Abstract
I think a better title for this book would be “Understanding Others.” Although the selected essays either focus on or at least indirectly touch on the Tacit as tacit knowledge, the overall background problem of each of the essays is how we understand each other. The answer Turner rejects is what he calls the neo-Kantian one of seeking common presuppositions, frameworks, worldviews, paradigms, language games, communities, universal rational, or transcendental structures. In the place of neo-Kantian answers based on some kind of propositional knowledge or even abstract objects such as concepts and conceptual systems, Turner looks to tacit knowledge, social interaction, and neuroscience—at least what he calls the “connectionist” model in neuroscience similar to the Churchlands (Paul and Patricia), though Turner does not mention them, nor their “neurophilosophy,” and also similar to the unmentioned Marvin Minsky’s mind as a society of minds. Basically, Turner is promoting a distributed individualistic bottom-up approach to the problem of how common understandings are achieved: whether through computational functional simulations, constellations of neural patterning, mirror neurons, imitation, and social interaction.
As a reviewer of a book where the author argues for a connectionist approach to understanding where understanding involves mutual adjustment among neurons, simulations, functional equivalents or functional substitutions, and mutual adjustment among individual persons, it would bias the issue against the book to evaluate the book from an external set of propositions, an external framework, or even an external set of criteria. (See chapter 8 where Turner critiques Quentin Skinner’s theory of historical interpretation as one of the “neo-Kantian historicists” and counters Skinner through Turner siding with Collingwood’s theory of putting yourself in the historical situation to be interpreted.) Turner argues for an alternative approach to understanding—especially an alternative to what he terms the neo-Kantian supposedly transcendentally necessary structures for thought and judgment where no alternatives are allowed, let alone alternative thoughts or theories as logically possible. (See chapter 7 where Turner talks about the “troubles with the Kantian Mind” and squarely advocates “Connectionism” as an anti-dote to Kantianism.) So, I will attempt a review that simulates the argument and conclusions of the book’s particular constellation of selected individual essays. What patterns of argument do the essays produce? How do the essays converge on articulating, or should I say, invoking or stimulating, an understanding of tacit knowledge as a functional element of how we understand each other?
Going back a few steps, I notice that I started looking for other authors who have a point of view similar to Turner’s point of view. I found that Turner did not discuss some authors who came to mind, the Churchlands and Minsky. But he does discuss Davidson’s arguments against conceptual systems (especially in chapter 2), as well as refer to Quine’s naturalist epistemology as forerunners to his own ideas. In other words, can we help ourselves from avoiding thinking of our own beliefs as part of general systems of thought and as opposed to other systems of thought? Turner’s essays seem to work out a facet of a naturalist holistic epistemology that is intended to be anti-Kantian, and empirically based in computer science, cognitive psychology and neuroscience. So, Turner is working with what he rejects—a worldview or at the minimum a kind of philosophical outlook or to sound more empirically based, an extrapolation from the cognitive sciences and neurosciences. But still his views form a viewpoint, or framework, or conceptual system—a kind of thinking Turner aims to refute or at least show as problematic.
However, I think Turner clearly and concisely, though repeatedly in several of his essays, articulates serious challenges to philosophers who have tacitly followed the path of critical philosophy or neo-Kantianism: all views are framed within cultures or forms of life and those forms of life are implicitly normative. Turner poses three challenges to the (neo-)Kantian outlook where the supposedly implicitly held presuppositions of specific forms of life supposedly legitimate and explain beliefs: (a) explaining apparent strange beliefs with hidden presuppositions is under-determined because one can invent alternative hidden presuppositions; (b) explanation by way of hidden assumptions and presuppositions results in infinite regress because one can always ask for an explanation and/or justification of those presuppositions; and (c) using common assumptions to validate views and strange beliefs results in circularity because one treats those presuppositions that justify the strange beliefs as necessary requirements for all belief, or for all experience, or for all social-political-legal practice. When the very existence of a practice, a form of life, a culture, a worldview, is used to justify the justification by some set of presuppositions or principles as necessary, exclusive and exhaustive principles, we run in circles. (See chapter 10 for Turner’s concise discussion of Lewis Carroll’s version of this critique of neo-Kantianism and also Turner’s return to Brentano’s version of empathetic understanding.)
I think those three challenges to Kantianism are well known and variously answered by all post-Kantian philosophers. However, what Turner does contribute is a new attempt to escape the apparent fly-bottle of neo-Kantianism that he partly tacitly and partly explicitly borrows not so much from connectionist and/or naturalist epistemology, but more from Michael Polanyi’s post-critical philosophy of personal and tacit knowledge. In the following, I will attempt to explicate and articulate the tacit Polanyian dimension of Turner’s essays in this book.
Turner turns to Polanyi’s discussion of Meno in Turner’s first essay in part I of the book.
Polanyi thinks that the Meno shows conclusively that if all knowledge is explicit . . . then we cannot know a problem or look for its solution. And the Meno also shows, therefore, that if problems nevertheless exist and discoveries can be made by solving them, we can know things, and important things, that we cannot tell. (19)
Turner reviews attempts in Artificial Intelligence to develop models of tacit knowledge where tacit knowledge is reduced to rules, procedures, and heuristics and concludes,
. . . So ‘global identity’ between any model and the whole of tacit knowledge or any larger thing of which tacit knowledge, taken as a whole, is a part, such as “the scientific cognitive processes of community x,” is a hopeless aim. (28)
This underlines Polanyi’s use of tacit knowledge as part of the process of scientific discovery where any supposed scientific methodology falls flat, especially those methodologies that presuppose the use of presuppositions, worldviews, or even paradigms.
The next time Turner turns to Polanyi is in Turner’s discussion of how Harry Collins uses Polanyi’s theory of tacit knowledge to explain the social character or more exactly the supposed “collective” character of knowledge (chapter 3, 55-65). The “. . . solution to the problem of irreducible tacit knowledge” (62) is its “collective” character. People acquire “collective tacit knowledge” through “socialization.” However, Turner objects to how Collins interprets tacit knowledge as “collective.” According to Turner,
The big question is whether there is any reason to think that there has to be anything in the way of tacit knowledge that is shared or collective, that is, whether functional substitutability is enough—that each of us can get by with sufficient tacit knowledge of our own to function in a group and generate utterances that others can interpret, without “sharing” anything tacit. (65)
Here is where Turner’s sociological individualism turns up. The social is the individual interacting in groups adjusting to each other through their use of tacit knowledge of how people react and interact.
The essay that immediately follows (chapter 4) again attacks collectivist sociological methodologies and introduces the phenomenon of “neural mirroring” to explain so-called sharing, or better, to replace the collectivist concept of learning as sharing abstract social objects, such as theories, propositions, and presuppositions. According to Turner,
. . . mirroring as a copying mechanism is analogous to connectionist learning, in that what gets acquired depends on the individual history of the person doing the acquiring. It provides a mechanism for copying that is more rapid than trial and error, but a mechanism for excluding error or directly transferring mental content, either from one person to another or from a collective object to an individual. (76)
Here is where Turner kicks out the “collective object” from the ontology required for his naturalist but Polanyian account of how both understanding of others and discoveries occur.
The fifth chapter continues and repeats the argument against conceptual systems, worldviews, and so forth by focusing on how Turner’s Polanyian theory of practice solves the problem of knowledge transfer for which the idea of abstract conceptual systems was invented to solve, and does away with the relativism of so-called conceptual systems. Knowledge and practice is transferred through the hands-on approach:
Michael Polanyi . . . had an individual conception. Science was for him an apostolic succession, in which masters trained successors; however, what the successors got was not the thing the master had, but the capacity to discover on their own, and in their own way. Discovery was individual . . . For Polanyi, knowledge itself was “personal” . . . (88)
Turner contrasts Polanyi’s individualism to Kuhn’s own attribution of a herd-mentality to scientists: “. . . Kuhn can be taken as giving a model collective-collective explanation, in which a collective fact about consensus is accounted for by a collective fact about paradigms” (89). However, the basic point of the attack here against conceptual systems, paradigms, and other forms of “collective objects” is to show that the basic point of failure of such “neo-Kantianism” is relativism. The problem of relativism does not at all arise for a Polanyian non-conceptualist account of knowledge, knowing others, learning, and discovery.
Turner squarely faces a still unresolved problem in chapter 9: if the tacit is at the core of all knowledge, learning, and discovery, how is tacit knowledge transmitted among individuals? Turner does not want to appeal to conceptual systems, paradigms, semantic frameworks, and so forth. He has none of that.
. . . tacit knowledge need not be conceived of as a collective object, and neither does culture nor even language need to be understood in this way . . . Michael Polanyi’s major work was called Personal Knowledge . . . But Polanyi was . . . concerned with what could be transmitted . . . . In the case of science, he believed that personal contact was important, and especially important for great science. (158, 159)
Again in this ninth chapter, Turner returns to the tacky problem of the transmission of tacit knowledge: “. . . the problem with tacit knowledge is explaining how it is transmitted” (170). Turner’s solution sounds almost as strange as Polanyi’s hands-on approach to transmission from master to disciple. We use explicit knowledge as simulations:
. . . explicit statements that people make to enable themselves to be understood, or construct to enable them to understand others, do not correspond to tacit knowledge. They are, rather, functional substitutes for bits of tacit knowledge for particular audiences and particular purposes, invented on the fly. (171)
Turner’s main point of argument is this: On one side, tacit knowledge is transmitted through hands-on activity guided by an expert-coach. (See chapter 6 for how mirror neurons fit into this issue of tacit knowledge transfer and for specific examples of coaching, such as learning to swing a baseball bat, in tacit knowledge transfer.) On the other side, tacit knowledge is reproduced in the individual through attending to statements used as simulations or models of the tacit knowledge. The primary contact may be one-to-one, or one-to-many, but the “one” and the “many” are individual persons and not collective objects such as conceptual systems.
The short of it is that for Turner, philosophy was derailed when it followed Kant and the neo-Kantians. You can turn to chapter 11, the final chapter, and its sub-section “Some Deep History” (193ff.) for Turner’s critique of Kant, and neo-Kantians such as Hermann Cohen, and Ernst Cassirer. I find it somewhat ironical, if not self-contradictory, that Turner’s critique of Kantianism in this final essay ends the book with a reference to Quine:
The most famous text on naturalist epistemology, Quine’s, took the view that epistemology would eventually collapse into or be replaced by scientific knowledge of the process of knowing . . . Kant’s distinction between psychology and the epistemic was a target of this claim, just as Kant’s analytic synthetic distinction was the target of “Two Dogmas of Empiricism.” (209; see also Turner’s chapter 2, sub-section “The Quinean Background” for fairly extensive discussion of Turner’s intellectual heritage in Quine)
But what I find troubling and virtually impossible is my attempt to describe in Turner’s own terms what he is doing in this collection of his essays without referring to labels for schools of thought, or worldviews, or models, or theories, or presupposition and other abstract “collective objects.” Can we do away with abstract symbolic systems or conceptual frameworks for understanding the thinking, philosophies, and arguments of others? If so, how? Perhaps we can only avoid the attribution of worldviews to other thinkers by engaging in face-to-face conversations as opposed to using text-based communication or using third-party intermediaries such as books, the Internet, and the new social media. But that means in a book review, as well as in books and articles, we can only use collective objects and hope they stimulate the correct neurons in the individual readers. The bottom line question is this: Do books, texts, and other linguistic intermediaries use verbal strings to directly stimulate connections among neural strings? Or, do books and symbolic intermediaries create quasi-independent virtual mental worlds of abstract thought with a story-line or narrative or thematic structure and with problems or internal conflicts as well as external oppositions? What’s in a book: abstract thought or strings that set neurons firing away?