This leads to an interesting situation: no matter how hard we try to
articulate explicitly what is going on, we are always at the same time
tacitly participating in some interactional positioning or other. Because
of this situation (pointed out by philosophers of science and others, as
well as by students of language and interaction like myself), I believe we
should be studying the intersection of explicit articulation and tacit
action, as opposed to arguing that one level or another is better.
Much interesting work has been done recently in linguistic anthropology on
"linguistic ideology," which studies precisely this: how people's explicit
articulations of what they do with language interact with the
(analytically demonstrable) patterns in how they use language.
Joe Errington, for instance, describes how Javanese explicitly intend to
use forms that presuppose a higher status (ie, they try to make themselves
into higher status people by talking as they perceive those higher status
people to talk). But people do not have adequate representations of the
full grammar or pragmatic regularities of their language, so their
attempts to manipulate language in this way have unintended effects.
Errington and others (Judith Irvine, Asif Agha, even Labov) have shown how
this slippage or interaction between linguistic ideology and the
analytically-describable workings of language leads to diachronic language
change.
So if we generalize from this work, we see that full analyses of complex
human phenomena must examine the interplay of explicit articulations and
tacit actions, because this interplay causes important aspects of those
phenomena. So, in response to Jay's question about critique, I would say
that we should not decide in advance whether critique requires explicit
articulation or tacit action. It's got to involve both. But seeing how
will require a lot of work to displace Platonic and Enlightenment
assumptions about the primacy of distanced reflection.
(I can attest that this is hard work, having just tried to convince an
audience of philosophers of this point -- if we displace the primacy of
reflective articulation, where does that leave us academics?)
Stanton Wortham