Where contemporary thinkers well disposed towards Rorty tend to emphasize the significance of Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, more skeptical voices are apt to impugn his relevance to ongoing debates in philosophy on the grounds that that work’s attempt to dispose of the traditional conception of the discipline in the name of a nebulous “literary criticism” is little more than an exercise in self-therapy. The contention of this chapter, then, is that the antagonism this emphasis generates is both unfruitful and ill-conceived. Taking as its starting point reactions to criticism of his early (eliminativist) materialism, it argues that Rorty’s work in the 1970s offers a vindication of the activity of traditional philosophy, albeit within the broader conception of intellectual inquiry we’ve come to call neopragmatism and – latterly – “cultural politics.” From this perspective, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity is just one (perhaps self-revealing) prophetic-theoretical proposal amongst many that neopragmatism/philosophy-as-cultural-politics makes possible. But that in turn shows how important this period of Rorty’s work is, not only to understanding his later output but also to elucidating the options available to contemporary philosophy.

In this book, we have outlined a conception of tacit knowledge as context-dependent, conceptually structured, practical knowledge. We have taken as two key clues Polanyi's early emphasis on the importance of personal knowledge as “active comprehension of things known, an action that requires skill” and his slogan that we can know more than we can tell. Tacit knowledge is practical knowledge or know-how. Further, in some sense at least, it resists being put into words. Respecting this second element is more difficult than the first, however, because of a dilemma that an account of tacit knowledge faces.

Any plausible account of tacit knowledge must respect its status both as tacit and as knowledge. But if one addresses the former by adopting what we called the principle of inarticulacy and assuming that there are states of subjects that are cognitive but which are not articulable, then one makes a mystery of how such states should count as knowledge. What is the content of such knowledge? For that reason, we have defended a view of tacit knowledge according to which it does have a content, but not one that can be captured in context-independent or purely linguistic terms. The articulation of the content requires practical demonstration. But, following late-twentieth-century developments in the philosophy of language and thought, this does not imply that the content lies outside the space of concepts.

INTRODUCTION

Drawing on two key slogans from Michael Polanyi and “regress arguments” for the priority of practical knowledge over theoretical knowledge (or practical knowledge-how over knowledge-that) put forward by Polanyi, Gilbert Ryle, Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein, we have argued that the idea of tacit knowledge should be thought of as context-dependent but conceptually structured practical or personal knowledge.

The stress on balancing conceptual structure with both context-dependence and practical knowledge addresses a potential worry that knowledge has to have a content. Tacit knowledge is knowledge. Thus, unlike accounts of context-dependent skilled coping, our account of tacit knowledge presupposes a rational subject. At the same time, unpacking the conceptual structure requires both context-dependent demonstratives and practical demonstration. It cannot be put into words alone. Tacit knowledge is tacit.

The equation of “personal” and “practical” flags the fact that such knowledge can only be articulated practically and from within. It requires not just a context, which would be sufficient for context-dependent spectator knowledge, but also a skilled agent both to perform the practical demonstration (in the role of the teacher) and also to have “eyes to see” the import of the demonstration (as the “learning-ready” pupil).

This chapter considers what might appear a surprising connection: a positive relation between tacit knowledge and language. It might seem surprising because we have approached what is tacit by a suitable contrast with what is “tellable” or what is explicit, and what can be codified in general (i.e. context-independent language) has been paradigmatic of the explicit.

INTRODUCTION

In Chapter 1 we introduced three thinkers whose accounts of human nature and knowing have a bearing on our understanding of tacit knowledge. Having dealt at length with the debate that has arisen around Ryle's distinction between knowing that and knowing how, we turn now to considerations that give succour to the idea that in so far as tacit knowledge is associated with the latter it characterizes a distinct mode of being of creatures like ourselves. The key idea was introduced in §”Regress redux” in relation to Heidegger. It is that the “familiarity with the world” that is our “understanding of being” forms what Hubert Dreyfus characterizes as the non-intentional “background” (BB) to both the fundamental intentionality (FI) of the know-how that comprises our ongoing coping practices, and the representational intentionality (RI) of the states characterized by having disengaged reflectively from our practices and associated with the knowledge-that of what is present-at-hand.

At the time we noted that Heidegger's distinction between the “ur” know-how of the background and the more intramundane know-how of our practices was not something we wished to uphold. It is also, of course, a source of embarrassment to phenomenologists of a Dreyfusean persuasion. Like Polanyi, for example, they want to argue that the knowledge-how that exhibits the “naturalness” of our natures should be understood to denote a mode of being shared with other animals (and consequently illuminated by the sort of experimental finding Polanyi was so fond of).

INTRODUCTION

In Chapter 1, we examined three historical resources for an account of tacit knowledge: the work of Polanyi, Ryle and Heidegger. We argued that through a shared opposition to a Cartesian approach to knowledge they also share an emphasis on the priority of both practical knowledge over theoretical knowledge and the importance of the person and the personal. All three also deploy a regress argument against a view of theoretical knowledge. Taken together, this suggested a clue for thinking about tacit knowledge. Tacit knowledge is practical knowledge or know-how. But this left the nature of what is known and the precise sense in which it is tacit undetermined.

In Chapter 2, we examined Ryle's regress argument and his account of know-how in more detail. We defended the regress argument against recent criticism by defenders of “intellectualism” But we conceded to them two important points. First, there is no general semantic marker for practical knowledge: practical knowledge-how has to be distinguished from theoretical knowledge-how in context. But that does not threaten the distinction. Second, practical knowledge has a conceptually structured content that can be articulated “from within”. To that extent, practical knowledge is more like theoretical knowledge or knowledge-that than might at first be thought. So if tacit knowledge is construed as practical knowledge there is, nevertheless, a content known. But unlike theoretical knowledge (and contra the new intellectualists view), there is, as Ryle asserts, a close connection between practical knowledge and ability.

MAKING IT TACIT

We live in an age of explicit rules and guidelines; of aims and objectives; of benchmarks and performance indicators, standardized tests and league tables. Systematization abounds in the criteria specifying good practice and the delivery of public services; in the charters that outline rights and responsibilities in both civic society and in society's microcosms. A university's once unspecified expectation that its students will attend lectures and prepare work is often now formalized in contracts, and in return students are informed of the explicit “outcomes” of their learning activities. Likewise, in the UK at least, patients' expectations of the quality of care from the National Health Service (NHS) are increasingly constituted by waiting times and the availability of choice. Such reforms aim to replace a tacit or implicit understanding of practices with something explicit and codified. They are expressions of what Max Weber calls “intellectualization”: the sentiment that one can “in principle, master all things by calculation” (1946: 139).

Weber traces the “disenchantment” (ibid.) of the world that this presages to the very origins of systematic epistemological inquiry, and in The Craftsman Richard Sennett similarly identifies as longstanding a suspicion of merely implicitly understood standards:

INTRODUCTION

Chapter 1 introduced tacit knowledge through the work of Polanyi, Ryle and Heidegger. We highlighted an initial connection between Polanyi's slogan that “we can know more than we can tell” and an emphasis both on the personal and practical. One indicator of this connection is a shared concern to undermine an overly (“Cartesian”) impersonal and intellectual conception of the knower and of their cognitive achievements and a method characterized by the deployment of versions of a regress argument. The purpose of the regress arguments can be seen in the light of the three competing principles to which tacit knowledge might be subject:

The regress arguments target a conception of knowledge constrained by PC. Their purpose is to demonstrate that we are entitled to the concept of explicit knowledge only if we acknowledge that its achievement is grounded in something more fundamental. That leaves open the competing possibilities marked by PI and PA. Rejecting PI, we suggested that tacit knowing, construed in terms of context-dependent knowing how (the sort of activity-dependent understanding that is manifest in practice), resists codification in purely linguistic context-independent terms but can be regarded, nevertheless, as fully determinate (thus satisfying PA) under the appropriate analysis.

1976 AND ALL THAT

In this chapter we will offer a preliminary explication of the concept of tacit or personal knowledge by focusing on aspects of the work of three thinkers: Michael Polanyi, Gilbert Ryle and Martin Heidegger. Having given this book its theme, the inclusion of Polanyi requires little justification; likewise that of Ryle, since, as we remarked in the introduction, there are good prima facie reasons for associating tacit knowledge with both knowing that and knowing how, yet it cannot seemingly be both. For some readers Ryle's anti-intellectualist argument for the primacy of knowing how will be sufficient to explain the introduction of Heidegger. To this can be added both the interest Ryle took at one time in the development of phenomenology and the isomorphism between Polanyi's work and that of one of Heidegger's scions, Merleau-Ponty. However, what follows is not intended as mere background. Polanyi et al. share a concern and a method, which serve both to illuminate the concept we are proposing to elucidate and to diagnose why competing views fall into the trap that (we will in subsequent chapters claim) they do. It is in the account given of Heidegger that this becomes clearest.

At its most basic, the concern is to rebut what is construed as an unacceptably Cartesian or Intellectualist conception of knowing. The method then has two characteristic moments: a negative phase involves the deployment of a regress argument against that conception, and a positive phase: the instatement of some progressive alternative.

INTRODUCTION

Drawing on two clues from Michael Polanyi – that “we can know more than we can tell” and that knowledge is an “active comprehension of things known, an action that requires skill” – and on arguments for the priority of practical knowledge from Ryle and Heidegger, we have argued for a conception of tacit knowledge as a context-dependent, conceptually structured form of personal or practical knowledge. In Chapter 2, we attempted to draw the sting of a recent “intellectualist” backlash by accepting that, like knowledge-that, practical knowledge has a content even as we defended the (Rylean) argument supporting its priority. This gives rise to a conception of tacit knowledge that deserves the label “knowledge” because of its content and “tacit” because it runs counter to what we called the principle of codifiability:

In Chapters 3 and 4 we examined and rejected a number of possible routes towards a more radical conception of tacit knowledge drawing on both Wittgenstein's rule-following considerations and responses to it which deploy the notion of a background. These run counter to both PC and the principle of articulacy:

That is, in related but differing ways, they subscribe to the claim that:

Introduction

Hitherto we have encountered scepticism as presenting epistemologists with a certain theoretical problem; namely, to show that our empirical beliefs are held on rational grounds by demonstrating that the distinction between being justified in believing that q and merely assuming that q is legitimate. Although the sceptic who uses philosophical arguments to generate doubt about our practices of justification was contrasted with the pk-sceptic who challenges the possibility of philosophical knowledge, the latter too was seen as posing a theoretical obstacle, in the form of the radical version of the Agrippan argument with which we concluded Chapter 1. In both cases, then, scepticism was associated with theoretical attitude doubt.

This theoretical picture of pk-scepticism and the threat of the Agrippan argument differs from the one that emerges when one looks at the Ancient Sceptics. Like their traditional foes the Dogmatists, these were concerned with the role that philosophy has to play in determining how human beings should live their lives. Principally, the Sceptic's view was that rather than guide us in the search for the knowledge that would enable us to live happy lives, philosophy should cure us of the disposition to believe that there is any such knowledge. Inspired by the legacy of that most enigmatic of figures, Socrates (c. 469-c. 399 bce), they attempted to make sense of his seemingly paradoxical claim that the one thing he knew was that he knew nothing.

Introduction

For most philosophers, the Meditations on First Philosophy (1641) marks the beginning of a new phase in the long history of scepticism. As we saw in Chapter 1, foundationalism is one attempt to respond to the Agrippan argument, which threatens the idea that any of our beliefs are justified. Descartes's ‘First Philosophy’ is the original systematic attempt to formulate such a response. Crucially, he uses scepticism in a methodologically constructive way to advance his foundational project and in doing so gives rise to another sort of sceptical problem, which we have associated with the argument from ignorance. The task for the first part of this chapter is to examine how the emergence of this new form of scepticism relates to the disengagement of epistemology from a practical concern with the good life and with the theoretical attitude. As we saw in Chapter 2, the idea of cognitive responsibility for the Ancients is linked to the achievement of a practical goal and thus with a certain idea of what sort of thing the responsible knower is. Part of this task will therefore be to investigate what cognitive responsibility amounts to when practical concerns are eliminated, and what new concept of the knowing subject emerges as a result.

The association of Descartes's philosophical method with a response to the Agrippan argument is not arbitrary. The works of Sextus and other Ancient Sceptics were rediscovered in the sixteenth century and had a profound influence on the direction of European thought and culture in the hundred or so years before the Meditations appeared.