Interesting, from a reader:
Jonah,
I’m a philosopher who’s writing a dissertation on the distinction
between knowing-that (i.e. propositional knowledge) vs. knowing-how
(i.e. knowledge of skills and abilities). I agree with your previous
correspondent that the evidence for multiple intelligences is growing.
Interestingly, the neurological evidence is growing that these two
different kinds of knowledge have different neurological substrates
(i.e. they use different parts of the brain, or the same parts in
different ways). A famous — and interesting — case of amnesia in a
guy named Henry M. is what started this line of research. Henry M. is
like the main character in Memento — he can remember stuff from
before the surgery that caused the amnesia, but he cannot remember or
learn new things (in the long term, that is). Except, that is, he can
learn how to do new things — that is, he can pick up new skills and
abilities. He doesn’t remember doing so, but his performance gets
better and better with successive (unremembered) practice sessions.
Here’s the Wikipedia entry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_m
This is pretty tangential to the Murray debate, I suppose, but interesting.






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