In this episode I speak with Dr Yuri Cath.
We discuss going from practising painting to practising philosophy, the gradations of what it is like knowledge and the differences and similarities between art and philosophy.
Dr Yuri Cath’s work explores epistemological questions about the nature and sources of different kinds of knowledge and the importance of these issues for other areas of philosophy, including philosophy of mind and moral philosophy. He is interested in the philosophical distinction between “knowing-how” and “knowing-that”; the role of intuitions as a kind of evidence; and the relationship between testimony and knowledge.
Dr Yuri Cath, thank you for joining Concept : Art.
Oh, thanks for having me on, Pat.
Can you begin by telling us a little about yourself and how you came to be doing your academic work?
Yeah. When I first went to university, it wasn’t to do philosophy. It was actually to study fine art, and I slowly drifted towards philosophy during the process of doing that degree. So, I was majoring in painting. It was quite a long degree over four years, and as part of it one thing that influenced me towards going towards philosophy is that I had to do art history subjects outside of the art school with the history department. And so there I kind of learned, “oh, I like writing university essays,” and I kind of enjoyed the craft of that.
And the other kind of influence was a little bit of frustration with the way we were taught philosophy, or as it was called “art theory” in the art school. So, it was quite didactic, and it wasn’t really about evaluating the thinker we were looking at. So you’d be studying [Jacques] Derrida or Walter Benjamin or someone like that, and you’d learn a lot about them, so that was great. But then the sort of what we were being trained to do was to take their work, then take an artwork and cynically – the way I thought of it at the time was – rely on the fact that any two things sort of trivially will share some properties, and sort of just do a kind of a free association game. And then that would lead us to writing little artistic statements at the end of the year that we would put by our final works.
And you know that had some value, but I think during the course of the degree I just got more interested in the ideas for their own sake and kind of wanted to just explore them on their own terms and be allowed to question these thinkers, which it sort of felt like within the art school context that wasn’t really what we were doing. And then after at school, I had a job at the Auckland Art Gallery where I would— It was called a gallery assistant, but that basically just meant standing around telling people not to touch the artworks, occasionally more fun things like doing tours with school groups and stuff like that.
So, I had a lot of time on my hands to stare at art, which was great, and I loved that, but also to think about what I was doing. And then I decided to enrol in philosophy and I did what was called a Transitional Certificate. So, basically I did a major within a year in philosophy. And then before I finished that, I was able to get a Master’s Scholarship and then without really ever thinking about what I was doing, I just sort of followed from one thing to the next and ended up in academia.
But so yeah, that’s how I got into— I got into philosophy from art, I guess I was a little bit aware of philosophy before going to university. Not much. I think my dad had a copy of Bertrand Russell’s Western philosophy history book, and it was an illustrated copy. And that was, you know, that intrigued me, but I don’t think I was really aware that you could study philosophy at university until I got there. And then, yeah, I took it from there.
The way that you’ve put it there, it’s sort of almost sounds like philosophy was a bit of an escape from art, or that the way that our art was thought about, thought through within art. So I’m wondering then has our influence your academic work in philosophy?
Yeah, I think not in a direct way. And at the time when I was moving from art to philosophy, I saw more of a sort of discontinuity between those two parts of my life. My sense of maintaining an interest in art is often being as an escape from philosophy. So first I was escaping from art to philosophy because I wanted to just get into these ideas and think more analytically and reason and argue. But now when I’m sort of burnt out by academic work or something, I love to go to the gallery and just spend time with art. But yeah, in terms of the commonalities, I was really interested in things like abstraction, abstract painting, late modernist painting, things like abstract expressionism.
And that kind of movement in modernism away from the representational and symbolic aspects of painting to the more formal features, in terms of, you know, just the medium of the canvas and the paint the 2D surface, that progression and art I think can it can be a way of getting us to pay attention to aspects of the aesthetic experience that you would otherwise perhaps overlook. And often I think abstract artists are trying to express certain feelings that are quite hard to express in words – if not ineffable at least difficult to express in words – and funnily enough now in my philosophy, I’m really interested in issues around that, like forms of knowledge and experience that are difficult to convey in words. So that’s the sort of commonality I guess.
And also just the fact that I have these interests in the philosophy of mind, in what’s called phenomenal consciousness and the subjective properties of our experiences. And I think abstract painting can sort of get us to slow down and pay attention to some of those aspects of our own experiences. In reducing the sort of representational content of the artwork, you can pay more attention to these formal properties, and there’s a similar kind of thing you can do with your own experiences of the artwork. You can pay more attention to their qualitative or phenomenal properties, rather than just their representational properties, what they’re about.
I’ve mentioned epistemology. You’ve mentioned philosophy of mind. What drew you into philosophy? What are your, kind of, general philosophical interests?
Yeah, when I started doing philosophy after being at art school, I was just interested in all of it. So I was, you know, studying lots of different things. I was doing Kant and Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche. So quite a bit of what gets called continental philosophy including more twentieth century stuff.
Then I started drifting towards analytic philosophy. I mean, funnily enough, the one subject that I didn’t vibe with as a philosophy student was an analytic philosophy of art subject. It was very dry and I really just couldn’t get it to connect with what I had been interested at art school. It seemed to me to be missing the point or something. Although a lot of the issues were the same too, so a lot of the issues about how to define art. They kind of felt old hat to me, almost. It’s like, “oh, all the conceptual artists in the ‘60s were dealing with that and then you’ve got these philosophers still fussing about it, you know, 30 years later” or something. But now, if I were to do that subject again, I think I would really enjoy it. But at the time, I couldn’t quite get into it. But otherwise I was enjoying moving to analytic philosophy. So I was getting into philosophy of language. I was getting into philosophy of mind.
And, but yeah, there was a difficulty when I go back and talk to friends that I went through art school with and they say, “oh, who are you studying?” They get kind of excited and I’d go, “[Willard] Quine and [Saul] Kripke” or something. And they were like, “who?” And that was none of the figures that they were interested in. And I didn’t tell them to go and read these people because I don’t think they would have found them interesting. I mean, they weren’t figures that would be particularly inspiring to an artist. So I think there’s some interesting things there about like, yeah— Quite a difference in, you know, what a philosopher might or might not find interesting, and what an artist is looking for when they go to go to philosophy.
You studied fine art, specifically painting, and I wonder if you noticed influences flowing in the other direction with philosophy helping to shape art?
Yeah, I mean, there’s certainly clear cases in the history of philosophy where you can say this artist was influenced by this philosopher. Some of the conceptual artists in the ‘60s, Joseph Kosuth, who was one of the major figures. He cites Wittgenstein a lot. His works are titled after him and, you know, so this movement towards thinking of the purpose of art as being conceptual and the idea being more important than the artwork, the physical artwork itself is a very philosophical movement and it was influenced by philosophers like [Ludwig] Wittgenstein, and I’m sure many others. So there’s definitely cases where you have that kind of influence.
I think for a lot of artists, what they’re doing with philosophy is really looking for some inspiration for their art, so it’s not that the ultimate aim is maybe to assess a philosophical theory. It might be to express a philosophical concept through their art. I think that happens in lots of artworks. But you’re not trying to evaluate a philosophical theory or build a philosophical theory or argue for it. So those aims are quite different. So often they’re approaching, I think, philosophy with an instrumental aim. You know, sort of what can it do for my artistic practise? And of course, I guess it’s the philosophy you’re interested in the philosophical questions more for their intrinsic interests.
I do think artists are interested in the questions for their intrinsic sort of value as well, but there’s often these two things going on. And so there’s a there’s a difference in aims. I think, even though you know often there might be drawing on and interacting with the same philosophical thinkers.
Now some of your work is in epistemology, the study of knowledge. You’ve a paper called, “Knowing What It Is Like and Testimony” in which you talk about something you call What It Is Like knowledge. What is What It Is Like knowledge?
Yeah. So it’s just simply the knowledge you have when you know what it’s like to do something. So this could be anything from, like, knowing what it is like to eat Vegemite to knowing what it is like to fall and love, knowing what it is like to live with a disability, knowing what it is like to smell your cup of coffee in the morning. So we have all these experiences and then we can have this knowledge about how those experiences feel. And this form of knowledge I guess has been of interest in philosophy and especially the philosophy of mind because it seems to be closely tied to consciousness and so people interested in debates about the nature of consciousness and how we understand its relationship to the physical world get interested in What It Is Like knowledge because of those connections.
And I’m interested in that sort of background as well, but as an epistemologist – someone interested in different forms of knowledge – I’m interested in it on its own terms, so not just as it applies to certain philosophical arguments about the nature of consciousness, but also just like what is this form of knowledge? When we look at it more closely it’s kind of intriguing. And so, yeah, that’s part of what I’m up to in that paper.
So, this paper is about testimony, or the ways in which people sort of recount or describe their experience. Can What It Is Like knowledge be shared through testimony?
Yes and no is the short answer, and I get to that short answer by thinking about a certain puzzle that I identify in the paper between what we might call a kind of pessimistic attitude and a more optimistic attitude. So, the pessimistic attitude relates to the discussions of What It Is Like knowledge and the philosophy of mind, where there’s this common idea that you can’t know what it’s like to do something until you’ve done it yourself.
And in popular culture, like, there are often pop songs that people, the lyrics are basically saying, you know, you can’t know what it’s like to fall in love until it happens to you. There’s loads of different songs like this. And, you know, in everyday life we’ll often say this too, like, “oh, you can’t know what it’s like to be a parent until you are one.”
So, that seems like something important in how we think about What It Is Like knowledge that experience seems like a precondition for. But on the other hand, people try to share What It Is Like knowledge all the time, including sharing it with people who haven’t had the relevant experiences. So, one of the examples I talk about in the paper is a book called What It Is Like to Go to War by a guy called Karl Marlantes, who is a Vietnam War veteran.
And in the intro. he explicitly says, “I’m trying to explain something of what it’s like to go to war, to people who haven’t been to war”. And there’s just loads of examples like this. If you Google “how does it feel?” or “what it is like?” you see all these YouTube videos, articles where people are trying to express something about a certain kind of experience and explain certain features of it to other people who haven’t had the experience.
And so, there’s this tension between our attitudes about this form of knowledge, whether we can or we can’t get it through testimony. And what I’m doing in the paper is trying to make the case that this form of knowledge actually comes in different degrees and grades. And so we can see some of those grades of What It Is Like knowledge as not being able to be shared through testimony and other forms of it being able to be shared through testimony.
So, just as an example with the going to war case: consider three different people who have different forms of knowledge about what that experience is like. So you might have someone who’s interested in knowing something about what it’s like to go to war, has never had that experience, and has never had any kind of remotely similar experiences. But they go and read Karl Marlantes’ book or they read the works of Nancy Sherman, who’s a philosopher who hasn’t been to war herself but has interviewed hundreds of soldiers and uses philosophy and psychology to try and analyse and understand their experiences.
So they could read all this stuff. And they could learn some truths that kind of answer the question partially, like what it is like to go to war. I mean, that’s what you find in these books. You find certain answers to that question.
When you haven’t had any similar experiences, but you’ve read some books or something or you’ve listened to people who’ve had the experience, I call that the Bronze What It Is Like knowledge.
At the other end of the spectrum you have someone who’s been to war like Karl Marlantes himself. So they know truths that answer the question what is it like to go to war? But the way that they know them seems very different; that knowledge is based in their own experiences. So when they think about the way it feels to be in a certain combat situation, they can have episodic memories of certain of those sorts of events. They can have the sort of vivid recall of them. And their own conceptions of the way it feels to have these experiences was grounded in their own experiences. When you’ve had the experience, we call that Gold What It Is Like knowledge.
And then the in-between cases are the silver What It Is Like knowledge, where you’ve not only listened to people explain what these experiences are like, but you’ve also had some relevantly nearby experiences. So take someone who hasn’t been to war and is also reading these books, but they’ve had experiences that have some important similarities. So maybe they’ve been an ambulance officer and they’ve dealt with all kinds of traumatic injuries and the way that people respond to those injuries and their own emotional responses to those situations. Reading Karl Malanthes’ book they might be able to have slightly better knowledge than the person who’s not had any similar experiences, because they might be able to go, “oh, that experience is a little bit like this one I had,” and then they can – in their memory and imagination – they can kind of recall certain qualitative features of those experiences and relate them to the target experience they haven’t had.
And I think in most cases, when we’re saying that someone has What It Is Like knowledge, we’re usually interested in the gold What It Is Like knowledge and that’s why we have this strong intuition that you can’t know what it’s like until you’ve done it yourself. But in other cases, I think, actually we— In certain conversational contexts we lower those standards a little bit. So it would be totally fine for me to say, and I think correct for me to say that Nancy Sherman knows a lot more about what it’s like to go to war than I do. Neither of us have been to war, but she’s studied it for years and years and has interviewed all these soldiers and thought about the subjective nature of these experiences. So she has better What It Is Like knowledge than I do.
So we can kind of compare and grade peoples’, what it is like knowledge in different ways. And sometimes we will, in doing that, attribute forms of What It Is Like knowledge to people who haven’t had the experience. And yeah, part of what I’m interested in there is what can we do when we haven’t had an experience, but we’re trying to empathise with people who have had it and trying to understand their subjective perspective.
And I think we’re not totally in the dark there. Things like testimony, art, literature can give us some insights into the experience we haven’t had. Although it’s always important to have deference to those who have had the experience because there’s something better about the knowledge that they have.
You talked earlier in your explanation there – which is a really good explanation – about conversation, about books. You talked about YouTube videos. Can art be a form of testimony?
Yeah, I think definitely so. I mean I guess one thing I haven’t thought much about is the role of visual arts in this where, you know, it wouldn’t be conveying testimony, perhaps in the most straightforward way of just having, you know, speech, you know, although, you know, you might have an installation where you have some form of testimony in it or something like that.
So there are interesting things about what visual art can teach us about experiences we haven’t had that I need to think more about. So I’ve been mainly focused on cases of testimony. But I do think art is something we go to often when we’re trying to understand the inner lives of other people. And it’s an important part of those, sort of, social practises of trying to get some understanding across these experiential boundaries. I mean, you know, it’s a difficult thing because you don’t want to start pretending like you can know what these experiences are like, like the people actually having them. So there’s got to be some epistemic humility with it.
But I think we don’t want to end up in the situation which sometimes people end up in where they say, “oh, there can be– Nothing’s shared across these boundaries. You know, at most you can sympathise with other people who have experiences very different from you, but you can’t truly empathise with them.”
I think that perspective is harmful too. So you know, one thing we have to avoid here is this sort of epistemic arrogance of thinking you can have knowledge that you can’t have until you have the experience, but at the other end of the spectrum, there is this danger of not recognising our obligations to try and understand other people and to— And that involves trying to get a better kind of imaginative model of their experiences. And there I think art can come in.
So in general, if art helps us to exercise our imagination, that is something that can be useful in trying to imagine the perspective of another person.
When I was thinking about this question, I was thinking, well, maybe we can straightforwardly map art onto testimony, as a kind of testimony, but I I think you seem uncomfortable to do that, and I think you know I can understand there would be— I’ve got a few intuitive reasons why that might be: sometimes artists might not know exactly what they’re saying, or they might not be meaning to convey a certain sense or form of knowledge or experience, that it might be up to the beholder of things, but I guess that’s true of all testimony. Do you have those misgivings about including art within that category of testimony?
Well, I guess I would say the art itself is not a form of knowledge. So it’s a— I don’t know what art is, but it’s not knowledge.
I guess it depends a little bit how we define testimony. I was thinking of it as something linked quite closely to speech, you know written or verbal. So something propositional; something that can be expressed in language, and then I think often what, you know, visual artists are doing: maybe they’re expressing certain feelings associated with certain experiences and so you can learn maybe something about those experiences by engaging with the artwork. But on one way of looking at it, it wouldn’t be straightforwardly testimony, because it’s not— You can’t sort of take out of it, you know, sort of proposition that was said in in any straightforward way. So maybe there’s a there’s just a question of labels here a little bit, but I generally don’t think of art— I think of the visual arts that yeah— Testimony is not the first concept that comes to mind because I think often it’s something more expressive and that doesn’t fit neatly into the box of testimony.
I wonder if the experience that is had by consuming a certain artwork; maybe that’s one of the related experiences that you talked about. You know, it’s kind of like a silver standard of knowledge?
Yeah, I think that can be the case. I mean, certainly— I mean, one thing I’ve been interested in recently is to what extent virtual reality can be used to help us to understand the experiences of other people. There have been a lot of, sort of, over the top and inflated claims about VR being able to be an empathy machine which can give you the experiences of other people. And various people, including artists who work with virtual reality, and philosophers and psychologists have come in and criticised that and, you know, pointing out just—
So if you go into, you know, there are VR simulations of things like being a refugee or being homeless and a lot of these simulations are quite problematic in different ways. I mean, the idea that as a sort of middle-class person with housing security that I can, sort of, don this VR headset and get insights into the experience of being homeless is that, you know, can that can be very morally problematic and it’s also epistemically problematic because, at most, maybe what’s being simulated a certain sort of basic perceptual aspects of the experience, but that doesn’t mean you’re simulating, you know, the anxiety involved with this or other aspects of the experience.
And so I think there’s a lot of reason to be sceptical of how much you can do with those technologies, but I don’t think that that we can do nothing with them and maybe in some cases they can help us to better imagine an experience we haven’t had, if used with suitable care.
And of course, you know, we can always raise these issues too about literature and about, you know, whether that can give us insights into experiences we haven’t had. So I don’t think VR’s alone in these criticisms and these concerns and it’s kind of a new medium. So I think people are still figuring out how to use it in sensitive ways and effective ways when communicating different types of experiences. And artists are doing a lot of interesting work with virtual reality.
So yeah, but if on the more positive side you might think virtual reality allows us to have not the target experience – so that’s where the overinflated claims come, like “you can you can walk in the shoes of these people” – but it might give us as a kind of experience which shares certain similarities with the target experience. So, it’s a bit like thinking of the difference between, you know, a model of a yacht in a, you know, in the lab with the flotation tank or model of a yacht in a computer program; and then there’s the real yacht out there racing on the America’s Cup track or something.
That relationship between the model and the target. The model can represent the target and it can simulate certain aspects of it, even when it differs from it in a lot in other ways. So if it’s a computer model, it’s like ontologically a very different kind of thing from the actual yacht out there in the ocean.
But nonetheless, you can learn things about the real thing by studying the model. And so sometimes I think artworks can help us to build models in our imagination of experiences we haven’t had, and we can potentially learn something about those experiences, even whilst acknowledging that the model is not the target. And there are always going to be these big gaps between them.
So I want to come back to that relationship between art and philosophy, but rather than ask about how one has influenced the other, I want to ask: are there shared features of these two things like methods or perhaps aims?
Yes, I think so. Earlier, I guess I was saying that the aims are quite different, right? Because the aim of the artist ultimately is to make art work and the aim of the philosopher is to assess the works of philosophy or make arguments or build theories. But I was looking at some of the artists I was into at art school.
One of them was Agnes Martin. She classified herself as an abstract expressionist painter, but very minimalist. These sort of very minimal grids: quite beautiful works. I was looking at some of the things she said about her art practice and it’s like she’s a Platonist philosopher trying to contemplate the Form of the Good or something right, like she was a famously ended up being quite reclusive; lived out in the desert in New Mexico; had, I guess, spiritual or contemplative aspirations with her artistic practice.And so when you look at how she’s describing things it can, like I said, sound a little bit like a philosopher trying to contemplate the Form of the Good. But the method is very different because it’s not through doing philosophy and engaging in philosophical analysis or Socratic dialogue.
So I guess the method there is very different, but maybe the ultimate aim could be similar. And, you know, that’s just one example, one with a very particular aim. But more generally I think sometimes they might share certain aims, and other times they won’t. Another interesting contrast might be between, say, a conceptual artist who has a certain view about what art is, that it’s a conceptual matter, it’s about ideas. And then compare them with the philosopher of art who’s interested in arguing for that very same conclusion. Okay, so in a way, there’s a lot of overlap between their outlooks on what art is. But what are they trying to do? Well, the artists is still producing these works that are maybe expressive of that commitment to the key thing with art being the concept.
So if it was like Joseph Kosuth, you know he had a famous work – I think it was just titled Chair – and there was a real chair, there was a photograph of the chair on the wall. and there was a print-out of the dictionary definition of a chair. So that’s a really interesting artwork, expressive of a certain conception of what art is. Now compare that with, say, a philosopher of art who’s writing an academic article or an academic book where they’re arguing for the conclusion that you know what art is is a conceptual thing.
So they’ve got a very— There’s a lot of overlap between the artist and the philosopher of art there. They both agree on what art is. But the philosopher is trying to build this argument for that, and maybe the artist is trying to maybe convince people of the same conclusion, but doing it through an artwork that is expressive of their commitment to that conception of what art is. And so there are these big differences in what you’re trying to do when you do art versus philosophy. But there can be a lot of commonality, I guess in how you think about these, you know, these big questions.
I mean ultimately, I think a lot of artists are just trying to understand the world, just like philosophers. But you do it through your artistic practice rather than through argumentation and that kind of reasoning. So that’s a really big difference. But when you dig down into what a particular artist is doing, what a particular philosopher is doing, you can also find all these interesting commonalities.
We’ve certainly covered a lot; you’ve been very generous with your time as well and I really appreciate that.
What are you currently working on?
More on the What It Is Like knowledge stuff. So I’ve got a short book under review on What It Is Like knowledge, so hopefully that will be out before too long. And I want to start looking in more detail at different ways of trying to acquire What It Is Like knowledge beyond testimony, but still not actually involving the experience. So I’d like to think more about the visual arts. I’d like to think more about virtual reality and fiction. So I feel like there’s a lot— I’ve got a sort of basis to work from now and now to go out and explore more applied questions about What It Is Like knowledge. So that’s the next thing on the horizon.
And listeners can find links to Dr Cath’s work and some of the art we’ve discussed today on the Concept : Art website.
Dr Yuri Cath, thank you for joining Concept : Art.
Oh, it was a pleasure Pat. Thanks for having me on.
Concept : Art is produced on muwinina country, lutruwita Tasmania. Always was, always will be, Aboriginal land.
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