To me terminology like “puzzle” seems to suggest it is a search for an answer but the process seems also be characterised by avoidance of information generation.
You could have a challenge of lifting a weigth and one could struggle by pulling or pressing hard with their muscles. “tinkering” seems to refer to cognitive adaptation so weightlifting doesn’t fit into the definition. But to me it seems it is more about success rather than smarting up. If one phrases it as “I feel uncomfortable when X happens, let’s do something different” and “Now I feel comfortable” it is a challenge and a struggle but not a question or a puzzle. If one were to ask “What I could do to make myself comfortable?” that could be answered with knowledge or knowledge generation. But it doesn’t seem clear to me whether the struggle actually has question structure.
At most extreme it would not be totally crazy to describe a weightlifter as answering the question “How do I lift these weights?” and the answer being “give muscle motor commands in the order x, y ,z”. I guess somebody could help with weigthlifting with turning it into a puzzle “hey I see your technique is wrong. Try lifting like this.”. But more usually it is a challenge of bothering the effort and maybe living throught the uncomfortability of the lift. And while even those could be turned into emotional intelligence questions (“emotional technique”) they are not standardly tackled as questions.
Someone that is interested in “instrumental epistemology” should be interested in instrumental anything and succeeding at a task often involves succeding in dimensions other than epistemology too. All models are wrong but some are useful so in some situations it might be easy to find models that are very useful but very simple. Like being a religious zealot might give a lot of confidence which could be very useful so a consequentialist mind might recognise the success and lean into that direction. Is such an inductive inference reasonable? Maybe doing quantum mechanics as a bind fate black box leads to “shut up and calculate” be a more succesfull strategy than trying to form a broken understading/intuition and suffer many mistakes. Thus competence might mean abstraction supression.
To me terminology like “puzzle” seems to suggest it is a search for an answer but the process seems also be characterised by avoidance of information generation.
You could have a challenge of lifting a weigth and one could struggle by pulling or pressing hard with their muscles. “tinkering” seems to refer to cognitive adaptation so weightlifting doesn’t fit into the definition. But to me it seems it is more about success rather than smarting up. If one phrases it as “I feel uncomfortable when X happens, let’s do something different” and “Now I feel comfortable” it is a challenge and a struggle but not a question or a puzzle. If one were to ask “What I could do to make myself comfortable?” that could be answered with knowledge or knowledge generation. But it doesn’t seem clear to me whether the struggle actually has question structure.
At most extreme it would not be totally crazy to describe a weightlifter as answering the question “How do I lift these weights?” and the answer being “give muscle motor commands in the order x, y ,z”. I guess somebody could help with weigthlifting with turning it into a puzzle “hey I see your technique is wrong. Try lifting like this.”. But more usually it is a challenge of bothering the effort and maybe living throught the uncomfortability of the lift. And while even those could be turned into emotional intelligence questions (“emotional technique”) they are not standardly tackled as questions.
Someone that is interested in “instrumental epistemology” should be interested in instrumental anything and succeeding at a task often involves succeding in dimensions other than epistemology too. All models are wrong but some are useful so in some situations it might be easy to find models that are very useful but very simple. Like being a religious zealot might give a lot of confidence which could be very useful so a consequentialist mind might recognise the success and lean into that direction. Is such an inductive inference reasonable? Maybe doing quantum mechanics as a bind fate black box leads to “shut up and calculate” be a more succesfull strategy than trying to form a broken understading/intuition and suffer many mistakes. Thus competence might mean abstraction supression.