Gradgrind and Definitions

Another old post-- it is related to the earlier one mentioning Dietrich von Hildebrand's description of "superficial knowledge".   (By the way, the Catholic Thinkers site is a very good resource for learning or reviewing topics related to Catholic philosophy and theology.   It was a project of the prodigiously energetic Dr Ralph McInerny.) 

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This quote is from Dr Andres' first lesson on Logic at the Catholic Thinkers site.    Dr Andres writes:

It might seem strange that we would need a part of logic devoted to understanding what is so simple, the bare idea of what something is, such as what a triangle is. But St. Thomas would respond that we begin with an indistinct understanding of what a triangle is, and that the idea of a triangle is perfected and made distinct when we find a definition of a triangle. 

This is from Lesson 2, where he goes into detail about how and why we form definitions of words:  

Even in the first operation of the intellect there is a progress in knowledge, a progress in which we begin with a vague, an indistinct idea of what something is, and move towards a more distinct idea of what it is. That distinct idea is necessary for reasoning about the properties of the thing. We need a logic, therefore, which directs us so that we proceed correctly from the indistinct idea to the distinct idea. The process of moving from the vague to the distinct knowledge of what a thing is is the process of defining. A definition is the way in which the first operation of reason is perfected, and so it is the fundamental concern of the first part of logic.

This description brings out something that has puzzled me for a long time.     Everyone has probably seen Charles Dickens' portrayal of the Gradgrind method of education:  Facts, facts, facts! in Hard Times.   It indeed seems on one hand that when you define a thing, however accurately and precisely, you diminish it in the experiential order of things.   In other words, when Bitzer defines a horse, in contrast with Sissy Jupe's long-founded personal experience of horses, the definition seems reductionist.    Precision and abstraction have been made into the enemy of real knowledge.

This is most apparently not the way the ancients and earlier medievals thought about the matter.   But it's one of those modern frames that I sometimes don't realize until I encounter them in myself.     Knowing in universal terms what a mother is does not diminish my relationship with my unique mother.  

In Peter Shum's review of Hildebrand's book, which I mentioned in the last post, I found this summary of Hildebrand's thoughts on knowledge: 

Theoretical knowledge is knowledge that stems from reflection, over against knowledge that stems from perception. This is to say that in the transition from naïve enquiry to a theoretical attitude, something is gained, namely reflection, but something is also lost, namely proximity to the object. So-called “organic” theoretical knowledge grows “organically” out of episodes of naïve taking cognizance. It is a kind of condensation of episodes of naïve taking cognizance.

Hildebrand opposes this kind of organic theoretical knowledge to what he called "superficial thinking", where the supposed knowledge is built on shaky ground of one kind or another -- either secondhand assimilation of someone else's knowledge, or generalizations built on insufficient experience, or category errors where the method used is imported from another discipline.   

This accounts for the evident wrongness of the Gradgrind approach without dismissing the value of theoretical knowledge.   Sissy Jupe doesn't really need to theorize about horses -- she has a vast body of understanding of their ways gained from living with them and caring for them.  If she ever does theorize, she will have a large field of organic knowledge to distill from.

Bitzer does not know horses except from books, and for that matter, dry books, not ones about real horses.    (He does apparently have lots of organic experience in playing the Gradgrind game, which Sissy does not.)

Nevertheless his information is not erroneous -- it is more what Richard Feynman called "Fragile Knowledge".  

The Gradgrind method is reductive and anti-philosophical, but abstraction and theorization do not have to be.