has relevance in the sense of animal knowledge, and if it accomplishes its goal, that is, it comes true, not by luck but by the use of first-order abilities, which are "reliable enough to ensure that the resulting belief is accurate"; second, a belief has meta-apt in the sense of reflective knowledge. If it is formed not by luck but by the use of meta-competence, which "enables a person to decide on controversial questions whether a certain belief should be formed or should not hold any faith"; finally, if a person has a perfect and appropriate belief, that is, a perfect knowledge, if his appropriate belief (animal knowledge formed through the application of first-order ability) is guided by the meta-appropriate belief (reflective knowledge formed through the application of meta-ability).
The second Platonic problem of Sosa's discussion is found in The Meno, which deals primarily with the value of knowledge over purely true beliefs. In other words, what does knowledge add to true belief? As Sosa said, "Plato was puzzled by the fact that if a true belief can help you do the same thing, is knowledge more valuable than the corresponding true belief?" True beliefs are just as effective in guiding you to your goals than the corresponding knowledge. Therefore, we ask: Can such knowledge always help to promote the corresponding simple belief? Socrates gives an example in the dialogue: "A man knows the way to Larissa ... Just set off there and guide others, and he will be able to bring others there correctly. "This is a man of knowledge. In contrast, a man with only true conviction "has the right opinion on this path, but has never been there, does not really know it," but he can correctly guide others there. Socrates further said: "As long as a person has a correct opinion on something that others have knowledge, he, who has only true opinion and no knowledge, is no less than a knowledgeable person. If so, then knowledge does not seem to have any additional value compared to true opinion or true belief. Mesono was puzzled by the question, "If so, why knowledge is far more valued than correct advice?" Socrates' own solution to the problem is that true opinions are less stable and easily lost: true opinions "cannot dwell permanently, they will escape from the minds of men, and therefore be of little value, unless they are tied up by reason.".
Sousa was clearly less satisfied with Socrates' solution to the question of the value of knowledge. His own solution is to explain the value of knowledge through the so-called "a knowledge norm of assertion": knowledge, rather than pure true beliefs, can be used as the normative standard for assertion, and in this regard knowledge is superior to pure true beliefs, or knowledge has the value that pure true beliefs lack. To explain this, Sousa points out that "if it is concluded that it is insincere, it is cognitively unqualified", in the sense that sincerity is a presumptive cognitive norm. Whether a person asserts that he knows something that is incorrect or that he knows something that is correct but he does not know, he is not sincere and therefore acts inappropriately. On the contrary, "if there is no epistemic deficit in the (one's own) assertion of p, it must be sincere; only if the subject knows p, a judgment about p may be appropriate".
However, this article is not intended to discuss the pros and cons of Sosa's approach to solving these two Plato problems. Instead, I will focus on the third Platonic problem, which is primarily discussed in Protagoras. This is not only because it is also a central question of knowledge, to which Sousa does not pay enough attention; but also because, if this Platonic problem is not adequately solved, the other two Platonic problems that Sousa is concerned with cannot be adequately solved, at least in some cases. The question is about whether a person's behavior is likely to contradict one's own perceptions, or whether one's knowledge is intrinsically driven. Although it is often thought that this also involves the question of weakness of will, in order to relate to Tosa's first two Platonic questions concerning the nature and value of knowledge, we shall for the moment consider the third Platonic question to be a question concerning the influence of knowledge. In fact, this issue is not completely separate from the first two. The proper answer to the third question may require us to correct the answer to the first question and help us better answer the second question. Why are we digging into this issue here? Suppose that a person has a perfect and appropriate conviction in the sense of Tsusa that it is better not to smoke (or better not to lie); but in fact to continue to smoke (or still lie). If so, can we really say that this person has a good idea of how best not to smoke (or the best to tell the truth)?
Socrates, in proposing (and solving) this problem, first expressed the usual view that knowledge "is not something as powerful, it is neither a leader nor a ruler ... But knowledge is often presented in man, but it is not knowledge that governs man, but something else—either anger, or pleasure, or pain, or love, often fear; they think that their knowledge is like a slave who is completely led by these things by the nose." In other words, most people think that a person's behavior may go against their own perceptions because knowledge is not something as powerful. Socrates then asked Protagoras, "Is knowledge a wonderful thing that can rule over man, that as long as man can distinguish between good and evil, he is not compelled to act in a way other than as he is instructed by knowledge, and that if he is full of reason, it is enough to save a man?" Protagoras replied, "It seems to me shameful not to regard wisdom and knowledge as the most powerful force in human activity." ”
Socrates himself's view of the problem was: "A man who knows or believes that there is something better than what he is doing will not continue to do what he is doing when he is likely to do something better." What can make people submit is ignorance, and what can control oneself is wisdom. In this passage, Socrates makes two parallel claims. (1) A person who really knows must have the desire to act according to cognition. Thus, the following statement seems absurd to Socrates: "A man who knows what is evil and has the ability not to do evil, but always does evil, because pleasure conquers him and drives him to do so; A man who knows what is good is not willing to do good, because the immediate happiness conquers him", because "no one will be inclined to evil or to what he believes to be evil; no one will be by his nature... Want to tend to what he believes to be evil, not to what is good." (2) A person who has done something worse than "knowing" and "believing" is that he has no true knowledge. In other words, the person is ignorant: "Those people are right about ... Good and evil make bad choices because of a lack of knowledge... And you must know that wrong actions without knowledge are due to ignorance. However, the following two kinds of ignorance are obviously different: Zhang San "knows" that smoking is not good but still continues to smoke, while Li Si does not know that smoking is not good and continues to smoke. To explain this, Socrates made an analogy: "Something of the same size looks larger in front of the eye, and smaller in the distance... The same sound, closer to the sound louder, far away sounds softer. In the above example of smoking, Zhang San does know to some extent that smoking is harmful, but he also knows that the happiness brought by smoking is good, and he also knows that the happiness brought by smoking is higher than the harm caused by smoking, because the former is certain and right in front of him, and the latter is uncertain and future. Therefore, Zhang San did not really know that smoking was harmful or that he should not smoke.
Putting these two propositions of Socrates together is tantamount to saying that knowledge that does not motivate man to act is not true knowledge. Therefore, if a person knows that he should not smoke but still continues to smoke, he cannot say that he has an intact knowledge of it. In other words, if Plato was right, then what Sousa called the perfect and appropriate faith is still not knowledge. Thus, the solution of the third Platonic problem helps us to solve the first Platonic problem about the nature of knowledge and the second Platonic problem about the value of knowledge, which are exactly the problems that Sosa is trying to solve.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="94" > two normative knowledge</h1>
Admittedly, the third Platonic question does not seem to apply to all knowledge. For example, such a problem does not arise under such a sound and appropriate belief as "this is a barn", because this knowledge does not involve any particular motivation/action. Rather, as shown in the example discussed in the previous section, it deals only with a specific type of knowledge, namely normative knowledge, while moral knowledge belongs to normative knowledge. This may explain why Sousa did not discuss this issue, as he was primarily engaged in epistemological research rather than ethical research.
But we can still learn some of Sosa's views on normative knowledge from his discourse on ethics, because his epistemology is a kind of epistemology of virtue, and he often compares it with virtue ethics when proposing it. For example, he quotes Aristotle in knowledge in Action: "The goodness of man is the activity of the soul in accordance with virtue, and if there are many virtues, then it is the activity of the soul in accordance with the most outstanding and perfect virtues." Aristotle makes an analogy in another place with people who know grammar. The person who understands grammar does what is grammatical and acts in the way that grammar prescribes, that is, he speaks "in accordance with his own knowledge of grammar", rather than "by chance, with the guidance of another person". "A sentence is grammatical, which is consistent with the grammatical knowledge or ability of the speaker; likewise, the good qualities of an action or action are consistent with the virtues of the actor," Sosa said. In both cases, the good quality of the performance must be attributed sufficiently to competence, not chance."
He then began to propose the epistemology of virtue: "The epistemology of virtue is similar to this Aristotle ethics of virtue, and we shall argue that it is a special case of the general theory of the practice of behavior." As a historical example of an epistemology similar to the ethics of Aristotle's virtues, Tosa quotes Descartes: "If I only did not make a judgment without having a clear enough clarity and clarity to understand the truth, then it is clear that I was right and avoided mistakes in my actions." But if I make a positive or negative judgment in this case, then I have not used my free will correctly. If I choose wrong, it is obvious that I will make a mistake; if I choose the other side, I will grasp the truth entirely by chance, and therefore my choice will still be problematic."
In Sosa's view, epistemology and ethics are two branches of general theory of the execution of behavior with goals. Epistemology focuses on the act of doing the work with the goal of true belief, while ethics is concerned with the action of doing the right thing. Virtue is the associated ability to manifest itself in the execution of an act. Virtue ethics is about obtaining correct action through the use of moral faculties, while virtue epistemology is about attaining true convictions through the use of cognitive abilities. Thus, Sosa argues, "Virtuous acts of conduct, whether by virtue of reason or right action by virtue of practice, will involve the qualities of the actor and his circumstances."
However, this contrast between Sosa's epistemology of virtue (the acquisition of true conviction through the use of cognitive virtues or abilities) and virtue ethics (the right action by applying moral virtues or abilities) is not very precise. First, while it can be said that deontological or consequential ethics is primarily concerned with how to act correctly, it is often said that virtue ethics is primarily concerned not with actions, but with actors. It may be argued that the object of conduct concerned with virtue ethics is to cultivate virtuous men or to make them virtuous. Second, while it is true that a person's moral virtues, or abilities, as Sousa put it, can be embodied in the correct actions of man, Aristotle believed that they were also embodied in man's emotions. Especially in the case of unsolvable moral dilemmas, no action is correct, but the difference between the virtuous and the unethical is that the former always shows appropriate emotions, while the latter has no such emotions, and even has inappropriate emotions.
But the third and most serious shortcoming of Sousa's comparison of the epistemology of virtues concerning knowledge with the ethics of virtues concerning action is that it misleads people into thinking that there is no knowledge in the ethics of virtue, as if epistemology is only about beliefs and ethics is only about action. However, knowledge, especially moral knowledge, is essential for virtue ethics. Moreover, I will discuss in the next section that moral knowledge ("moral" imitation "knowledge", that is, this knowledge itself is moral or good, distinguished from "moral knowledge" with "morality" as the content of knowledge, that is, knowledge about morality) has an intrinsic nature that stimulates action. Aristotle emphasized, for example, that "action according to virtue takes place in a just or restrained manner, that this action is not merely of a particular attribute of its own, but that the actor fulfills the corresponding conditions in his action, namely, first, that he knows what he is doing; second, he acts on the basis of rational choice, and he rationally chooses this action for the sake of the action itself; and third, he acts firmly and unswervingly." Here, the virtue of an action must satisfy three conditions, and the first condition is knowledge.
The type of knowledge that involves moral virtues or abilities is normative knowledge. For example, the knowledge involved in helping someone in need is not just knowledge about the most effective ways to help that person, but more importantly, knowledge about "I should help this person who needs help." Although Sousa did not spend much time discussing this kind of knowledge, unlike moral non-epistemologists or moral subjectivists, he clearly had a realist view of this kind of knowledge. In other words, he is a moral realist. For example, in his essay Moral Relativism, Cognitivism, and The Repealable Rule, he defended moral beliefs against challenges from anti-realists, including non-cognitivism such as prescriptivism, emotivism, and subjectivism such as moral relativism. In an earlier paper, he made it clear that our moral knowledge differs from social customs: "Whether we should drive on the right or vice versa depends only on the rules adopted by society." But whether a person should kill people in cold blood at will for fun seems to be a different kind of question. The demand to avoid such behaviour is motivated not only by the customs of the group in which the person is found. ”
Thus, we can argue that Sosa's epistemology of virtue can also explain normative beliefs in general and moral beliefs in specific senses. According to this interpretation, beliefs as knowledge are not only true but also intact: on the one hand, the truth of beliefs is acquired not only by the use of first-order faculties (which in this sense it is appropriate), but also by the use of meta-faculties (in which sense it is meta-appropriate), and on the other hand, the application of first-order faculties is guided by the application of second-order faculties (in which sense it is intact and fit). So, if someone gains true faith in moral issues in such a way, can we say that he has a complete knowledge of moral issues? According to Sosa's solution to the first two Plato's problems, especially the first one, the answer is clearly yes. However, in conjunction with the third Platonic question to be discussed in the next section, the answer is clearly no. If I have a perfect and appropriate conviction in the sense of Tosa that I should help those in need when I can, but do not do it, then how can I say that I know, let alone fully know that I should help those in need when I can?
The point here is that for Sousa, knowledge and (correspondingly) action are separate. This may sound surprising because Sousa often associates knowledge with action. In fact, two of his papers published in 2016 were titled "Knowledge as Action" and "Knowledge in Action," and the important sixth chapter of his monograph Judgment and Agency was titled "Knowledge and Action." However, Tsosa's understanding of the relationship between knowledge and action is clearly another: "Knowledge is a form of action, and knowledge is acting, and therefore knowledge is subject to the specific normativity of action (including intentional action)"; This is because judgment is an action with an intention corresponding to the belief in judgment."
Thus, when Sosa says knowledge is action, he means that cognitive behavior is intended to form true beliefs, that is, the action of forming true beliefs. This is consistent with what he said about knowledge as a kind of execution. The same must be true of normative beliefs; for Sousa, knowledge as action simply means that knowledge is the act of cognitive ability to form truly normative beliefs (e.g., "those who need help"), rather than actually engaging in the actions involved in that belief (e.g., helping those in need). In fact, since Sosa understands cognitive virtues as abilities rather than personality traits, a person with cognitive virtues, i.e., abilities, is only someone who is capable of performing cognitive behaviors, not necessarily someone who likes or is motivated or inclined to do so. Thus, Sousa said, "When a person tries to achieve a certain set goal, ability in the general sense is the tendency to succeed." The ability to believe correctly is one of those specific abilities. "It's important to note that the ability here is only the tendency to succeed when one tries to achieve a given goal, not the tendency to achieve it." This is because, for Sousa, "epistemology is not a part of ethics." The ethics that Sousa is referring to here is what he calls "intellectual ethics" in another place. It is not yet about whether a person is motivated to do something corresponding to his beliefs, for example, that he should help people in need, but about whether he is motivated to form the belief that he should help people in need. Epistemology has nothing to do with the latter, let alone the former. Thus, he points out, "there exists a dimension of cognitive judgment that is clearly unrelated to a broader moral (or prudent) concern," which includes "an admirable love for truth [in a certain matter] and a willingness to pursue it with perseverance and sacrifice," and "open-minded and intellectual courage," among other things.
One might argue that even in terms of moral convictions, Sosa, as an epistemologist of virtues, was concerned only with our cognitive faculties or virtues, with how to form true beliefs about moral questions. How morally correct action arises is a concern of virtue ethics. In such a picture, the person who is virtuous in the ethical sense first needs to perform cognitive action through his pure cognitive virtue or ability in order to obtain true moral conviction. He has a perfect knowledge of what the right action is, and then performs another action through moral or practical virtue to achieve that right action. However, since Sosa considers moral behavior (as cognitive behavior) to be a particular kind of generally performing behavior, and moral virtue (as cognitive virtue) as a specific kind of general ability, the question of motivation remains unresolved. Why?
For Sousa, saying that someone has the ability to do something is not saying that he has the motivation to do it, but that he tends to do it well when he has the motivation to do it. This is particularly evident in terms of driving ability. Faced with the criticism of situationalism, Sosa defended virtue ethics by using the analogy of driving ability to explain moral ability. He believes that "driving ability is such a tendency: safe driving, after determining the direction and efficiently driving to the destination". Please note that driving ability is not a tendency to drive, but a person's tendency to drive safely and efficiently while actually driving. By analogy, moral competence is a tendency to manifest when a person has been motivated to do something morally correct. On the one hand, a person is motivated to do what is morally right, but without moral capacity he may not be able to act morally correctly, or even if he does it, it is only by luck; on the other hand, a person, regardless of moral ability, will not do morally correct things if he lacks the motivation to do morally correct things.
Of course, it doesn't matter to our discussion whether moral capacity is morally motivating or not. What's really troubling is that the well-relevant moral beliefs generated by cognitive abilities (such as the need to help someone in need) are not morally motivated to motivate anyone with that belief to actually do something to help someone in need. Therefore, of course, we cannot say, as Sousa did, that a man with such a moral conviction has an intact knowledge of what should be done to help those in need, for this knowledge does not enable him to help those in need. This is precisely the point of view implied by the third Platonic question mentioned above.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="95" >3 Wang Yangming: How to know better than "good knowledge"</h1>
It is at this point that I think we can look to the Confucian tradition, especially the Ming Confucian Wang Yangming. The moral knowledge we are discussing is exactly what Wang Yangming calls "conscience." "Good" here takes moral or ethical meaning, so conscience is "moral knowledge"; but for Wang Yangming, "conscience" is not only about moral knowledge, but it is itself moral or good knowledge (in the sense to be discussed below), so it can be called "moral knowledge". We can discuss the three characteristics of YangMing's "conscience". The first feature explains Yang Ming's answer to the third Plato's question, while the other two explain how such an answer can be provided.
The first characteristic of "conscience" is that it gives rise to a tendency to act: "He who does not know is not." Know and don't, just don't know. Obviously, he's talking about normative knowledge, because non-normative knowledge (such as knowing that there's a barn on the side of the road) doesn't correspond to any particular action. In contrast, normative knowledge (such as knowing that parents should love themselves) always requires specific actions. Yang Ming uses water to explain the relationship between knowledge and action: knowing is like water, and the tendency to know and act is like the tendency of water to flow downward. Just as there is no water that does not flow downwards, there is no knowledge that is not inclined to walk. It is in this sense that he believes that knowledge and action are one, so that the effort to know is also the effort to act, and the effort to act is also the effort to know; in other words, knowledge and action are two sides of the same coin: "knowledge is the beginning of action, and action is the completion of knowledge"; "The truth of knowledge is the practice; the clear and precise observation of action is knowledge". With this knowledge, Wang Yangming pointed out: "Knowing is the essence of the heart, and the heart will naturally know: seeing the father naturally knows filial piety, seeing the brother naturally knows the brother, seeing the widow entering the well naturally knowing compassion, this is the conscience does not falsely ask for." ”
"Zhi filial piety", "zhi brother", "zhi compassion", here "zhi" is a moving word, "filial piety", "brother" and "compassion" are also moving characters. This expression is best translated as "know to act" in English, thus conveying that a person is inclined to act rather than just knowing what they should act or how to act. Note that the aforementioned concept of Tosa's ability refers to a person's tendency to do things well when acting (so if the capable person has no motivation to act, the ability is useless), in contrast, YangMing's moral knowledge is a kind of knowledge that tends to action (the content of action is the same as the content of the corresponding knowledge).
It is in this sense that in a previous paper, the author defined Yang Ming's knowledge of virtue as a kind of knowing-to. Cline M. Beck first used the concept of "knowledge of motivation" in the sense he is talking about: "'He knows to' means that, in the right context, he will do things the way we are discussing, at least in most cases." Later, Chad Hansen used the term "knowledge of dynamics" to characterize the uniqueness of knowledge discussed in ancient Chinese philosophy, and he also gave a similar explanation of this knowledge: "The knowledge of dynamics is a normative knowledge... This knowledge is embodied in action"; "X knows to act A" means "X tends to act A"; the knowledge of motivation "contains not only reason, but also elements of attitude: desire and disgust"; and he also explains this meaning with examples from everyday life: "If I know to go into the house when it rains", thus emphasizing that the knowledge of motivation has a tendency to stimulate action.
But unlike Baker and Hansheng Chen (the former considering knowing-to belong to know-that, while the latter considering it to belong to knowing-how), I believe that the knowledge of motivation in this sense is the third kind of knowledge (without discussing whether there is any other type of knowledge) other than what Gilber Ryle talks about (knowing-that) and knowing-how. The well-relevant convictions that Sosa is concerned with are clearly the propositional knowledge of the intellectualism discussed (and still focused by contemporary epistemology) in the traditional epistemology that Ryle spoke of. Surprisingly, Sosa's ability to understand virtue as virtue is a classic example of Ryle's "knowledge of ability." This is explained below.
Knowledge of ability refers to knowing how to accomplish certain tasks, such as "making jokes and appreciating jokes, speaking grammatically, playing chess, fishing, or debating." In fact, such tasks also include the formation of beliefs, and the knowledge of the ability to accomplish this task is the "ability of man to discover the truth for himself, and the ability to organize and apply the truth after discovery." When people know how to "perform these operations, they tend to perform them well, i.e. correctly, effectively, or successfully." As we can see, Ryle's description of knowing-how is very similar to Sosa's description of competence, if not identical: "What is required to possess a particular ability is that if a person tries to do ∅, then he has a tendency to succeed, which requires not only the ability to do ∅, but also the ability to use this ability (or other ability within the limited range of ability) when trying to do ∅." In Ryle,the person with the knowledge of ability tends to do it well; in the same way, in Sousa, the person who has the ability has the tendency to succeed if he wants to do it. Like propositional knowledge, the knowledge of ability does not motivate a person to act. It is in this sense that the knowledge of motivation is unique in that it in itself can motivate the cognitive to act accordingly. Therefore, if a person knows to help someone in need, he will be inclined to help him. Only with this knowledge can we solve Plato's third problem, and we can say that a man of dynamic knowledge knows better than "intact knowledge" in the sense of Sossa!
If we do not examine the second characteristic of yangming conscience as the knowledge of motivation, then his solution to Plato's third problem may seem cheap. In fact, Irving Copi, author of america's best-selling logic textbook, used Wang Yangming's concept of conscience as an example to illustrate the fallacy of circular argumentation. Yang Ming said, "Those who do not know and do not do it." Know and don't, just don't know. Kopi uses this sentence as an exercise and asks the student to "find out what kind of fallacy this passage makes and explain how the argument in it commits such a fallacy." The main point of the answer to the above exercise questions is "petitio principii" (pauper question). This is obviously a circular argument." In order to avoid this misunderstanding, we can only study the structure of yangming conscience as the second characteristic of yangming kinetic knowledge.
Why does conscience have the power to inspire action? In Yang Ming's view, this is because conscience is not only like faith, but also like desire. He believes that "conscience is only a right and wrong mind, and right and wrong are only likes and dislikes." Therefore, on the one hand, the conscience knows that something is right and something is wrong, and on the other hand, it likes to do the right thing and hates to do the wrong thing. Here, belief and desire are not two separate mental states, but two aspects of the same mental state, i.e., a state of mind that resembles both belief and desire.
Wang Yangming gave the examples of "seeing lustfulness" and "stenching": "Seeing lust belongs to the know, and lustful belongs to the line." When I saw that lustful, I was already good, not to see it and then set up a heart to go well. Smelling the stench is knowing, and stenching is doing. When you only smell the stench, you have already sinned yourself, not after smelling it, don't set up a heart to go to evil. "When you see a beautiful flower, you form the belief that it is beautiful and generate the desire to like it. However, these two processes are not separate from each other. Rather, they are two aspects of the same process; and the result of this process is not two separate states of mind, belief and desire, but a state of mind, which is both like belief and desire. If you don't think the flower is good-looking, you won't love it; if you don't love it, you won't think it's good-looking. In the same way, when you smell a bad smell, on the one hand, you form the belief that it smells bad, and on the other hand, you also have the desire to hate it. If you don't think it's a bad smell, you don't hate it; if you don't hate it, you don't think it's a bad smell. In Yang Ming's view, "Good is as good as lust, and evil is like evil and stink, and he is a saint."
Yang Ming's conscience as a driving knowledge is a single state of mind in which beliefs and desires are combined, so it can be appropriately called "besire". The term was coined by J.E.J Altham to describe "a single state of mind with both the attributes of faith and desire... It is not two states of mind, one is belief and the other is desire." According to Michael Smith, "faith" is a good indicator of such a state of mind, "because, although this state is like a belief, it is also like a desire"; it is not "the accidental coexistence of faith and desire", but a single state of mind outside of belief and desire. It is this conscience, made up of beliefs and desires, that explains why this state of mind has the power to inspire action. This is explained below.
The dominant theory of contemporary philosophy explaining human behavior remains the Hume model, which divides belief and desire into two separate mental states: beliefs tell us what to do, and desire inspires our actions. Hume's opponents, one rationalist, argued that human behavior could be explained by faith alone, and the other was an emotionalist, arguing that human behavior could only be explained by desire. But I think the most likely alternative to Hume's model was proposed by philosophers such as John McDowell and Mark Platt, who argued that human behavior could at least be explained in terms of the single state of mind of faith (although neither of them used the term faith, which Oltham originally coined to describe their views). They are still Humeists, for they also believe that human behavior needs to be explained in terms of beliefs and desires; but at the same time they are anti-Humeists, for they believe that belief and desire are not two separate states of mind, but two aspects of a state of mind that are inseparable from each other. However, none of them was as clear, unambiguous, and sufficient as Yang Ming—especially not as convincingly as Yang Ming put forward the theory of faith. This has been demonstrated a little earlier.
We move on to the third and final characteristic of Yang Ming's conscience. If the first characteristic is about its essence and the second is about its composition, then the third is about its source: how we acquire such a conscience. In distinguishing between propositional knowledge and knowledge of ability, Reil pointed out that the way to obtain the former is purely intellectual, while the way to obtain the latter is practical. For example, reading relevant books, listening to relevant lectures, and making relevant observations may be appropriate ways to acquire propositional knowledge, but these methods alone cannot learn to ride a bicycle. Instead, practicing cycling is essential to gaining knowledge about the ability to ride a bike. This means that the two different types of knowledge are also acquired in different ways. We have seen that the conscience of Yang Ming as the knowledge of motivation is different from both propositional knowledge and the knowledge of ability, and is therefore the third type of knowledge. What makes it unique compared to the other two types of knowledge is that it is a knowledge that stimulates corresponding action, and that this ability to stimulate action is obviously not acquired by reading, listening to lectures, observing, or practicing (first of all, there is a need to have the motivation to practice).
So, how do you acquire knowledge as motivation or conscience? Some students asked, "How about reading a book that can't be understood?" Wang Yangming replied: We must work the mind and body, and if we know what we cannot do, we must not go; instead, we must taste it in our own mind and we can understand it. There are two key terms here, one is "mind" and the other is "body." In the Chinese tradition, especially the Confucian tradition, the "heart" has the functions of both thought and feeling (so "heart" is now often translated as "heart-mind" in English) and is fully capable of acquiring the knowledge of motivation, because the knowledge of motivation is like both faith and desire. "Body" is usually understood as "body", but Yang Ming's "body" here has two points to pay attention to. First, since Mencius, "body" refers to both the "small body" in the sense of the body and the "general body" in the sense of the "heart". Yang Ming obviously uses it here to refer to "general body". Second, "body" is used here as a verb rather than a noun, referring to the inner introspective experience of the mind, which is both cognitive and emotional.
This inner experience of self-reflection is the core of Yang Ming's teaching. For example, when a student asked him how to seek the Confucian way, Yang Ming replied, "It must be the kings who recognize it from their own bodies." "This shows that one cannot acquire conscience in the manner of seeking scientific knowledge." Yang Ming pointed out in another place that the Confucian way "must be seen later, and the work of the Tao of the Tao must be added after the body is not seen." This shows that yangming's conscience, as a knowledge of motivation, is not propositional knowledge at the beginning, and that the person who possesses this propositional knowledge acquires the motivation to act according to it only later. Yang Ming's conscience, as a desire to believe, is not a belief at the beginning, and the person who possesses this belief acquires the desire to act according to this belief only later. On the contrary, the yangming conscience, as the knowledge or desire to believe, is acquired in the process of a single inner experience. We have seen that this intrinsic process and its results (dynamic knowledge or belief) are both cognitive and emotional.
It is precisely because of this nature that the acquisition of conscience has a unique feature. It is mainly related to the extent to which a person can seek help from others in the process. One can rely heavily on others to acquire propositional knowledge. In fact, most of our propositional knowledge is learned from others. Scientific knowledge is a clear example of how not only we ordinary people depend on scientists, but even scientists must rely heavily on other scientists. The knowledge of ability is a little different because it is something that we have to practice over and over again. If absolutely indispensable, teachers or coaches can still be of great help in gaining knowledge of our abilities. However, as far as the conscience as a motivating knowledge or a desire to believe is concerned, we can rely almost entirely on ourselves, because no one can experience it for us, and no one can even help us to experience it within. It is in this sense that Yang Ming emphasized "self-sufficiency," an idea that originally came from Mencius. Yang Ming said, "Learning is expensive and self-sufficient." The meaning of the Confucian classics can only be summed up; "if its subtle and mysterious meanings are self-sufficient in people's thinking, they cannot be described by words." In his view, the Confucian scriptures are about what the saints get through their own inner experience, but since this kind of thing cannot be fully expressed in words, in order to experience the experience of the saint's heart, we cannot rely on such classics, but must experience it ourselves.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="96" > iv conclusion</h1>
This article has pointed out that in order to gain a perfect knowledge, it is not enough to provide answers to two Platonic questions concerning the nature and value of knowledge, as Sousa did, no matter how adequate the answers. A person who knows exactly in the sense of Sousa that he should help those in need within his power, and who does not have the motivation to act accordingly, then he does not have a true sense of intact. This involves the third Platonic problem that I have spoken of in relation to epistemology. In order to solve this problem, the author draws on Yang Ming's insight that true conscience must make people tend to act accordingly. In contrast to the two questions that Sousa is specifically concerned with concerning the nature and value of knowledge, the third Platonic question introduced in this paper concerns the influence of knowledge. By discussing Wang Yangming's solution to the third problem, we have realized that the third problem is not unrelated to the first two. Only a proper solution to the third issue will it be possible to properly resolve the first two. Through Wang Yangming's answer to the third question, we can now see that, by its very nature, knowledge is knowledge that is motivated by beliefs and desires; part of the value of knowledge compared to pure true beliefs lies in its ability to inspire people to act accordingly. The third Platonic problem, of course, is not a general problem of epistemology, but a specific problem of moral epistemology. For moral anti-realists who argue that morality does not involve belief, this Platonic problem is a pseudo-question and can be ignored epistemologically. The author believes that moral anti-realism is wrong, and Sousa himself is not a moral anti-realist, because he believes that moral belief is a legitimate concept. Therefore, Yang Ming's solution to the third Plato problem deserves our attention (including Sosa).
Source: Journal of East China Normal University, Philosophy and Social Sciences Edition, No. 5, 2021.
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