On interactional expertise: Pragmatic and ontological considerations

This paper is a critical examination of Harry Collins's investigation into a third form of knowledge, “interactional expertise.” We argue that although Collins makes a genuine contribution to the phenomenological literature on expertise, his account requires further critical evaluation and response due to pragmatic and ontological considerations. We contend that by refining (in some questionable ways) the category of interactional expertise so as to create epistemological equivalence between activists, sociologists, critics, journalists, and some science administrators, Collins potentially undermines the value that a more rigorously construed concept of interactional expertise might have. We further show that Collins misunderstands the nature of embodiment in a way that is exacerbated by the sociological perspective that he adopts.     

Tacit Knowledge and Spiritual Pedagogy

Michael Polanyi recognized the relevance of his theory of tacit knowledge to all areas of human understanding, including the religious, spiritual and moral domains. Nonetheless, few if any efforts have attempted to extend his theory's implications into the formulation of a spiritual epistemology. This article examines the possible implications of the concept of tacit knowledge advanced by Polanyi for the development of a spiritual epistemology. Furthermore, due to the relation Polanyi described between a skill and the tacit element of understanding, there are additional implications drawn out in this article for the formulation of a corresponding spiritual pedagogy     

Perception, knowledge and freedom in the age of extremes: on the historical epistemology of Ludwik Fleck and Michael Polanyi

This paper deals with Ludwik Fleck??s theory of thought styles and Michael Polanyi??s theory of tacit knowledge. Though both concepts have been very influential for science studies in general, and both have been subject to numerous interpretations, their accounts have, somewhat surprisingly, hardly been comparatively analyzed. Both Fleck and Polanyi relied on the physiology and psychology of the senses in order to show that scientific knowledge follows less the path of logical principles than the path of accepting or rejecting specific conventions, where these may be psychologically or sociologically grounded. It is my aim to show that similarities and differences between Fleck and Polanyi are to be seen in the specific historical and political context in which they worked. Both authors, I shall argue, emphasized the relevance of perception in close connection to their respective understanding of science, freedom, and democracy.     

Linguistic competence and expertise

Questions about the relationship between linguistic competence and expertise will be examined in the paper. Harry Collins and others distinguish between ubiquitous and esoteric expertise. Collins places considerable weight on the argument that ordinary linguistic competence and related phenomena exhibit a high degree of expertise. His position and ones which share close affinities are methodologically problematic. These difficulties matter because there is continued and systematic disagreement over appropriate methodologies for the empirical study of expertise. Against Collins, it will be argued that the term ‘expertise’ should be reserved for expertise (esoteric experts) and exclude everyday performance (ubiquitous experts). Wittgensteinian ideas will be employed to maintain that it is mistaken and misleading to derive substantive conclusions about the epistemology of expertise from ordinary linguistic competence and vice versa. Significant attention will be devoted to the notion of following a rule with particular reference to the intelligibility of tacit rule following. A satisfactory theoretical approach to expertise should not involve making important claims about ordinary linguistic competence.     

Situation and Limitation: Making Sense of Heidegger on Thrownness

Abstract: As Heidegger acknowledges, our understanding is essentially situated and so limited by the context and tradition into which it is thrown. But this ‘situatedness’ does not exhaust Heidegger's concept of ‘thrownness’. By examining this concept and its grammar, I develop a more complete interpretation. I identify several different kinds of finitude or limitation in our understanding, and touch on ways in which we confront and carry different dimensions of our past.     

What Does Heidegger Mean by the Transcendence of Dasein?

Abstract

In this paper, I shall examine the evolution of Heidegger’s concept of ‘transcendence’ as it appears in Being and Time (1927), ‘On the Essence of Ground’ (1928) and related texts from the late 1920s in relation to his rethinking of subjectivity and intentionality. Heidegger defines Being as ‘transcendence’ in Being and Time and reinterprets intentionality in terms of the transcendence of Dasein. In the critical epistemological tradition of philosophy stemming from Kant, as in Husserl, transcendence and immanence are key notions (see Husserl, The Idea of Phenomenology, 1907, and Ideas I, 1913). Indeed, ‘transcendence in immanence’ is a leitmotif of Husserl’s phenomenology. Husserl discusses transcendence in some detail in Cartesian Meditations §11 in a manner that is not dissimilar to Heidegger. Heidegger is critical of Husserl’s understanding of consciousness and intentionality and Heidegger deliberately chooses to discuss transcendence as an exceptional domain for the discussion of beings in his ‘On the Essence of Ground’, his submission to Husserl’s seventieth-birthday Festschrift. Despite his championing of a new concept of transcendence in the late 1920s, Heidegger effectively abandons the term during the early 1930s. In this paper, I shall explore Heidegger’s articulation of his new ontological conception of finite transcendence and compare it with Husserl’s conception of the transcendence of the ego in order to get clearer what is at stake in Heidegger’s conceptions of subjectivity, Dasein and transcendence.     

Temporal Finitude and Finitude of Possibility: The Double Meaning of Death in Being and Time

Abstract

The confusion surrounding Heidegger’s account of death in Being and Time has led to severe criticisms, some of which dismiss his analysis as incoherent and obtuse. I argue that Heidegger’s critics err by equating Heidegger’s concept of death with our ordinary concept. As I show, Heidegger’s concept of death is not the same as the ordinary meaning of the term, namely, the event that ends life. But nor does this concept merely denote the finitude of Dasein’s possibilities or the groundlessness of existence, as William Blattner and Hubert Dreyfus have suggested. Rather, I argue, the concept of death has to be understood both as temporal finitude and as finitude of possibility. I show how this reading addresses the criticisms directed at Heidegger’s death analysis as well as solving textual problems generated by more limited interpretations of the concept.     

From Destruktion to Deconstruction: A Response to Moran

Abstract

As a response to Moran’s (1994) recommendation that Heidegger’s Destruktion be extensively elaborated and critiqued, this paper suggests a way in which Heidegger’s thinking can be more clearly understood as a search for how better to ‘say’ the destruction. By briefly tracing how Heidegger’s thinking on the Destruktion repeatedly turns against itself throughout his writings, it is demonstrated that Heidegger does indeed revise the notion by abandoning the term in his later writing; to replace it first with the concept of ‘overcoming’, and subsequently with the notion of Verwindung. This self-critical reworking of the Destruktion is evident in his turning towards these concepts; which is taken up by Derrida’s deconstruction in its simultaneous turning towards and away from Heidegger’s Destruktion.     

Heidegger’s Concept of Truth Reconsidered in Light of Tugendhat’s Critique

Ernst Tugendhat’s critique of Martin Heidegger’s conception of truth is an ongoing topic in Heideggerian scholarship. In this paper, I contribute to the ongoing exchange between defenders of Heidegger and those who are in agreement with Tugendhat. Specifically, I contend that Tugendhat’s criticisms fail to situate Heidegger’s account of truth within his broader phenomenological–hermeneutic project. In the end, Tugendhat’s critique is grounded upon philosophical assumptions that Heidegger is bringing under question by rethinking the concept of truth. I suggest that thinking through Tugendhat’s critique and attempting to formulate an adequate Heideggerian response gives us a richer understanding of both Heidegger’s account of truth and his general philosophical project.     

A progress report on the ongoing Heidegger reception

Philosophy, which does not begin again, always unfolds against the background of the ongoing philosophical tradition, which it needs to interpret. I argue that Heidegger’s theories, like all philosophical theories, can neither be reduced to, nor separated from, the historical context. In that sense they are like all other philosophical views, perhaps in theory ahistorical but in practice historical, hence always bound up with and inseparable from their historical moment. If, as I believe, Heidegger’s theories led him in part toward National Socialism, there is no alternative, if philosophy is to survive in a meaningful sense, to rejecting those aspects of his position, which must now be considered as simply and wholly dead, in favor of other aspects of Heidegger’s thinking that, if they are still living, can possibly be saved.     

Auseinandersetzung,Colonialism and Heidegger’s Oblivion of Other Beginnings

ABSTRACT

This article attempts to enact a creative confrontation (Auseinandersetzung) between Heidegger and Sikh spirituality. Heidegger’s idea of confrontation did not stay the same throughout his career. It goes through multiple transformations. The earliest iteration of this idea in the 1930s can be linked to his ethno-centrism. In the Black Notebooks, Heidegger performs a confrontation with himself, which marks his attempts to go beyond his prior position. Later in the 1960s and 1970s, Heidegger gets a glimpse of what a different confrontation might look like. However, he fails to enact it. This failure can be located in his inability to build a profound connection between his quest and non-European traditions. The article concludes with a fleeting glance at what such a connection between Heidegger’s quest and Sikh spirituality might look like.     

Levels of immersion, tacit knowledge and expertise

This paper elaborates on the link between different types and degrees of experience that can be gone through within a form of life or collectivity—the so-called levels of immersion—and the development of distinct types of tacit knowledge and expertise. The framework is then probed empirically and theoretically. In the first case, its ‘predictions’ are compared with the accounts of novices who have gone through different ‘learning opportunities’ during a pre-operational training programme for running a huge nickel industrial plant in Brazil. These are also analysed vis-à-vis the experience of an expert who has designed and experienced the outcomes of two pre-operational training sessions in the nickel industry before developing and managing the one discussed here. Theoretically, the framework is used to pinpoint exactly what interactional experts who have developed their expertise through linguistic socialisation alone are able to do as well as to analyse the case of technical connoisseurs. The results indicate that the proposed framework is useful. It supports the design and improvement of training programmes for the development of tacit knowledge while at the same time bringing about a refined analysis of claims concerning the abilities of types of experts and expertise.     

Against the Politics of Postmodern Philosophy of Science

This paper discusses the tenets of the politics of postmodern philosophy of science. At issue are Rouse’s version of naturalism and his reading of Quine’s distinction between the indeterminacy of translation and the underdetermination of theories by empirical evidence. I argue that the postmodern approach to science’s research practices as patterns of interaction within the world is not in line with the naturalistic account Rouse aims at. I focus also on Rouse’s readings of Heidegger’s existential conception of science and Kuhn’s concept of normal science. Finally, a strategy of defending science’s cognitive distinctiveness in terms of hermeneutic philosophy is suggested as an alternative to the postmodern philosophy of science.     

Heidegger in the township

Imagine Heidegger in a township. Imagine you are able to translate his concept of ‘care’ to ‘the people’. Would they agree that in their ordinary experience people care? I argue not and contend that, instead, they would choose the term ‘struggle’. I analyse experiential aspects of ordinary life in the context of the township, which involves a significant part of people around the world, in order to argue that, at least in such contexts, it is a more common experience for people to struggle than to care. In this way I hope to show how a phenomenological analysis of everyday life experience such as Heidegger's can contribute to the understanding of contextual issues, but also how a context can induce the introduction of new concepts of thinking.     

时间与本源——关于德里达对海德格尔时间概念的批判

在《存在与书写》①一文中,德里达针对海德格尔《存在与时间》②第82节注释中对哲学史流俗时间观的梳理,对亚里士多德、康德、黑格尔的文本进行了重新的阅读。本文将把德里达的批评重构为三组,并依次指明其中的弊病。     

Der Begriff der „Bekundung“ bei Husserl und Heidegger

The article intends to explore the extension of several Husserlian concepts and issues in Heidegger’s first lectures of the 1920s. To this extent it focuses especially on the concept of Bekundung (intimation), exposed by Husserl in the second book of his Ideas, and also discussed by Heidegger in his Freiburg lecture Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie (WS 1919/20). By following this concept both in Husserl’s theory of the constitution of materiality and causal reality, as well as in his discussion of the personal self, and by pointing out the tensions between the two perspectives, we will try to show that Heidegger’s use of the term can in several aspects be seen as an attempt to solve certain difficulties of the Husserlian perspective. Thus, we wish to sketch out a part of that complex network of continuities and differences that constitute the “common ground” of the two thinkers in the early 1920s.     

Becoming a philosopher: What Heidegger learned from Dilthey, 1919–25

Wilhelm Dilthey is, famously, an epistemological pioneer for a second, ‘human’ kind of science that ‘understands’ life as we live it, instead of ‘explaining’ things as we observe them. Even today, he is usually cited for his role in the Erklären–Verstehen debate. My article, however, follows Heidegger's suggestion that we make the existence of the debate itself the problem. Whether there are different sorts of entity, different reasons for studying them and different means for doing so – such issues raise questions about science itself, not just about how to do it better. Moreover, what sort of philosopher is competent to address such questions? Heidegger argues that Dilthey's later writings intimate that it must be one who thinks from the ‘standpoint of (historical) life itself.’ This issue, says Heidegger, is ‘alive’ in Dilthey but is continually short-circuited by his very traditional plan for a ‘Critique of Historical Reason.’ Dilthey's unsuccessful struggles to produce this Critique are his gift to us, however. They encourage us to explicitly reconsider, as Heidegger does not only in Being and Time but throughout his life, what Dilthey cannot: If philosophy, like all human practices, is historical to the core, what is it to ‘be’ philosophical, about science or anything else?     

The trouble with Madeleine

I respond to Selinger and Mix (Selinger, E. and Mix, J. 2004. On interactional expertise: Pragmatic and ontological considerations. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 3: 145–163), concentrating on their charges that Collins (Collins, H. M. 2004a. Interactional expertise as a third form of knowledge. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 3: 125–143) underrates the importance of interactional expertise as an expertise sui generis and that the paper fails to analyse the idea of embodiment sufficiently holistically, misleading treating the ‘body’ as no more than the linear sum of its parts. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Tacit knowledge management

How can we identify and estimate workers’ tacit knowledge? How can we design a personnel mix aimed at improving and speeding up its transfer and development? How is it possible to implement tacit knowledge sustainable projects in remote areas? In order to answer these questions, it is necessary to distinguish between types of tacit knowledge, to establish what they allow for and to consider their sources. It is also essential to find a way of managing the tacit knowledge ‘stock’ and distribution within the workforce. In short, a conceptual framework is needed to manage tacit knowledge. Based on previous works and 2 years of action research, this paper introduces such a framework and describes its partial application to support the pre-operational training and hiring in a large industrial plant in Brazil. Two contributions emerge from the research. First, the concept of ‘levels of similarity’ is introduced as a means to qualify the experience of workers and estimate the associated tacit knowledge. Second, the capability of carrying out three types of judgement properly and speedily is put forward as being a core ability of those who possess what has been called ‘collective tacit knowledge’ (Collins in Organ Stud 28(2):257–262, 2007). In practical terms, the results indicate the opportunity for companies to capitalize on the experience and tacit knowledge of their workers in a systematic way and with due recognition. Ultimately, positive impacts are expected in their absorptive capacity as well as in their management and human resources systems, accident prevention, productivity and the development of sustainable projects in remote areas.