The whole thing is based on changing some of the rules regarding communication. Mainly groups with various skills volunteer to be potentially bored for at least 1 hour commitment per day. The Evaluators would be folks capable of being openminded, not overly egotistical,and could possess any number of skill sets. Their job would be to listen to ideas they may not have any particular interest in hearing. They would make a determination as to whether or not the ideas or concepts have merit and if they did steer them toward another better suited evaluator and eventually a writer with the evaluator teaming up as the go between. The evaluators are the equivalent to talent scouts. The writers and communicators are the driving force.
One person’s way of organizing a set of knowledge isn’t going to be the same as someone else’s.
I have to make sure that is clear.
Hence, your very first statement is flawed. The topic doesn’t matter at all. I will always default to a visual way of organizing knowledge. Yes, even Phil 101. Even if all the course materials are all text. I won’t memorize the text. I will convert the text to imagery and remember that.
People who rely on language for organizing knowledge just can’t seem to wrap their minds around other people having a very different system.
I am aware that some people are language-based learners and what that entails. It seems to be that it ought to be reasonable that they ought to have the same courtesy to visually-based learners. (Or any other type of mental organization.)
Note that I am hardly crippled when it comes to language. I scored consistently around 90th percentile on language skills as a kid. But 99 percentile on Math/Sci. No reason why another visually-oriented person couldn’t have the reverse numbers. Because, you know: the topic doesn’t matter.
This, I think, was the professor’s main point. In the context of a philosophy class, where words are pretty much all you have to express your point of view, the professor was fine with students working out their thoughts aloud in the class. He just didn’t want them to give up too soon.
I mentioned art and music in the OP to note that there are other ways to communicate than words.
I think the professor’s position is useful, especially in a philosophy class, but I disagree that it would be true all the time.
For example, if I tell you “turn when you see the red thing next to that big tree” - I know exactly what I’m thinking. The problem is that I’m not choosing useful words to communicate the information to you. We could continue the conversation until you understand that I mean a right turn at the large maple next to a red mailbox on 74th street, but I knew that all along.
The “technicality” example, though, is a case where I think the professor is exactly right. It is very easy to say “We shouldn’t let criminals out on technicalities.” But then find a technicality that they really think that’s true for. Should the police be allowed to do warrant-less searches? Should the court rely on gossip as evidence? Can you coerce a confession out of a suspect? Should DNA evidence be permitted even if no one is sure it came from this crime scene? When you list real technicalities, almost everyone backs off - no, it’s always those “other technicalities” and they can’t ever give you an example of one. With those kinds of arguments, the professor should smack them down every time.
Hmm smacks of echo-chamber elitism to me. But then I’m well past the point where some asshole could get away with that comment with me.
I definitely disagree with this. The lack of communication you’re describing is very much due to the speakers not the bystander. The speakers are choosing to use specialized terms that only insiders would know.
I think it’s partly right: that when a person can’t articulate something, it is sometimes (maybe even often) because they don’t really understand that thing.
But if they don’t have the vocabulary to express an idea, how do you know they have the idea? I thin an important question is: In what form does the idea exist in their mind, if not in words?
There’s a difference between not knowing the technical term for something and not being able to describe or explain it at all.
Which, I think, means they don’t actually know what they’re talking about. They don’t know what “getting off on a technicality” really means.
And this relates to what I said earlier, about the form that ideas take in the mind (e.g. verbal vs. visual).
I question this. Did having to learn how to express and explain the ideas really not help you to understand them better?
Some parts of post deleted by me.
Well there was that case where the cops wanted to inspect storage unit 668 owned by Mr Criminal. They got the warrant. Went to the storage place. Ask manager to take them to the unit owned by Mr Criminal. He looks it up, grabs the master key and off they go. Manager opens unit and wallaaa…crimey crime stuff.
Turns out guy typing out warrant unit typed 668 when it was actually unit 666.
Case dismissed.
Law and Order SVU is my cite 
Anyways. I often have to chuckle a bit when two people are discussing/arguing about something. And there is apparent confusion. Finally A rephrases it and B gets it. Then B has to get butt hurt about it and scold A for poor communication skills. And as an innocent bystander I’m thinking “I knew all along WTF he was saying/meant/thinking…maybe A isn’t the problem here”.
At the college level, students are expected to do more than simply remember things. There are fields where one can achieve the desired result without necessarily being able to explain the process, but explaining how one arrived at a conclusion is a large part of what philosophy is.
All language assumes that both parties are insiders. You can keeo crafting your description more and more finely to try to reduce that, but then you have something like a legislative bill or an insurance policy, which is still intelligible only to insiders. Regionalisms and anachronisms militate against clear understanding, by turning people of different ages or from different localities into outsiders… I’m old enough that I had to learn not to talk about when I wore thongs to the beach, lest hilarity ensue.
When insiders use “specialized” terms, it is because the mutual understanding of those terms are the most efficient way of “saying what they mean”, and signals to other insiders that they “really know whet they mean”. People who can explain things to each other, but not to me or you, so we blame them for not knowing it…
I understand what you’re saying about specialized vocabulary allowing two insiders to discuss a subject more concisely. But I see it just as a tool of convenience not a means to lock people out of the conversation.
If one doctor is talking to another doctor about a patient’s condition, I’m sure the conversation would be full of technical terms which have no meaning to a layman. And that’s fine for doctor-to-doctor communication. But if a doctor was explaining to a patient what his medical situation was, I would expect that doctor to be able to do so. And it would not be the patient’s fault if the doctor was unable to translate his explanation into non-jargon.
A doctor, or any other jargon user, is not born with an innate knowledge of jargon. At some point in their education, they only knew the regular mainstream language that laymen used. They had to learn the knowledge and the jargon via that layman language. So any concept that can be explained in jargon must also be explainable in layman’s language, even if it takes some extra words. An insider who is unable to stop using jargon and go back to layman’s language is a poor communicator.
But which words are in “layman’s language” and which are not?
I’m sure you understand how to program a ring tone into your phone so you will know it is me that is calling you. But I bet you can’t explain, in a layman’s language that I can understand, how to do that. The reason for that is not your failure to understand the basic concepts and principles, but MY failure to have any familiarity with the instrument and how it functions.
I’m sure you fully understand what your wife looks like, and you can recognize her by her walk at a hundred yards. But I bet you can’t give me a verbal description of her looks that would enable me to pick our her mug shot. I bet if you’re at home, with cars passing in the street, you know by the sound of her car when she is pulling in. When you hear footsteps coming up the stairs, you know which family member it is. How do you explain that to me, so I would recognize them? Those are things that you know and understand better than anybody else in the world, but there is no way to impart that knowledge to another.
There’s a difference between knowing something and knowing how to say it. An example is John Harrison, who invented the ship’s chronometer. He built three different models, each more refined than the last, but was such a poor writer that he was nearly unable to put his ideas into words.
A philosophy professor lives in a world of abstract ideas expressed in words. I think the OP’s prof is usually right when it comes to the things that come up in a philosophy class. It’s less likely to be true when it comes to procedural knowledge (how to do something), and knowledge of the physical world. Can you tell someone how to tie shoelaces entirely in words? Could you describe a horse to someone who’s never seen one? It’s not easy, yet we can all tie our shoes, and we can all recognize a horse on sight.
I disagree with the OP’s prof, at least as far as it being an absolute. Some people simply can’t explain stuff to save their life. I’ve run into many such.
Perhaps we could refine it to something like “If you can’t demonstrate that you know something, you don’t really know it.” Some people think they know something because they’re read about it or seen someone else do it, but their knowledge is very superficial.
Also, the kind of knowing that the thread title talks about is “knowing what you mean,” which I interpret to refer to, not things that you’ve learned from someone/somewhere else, but ideas that you’ve come up with yourself. It’s about distinguishing vague, half-baked ideas from coherent, fully-formed ones.
I basically agree, although I think limiting what one “means” to wholly original ideas is too narrow. But I do think it’s significant that the professor said “If you can’t say what you mean” and not “If you can’t say what you know” or “If you can’t say what you can do”.
To take Jeff Lichtman’s example, I know what a horse looks like and can recognize one when I see one, but it would be strange to refer to this as something that I mean. When I “mean” a horse I am thinking about a horse and trying to convey this idea to someone else. Barring speech/language problems, describing a horse should actually be pretty easy for anyone who has a clear idea of what a horse is. Describing the process by which I am able to look at an individual animal, match it to a category, and associate this category with the label “horse” would be much harder, but this is because I don’t have a very good understanding of what is going on in my brain when this happens. Recognizing a horse is something I can do, and I can “know what I mean” in the sense that I am aware that this mental process is what I wish to discuss, but I don’t “really know what I mean” in the sense of having a clear idea of how this process works.
I’m with ftg on this one.
A very simple counterpoint to the prof is expert knowledge. Our brains are very impressive pattern matchers, non-linear n dimensional mapping functions built over years that are not easily expressed, and yet the expert does indeed “know” that the mapping is a good one.
It’s not so easy as you might think. Try it - come up with a description of a horse that would allow someone who’s never seen a horse to recognize one.
One reason it’s hard is that what makes a horse isn’t just a set of features. A horse has a shape - a configuration. A Clydesdale, thoroughbred and Shetland pony are all horses, but they’re different enough from each other that it’s hard to come up with a verbal description that covers everything, yet excludes things that aren’t horses. It’s easier to draw a picture of a horse and say, “A horse is something that looks like this.”
Dogs might be a better example. A Saint Bernard and a Chihuahua are both dogs. They’re very different from each other, but they both have an essential “dogness” that we all recognize. This dogness is hard to put into words.
I get the distinction between knowing something and meaning something. I’m not sure this distinction is clear-cut. Suppose I were to tell the OP’s philosophy professor that I was riding a horse, and he said, “What do you mean by horse?” If I weren’t able to describe a horse to his satisfaction, would that mean I didn’t know what I meant by “horse”?
I said it was easy to describe a horse, not that it was easy to describe one in such a way that someone who had never seen one before would be able to recognize one. The former depends on my understanding of what a horse is and my ability to put this into words, but the latter also involves my ability to determine what relevant information the other person might already possess as well as something that has nothing to do with me at all – their ability to comprehend my description and make use of it in a specific way.
Your challenge isn’t equivalent to what the professor was asking his students to do. He didn’t say “If you can’t say what you mean in such a way that someone totally unfamiliar with the concept would understand it as well as you do, then you don’t really know what you mean.” He was talking to students who said they couldn’t explain what they meant to him, the philosophy professor. That’s not like trying to describe a horse to someone who’s never seen one so well that they’d be able to recognize one. It’s like trying to describe a horse to a horse wrangler well enough that they’ll be able to figure out that you’re talking about the same type of animal that they work with.
Whether the professor would be satisfied is again a question about the other person’s state of mind, not your knowledge. But if I for some reason asked you to tell me what a horse was and the best you could do was “Well, I know what I mean, I just can’t put it into words” then I would be concerned that you were having a stroke or something.