Overview

Articulating a thought can be astoundingly easy. We generally have no trouble expressing complex ideas that we have never considered before, though not always. Articulating a thought can also be extremely hard. Our difficulties in articulating thoughts pervade many aspects of philosophical inquiry, as well as many ordinary situations. While we may overcome some of the challenges through education and practice, we cannot do away with them altogether. And the hardest thoughts to articulate often come to us unbidden: as we neither assemble them from other thoughts nor get them from any source of external information. They can come from us freely and spontaneously, and frequently we articulate them in order to find out what they are. In many cases, we would not bother articulating our thoughts if we already had this knowledge--yet, when we find the right words, we can often instantly tell that they express our thought. How do we manage to recognize the formulations of our thoughts, in the absence of prior knowledge of what we are thinking? And why is it that producing a public language formulation contributes in any way to the deeply private undertaking of coming to know our own thoughts? In Articulating a Thought, Eli Alshanetsky considers how we make our thoughts clear to ourselves in the process of putting them into words and examines the paradox of those difficult cases where we do not already know what we are struggling to articulate.

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9780198785880

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C.I. Lewis was describing philosophical investigation when he wrote: We all know the nature of life and of the real, though only with exquisite care can we tell the truth about them. But what is the difference between knowing the nature of something, on the one hand, and being able to tell the truth about it, on the other? And how can we move from the former state to the latter? Alshanetsky's fascinating book is the first sustained treatment of these questions since Socrates' discussion of recollection in Plato's Meno. This book makes a crucial contribution not merely to the psychology of self-awareness, but also to philosophical methodology. * Ram Neta, University of North Carolina *

C.I. Lewis was describing philosophical investigation when he wrote: We all know the nature of life and of the real, though only with exquisite care can we tell the truth about them. But what is the difference between knowing the nature of something, on the one hand, and being able to tell the truth about it, on the other? And how can we move from the former state to the latter? Alshanetsky's fascinating book is the first sustained treatment of these questions since Socrates' discussion of recollection in Plato's Meno. This book makes a crucial contribution not merely to the psychology of self-awareness, but also to philosophical methodology. * Ram Neta, University of North Carolina * This book addresses a familiar yet perplexing phenomenon: you have a thought that seems to you to be perfectly coherent and definite, but you have difficulty putting it into words. When you ultimately succeed in expressing the thought, how does this occur? And what enables you to recognize this articulation as correct? These questions parallel those that arise in the Meno paradox, and Alshanetsky's novel response to them bears on that paradox and on a host of other foundational issues in epistemology. He offers an ambitious account of how experience generates a kind of implicit knowledge; explains the process by which this implicit knowledge can yield explicit understanding; and argues that this process [...] exemplifies a type of cognitive agency.[... ] Alshanetsky develops a strikingly rich and original view, one that will be of interest to any philosopher who wants to understand the nature of learning and the varieties of reasoning. * Brie Gertler, University of Virginia *

Author Information

Eli Alshanetsky is currently an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Temple University. He received a BA in philosophy and cognitive science from UC Berkeley, and subsequently obtained a PhD in philosophy from New York University in 2014. He was awarded an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities at Stanford from 2015-2018.

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