Malcolm Gladwell’s “Blink” talks about how you can know something without being to articulate the reasons–since the reasoning happens on an unconscious level. He talks about the phenomenon of “latent inhibition” and uses chick sex identification as an example. You can’t really verbally teach someone how to tell a female chick from a male. You learn the differences after you look at enough chicks.
I would disagree with the professor mentioned in the OP. For instance, i had never heard of the term “passive-aggressiveness” before until only a few years ago. But even before then, I knew there was a certain form of manipulation that made me very frustrated. I just could not put it into words, but I knew something was amiss.
Did you try to put it into words? You can do that without using, or even knowing, the specific term for a concept. If you’d encountered this type of behavior before then it seems like it should have been easy enough to offer some examples (“It’s like the kid who ‘accidentally’ breaks a plate to get out of being asked to do the dishes”) even if you didn’t know there was a name for this sort of thing.
Slate has a new Q&A post that briefly addresses alternate modes of thinking.
The BU guy admits that he used to have a hard time understanding that visual thinking is a real thing. And from how he phrases it and all, it’s clear he still has a problem.
I’ve run into this over and over. Esp. among Psychology profs and such. E.g., “You can’t remember anything from before age 4 because of language, yadda yadda yadd.”
Regarding describing a horse: As noted this is a much harder problem than you think. Too many people don’t realize when posing such things that there are other people out there who can easily point out a huge number of variables to consider.
Is a horse four legged? Well, what about that three legged thing over there? Is it still a horse even it was born with only three? Has a tail? If the tail is removed is it still a horse? What about this fossilized thing from a 100k years ago? And on and on. It is amazingly hard to do.
By “say what you mean”, surely we can include drawing a diagram or map or picture. I don’t think it’s essential to be able to explain the Pythagorean theorem in words, drawing a diagram is usually a much better way of communicating it. 20,000 years ago some guys drew pictures of woolly mammoths on cave walls, and we know they are woolly mammoths even though no human being today has ever seen a live woolly mammoth.
The point is that if you can’t explain what you mean, what good is it that you know what you mean? If you can’t get your idea from inside your skull to the inside of another person’s skull, then what good is the idea?
I mean, there are skills that can’t be taught in words. If you are a dance teacher you can’t just use words, you have to get up and demonstrate what you want people to do, you can put your hands on them and adjust their bodies, and so on. But if you can’t explain what you want your students to do, and you can’t show them what to do, then you can’t teach them. Even if you’re doing Mr. Miyagi style wax-on wax-off teaching where you’re giving them the muscle memory and strength they would need before they can actually learn to do the moves, you’re still teaching them.
What utter Bravo Sierra.
This happens to me all the time, and is most prevalent when asked about something that requires an emotive quality to answer; I am so much of a left brained logical type I walk in counter clockwise circles.
Wife is a quilter, and I am frequently asked about my opinions on colors and patterns. To me, the answer is almost binary, either I like it or I don’t; unless there is some very simple concept as ‘too much yellow’, or ‘that pattern is too busy’, I cannot articulate exactly why I like or dislike something. However, when she solicits my opinion and I cannot describe the why, she nonetheless trusts my binary opinion as accurate.
A second characteristic is I will have an immediate visceral reaction to something, but very frequently it takes time on the order of multiple minutes to be able to articulate solid reasoning. Sort of the ‘Fuck you, strong letter to follow’ model.
If it has only one leg, it’s a quarter horse… 
On the one hand, I don’t think there are no valid mental processes that aren’t anchored in language.
But having said that, I think most of the mental advantage of the human species is our ability to think in languaged terms. Language lets you build a complex concept, express it as an explanation, then identify the whole thing with a short title or label and then go on to make sentences that use that short title as a noun in relationship to other equally complex nouns joined by verbs and adjectives and qualifiers and such. You just can’t construct thoughts that complex in a nonverbal thinking environment, in my opinion.
Anecdotally, I had some students assigned to our agency as interns who frightened me with their lack of language skills. I’d never made a big deal about illiteracy as a barrier to thought (although clearly it deprived people of the repository of the thoughts of others); this went beyond illiteracy and approached a state of being unlanguaged. They didn’t know the terms to express situations, feelings, attitudes; because they didn’t, they misused words that they did know, words that they also used for other things, and then their subsequent thinking appeared to commingle the different possible meanings that they had an insufficient vocabulary to distinguish.
It was like person has it in their head, you know, that they know stuff but what they say, it won’t come out right, because they can’t get it out the way it is. Then what they do have in their head isn’t right either because it’s what they say it is, but it wasn’t, if you get what I’m saying.
Maybe they have something which will offend society greatly and they do not know how to mitigate their words.
It sounds to me like you have no problem saying what you mean. When you’re asked if you like something, you are able to describe your reaction to it – either you like it or you don’t. Why you reacted this way is another question, but if you don’t know why and are able to say “I don’t know why” then that’s also saying what you mean.
The professor in the OP probably would have been happy if his students had just admitted it when they didn’t know why they held a particular view instead of trying to BS an answer. Being able to recognize gaps in your own knowledge and challenge your own assumptions is important in any field of study, but it’s crucial in philosophy.
As a lawyer, people who say “I know what I mean but I just can’t put it into words” are the bane of my existence.
9/10, when I try to elicit what’s in their head, asking questions, further questions, diagrams, forward me the term sheets, show me your emails, demonstrate the product, take me to see your damn processes… It then becomes clear that they don’t know what they mean, and what they really want is for it to “just work”, and expect me to come up with what they “mean” so that it “just works”.
Now, that 1/10 of the time, the person /does/ know what he means, and I can elicit his meaning by helping him express himself in words. In my experience, that has been a rarity.
Looking back over the thread, it occurs to me that some people may be interpreting “you don’t really know what you mean” in a very different way than I am. Are people taking it to mean something like “you are wholly ignorant of this subject” or “you don’t really mean anything”?
As I mentioned upthread, in the context of a philosophy course I’d interpret “you don’t really know what you mean” as something more like “you have not examined your own beliefs.” That is, the student may genuinely have a belief that they wish to express (they mean something) but they have not thought about this critically and thus do not truly understand their own belief (they don’t really know what they mean), and that’s why they struggle to put it into words.
Yes, as a lawyer I, too, think that people who can’t explain it well and simply, don’t really understand it. I’ve thought that since I was in my early 20s.
Grin! When I went to a lawyer to write up my will, I didn’t know how to say it in words…so I took him a flow-chart with “if/then” boxes and arrows to action items.
(“If my sister dies before I do, then… Otherwise…”) I didn’t know how to say what I wanted in words…but I was pretty clear on the logical sequence of events. My lawyer smiled, and wrote it up properly.
I would love you. Long time.