Abstract
The relationship between language and practice has been badly and profoundly misunderstood. There is an intimate relationship at the collective level and the content of language is formed by the practices of a community. It is not the case, however, that an individual has to engage in all the practices of a community in order to acquire the language and the practical understanding that goes with it. Were this not the case there could be no societies: societies depend on the division of labour and any profound division of labour depends on practical understanding by those who do not themselves practice what they have to understand. Were it not the case that individuals could learn language without practicing it then the speech of the congenitally wheelchair-bound, or blind, would be noticeably limited. The chapter works through this position, contrasting it with the position developed by philosophers of practice such as Hubert Dreyfus, describes experiments which support the position, and explores the question of the extent to which this means experience can be captured by language.
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Notes
- 1.
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1953, p. 223).
- 2.
Dreyfus (1965).
- 3.
Another incarnation of the argument is to do with the incommensurability of Kuhnian ‘paradigms’ in science. (Kuhn, 1962).
- 4.
See Collins (2004a) for the ‘social embodiment thesis’ and its counterpart, the ‘minimal embodiment thesis’.
- 5.
For the difference between symbol manipulation and language see the ‘The Transformation-Translation Distinction’ in Collins (2010, p. 25).
- 6.
See, for example, Collins (2004b).
- 7.
Selinger, Dreyfus, and Collins (2007 at p. 737).
- 8.
It was unfortunate that one of the most salient arguments against the potency of computers, John Searle’s ‘Chinese Room’ argument, starts by positing the existence of a completely fluent computer. Actually, the Chinese Room would not work without it being embedded in society through the medium of a human being (Collins, 1990, 2010).
- 9.
See the quotation from H G Well’s ‘Country of the Blind’ below.
- 10.
I am sure Dreyfus too would believe that a community of hammerers is necessary to develop the HAL language but he does not work out the consequences, concentrating on the practices of individuals.
- 11.
I am sure Dreyfus would agree that isolated individuals and isolated computers could not speak. Again, however, it is a matter of what you concentrate on. He concentrates on their activity rather than their isolation.
- 12.
See also Collins (2011) for development of the point.
- 13.
Latest results can be found at http://www.cf.ac.uk/socsi/expertise
- 14.
- 15.
- 16.
For a recent analysis of the relationship between ‘contributory expertise’ and ‘interactional expertise’ see Collins (2011).
- 17.
A ‘brain-in-a-vat’ is here assumed to be different to a computer. A computer, (here by definition) is a digital symbol manipulator or transformer. It is not immersed in language, only in symbols, irrespective of its physical connections to the rest of society. The brain-in-the-vat, we assume, has some mysterious properties that allow it to be immersed in meaningful language, as opposed to symbols, if the right prostheses are added. It should be thought of as a human from whom more and more bodily parts have been stripped away.
- 18.
Selinger et al. (2007).
- 19.
H. G. Wells (1911) ‘The Country of the Blind.’ The quote can be found on page 474 of the Odhams collected edition of Wells’s works. One might illustrate the point further with the metaphor of the immune system: however well a child is prepared for the biological environment via the antibodies in its mother’s milk, isolate it from dirt and its immune system will start to fail – it will no longer be ready for interaction with the changing world of infective agents.
- 20.
- 21.
For a discussion in the context of interactional expertise see Schilhab (2007).
- 22.
Whether this could be achieved as a matter of fact rather than principle is not so clear since serving soldiers’ discourse would begin to change as soon as the war ended.
- 23.
Schilhab (2007).
- 24.
See also Collins (2004, chapter 23), where I give an account of my participation in a review committee and my feeling that I understood the technology in question better than some of the official reviewers.
- 25.
The term belongs to Rodrigo Ribeiro ex-Cardiff PhD student and professor at the University of Minas Gerais in Belo Horizonte, Brazil.
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Collins, H. (2012). Language as a Repository of Tacit Knowledge. In: Schilhab, T., Stjernfelt, F., Deacon, T. (eds) The Symbolic Species Evolved. Biosemiotics, vol 6. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2336-8_11
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