Abstract
In the following I show that Hubert Dreyfus’ account of skill rests on a misguided interpretation of Martin Heidegger’s work on understanding in Being and Time. Dreyfus separates understanding according to the analytic philosophical concept pair, so called ‘know-how’ and ‘knowledge-that’, that corresponds for him to the pragmatist differentiation between skillful acting and theoretical conceptual thinking. Contrary to that, Heidegger argues that only one form of understanding exists that is neither captured by ‘know-how’, ‘knowledge-that’ or a combination of both. Instead of presupposing two radically different ways to engage with the world, one practical-agential, the other theoretical-conceptual, Heidegger shows that all genuine forms of comportments rest on the same form of understanding that exhibits the highest degree of intelligibility when we deal with the world ordinarily. The Heideggerian account therefore comes without the many dichotomies so often criticized in the literature on skill and understanding, and offers a radically different view of world disclosure and of what we do when we ‘theorize’.
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Notes
I use in the following instead of ‘skill’ or other forms of knowing and understanding, the Heideggerian term ‘understanding’, which is supposed to capture both skillful and non-skillful forms of understanding. This term use has the advantage to circumvent the following conceptual problems with the term ‘skill.’ For instance, how do we draw a line between ‘skill’, ‘competence’, ‘ability’, or ‘expertise’? When I am skilled at something, I am also able to do this thing, I am good at it, competent at it, I understand it and I know what I am doing and how I am doing it. This vagueness of ‘skill’ entails significant confusion. For instance, Noë (2015) uses ‘understanding’, ‘skill’, ‘ability’ and ‘concept use’ interchangeably, but also gives all of them different explanatory functions. Rietveld & Kiverstein (2014; Kiverstein & Rietveld, 2020) state that skills are sociocultural and sensorimotor practices based on a form of life. But it is not clear how practices are different from abilities, habits or the performance of actions themselves; yet it seems that practices require skill, not the other way around. And, Christensen, Sutton and McIlwain use ‘skill’ interchangeably for actions and the ability to perform these actions: ‘’Driving’ is a complex primary skill that involves a suite of coupled component skills (including navigating, steering, accelerating and breaking, and changing gear) (Christensen et al., 2016, p. 49).’ To add to the confusion, ‘skill’ exhibits a natural ambivalence that allows it to denote all the psychological phenomena that I have mentioned above, but also to use it normatively. In particular, Rietveld & Kiverstein (2014) have argued that skill underlies the normative aspect of action, in that skill is that aspect of skillful action that makes an agent perform an action better or worse. In that regard, they treat skill in the realm of practical normativity (Jeuk, 2019b). Yet, analytic intellectualists treat skill primarily as an epistemic phenomenon that has the same conditions of satisfaction as ‘propositional’ knowledge (Pavese, 2015). To circumvent these problems, I use in the following ‘understanding’ instead of ‘skill’. I also use in the following instead of ‘action’ the Heideggerian terms ‘dealing’ and ‘comportment’. ‘Dealing’, and ‘comportment’ for that, have the advantage that they are wider than ‘action’. They denote all the other existentials, such as understanding, that co-constitute our encounters with the world, whereas action is usually separated from understanding. Further ‘dealing’ and ‘comportment’ are less contaminated by philosophical presuppositions that come with the term ‘action’ (cf. §3.1), such as for instance a commitment to so-called ‘intentions’.
I put in the following terms like ‘know-how’, ‘proposition’ or ‘intentionality’ into square quotes. The reason for that is that I do not believe that these terms refer, yet, I need to make use of them, because they are used by other authors whom I address. I loosely follow in that Heidegger’s practice in Being and Time, where Heidegger seeks to replace classic philosophical concepts with his own neologisms (cf. §3.1).
Dreyfus uses over the course of his work various terms to express similar if not the same phenomena. For instance, ‘know-how’ is seemingly used interchangeably with ‘motor intentionality’, ‘intentional arc’, ‘embodied skills’, ‘embodied, absorbed or skilled coping’, ‘practices’ and so forth. Similarly, Dreyfus uses instead of ‘knowledge-that’, ‘conceptual understanding’, ‘conceptual intentionality’, ‘propositional content’, and so forth. I seek to use in the following for matters of simplicity and consistency ‘know-how’ and ‘knowledge-that’, yet, remind the reader that these terms are often used interchangeably by Dreyfus with the terms mentioned above.
I focus in the following primarily on Being and Time. That is unusual in Heidegger scholarship, which usually takes into consideration a wider set of Heideggerian texts, and I have myself taken recourse to Heidegger’s work on Kant in the past Jeuk 2017a,b). However, I have my qualms now about the adequacy of this exegetical practice and confine myself to Heidegger’s most influential text, which I believe is more coherent and revisionist than his lecture slides and other works.
The way Dreyfus engages with McDowell is indicative of the issues that I attribute to Dreyfus. As we will see, in Being and Time, Heidegger is not interested in showing how conceptual ‘intentionality’ and ‘propositionality’ are continuous with motor ‘intentionality’ and ‘embodied skills’ or derivative of them. Rather, Heidegger wants to overcome the very idea that there is something like genuine conceptual ‘intentionality’ or ‘propositionality’. Neither does Heidegger try to explain action in terms of ‘motor intentionality’ or ‘embodied skills’. Again, Heidegger shows that a unitary, complex form of understanding accounts for all forms of dealings with the world if they are done based on the structures that disclose ordinary dealings. Further, it is surprising that Dreyfus overlooks Heidegger’s (1990) work on Kant in his reply to McDowell. Because, since Dreyfus accepts McDowell’s roughly Kantian problem setup—that is clearly at odds with Being and Time—it seems straightforward to refer to Heidegger’s Kantian solution of this setup in terms of Kantian schemata (Sherover 1971; Golob 2013, 2014; Jeuk, 2017b; Matherne, 2019).
Terms like ‘knowledge-that’ have become to many philosophers so commonplace that it is important to clarify here what I mean with ‘knowledge-that’ does not exist. What I argue for in this paper is that according to Heidegger ‘propositional contents’ and ‘facts’ do not exist. Importantly, this should not be confused with the claim that declarative sentences do not exist or that we cannot have a true understanding of the world. It merely entails that we should not confuse real phenomena like declarative sentences and our true understanding of the world with particular philosophical explanations of these phenomena, such as ‘knowledge-that’ or ‘facts’, that came up with analytic philosophy. For instance, it is one thing to state that I can articulate the declarative sentence ‘that I understand that Mary is 1,70 meters tall’. It is something else to claim that this sentence is an instance of ‘knowledge-that’ and corresponds to a ‘fact’. Rather, as we will see, according to Heidegger, declarative sentences allow to articulate understanding, but they do not correspond to it. And the structure of the world, which includes among other things the spatiality of the world, as well as the potential existence of Mary, do not require any recourse to so-called ‘facts’, although we can articulate the relationship between some phenomena in terms of declarative sentences.
Dreyfus is not alone in this. Other authors, such as Carman (2003) and Wrathall (2010, 2013) claim too, that theoretical understanding and ‘conceptual content’ are derivative of practical understanding and skill, yet, they do not show exactly what that means, i.e. they do not have a concrete explanation of what it means that ‘conceptual content’ is determined by skill or ‘know-how’.
It is telling that already Leibniz accepted the distinction between ‘skill’ and ‘thought’. For instance, Leibniz, in the Monadology (1991, 72, emphasis mine) claims that humans are usually unreflective ‘Empirics’ for ‘three fourths of our actions’, meaning, that humans usually act not according to reasons or verbalized rules, but according to habit. And in his Meditations on Knowledge, Truth and Ideas, Leibniz explicitly accepts that a form of non-verbalizable or at least often not verbalized knowledge exists that Dreyfus would later call ‘skill’: ‘Similarly, we see that painters and other artists correctly know what is done properly and what is done poorly, though they are often unable to explain their judgments and reply to questioning by saying that the things that displease them lack an unknown something’ (Leibniz, 1989, 24). This shows us again that Heidegger’s insight was not that ordinary dealings with the world are a form of skill based on ‘know-how’. This is an old insight that has only been neglected by many analytic philosophers—with their myopic focus on language and therefore ‘knowledge-that’— and therefore seemed new to Dreyfus against the backdrop of analytic philosophy. Yet, not is this not only Heidegger’s main insight, it is an utterly conservative claim that Heidegger seeks to deconstruct by a radically different way to conceive of understanding.
I believe the author who defends this approach towards Heidegger most explicitly is Wheeler (2005).
Dreyfus is not alone in this. Many Heidegger scholars use ‘intentionality’ too (Carman, 2003; Crowell, 2007; Wrathall, 2010; McManus, 2012; Haugeland, 2013; Golob, 2013, 2014). I believe this to be one of the more infelicitous hermeneutic decisions in translating Heidegger to make him available to a wider, usually Anglo-American, analytic philosophical audience.
This statement needs qualification in order not to lend itself to confusion. Heidegger argues that discourse is the meaningful arrangement of affective understanding (Heidegger 2006, 162). At first glance it therefore seems that language allows for the articulation of understanding via meaning. Yet, I think that this is misguided. A proper understanding of discourse again requires the functional analytic perspective. Discourse is that what has to make possible that we can articulate things about the world and that socio-cultural practices have an influence on meanings that feed back into understanding. In that sense, discourse, and with that language, is structurally entangled with understanding, yet, not itself part of it.
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Jeuk, A.A. The pragmatist domestication of Heidegger: Dreyfus on ‘skillful’ understanding. Synthese 200, 117 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03606-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03606-0