Abstract

The phenomenologist's claim that "language structures the world" refers to our experience that the "world-texts" which we encounter constantly demand interpretation. As suggested in Chapter 1, we react to the problem of interpreting this chaos by constructing "meaning systems": systems of rules which permit us to "structure our choosing." Mastering any skill first involves acquiring the "constitutive" rules--the rules of the game, possession of which makes meaningful action possible by assuring that we play the same game as others whom we encounter. Chapter II shows how we "master" those rules by altering our perceptual framework so as to see the world in light of them, allowing us to carry them to the act of perceiving/interpreting the world. We thus experience the world not as data in search of an interpretation, but as already interpreted. "Texts" appear to us in a pregiven or created context rather than as "raw sense data." However, examining perception among chessplayers of various skill levels demonstrates that this context includes elements provided by "rules of praxis" as well, which the novice learned along with the constitutive rules. While in exact tasks such as playing tic-tac-toe these rules would have the same "certain" status, in inexact skills like playing chess or speaking a language, following common-sense rules of praxis suggested as "best" by tradition cannot make one infallible, for they aim less at how to perform well than at how not to perform poorly, as Chapter III reveals. Moreover, in our everyday tasks these "inauthentic" routines, while both necessary and useful, prove to blind us to other ways of seeing and the possibilities thus entailed. But, as Heidegger argues and an analysis of the development of chess skill confirms, these self-imposed blinders can be removed in a "moment of vision" which reveals to us other possibilities more in accord with our "authentic" sight. Though these new ways of seeing will themselves be reduced to routine in time, thus completing the circle, the master traverses this fundamental circle many times. For that reason, Chapter IV suggests that our experience of chess, literature, and language is constantly rounded off into chess theory, genres, and scripts, which thus draw strongly on the "they." If we forget this, our models will prove inadequate to account for human skill