I have speculated a bit about this in my odd essay about radical cyberspace
futures for education, using virtual reality immersion to experience
directly realities on other space-time scales than the one we're evolved
for. ("Education, cyberspace, and change" -- somewhere on my website
there's a link to someone else's copy.)
Yes, this could also apply to matters of complexity such as traffic
patterns on highways or in the cortex (though the degrees of complexity are
vastly different and not everything perceptual scales up). It would not be
"understanding" in the sense that we could explain to ourselves in fairly
brief verbal terms, with or without simple diagrams, using technical or
nontechnical words, what's going on. We might nonetheless gain an
'intuitive' or tacit sense of what was happening, learn to distinguish
patterns (as in John's excellent study of learning to see cell types), and
... then what?
I think a key issue here is how to close the loop with ourselves in it.
Normally, we name those patterns, model their dynamics in some simple way
with analogies or simple mathematical forms, and use these explanatory
constructs as tools to guide our intervention in the systems' behavior. It
might be somewhat satisfying to feel that we sense the order and regularity
in cortex dynamics presented to us as complex visual displays ... but it
might be very frustrating if we could not use this tacit knowledge to act
on these systems.
Bourdieu offers us the athlete's or dancer's habitus as a paradigm of tacit
praxis (is that a contradiction? must praxis be informed by explicit and
articulate theory, by theorized knowledge, or only by knowledge that has a
critical component from experience? see below). One senses the pattern and
responds, not automatically, but certainly without the mediation of
articulate deliberation, in a way informed by past experience and action.
There is a habitus for language production, of course, but that is itself
not normally linguistically mediated.
I think there is something of a challenge here for mediational theories of
activity. So much activity is not deliberatively or articulatively
mediated, though it is no doubt still mediated, tacitly, by complex
structures of habitus, which in turn may have been shaped by semiotic
practices, including language use, tool use, etc. We have still not quite
answered the basic AT question of the relation between sign-mediation and
tool-mediation, especially not with regard to accumulated dispositions over
time scales long compared to that of the execution of action or activity.
It is easy to imagine tacit perceptual knowing, but less so for tacit
effectual action. How would we ACT in/on a simulation of cortical flows? if
they were our own flows visually fed back to us, this would probably happen
inevitably ... but otherwise? what sort of tacit language of control could
exist? could we even make a motor output complex enough to respond to such
dynamics? perhaps if our own cortical flows could be fed forward into the
simulation, and coupled to other perceived flows (a nice example of the
principle of having to be a participant in order to influence a system),
then there could be 'communication and control' at the tacit level ... this
would be a revolution indeed, it could even in theory lead to a way to
supersede language as our primary tool ... a vast evolutionary leap ... but
I don't quite see yet that it is obvious (1) how the coupling between our
cortical flows and the flows of other sorts of complex systems could be
accomplished in the first place -- and I mean in principle, not
technologically, or (2) whether the complexity of the cortex is sufficient
in all cases (though presumably it can do a lot more than we presently ask
of it).
Finally, there is the issue of the quality of such action. Can tacit
knowing and doing be genuinely critical? is it more likely to become
entrained in existing process, unable to critique or imagine alternatives?
Critical reflection appears to require the irrealis overlay produced by
semiotic mediations of the articulate sort. The only direction for a tacit
alternative I can see offhand would be some generalization of the notion
that tool-mediation can also be critical, perhaps in the sense that a
habitus produced from life experience, say of oppression, might tacitly
resist practices more natural to those who have only lived as oppressors
... and might also tend, in the same material circumstances, to generate
alternative or modified practices, thus offering a tacit critique. But
would this be a critique for the actor? or only for some observer
interpreting these events through articulate sign mediations?
Any ways forward through this landscape of mysteries? JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
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