Turner’s Evening of the Deluge (1843)
In a recent blog entry, Dave Snowden, commented on a statement I made in an exchange in the actkm.org list serv group. Here’s the quotation from my post:
“I do believe that there is a “correct” interpretation of Hamlet, and also that we can select among interpretations and find the interpretation that is closer to the truth than its competitors. Of course, however, even if we someday find the “correct” interpretation, we have no way of knowing that we have found it. It is, I’m afraid, our fate to be able to find the truth, sometimes, but, unfortunately, always to be less than certain that we have found it.”
I wasn’t referring to performance interpretations here, but simply to interpretation of Hamlet as a text. So, what I was suggesting above is that we may someday find a “correct interpretation” of what the Hamlet text asserts, and that in the meantime we can select among alternative interpretations ands evaluate which one is closer to the truth.
Now, my friend Dave, juxtaposed this quote from Gabriele Lakomski:
“The model of the human mind has been assumed to be akin that of a symbol processor, a computer like engine that allows us to manipulate successfully a range of symbols of which language is deemed the most significant. This view of the human mind is very limiting because it assumes that what we know, and are able to know, is expressible in symbolic form only.”
I have to admit that I have no idea what this quote has to do with the quote from my actkm post, or with any other work I’ve done.
- I’ve never said that the mind is “akin to a symbol processor.”
- I’ve never said it is “like a computer engine that allows us to manipulate a range of symbols”, and
- I’ve also never said “that what we know, and are able to know, is expressible in symbolic form only.”
That I do say these things is in no way implied by the above quote. Furthermore, I don’t think I’ve ever said anything which corresponds to those assertions. Indeed, I have said, or strongly implied, the opposite of all three in my chapter on “What Knowledge Is.”
In Dave’s blog he followed Lakomski’s statement with this one:
“So what is the false assumption in the idea that there is a correct interpretation of Hamlet? Well Joe is assuming that the text of Hamlet exists in isolation from its performance (which would include a reading) and fails to consider the nature of a play (or other work of art) just as other people have failed to appreciate the role of recipes in the production of Bouillabaisse.”
I have assumed that the text of Hamlet and its content is different from its performances and their content and that we can distinguish the two. And I have also assumed that one of these, the text, can be interpreted from the viewpoint of what it asserts, and that we can ask of any such interpretation whether it truly expresses the meaning of the text. I have said further that it is possible to discover the “correct” interpretation of the meaning of the text. Where is there a false assumption in any of this?
Dave says that the text of Hamlet doesn’t exist in isolation from its performance. But THIS is clearly the false assumption here. There is the text, and there are its performances. We can talk about the relationship of the two, but they are clearly not the same thing, ontologically speaking.
I have never said that there was a “correct” performance interpretation of Hamlet in the sense that one interpretation provides us with a TRUE account of what the Hamlet text MEANS. This is not even possible, since performance interpretations are not about providing an account of what the language in Hamlet means. Instead they are about providing a performance of the play of the highest aesthetic quality.
Regarding my “failure” to consider the nature of Hamlet in its performance aspects, I don’t agree that I was obligated to do so, in the first place, or that I missed the point I was trying to make by not doing so. I made a claim about Hamlet as a text. That’s all there is to this story, and Dave’s attempt to interpret what I was saying in terms of performance simply changes the subject.
Dave’s blog entry then goes on to offer three examples including experiencing soccer games, operas, and bouillabaisse. They are all about the idea that experiential knowledge is different from linguistic knowledge or information, and they are certainly good examples. But (a) I have never claimed that experiential knowledge is the same as linguistic knowledge, and I am quite systematic about distinguishing between mental and biological knowledge of all types, including experiential knowledge, and linguistic knowledge; and (b) what do these examples have to do with my view that there is a correct interpretation of what the Hamlet text says that we may someday express, but that we can never “establish” as the correct interpretation beyond doubt? Nothing.
Dave ends his blog with the statement:
“A very large part of what we know, and how we know it is fluid, evolutionary and context dependent. To constantly talk about validation in the sense of symbol manipulation is to impoverish human knowledge. Of course this does not mean that we cannot be objective. My experience of rugby and opera has subjective elements, but parts of it are also objective. But that is a blog for later in the week.”
I certainly agree that his first sentence, just above, applies to our mental knowledge and even that it applies to our cultural knowledge, though in a different way. But, as for the rest of this statement, if I talk about Knowledge Claim Evaluation (KCE) a lot, it is only because others in KM almost never talk about it; and why my talking about it, however excessively from Dave’s point of view, “impoverishes human knowledge,” Dave doesn’t say.
In fact, insofar as my focus on KCE reminds people to question their knowledge and to always look for higher quality knowledge, I think it is likely to help people to grow and enrich human knowledge. I also think that an essential aspect of KM includes enhancing KCE, since that is one of the major areas of knowledge processing that are performed very poorly in today’s enterprises.
As far as Dave’s experience of rugby, or opera, or bouillabaisse being “objective” is concerned, I must simply disagree with this, however authentic and rich that experience is, and however, much it immerses him in reality, since I know of no way to directly share his mental experience among the rest of us, and I believe that one important aspect of objectivity is sharability. Of course, he can describe such experiences to everyone, and I do agree that his description of them, whether true or false, is objective so long as he shares it with others, and all of us can critically evaluate his description if we feel the need to.
The bottom line here is that Dave’s blog post relates only very peripherally to the point I was making in the quote he used, and I can’t begin to understand how he associated the Lakomski quote with the view I expressed about the Hamlet text. That is one helluva stretch indeed.