Dreyfus
There are two distinct lines of thought in the work of Hubert Dreyfus which suggest support for a conception of tacit knowledge. One is his argument against AI-influenced cognitive science. In What Computers Still Can’t Do, he argues that the project of modeling intelligence on algorithms or sets of instructions or rules faces a vicious and undermining regress [Dreyfus 1999].
His other project is the interpretation of the philosopher Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time. Dreyfus finds in Heidegger the basis for a reorientation of philosophical approaches to knowledge, a reorientation which places embodied practical know-how rather than disinterested context-free ‘knowledge-that’ at the heart of the analysis. Following Heidegger, he stresses the importance of skilled coping for an account of how it is possible to think about the world at all.
Traditionally, philosophers have assumed that the most basic understanding we have of objects is as mere space occupying stuff. Heidegger argues that our basic stance is practical. Objects are first encountered as tools or equipment with taken for granted uses and purposes. Only given that understanding of what is ‘ready-to-hand’ can one have a more abstracted understanding of objects now thought of decontextualised from such practical projects and merely as space occupying and ‘present-at-hand’.
This stress on the primacy of practical coping and of tacit over explicit knowledge captures some of what Dreyfus finds in Heidegger’s approach. This idea of situation-specificity plays a role in Dreyfus’ other main argument for the importance of skilled coping based on his critique of using algorithmic AI to model human intelligence.
To what extent does Dreyfus’ account of Heidegger support a notion of tacit knowledge?
What is the nature of his regress argument concerning what computers cannot do? What is his solution to the challenge that that argument raises?
Reading
Dreyfus, H.L. (1999) What Computers Still Can’t Do, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press 'Introduction to the revised edition' pp1-66
Dreyfus, H.L. (1991) Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press pp40-59
Further reading
Rouse, J. (2000) 'Coping and its contrasts’ in Wrathall, M. and Malpas, J. (eds) Heidegger, Coping, and Cognitive Science, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press
Reflections on Dreyfus
