Tacit Knowledge: A Dispositionalist Account

• Applicant: Dr. Lars Dänzer
• Subject Area: Theoretical Philosophy
• Term: from 2018 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 398591551

The notion of tacit knowledge (TK) – knowledge inaccessible to consciousness – plays a central role in the foundations of linguistics and in different areas of philosophy and psychology. The received accounts of TK, developed in the 1970s and ’80s, tie the notion to substantive assumptions about subpersonal cognitive organization. But various developments in philosophy and cognitive science cast doubt on these accounts. This project aims to bring theorizing about the nature of TK up to date by motivating, developing and defending a more satisfactory account of TK. To this end, the project draws on, and combines, two important strands in the recent literature. (i) It proposes an account of TK modelled on dispositionalist theories of belief, tying TK only to the right kinds of behavioural and mental dispositions, as opposed to any specific subpersonal organization underlying these dispositions. While dispositionalist theories of mental states were long thought to face devastating objections, developments in metaphysics and philosophy of science have paved the way for a major comeback of such views. (ii) To accommodates the characteristic differences between TK and paradigmatic beliefs, the project turns to the assumption that the total cognitive state of an agent should be construed as comprising different task-indexed fragments – fragments that guide an agent with respect to some task but not others. Thus, the project ties in with a recent surge of work advocating the explanatory merits of this fragmentationist assumption for different areas of philosophy.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants