Harry Collins

truth casualty war lie principla weapon

“To say that the first casualty of war is truth is to miss the rather more important point that a principal weapon of war is lies.”

—Harry Collins

mistake human experience knowledge automation

“The mistake is to believe that understanding human experience is the route to understanding knowledge. Rather, to understand human experience one must start by trying to understand all the things that might count as knowledge and then work out how humans might use them. The growth of automation has provided new problems and more demanding questions about what knowledge might be even though it remains the case that, in the last resort, humans are the only knowers.”

—Harry Collins

human machine boundary permeable robot

“We show that the boundary between humans and machines is permeable at least insofar as humans often find reason for acting in machinelike fashion. We explore the possibility of shifts in the position of the boundary between humans and machines: If humans changed the ways they acted, they could make the very boundary between themselves and machines disappear.”

—Harry Collins

strange done told normal life

“There is, then, nothing strange about things being done but not being told-it is normal life. What is strange is that anything can be told.”

—Harry Collins

knowledge tacit explicit easy obscure

“What the mistaken claim that all knowledge is tacit does indicate is that, mostly, explicit knowledge is harder to understand than tacit knowledge. Most writing on tacit knowledge takes it to be the other way around. Though the tension between tacit and explicit goes back at least as far as the Greeks, it was modernism in general and the computer revolution in particular that made the explicit seem easy and the tacit seem obscure.”

—Harry Collins

interactional expertice mastery life language

“The claim associated with the idea of interactional expertise is that mastery of an entire form of life is not necessary for the mastery of the language pertaining to the form of life”

—Harry Collins