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Practical Knowledge Practical Knowledge: Outlines of a Theory of Traditions and Skills Edited by J.C. NYrRI and BARRY SMITH CROOM HELM London• New York• Sydney Contents Preface vii © 1988 J.C. Nyiri and Barry Smith Croom Helm Ltd, Provident House, Burrell Row, 1. Knowing How vs. Knowing That 1 Beckenham, Kent, BR3 lAT Barry Smith Croom Helm Australia, 44-50 Waterloo Road, North Ryde, 2113, New South Wales 2. Tradition and Practical Knowledge 17 Published in the USA by J.C. Nyiri Croom Helm in association with Methuen, Inc. 3. Theory and Practice: The Point of Contact 53 29 West 35th Street Roderick M. Chisholm New York, NY 10001 4. Rechtsgeftthl and the Rule of Law British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data 61 Roger Scruton Practical knowledge: outlines of a theory of traditions and skills. I. Knowledge, Theory of 5. Meaning and Rules 90 I. Nyfri, J.C. II. Smith, Barry Eva Picardi 121 BO161 ISBN 0-7099-4477-2 6. On the Feeling for Language and its 122 Epistemic Value Library ot Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rudolf Haller Practical knowledge: outlines of a theory of traditions and skills/ edited by J.C. Nyiri and Barry Smith. 7. Remarks on SprachgefOhl 136 p. cm. Joachim Schulte Based on papers from a symposium held in Schloss Lichtenau bei Gfohl. Aug. 26-27, 1985. ISBN 0-7099-4477-2 8. Poetry and Nationalism 147 I. Knowledge, Theory of - Congresses. I. Nyfri, Janos Krist6f. Johan Wrede II. Smith, Barry, Ph. 0. BD161.P745 1987 9. Practices of Art 172 121 - dcl9 . 87-23087 Barry Smith Notes on Contributors 210 I; Index 211 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Mackays of Chatham Ltd, Kent Preface The seeds of this volume were planted at a symposium on 'Kunstgefdhl, Sprachgeffthl, Rechtsgefilhl: Zum Problem· des praktischen Wissens' which was held in Schloss Licht­ enau bei GfOhl, ancestral home of the von Ehrenfels family, on the 26th and 27th of August 1985. Our thanks go to the Abeille Ehrenfels. Reinhard Fabian, Wolfgang Grassl, Rudolf Haller and Otto Schindler, all of whom had some hand in the organisation of the symposium. Special thanks are due also to the Osterreichische Forschungs..: gemeinschaft and the NiederOsterreichische Landesregierung, whose generosity made it possible. J.C.N., B.S. Budapest and Manchester, November 1986 vii Practical Knowledge: Outlines of a Theory of Traditions and Skills, J. C. Nyíri and B. Smith (eds.), London/New York/Sydney: Croom Helm, 1988 Knowing How vs. Knowing That Barry Smith 1. Practical vs. Propositional Intelligence More than forty years after Gilbert Ryle published his paper on "Knowing How and Knowing That" in 1945, 1 the problem of practical knowledge has still failed to establish for itself a secure position in the field of problems dealt with by analytic philosophers. Thus even today it can safely be asserted that it is discursive or theoretical knowledge. knowledge linguistically expressed, above all knowledge in the form of propositions, that holds centre stage in analytic treatments of epistemology and cognition. The present volume. which consist� of treatments of the presuppositions and specific character of practical knowledge in different spheres, is an attempt to fill this gap. The successive chapters fall into four interrelated groups: (I) those dealing with general theoretical problems associated with knowledge and practice and their inter­ relations; (2) those dealing with habit, learning, technique and skill as social phenomena. phenomena tied to socially established traditions and customs; (3) those dealing with that special kind of practical knowledge which is manifested in our use of language; and (4) those dealing with the role of practical knowledge and of tradition in the sphere of art. 1 Knowing How vs. Knowing That Knowing How vs. Knowing That Questions as to the role and nature of practical know­ other elements of the physiological and material contexts ledge were addressed by the classical Greek philosophers - to which they belong. Rather, our sensory contents are a not least by Plato in The Statesman and by Aristotle, for matter of holistic structures, experienced as being tied example in his writings on akrasia - as also inter alia by intrinsically to certain kinds of surrounding conditions and American pragmatist philosophers such as William James to certain characteristic presuppositions and outcomes. and Dewey. 2 It is however in the more recent philosoph­ Such contents are, most importantly, regularly recurring, ical literature of continental Europe that the most sus­ so that we have been able to build up through experience tained attempts to cope with questions of this sort are to a repertoire of perceptual structures which we are able be found. One thinks, for example, of Nietzsche, with his spontaneously to call in aid in relevant circumstances. emphasis on the role of training and drill and of the pain It might indeed be argued that it is recurring holistic involved in repetition and in the punishment of deviation, structures of this sort which constitute the true building all of which Nietzsche sees as powerful determining blocks of our perceptual world, something which may factors in the moral and cultural evolution of mankind. explain for example our capacity spontaneously to appre­ One thinks of Heidegger, whose Being and Time is, in its hend a facial physiognomy or the style or period of a phenomenological core, nothing less than a description of work of art or piece of music. the various forms of everyday action, both successful and What holds of perception, now, holds also of our unsuccessful, and of the ways in which such action shapes actions. Thus Christian van Ehrenfels, founder of Gestalt and determines the ontological structure of the world of psychology in the 1890s, points to the way in which everyday experience. Above all one thinks of the Gestalt complex higher order actions are executed by being psychologists with their conception of perceptual experi­ broken down into constituent, relatively routine tasks, ence as a spontaneous total process of physiological equi­ each of which may be performed without thought or con­ libration, as contrasted with more traditional empiricist scious reflection. A given higher order action is then views of perception as involving separate or separable itself able to be carried out more or less automatically in phases of sensation and cognition. virtue of the fact that the objects whose successive realisation is aimed at in the given constituent micro­ actions have become, in different ways, stamped with value in their own right. The desires necessary to call forth each particular task thereby enter into consciousness 2. Perception and Action automatically, or, to put the matter in another way, the subject himself has become affected in such a way that desire for the realisation of each given object arises Central to the different theories of Gestalt is the idea spontaneously within him, without his having to recall or that our perceptual experiences do not arise because we work out rationally in each successive instance why it is consciously or unconsciously apply rules or concepts to that he finds this given object valuable. 3 putatively meaningless collections of data gathered at our Our everyday actions in the world are effective, then, sensory receptors. Rather, we have been formed by our not primarily because we think out in each case what it previous experiences and by our immersion in our present is that we want to do. Rather - in part because we have perceptual environment to the extent that the informa­ been shaped in certain ways by past experiences - the tion taken in by our senses is already, in normal circum­ world in which we act is positively and negatively charged, stances, endowed with meaning. That this is possible is a in different ways, by a pattern of values which as it were consequence of the fact that the contents of sensation are attract or repel our successive actions. not mere sums of elementary data separated off from the 2 3 Knowing How vs. Knowing That Knowing How vs. Knowing That manifest different degrees of salience - to the extent, in fact, that the subject may be said to choose the stimuli to 3. The Structure of Behaviour which he will be sensitive. The functioning of our muscles, nerves and psyche is not, then, identical to the functioning of a mosaic of juxtaposed parts. Human action is rather a The later Gestaltists argued quite generally that our capa­ matter of integrated behaviours whose physiological and cities to think and to perceive are not separate, independ­ psychological sides are fused together, in much the same ent faculties, but rather mutually dependent aspects of a way as the information from our five separate senses is single physiological-psychological whole which would fused together in our everyday perceptual experience. embrace in principle also the habits and skills of the Here again, the subject will acquire, in part through thinking and perceiving subject. The philosopher who repetition, a repertoire of behaviour patterns, a wealth of has done most to bring out the implications of a view of different portmanteau reactions (walking, running, trip­ this sort in regard to its practical, behavioural implica­ ping, sliding, lifting, pushing, speaking, writing), to which tions is undoubtedly Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose he may resort, spontaneously, from occasion to occasion. phenomenology of bodily experience must come close to These behaviour patterns are as it were written into his being the most sustained defence of the primacy of prac­ muscles ('become part of his very flesh', as Merleau-Ponty tical knowledge in the literature of philosophy. For while would express it). They are however built up in such a Gestalt-theorists such as Koffka acknowledged that the way that they can be transferred immediately for example holistic implications of their work extended beyond the from one group of muscles to another, should occasion sphere of purely perceptual phenomena, they themselves arise (for example when a limb is amputated, or when we were concerned in their work almost entirely with the move from writing words on paper to writing the same latter, so that Merleau-Ponty can be said to have drawn words on a blackboard or in the sand).
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