Abstract
This article offers a detailed reading Gascoigne and Thornton’s book Tacit Knowledge (2013), which aims to account for the tacitness of tacit knowledge (TK) while preserving its status as knowledge proper. I take issue with their characterization and rejection of the existential-phenomenological Background—which they presuppose even as they dismiss—and their claim that TK can be articulated “from within”—which betrays a residual Cartesianism, the result of their elision of conceptuality and propositionality. Knowledgeable acts instantiate capacities which we might know we have and of which we can be aware, but which are not propositionally structured at their “core”. Nevertheless, propositionality is necessary to what Robert Brandom calls, in Making It Explicit (1994) and Articulating Reasons (2000), “explicitation”, which notion also presupposes a tacit dimension, which is, simply, the embodied person (the knower), without which no conception of knowledge can get any purchase. On my view, there is no knowledgeable act that can be understood as such separately from the notion of skilled corporeal performance. The account I offer cannot make sense of so-called “knowledge-based” education, as opposed to systems and styles which supposedly privilege “contentless” skills over and above “knowledge”, because on the phenomenological and inferentialist lines I endorse, neither the concepts “knowledge” nor “skill” has any purchase or meaning without the other.
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Notes
On colour-recognition, see McDowell (1994, Lecture III, sect. 5).
“Contexture” is taken from Heidegger (1988, 1–24, passim).
See also Taylor (2013).
On this holistic conception of the person, see Hacker (2007).
See Gascoigne and Thornton passim, but especially chapters 2 and 4 (passim; 76–77; 130).
On testimony and tacit knowledge, see Gascoigne and Thornton (183–89).
In different terms and contexts, David Lewin (2016), drawing on Taylor, explores the constitutive-affective role of the propositional frame. Quine (1963), Cavell (2002), and Brandom (2000) are but three philosophers who have shown the bankruptcy of the analytic/synthetic distinction. Cavell reminds us that preserving necessity is not the same as preserving analyticity.
This is one reason why those participants who are retrospectively credited as innovators and geniuses are often controversial if not rejected in their time. The innovator strains at the norms of their discourse, but without ever breaking entirely free of their reach.
McDowell (2007, 349), qtd Gascoigne and Thornton (164).
Aldridge (2015, ch.4).
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My thanks to the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. Their Research Retreat marked the beginnings of what has grown into the present article.
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From January 2018 Oliver Belas will be Lecturer in Education at University of Bedfordshire.
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Belas, O. On Tacit Knowledge for Philosophy of Education. Stud Philos Educ 37, 347–365 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-017-9585-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-017-9585-0