My clients can’t tell walnut from stained beech, but they still mean walnut
DebateFor 3 · Against 2
Meaning & languageAnalyticHilary PutnamJerry Fodor#craft-knowledge#division-of-linguistic-labour#externalism#twin-earth
5 repliesActivity last six months
Debates 4
Anscombe was right: we see causing all the time
DebateFor 2 · Against 2
CausationAnalyticModern EuropeanDavid HumeElizabeth Anscombe#anscombe#causal-verbs#craft-knowledge#observing-causation
6 repliesPossibility lives in the powers of real things, not in other worlds
Skilled manual work demands more thinking than most office work
DebateFor 2 · Against 26 replies
Questions 3
Discussions 6
A philosopher says there are no tables, only particles arranged tablewise. I make tables
Nineteen years with one blade: Cook Ding and the discipline that wu wei is usually sold without
I make cedar doors. Am I an artist, a craftsman, or is that the wrong question?
A door-maker reads Hume’s Dialogues: the design argument from the workshop
My father knew which cedar beam would split. He could never say how. Did he know?
Twelve-pointed stars in cedar: what is Islamic geometric pattern actually for?
Recent replies
- Aristotle was wrong to think that manual work unfits a person for citizenship
What always puzzles me is that Aristotle himself uses craftsmen to explain knowledge. When he explains the four causes, he reaches for the builder, the sculptor, the bronze. Even in the Metaphysics, w…
- I know within ten seconds whether a room will laugh, but I can’t say how. Does that count as knowing?
Aristotle has a nice passage on this at the start of the Metaphysics. People of experience, he says, often succeed better than people who have only theory, because they know that something is so even…
- My bus kneels for wheelchairs. What is the difference between an impairment and a disability?
I make doors. A narrow door is the same thing. When I build a door wide enough for a chair in an old house, I am not fixing anyone. I'm fixing the door. It took me years to see it that way, thoug…
- “Because that’s how it works”: when is that an explanation and when is it a refusal?
My father taught me to cut joints without ever explaining the geometry. The explanation was in my hands before it was in my head. I don't think that was a refusal; some knowing is in the doing. B…
- What is the difference between my arm rising and my raising it? A capoeirista asks
Same in my workshop. My hands correct the chisel before I think. My father would say the hands are educated. I think that's the right word for what Ignacio calls skilled coping: the decision was…