Philosophy of Learning

Philosophy of Learning

In philosophy we study perception, knowledge, belief, memory, and reasoning—but not so much learning. In psychology learning is central, but in philosophy it is peripheral at best (perhaps part of philosophy of education). I propose to make some programmatic remarks about learning as a philosophical topic (I happen to have a strong interest in the subject). What is learning? It is the transition from ignorance to knowledge: at time t you don’t know something and then at time t+1 you do know it—the process between is the learning process. To define it we need to use the concept of knowledge: you can’t learn something false (“learn” is factive). To learn is to come to know. The OED gives us “acquire knowledge of or skill in (something) through study or experience or by being taught”. You can’t say “Today I learned that Paris is the capital of England”. The upshot of learning is knowledge not mere belief. So, any definition of learning will incorporate a definition of knowledge. What kind of knowledge? All kinds—any kind of knowledge can be learned: knowledge-how, knowledge-that, knowledge-what. You can learn how to play tennis, or learn that global warming is real, or learn what mango tastes like. Learning is as conceptually promiscuous as knowing. In all cases it signifies the transition from not knowing to knowing. There is no kind of learning that is not a case of knowing. You can learn consciously or unconsciously, but either way you end up knowing something you didn’t know before. Growth isn’t learning because getting bigger does not involve knowing anything. Learning always involves change, but not all change involves knowledge. All learning is epistemic (analytically so).

So far, so obvious. But we can raise unobvious questions: is it possible to learn a tautology? You can learn that Hesperus is Phosphorus, but can you learn that Hesperus is Hesperus? Intuitively, no; nor can you learn (discover) that bachelors are unmarried. Why? Because you already knew these things by knowing what the words mean; there is no transition to a new state of knowledge. If your kid came home from school and announced he had learned that bachelors are unmarried, you would want your money back. You have to learn a new proposition not an old proposition dressed in new words. Indeed, what can be learned is a criterion of identity for propositions, as Frege taught us. More challenging, what kinds of thing can learn? Can a rock learn? Not unless it can know things—and it cannot. What about genes? Here I am inclined to say yes, because genes can come to know that certain traits are conducive to survival. That is, they are naturally selected by the evolutionary process because they enable survival and reproduction. The evolutionary process is in effect a learning process: existing traits are the result of learning. The environment has taught the genes to produce certain traits and not others. The organism is a product of genetic learning. It is much the same with simple organisms: they learn things without being rational conscious agents, but by classical conditioning. Conditioning is a type of learning; so, the result must be a type of knowledge. Pigeons know which lever to peck as a result of trial-and-error learning. Genes are similar (as has often been noted) because they are the result of a selective process leading to a useful trait. So, I have no problem with the idea that genes are the result of a learning process, and hence know things. The concept of knowledge is broad enough to apply in their case—as it is to worms, rats, and baby brains. There is no reason to be snooty about knowledge and learning, as if you could only learn at school. You could in fact teach genes by artificial selection, hoping to improve the resulting organisms, thus causing them to learn. The genes of one species might be better at learning than another. Logically, the genes can learn and have done so over millions of years. This is why people speak of the genes as containing information, and of the genotype as a “book of the dead”. The analogies are strong enough to justify extending the concept of learning in this direction (and discounting the implicatures).

Here is a question: can there be Gettier cases of learning? Brief reflection suggests yes. If you see Jones parking a Ford, you will be justified in believing he owns a Ford, and this may well be true, even though the Ford he is parking isn’t the Ford he owns. You are right only by accident and hence don’t really know he owns a Ford. But by the same token, you didn’t learn that he owns a Ford; you came to believe it by accident. So, true justified belief is not sufficient for learning; learning requires full-blown knowledge, but Gettier cases show that knowledge cannot be defined as true justified belief. We can’t say that x learns that p if and only if xcomes to have a true justified belief that p. What you learn you must know, but knowledge isn’t definable as true justified belief.

Is innate knowledge learned? It is commonly said that it is not, because the animal had the knowledge all along; you don’t have to learn what you already know. So, innate knowledge might be described as unlearned knowledge. But this ignores a possibility alluded to above, namely that the genes learned it. The genes encode this knowledge, but it was instilled in them by the evolutionary process; so, they learned it from the world (“experience”) by natural selection. Thus, we can say that innate knowledge is acquired knowledge, though not acquired by the animal in question; it was acquired by the genes long ago and then passed on to the animal. Accordingly, all knowledge is acquired knowledge, i.e., learned. No knowledge is unlearned. Instinctual knowledge is learned as much as perceptual knowledge. The empiricist could correctly claim that all knowledge is learned knowledge, with the environment enlisted as teacher. The educated genes give us our innate knowledge (it wasn’t innate in them). All knowledge has to be learned from someone or something, given that evolution is the way instinctual knowledge comes about. Innate is not the opposite of learned, but a special case of it. Learning and knowledge go inextricably together.

Finally, we must say something humanistic about learning, because learning is highly prized by human beings (but not by worms and genes). People feel it is good to learn—skills, subjects, how to be a better person. The human animal is the learning animal par excellence. Why? Because we prize knowledge, and you can’t get far with that without learning. To know requires learning, and learning isn’t always easy. So, we sacrifice to learn. Knowledge is good for us, we feel, but you can’t possess that good without working for it—learning being a type of work (if only just looking around you). Learning is woven into our lives because knowledge is mentally nourishing. The quality of a man’s soul is calculated according to the learning that has gone into forming it. People say “I love to learn” and the verb is apt; we are nothing without learning. A blank slate is a worthless slate, sheer vacuity, rank nothingness. Learning is a moral imperative. We might even say it is the meaning of life. A worthy philosophical subject.[1]

[1] In this subject, as in others, it is methodologically unwise to focus exclusively on the human case; our mental concepts extend beyond us into the animal kingdom. We need to stay conceptually flexible if we want to limn the biological natural kinds. This is why anthropomorphic language comes so naturally in the case of worms and genes: they are at one end of a spectrum occupied by us (and by beings potentially superior to us—whatever that means). Thus, worms learn where the water is (and know it) and genes learn that fingers are useful (and know it). We are latecomers in the learning business not its paradigm.