Jay Lemke has remarked:
>It is easy to imagine tacit perceptual knowing, but less so for tacit
>effectual action.
I am not sure it is all that hard to imagine. I think immediately of
Heidegger's "ready to hand." The action is not attended to when driving a
nail, only the goal. Bateson tells a similar story about feeling with the
tip of the blind man's cane. And when we stop to consider it "tacit"
perception seems easier to understand because of a cultural predisposition
to regard perception as already passive. But it now seems like a better
analysis to say that it is actively mediated; that we see what we are
trying to see and what our history has lead us to expect to see in order to
solve our problems. We 'make' our perceptions insofar as they are
meaningful. And that gets pretty close to saying that perception is a form
of action.
>Finally, there is the issue of the quality of such action. Can tacit
>knowing and doing be genuinely critical?
A tough nut to crack. And one with which situated approaches of all stripes
have to contend. Maybe the trick would be to loop this sort of habit/us
back on itself--Dewey's "habit of reflection" worked for something like
this. I know I have an almost uncontrollable habit of tracking what the
author is trying to accomplish and what his or her assumptions are as I
read the text. There are, no doubt, a raft of other critical habits one
could cultivate. But in one sense these all remain embedded in tradition,
even if that tradition tries to make critique itself traditional--as I
think Dewey was trying to do.
John
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John St. Julien (stjulien who-is-at udel.edu)
Department of Educational Development
University of Delaware