Tacit Knowledge: A Dispositionalist Account
Final Report Abstract
What is tacit knowledge? Or, to put the question more concretely: How, for instance, are we to understand the claim of many linguists that we all have tacit knowledge of the grammatical rules of our native language, despite the fact that we are (normally) unable to articulate them? According to the received view in philosophy, such attributions of tacit knowledge are actually substantive hypotheses about the structure of information processing in our brains. Against this, the present project was centered on the thesis that attributions of tacit knowledge can be understood as ascribing complex dispositions of thought and action. The main results of the project revolve around this thesis by removing different obstacles standing in its way. (1) The dispositionalist view of tacit knowledge (apparently) runs afoul of the widely held view that tacit knowledge belongs to the realm of the “subpersonal” as opposed to the realm of the “personal”. To counter this objection, the project has presented a careful investigation and explication of the notoriously vague distinction “personal vs. subpersonal”, based on which it can be shown that the objection arises from conceptual confusion. (2) A further objection against the dispositionalist view of tacit knowledge derives from Ned Block’s influential “Blockhead”-thought experiment. By appealing to an imaginary humanoid robot Block aims to show that it is the structure of internal information processing that matters for intelligence—and thereby for cognitive states like tacit knowledge—and that complex behavioral dispositions are insufficient. The project has offered a thorough analysis and critique of this thought experiment and thereby rebutted the Blockhead objection. (3) The dispositionalist account of tacit knowledge must appeal to the idea that the knowledge of human beings is “fragmented”, where each fragment plays a distinctive role in the cognitive economy of its owner. The extant literature on cognitive fragmentation rests on the assumption that this role always consists in guiding actions. However, implicit knowledge often manifests itself not in action but in automatic, “intuitive” judgments and beliefs (e.g., about whether a given sentence is grammatical or not). Accordingly, the project has presented a defense of the thesis that extant theories of cognitive fragmentation are to be amended: In addition to action-guiding fragments they need to allow for fragments whose role is restricted to enabling automatic inferences.
