Practical Knowledge: Outlines of a Theory of Traditions and Skills, J. C. Nyíri and B. Smith (eds.), London/New York/Sydney: Croom Helm, 1988 Knowing How vs. Knowing That 5. See especially Polanyi's Personal Knowledge. Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958. Polanyi's thinking has been for a long time familiar to philosophers of science, but it has received little attention from philosophers interested in the wider aspects of knowledge and action. 6. Here I run together two notions developed by Polanyi himself at different times. 'Personal knowledge• is used above all to bring out the element of commitment on the part of the scientist to his as yet unknown, but approaching. discovery. 'Tacit knowledge' relates rather to the scientist's skills; see his The Tacit Dimension, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967. 7. Mind over Machine. The Power of Human Intuition and Expertise in the Era of the Computer, New York: Free Press. 1986. 8 ... Knowing How and Knowing That", p. 212 of the reprint. 9. Ibid., p. 223. 16 I . '*, t r ~J f Tradition and Practical Knowledge J. C. Nyiri 1. Preamble 1 The first task of this chapter is to indicate how the topic of practical knowledge might involve, or why it should involve, an analysis of the notion of tradition. Such an indication is in fact not difficult to give. After all, both practical knowledge and knowledge embedded in tradition are kinds of knowledge that seem to lie outside the domain of reflection or reasoning; both presuppose an epistemological subject whose activity encompasses more than the life of pure cognition a subject to whose make-up there belong essentially traits other than the purely mental. No wonder, then, that philosophers with an eye for the dimension of practice in knowledge will usually not fail to draw attention also to the special ways in which that dimension is transmitted: to ways of custom, to institutions of handing down, that is: to traditions. Thus Ryle stresses that learning how is different from learning that: the former involves, as the latter does not, inculcation. 2 i.e. persistent repetition, impressing itself upon the subject. Thus also Michael Polanyi, after having argued that the rules of scientific discovery are no more than •rules of art', goes on to point out that, since 'an art cannot be precisely defined, it can be transmitted only by examples of the practice which embodies it'. 3 Science, 17 ~ , , I Tradition and Practical Knowledge he writes at another place, 'is operated by the skill of the scientist', 4 by a skill that, again, can be passed on only by example. But to learn by example is to submit to authority: By watching the master and emulating his efforts in the presence of his example, the apprentice unconsciously picks up the rules of the art, including those which are not explicitly known to the master himself. These hidden rules can be assimilated only by a person who surrenders himself to that extent uncritically to the imitation of another, that is, by a person who is willing to 'submit to tradition'. 5 Oakeshott, too, points out that the coherence of scientific activity does not 'lie in a body of principles or rules to be observed by the scientist, a "scientific method".' That coherence, he stresses, lies 'in the way the scientist goes about his investigation, in the traditions of scientific inquiry'. 6 And one of the main claims of T. S. Kuhn is of course that we have too long ignored the manner in which knowledge of nature can be tacitly embodied in whole experiences without intervening abstraction of criteria or generalisations. Those experiences are presented to us during education and professional initiation by a generation which already knows what they are exemplars of. ;, Even Feyerabend, having, in Science in a Free Society, once more made his peace with Wittgenstein, writes of 'standards or rules' we could not use were they not 'well integrated parts of a rather complex and in places quite opaque practice or tradition'. 9 As to Wittgenstein himself, one need recall only the central role his arguments played in turning into a philosophical issue the idea of knowledge embedded in, or constituted by, practice. When G. H. von Wright, interpreting Wittgenstein's On Certainty, coined the notion of 'pre-knowledge', knowledge that is not propositional but rather a matter of praxis, 9 the profession was quick to point out that the appropriate term here was not •pre-' knowledge, but, precisely, practical knowledge. 1 0 And I would like to underline that in those _arguments of Wittgenstein in which the idea of practical knowledge essentially figures, the concept of tradition, 18 Tradition and Practical Knowledge too, almost always crops up, expressed by terms like Gepflogenheit, Gebrauch, Institution, Lebensform, Autoritlit, and so on. 1 1 2. The Infinite Regress My point of departure is, then, roughly this: since practical knowledge encompasses, or serves as a foundation for much of what we know, and since such knowledge appears to be tacit, non-propositional, and indeed inarticulable, 1_ 2 it follows that channels of communication other than explicit discourse have indispensable functions to fulfil. Traditions represent just such channels. That this initial position leads immediately to a whole family of difficulties is clear. The first such difficulty is presented by the notion of practical knowledge itself, which seems on occasion precisely not to require any social context of transmission. Take skills, for example. Clearly skills are, or embody, practical knowledge; but not all skills presuppose a social context. Thus cycling, one of Polanyi's favourite examples, 1 3 involves a vast amount of tacit knowledge, in the sense that the mathematical description of what happens at every moment as one adjusts the curvature of one's bicycle's path in proportion to the ratio of one's imbalance over the square of one's speed is of course unknown to the cyclist, and would not help him in his performance even were it known. But I don't see what is, in principle, inarticulable about this knowledge; and I certainly cannot recall anything like a state of apprenticeship when learning to ride my first bicycle. I saw what other people were doing, but I did not learn by imitating them, I learnt by constantly falling, and then sometimes not falling, off. It seems there are technical skills like cycling and social skills like speaking, or counting and the former do not presuppose a tradition in the immediate sense in which the latter do. Or take medical diagnosis, another of Polanyi's* examples. Unless a doctor can recognise a certain symptom, for example the accentuation of the second sound of the 19 Tradition and Practical Knowledge pulmonary artery, it is no use his reading descriptions of syndromes in which this symptom occurs. He must personally know that symptom and he can learn this only by repeatedly being given cases for auscultation in which the symptom is authoritatively known to be present, side by side with other cases in which it is authoritatively known to be absent, until he has fully realized the difference between them and can demonstrate his knowledge practically to the satisfaction of an expert. 1 4 It was similar or related observations that led Ludwik Fleck in the early 1930s to his traditionalist, pre-Kuhnian theory of science. Thus in his explanations of the Wassermann reaction, Fleck points out that, since there is no unified theory of the underlying syndrome, different laboratories have developed somewhat different quantitative procedures to detect it; still, however, 'the experienced eye or the "serological touch'" das 'serologische Fiihlen' proves 'much more important than calculation'. 1 5 The field of serology, Fleck writes, 'is a little world of its own and the ref ore can no more be fully described in words than any other field of science'. 1 6 It is however a fact that important areas of medical diagnosis are today conducted by computer programs, and it would seem strange to speak of 'personal knowledge' or 'touch' with respect to a piece of software. Yet these programs are of course based on the knowledge of experienced human experts, and it is in fact quite a problem to unearth that knowledge in software-digestible form. One becomes an expert not simply by absorbing explicit knowledge of the type found in textbooks, but through experience, that is, through repeated trials, 'failing, succeeding, wasting time and effort, ... getting a feel for a problem, learning when to go by the book and when to break the rules'. 1 7 Human experts thereby gradually absorb 'a repertory of working rules of thumb, or ' 1heuristics", that, combined with book knowledge, make them expert practitioners'. 1 8 This practical, heuristic knowledge, as attempts to simulate it on the machine have shown, is 'hardest to get at because experts or anyone 20 Tradition and Practical Knowledge else rarely have the self-awareness to recognize what it is. So it must be mined out of their heads painstakingly, one jewel at a time'. 1 9 But now. practical knowledge as here described does not seem to possess any philosophically interesting characteristics at all, and it is quite disturbing to realise that the faculty of judgment, the ability to subsume particular instances under given rules and to apply such rules, can be imparted to a suitable machine at all, at least in certain cases. For the machine is of course lacking in that social context which seemed so essential for this kind of acquisition. The problem that confronts us here was recognised by Kant, for whom the application of rules seemed to embody a vicious sort of circularity. Kant starts out from the idea that understanding in general is a matter of rules. Judgment, more particularly, is the faculty of subsuming under rules, of distinguishing whether something instantiates a given rule. But how, now, could it be possible to formulate applicable 'rules for judgment'. For clearly we could judge on the basis of such rules only by means of other rules, and these, too, would demand guidance from judgment. Thus it appears that, 'though understanding is capable of being instructed, and of being equipped with rules, judgment is a peculiar talent which can be pr-~tised only, and cannot be taught. It is the specific quality of so-called mother-wit'. 2 0 Its absence is just what is ordinarily called stupidity, for which, according to Kant, there is no remedy: A physician, a judge, or a ruler may have at his command many excellent pathological, legal, or political rules, even to the degree that he may become a profound teacher of them, and yet, none the less, may easily stumble in their application. For, although admirable in understanding, he may be wanting in natural power of judgment. He may comprehend the universal in abstracto, and yet not be able to distinguish whether a case in concreto comes under it. Or the error may be due to his not having received, through examples and actual practice, adequate training for this particular act of judgment. Such 21 Tradition and Practical Knowledge sharpening of the judgment is indeed the one great benefit of examples. 2 , Ryle, too, stresses that stupidity is not the same as mere lack of knowledge, pointing out that •if, for any operation to be intelligently executed, a prior theoretical operation had first to be performed and performed intelligently, it would be a logical impossibility for anyone ever to break the circle'. 2 2 And Polanyi has pointed out that: 'The application of rules must always rely ultimately on acts not determined by rule'. 2 3 Hayek has drawn from this same idea an important conclusion concerning restraints on the transmission of knowledge. There will always, he tells us, 'be some rules governing a mind which that mind in its then prevailing state cannot communicate'. Even if the mind were to acquire the capacity of communicating these rules, 'this would presuppose that it had acquired further higher rules which make the communication of the former possible but which themselves will still be incommunicable'. 2 4 Yet it is exactly this infinite regress argument, seemingly so central to all philosophising about practical knowledge and of course also to Wittgenstein's later philosophy 2 5 which somehow loses its magic once the nature of the knowledge built into non-human expert systems has been considered. Or take the case of Ryle's 'well-trained sailor boy', who 'can both tie complex knots and discern whether someone else is tying them correctly or incorrectly, deftly or clumsily. But he is probably incapable of the difficult task of describing in words how the knots should be tied'. 2 6 Knots are more easily tied than explained, but the boy's presumed inability to do the latter does not seem to carry a philosophical message. He might be unable to explain anything. Or a detailed terminology of knots could be developed, helped by which the boy would have no difficulties at all in describing and criticising. Of course the usual way to explain tying knots is through pictures rather than through words. And here one should perhaps say that, though knowledge conveyed through pictures might be non-propositional, it does not therefore 22 Tradition and Practical Knowledge necessarily follow that it is practical, i.e. non-theoretical, in the sense of the present volume. 3. Traditions and Rationality It might be useful, at this stage, to distinguish between two positions with regard to the issue of practical knowledge. According to the first, this knowledge is a practical abbreviation within the texture or flow of knowledge as such; a device of paramount pragmatic importance perhaps, but not something whose discovery should basically transform our epistemological convictions. According to the second position, there is a layer or dimension of practical knowledge which could in no sense be dissolved into knowledge of a propositional sort. Or perhaps and this would be a stronger version of the same position there is a hard layer of practical knowledge which serves as the bedrock upon which all knowledge rests. Or indeed to formulate a yet stronger version all theoretical knowledge represents but an articulating, a spelling out, of a knowledge which is invariably reducible to practice. Philosophers like Wittgenstein, Oakeshott, or Kuhn, clearly hold some version of the second position; but Ryle, too, flatly states that 'theorising is one practice amongst others'. 2 "? Now each of these positions has its counterpart within the theory of traditions. Let us distinguish between primary and secondary traditions, and say that secondary traditions contain and convey, in an abbreviated and often emotionally coloured form, information which could in principle, though perhaps only with a loss of convenience, be communicated in a purely discursive fashion. The information embedded in primary traditions on the other hand cannot be separated from the way in which it is handed down, *or rather it can be thus separated only within a context different in kind from that in which these traditions were originally functioning. 23 Tradition and Practical Knowledge In the case of secondary traditions, in other words, it is possible that they be dissolved in such a way that the activity whose transmission they serve be not essentially impaired. Primary traditions, in contrast, are such that the dissolution of the tradition brings with it of necessity the dissolution of the relevant knowledge. The thesis to the effect that there are primary traditions, a thesis to which the present essay subscribes, I shall call the strong traditionalist thesis, and contrast it with the weak traditionalist thesis which denies the existence of primary traditions but recognises the existence, and usefulness, of secondary ones. The position denying this usefulness might then properly be called anti-traditionalist. I take the hard-core view of practical knowledge to imply, and be implied by, the strong traditionalist thesis. In what follows I shall, very briefly, call attention to some of the issues bearing on this thesis; before doing that, however, I should like to touch upon two other, closely related topics. The first is rationality. Reason and tradition are usually conceived of as opposed, 2 8 and even traditionalist arguments are often enough phrased in such a way as to maintain this opposition. The power of the irrational or of the arational is stressed, along with the importance of traditions as creating a dimension of coherence in the non-rational realm, as bringing, through their very irrationality, cohesion into society. It is in this sense that Karl Popper, quite a traditionalist in his way, writes: 'What we call social life can exist only if we can know, and can have confidence, that there are things and events which must be so and cannot be otherwise. It is here that the part played by tradition in our lives becomes understandable.' The social world, if it is to be inhabitable at all. must contain •a great number of regularities to which we can adjust ourselves', regularities whose mere existence may be 'more important than their peculiar merits or demerits. They are needed as regularities, and therefore handed on as traditions, whether or not they are in other respects rational or necessary or good or beautiful or what you will.' 2 9 If the strong traditionalist thesis holds, however, then this almost utilitarian way of putting things may be misleading. For strong traditionalism implies that reason itself 24 l l l Tradition and Practical Knowledge is ultimately grounded in traditions, or, as Oakeshott eloquently puts it: 'Rationality' just is 'the certificate we give to any conduct which can maintain a place in the flow of sympathy, the coherence of activity, which composes a way of living'. 3 0 Hence it will not do to regard rationality, as Feyerabend does, as 'one tradition among many rather than a standard to which traditions must conform'. 3 1 This would still amount to an unjustifiable picking out of rationality as some one single tradition, as if there were some fixed set of criteria of what is rational, independently of the domain to which they were applied. Oakeshott, I think, comes closer to finding a more adequate formulation when he writes that •no -conduct, no action or series of actions, can be "rational" or "irrational" out of relation to the idiom of activity to which they belong' and goes on to state that 'an activity as a whole (science, cooking, historical investigation, politics or poetry) cannot be said either to be "rational" or "irrational" unless we conceive all idioms of activity to be embraced in a single universe of activity'. 3 2 But the author who, in my opinion, really pointed the way here, even if for 60 years no one seems to have embarked upon it. was Maurice Halbwachs, in his Les cadres sociaux de la memoire. 3 3 •Reason,' Halbwachs wrote, 'is actually a striving to raise oneself from a narrower to a broader tradition, into which latter the memories not merely of one class, but those of all groups will fit. ... Reason faces tradition as a broader society faces a narrower one.• 3 4 The tradition capable of absorbing a variety of other traditions, or the tradition that emerges as an amalgam of various particular ones, will then possess, or amount to, what might be called relative rationality; and of course all rationality is relative, at least in the sense that a 'maximum' of rationality seems impossible to conceive. The second topic I feel should be touched upon in the present context is the relation between traditionalism and the philosophy of mind. It seems to me that the strong traditionalist thesis is simply incompatible with what is usually called mentalism or intellectualism: the view of an autonomous, sovereign mind, of a mind intimately acquainted with, and freely operating upon, its own con25 I Tradition and Practical Knowledge tents (images, concepts, and the like), a mind for which language, in particular, is a mere instrument of communication, an external vehicle expressing, and indeed guided by, inner thought-processes. Wittgenstein and Ryle are of course well-known critics of this view, but their arguments are seldom taken notice of by traditionalist writers, generally insensitive to the epistemological presuppositions and implications of their position. Two notable exceptions were Edmund Burke and T. S. Eliot, both of whom did indeed realise these implications. In his essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent". Eliot wrote: The point of view which I am struggling to attack is perhaps related to the metaphysical theory of the substantial unity of the soul; for my meaning is, that the poet has, not a 'personality' to express, but a particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality, in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways ... The emotion of art is impersonal. 3 5 And as to Burke, he not only had a theory of traditions, but in fact the rudiments of a theory of meaning to match the former. Examining the common notion, according to which words 'affect the mind by raising in it ideas of those things for which custom has appointed them to stand' Burke does 'not find that once in twenty times' any s~ch idea or picture is formed, and indeed when it is, 'there is most commonly a particular effort of the imagination for that purpose'. Burke gives here a charming example. Suppose, he writes, we were to read a passage to this effect: 'The river Danube rises in a moist and mountainous soil in the heart of Germany, where, winding to and fro, it waters several principalities, until, turning into Austria, and laving the walls of Vienna, it passes into Hungary; there with a vast flood, augmented by the Save and the Drave, it quits Christendom, and rolling on the barbarous countries which border on Tartary, it enters by many mouths into the Black Sea.' In this description 26 Traditi~n and Practical Knowledge many things are mentioned, as mountains, rivers, cities, the sea, &c. But let anybody examine himself, and see whether he has had impressed on his imagination any pictures of a river, mountain, watery soil, Germany, &c. Indeed it is impossible, in the rapidity and quick succession of words in conversation, to have ideas both of the sound of the word, and of the thing represented; ... nor is it necessary that we should. 3 8 In the ordinary course of conversation, Burke concludes, 'we are sufficiently understood without raising any im- . . h k ' 3 ' Th .. ages of the things concerning wh1c we spea . 1s 1s, clearly, an approach to meaning which does not presuppose the mentalist view; it is compatible with the idea of language as an essentially social institution; it is, in particular, compatible with the strong traditionalist thesis outlined above. 4. Authority, Convention, Custom, Prejudice Returning now to a brief examination of this thesis itself, we have to take into account, first of all, that the term •tradition' is surrounded by a family of related terms. This family would include terms like •authority', 'convention', 'custom', 'disposition'. 'habit', 'institution', 'mentality', 'mores', 'norm', 'paradigm', •practice', 'prejudice', 'rule', 'skill', 'style'. 'taste', 'technique\ The interconnections within this family are far from unequivocal, the meanings of most of the terms vary and overlap. Clearly, both a survey of connotations and a list of stipulations is called for. For our present purposes, however, we shall have to confine ourselves to setting forth the details of certain specific cases. Consider, first of all, the term 'authority'. Here, according to Halbwachs, it is traditions which do the job of conferring authority upon certain roles and persons. 3 8 Polanyi, on the other hand, seems to suggest that the converse is true, i.e., as he puts it, that it is 27 Tradition and Practical Knowledge only by 'a previous act of a/ filiation'. by a 'combined action of authority and trust', that the assimilation of basic traditions will become possible at all. 3 9 It is at this point that we meet the philosophy of Wittgenstein. The role played by authority in Wittgenstein's work needs no special mention here. Indeed Wittgenstein notoriously goes so far as to suggest that one 'must recognize certain authorities in order to make judgments at all', 4 0 and seems to underline the parallel between authority and tradition when declaring: 'Tradition is not something a man can learn; not a thread he can pick up when he feels like it; any more than a man can choose his own ancestors.' 4 1 Or take the term 'convention'. For Hume and for Burke this notion was allied with, not opposed to, the notion of tradition. As Wilkins puts it: Social conventions such as rules for the acquisition and transmission of property are artificial in the sense of being man-made, but given man's social nature and the mutual dependence of men there is a sense in which they are natural as well. The important thing for understanding both Hume and Burke is their general refusal to equate artificial with arbitrary. 4 2 In the rather different context of the philosophy of science, Fleck, too, strives to show that in the connotation of the term 'convention' the element of arbitrariness has no primary role to play. He stresses 'how little conventions, which from the point of view of logic may seem equally possible, are in fact felt to be of equal value'. 4 3 The supposed 'epistemological choice' is in fact much rather historically and culturally dependent, so that the convention is constrained on all sides by what has gone before. And Arnold Hauser, in the domain of the philosophy of art, draws a close terminological parallel between convention and tradition. 'Spontaneity and convention, originality and tradition' are, he writes, inseparable from each other. The process of artistic creation is not one in which spontaneous personal experiences become communicable and accessible only ., Tradition and Practical Knowledge . 1 f b t one in which the through conventiona orms, u experiences to be depicted move from the ou~se~ along conventionally regulated lines. * * * ArthiSUCk to * * t of but t an s • expression comes about not m spi e • . 4 4 the resistance which convention offers to it. . d' . 1* t s far as the issue Clearly Hauser is a stnct tra 1tiona 1s a . , • . . th t m •convention ' of artistic creativity goes. But it ~s e er . h f Hausnot the term 'tradition'• that carries, the we1~ t 'oare hewer's argument. The connotations 01: cõv.e::101nd here, ever no less blurred than those of traditio *. h H lbwachs most modern authors would seem to agree wit a t 4 s' h me as free agreemen * for whom convention means t e sa . •custom'. Or consider again the next term on our h 5l, . *n ' , . . s Burton Leiser 1 It is a term extremely rich m meaning. * . s ranshis book on the subject lists at leaSt _nine mam 1 °°:en's to *ng from mere habits through sanctioned regu .atzo ' I . . ' 1 h"ch by their very so called constzlutrve rules, rues w 1 • to definition, could not be broken. 4 6 Before turn}ñ;00:r traditions proper, let me select one more ter~ _r • It list of related notions, namely the term 'preJutc~~lated was in connection with this term that Burke or he one of his most often-quoted pa_ssães. We do ;.ot, wrote, cast away all our old preJud1ces. Rathe * we cherish them to a very considerable degree; aod , 1 e cherish them to take more shame to ourse ves, w of because they are prejudices • : • Many of 0::-:~~es, speculation instead of exploding general P J. d Ill employ their sagacity to discover the latent wis O k which prevails in them. If they find what th~Y ~~e • (and they seldom fail,) they think it more w1s*~volved continue with the prejudice, with. th~ reasõ ; 0 leave ' than to cast away the coat of preJudice, ã d. with n othing but the naked reason; because preJU ice, on * * to that reas • its reason has a motive to give action Pre-, • 1 * *t manence and an affection which w1l give 1 per : . t judice is of ready application in the emergency, 1f previously engages the mind in a steady ~our:: 0hesiwisdom and virtue and does not leave ! e m led tating in the mom;nt of decision, skeptic~l, 1:'uzze his and unresolved. Prejudice renders a mans virtu 29 ' I Tradition and Practical Knowledge habit, and not a series of unconnected acts. Through just prejudice, his duty becomes a part of his nature. 4 ' Burke's reluctance to be left with nothing but 'naked reason' is a reluctance characteristic of the strong traditionalist attitude; but note also the concluding reference to 'just' prejudice, with its implication that not all prejudices are just. And it is of course the idea of the unjust, the malign, prejudice which constitutes the generally accepted meaning of this term. It is in this sense that Ernst Mach could speak of 'the fetters of inherited prejudice', 4 8 or of the 'terrible power' of what we call as the translation puts it - 'prejudgment or prejudice', i.e. 'habitual judgment, applied to a new case without antecedent tests'. 4 9 But even Mach, definitely no traditionalist, concedes that without certain 'fixed habitudes of thought' 5 0 new problems would not become perceivable at all. 'No one could exist intellectually,' Mach writes, If he had to form judgments on every passing experience, instead of allowing himself to be controlled by the judgments he has already formed .... On prejudices, that is, on habitual judgments not tested in every case to which they are applied, reposes a goodly portion of the thought and work of the natural scientist. On prejudices reposes most of the conduct of society. With the sudden disappearance of prejudice society would hopelessly dissolve. 5 1 It was in this spirit that Robert Musil, himself the author of a dissertation on the philosophy of Mach, pointed out that man, in his potentialities, plans, and emotions, 'must first of all be hedged in by prejudices, traditions, difficulties and limitations of every kind, like a lunatic in his straitjacket, and only then will whatever he is capable of bringing forth perhaps have some value, solidity and permanence'. 5 2 30 Tradition and Practical Knowledge 5. In Defence of Strong Traditionalism Of the term 'tradition', the OED provides some excellent definitions. Tradition, it says, is the 'action of handing over (something material) to another; delivery, transfer'. It is the delivery, 'esp. oral delivery, of information or instruction'. It is the 'act of transmitting or handing down or fact of being handed down, from one to another, or from generation to generation; transmission of statements, beliefs, rules, customs, or the like, esp. by word of mouth, or by practice without writing'. It is, also, that 'which is thus handed down; a statement, belief, or practice transmitted (esp. orally) from generation to generation'. 'More vaguely', the OED goes on, a tradition is a 'long established and generally accepted custom, or method of procedure, having almost the force of a law; an immemorial usage'. Clearly these explications, however apt, do not solve our theoretical problems, partly since the explanatory terms they employ - 'handing down', 'rule', 'custom', 'practice', 'law' themselves stand in need of elucidation, and partly because, as I tried to show in the foregoing, a host of yet other notions would seem to be of relevance here. Obviously, a nominal explication of the concept of tradition, though necessary, is not sufficient. 5 3 Rather more useful are certain particular definitions, like for example the one Hobsbawm gives of 'invented' traditions, which are taken to mean '[l 1 a set of practices, [2] normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and £31 of a ritual or symbolic nature, which [41 seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour by repetition, which [5] automatically implies continuity with the past'. 5 4 Useful, too, are explications such as those given by J. G. A. Pocock, who is concerned with traditions as a matter of the handing on of those ways of acting which contribute to our membership in a given society. 31 Tradition and Practical Knowledge In its simplest form a tradition must thus be thought of as an indefinite series of repetitions of an action, which on each occasion is performed on the assumption that it has been performed before; its performance is authorised though the nature of authorisation may vary widely by the knowledge, or the assumption, of previous performance. In the pure state, as it were, such a tradition is without a conceivable beginning; each performance presupposes a previous performance, in infinite regress. Furthermore, it may well be that it is the assumption, rather than the factual information, of previous performance that is operative. 5 5 Still, what we need is not so much definitions as much rather a detailed examination of the ways in which traditions in all their forms and varieties function at the different levels and in the different spheres of social life, and all the ways in which traditions relate to such general phenomena of social life as spontaneous orders, deviance and normality, creativity, learning, group behaviour, and so on. Also the issue of so-called national or ethnic traditions, as well as the culture/civilisation contrast would merit special attention. Here there exists already a substantial body of important research upon which one can draw. And I think much of that research directly supports the strong traditionalist thesis as formulated above. Thus with all the recent stress on linguistic universals and on the biological foundations of language, there has not survived in the literature any serious attempt to Question the existence of essential layers of language culturally structured and traditionally transmitted. Noam Chomsky's oddly impoverished notion of linguistic creativity, 5 6 a creativity determined by genetic inheritance and following inborn patterns, has become a curio of the past. In a 1982 study Slobin and Bever could once more revert to Bloomfield's classic dictum: 'We speak ... by certain well-practiced schemes, sentenceskeletons that require but the variation of a few words from utterance to utterance', and point to the languagespecific nature and broad contextual setting of 'schemadevelopment'. 5 ' 32 •*.;*}•**•.*. ' 1 di -~* Tradition and Practical Knowledge With respect to science, the role of traditions is an issue which, due to the Popper-Oakeshott controversy, 5 8 and especially to the controversy surrounding Kuhn's work, 5 9 has recently received ample attention. Important here is David Hollinger's observation that Kuhn has in fact applied to the history of science the conventional historiographic view of the part played by traditions in politics, arts, and the life of society in general. 6 0 Thus 'Kuhn's notion of the "paradigm", his most celebrated and maligned term', as Hollinger writes, embodies the sense that activities are defined and controlled by tradition, and that tradition consists of a set of devices, or principles, that have proven their ability to order the experience of a given social constituency. 6 1 And how does it carry out this function? By providing the community with the capacity to distinguish one activity from another and by setting priorities among those activities so that the members of the community will tend to perform those activities which serve to consolidate the community itself. 'Tradition, then, is socially grounded, and its function is that of organization'; and to the extent that its constituent organising devices 'have enough flexibility to sustain them through successive, contingent experiences: to the extent that a tradition can expand and adapt, like the English common law, it is that much more likely to retain its constituency'. 6 2 As Hollinger also points out, in different communities of which the community of modern-day natural scientists is only one specific kind the role played by traditions may vary widely. Kuhn himself has written an essay in which he draws attention to the particular way traditions function in art, as contrasted with science. In art but not in science Kuhn emphasises, a tradition might be dead yet its products still living. Or, again, 'though resistance to innovation is a characteristic common to both art and science, posthumous recognition recurs with regularity only in the arts.' 6 3 Also, even though artists •can and sometimes do voluntarily undertake dramatic changes in style on one or more occasions during 33 I '. I*. I' 1. I. Tradition and Practical Knowledge their lives', 6 4 still. 'most artists begin by painting in the style of their masters' 6 5 and this is not an incidental fact. Mention has been made above of the traditionalist theory of art of Arnold Hauser. Again and again Hauser emphasises that: 'Every artist expresses himself in the Ian guage of his predecessors, his models, and his teachers•, so that 'every newly created work owes more to other works than to the invention and experience of its creator'. 6 6 Wittgenstein. too, expresses a view of this sort when he says that 'every composer changed the rules, but the variation was very slight; not all the rules were changed. The music was still good by a great many of the old rules'. 6 ' According to Robert Musil, even the spontaneity of an artist is inconceivable without handeddown forms and concepts: it is those very handed-down forms that become a source of originality in the creative process. 6 8 We have already heard Hauser insisting that conventional forms of expression themselves help to create the content of what will be expressed. Hence. even though it is true that 'expression always moves on well-worn tracks, still, the tracks multiply and bifurcate as they are being traveled'. 6 9 A related position has been developed, perhaps surprisingly, by Karl Popper, who sees the canonisation of Church melodies, i.e. certain restrictions on musical usage, as having produced the conditions against which counterpoint could develop. 'It was the established cantus /irmus which provided the framework, the order, the regularity that made possible inventive freedom without chaos.'' 0 It is however in theories of law, politics, and of social life in general theories in which such apparently tradition-independent categories as truth and beauty never really played a role that the idea of an order imposed by mere traditions has always had its strongest appeal. The works of Carl Menger, inaugurator of the Austrian School of Economics. might convey a suggestion of the unlikely parallels here obtaining between AngloSaxon and Austro-German thought. Thus consider the way in which Menger, in his Investigations into the Method of the Social Sciences, exploits ideas derived from Burke. Burke was, as Menger himself puts it, 'probably the first. 34 Tradition and Practical Knowledge who, trained for it by the spirit of English jurisprudence, emphasized with full awareness the significance of the organic structures of social life and the partly unintended origin of these'. ' 1 Burke taught that numerous institutions of his country were not the result of positive legislation or of the conscious common will of society directed toward establishing these, but the unintended result of historical development. He first taught that what existed and had stood the test, what had developed historically. was again to be respected, in contrast to the projects of immature desire for innovation. Herewith he made the first breach in the one-sided rationalism and pragmatism of the Anglo-French Age of Enlightenment. ' 2 There is, Menger maintains, a 'subconscious wisdom' manifested in those institutions that come about organically; and the meddlesome advocates of reform 'would do well less to trust their own insight and energy than to leave the reshaping of society to the "historical process of development".• ' 3 In a similar spirit, today's leading exponent of the Austrian School, F. A. von Hayek, stresses that 'since we owe the order of our society to a tradition of rules which we only imperfectly understand, all progress must be based on tradition'. ' 4 But the grand old man of contemporary German philosophy, HansGeorg Gadamer, too, realises that the ordering of life through the rules of law and morality always amounts to more than the application of general principles. Thus Gadamer sees our knowledge of law and morality as being •always supplemented indeed almost productively determined by the individual case. The judge does not merely apply the law in concrete; he contributes through his judgment to the unfolding of the law itself'. ' 5 And in the domain of legal theory, too, the ideas of the later Wittgenstein have provided new impetus. Thus it was partly under Wittgenstein's influence that H. L. A. Hart developed his conception of law as a combination of 'primary' and 'secondary• social rules. Hart's primary rules seem to be a proper subclass of the primary traditions we 35 Tradition and Practical Knowledge des~ribed above. They are customs supported by strong social Pressure, coming into being through 'the slow Process of growth, whereby courses of conduct once tho.ught optional_ become first habitual or usual, and then obhgatory', ;, 6 Without their prior existence no legal system could be bu.itt up at all. ' , These ideas have relevance, too, in the sphere of educat~on, w~ere anyone guided by a sense for primary traditions wd~ soon find fault with many of the prevailing orthodoxies of the Present day. Here again, the writings of T. S. Kuhn have shed new light on certain crucial Problems. For .Kuhn, with his tru]y revolutionary notion ~f norz:na! scieñe, underscores the need for rigid traditt~ns ~~thm Par.t1cuJar scientific groups if coherent ~c1enti~1c work 1s to be possible at au. 7 7 This view has 1mmed.1ate consequ~nc~s. for educational theory. As Kuhn has. po1~ted out, sc1ent1f1c progress is, at least in the basic sc1~nce~, _not achfoved by 'liberal' education, by encouraging dwergent' thinking. i 8 And one can add that, at the elementary level, all learning seems to require a measure_ of external rigidity. Wittgenstein's later philoS?P~Y. did much to lay bare the reasons for this, and it is szgnific~nt that it was his work on an elementary spelling book, his Wl5rterbuch /fir Volksschulen of 1926 which served a! the i~mediate prelude to that philos~phy. 1 9 In .speih,:i-s. as in elementary mathematics, Wittgenstein beheved in authoritarian teaching methods methods whose advantages are today finally beginning to ;merge from a nu?l~er of e~ucational surveys and reports. 8 0 Wittgenstein s work m this fi~ld is of relevance, too, in relation to the con.cept of deviance, where our theoretical attifdes _ar~ JO many ways bound up wfrh those on education . . hus it 1s to be expected that an awareness of the essential role that is played by more or Jess rigid traditions in human _communities will, again, preclude the acceptance of the ra_d1cally permissive views that have too often held sway m the recent past. 8 • The very conviction that only a social fabrk entirely destroyed can be devoid of traditional elements wHJ howe~er enab!e. one also to see through the claims of an e~cessive trad1_t1ona1ism. For it wiH enable one to recognise also the vmues and the inevitability of invented 36 Tradition and Practical Knowledge traditions and thereby to withstand the romantic yearning • * 1* the one for bonds derived from the past. Nationa ism on . h , * *1* t' n' rn t e hand, and the attacks on contemporary c1v1 1sa lO name of some more authentic 'culture' on the other., are two notable instances of an excessive traditionalist 1deology, National divisions and nationalist sentiments are invariably much more the result of specific typ:s of. material conditions affecting the living. 8 2 Yet natwnah~t * 1* * onom1c ideology as often as not forfe1ts the po 1t1co-e,c . present white focusing on an imagined past. S1m1~ar!)'.• the foe of 'civilisation' while yearning for the f1ctrtiõs warmth of an age that ~ever existed, is blind t~ the rea traditions of his society, to the actual form of hfe that_ surrounds him. A seldom-quoted remark by Wittgeñtetn seems to be appropriate here. •1t is very remark~ble, he wrote in 1946, 'that we should be inclined to thm~ of civilization houses, trees, cars, etc. as separatm~ t man from his origins, from what is lofty and eterna i e c. Our civilized environment, along with its trees and. P ãts, strikes us then as though it were cheaply wrapped m ;e Jophane and isolated from everything great, from Go , as it were. That is a remarkable picture that intrudes upon us.' s 3 Notes 1. Thanks are due to the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung, under whose auspices the ideas in this paper were brought to fruition in their present form. 2. Ryle 1949, p, 59. 3. Polanyi J 964, p. 14. The cited passage is taken. fr~: the Introduction. but similar passages occur also m main body of the text, e.g. on pp. 42f. and 76. 4. Polanyi 1958, p, 49. 37 ~ /-{ \, i I Tradition and Practical Knowledge 5. Ibid., p. 53. Similar formulations can be found also in Ziman 1968, e.g. on pp. 7 and 10: The fact is that scientific investigation ... is a practical art. It is not learnt out of books, but by imitation and experience ... The young scientist does not study formal logic, but he learns by imitation and experience a number of conventions that embody strong social relationships. 6. Oakeshott 1962, pp. 102f. The passage is taken from the essay "Rational Conduct" of J 950. 7. Kuhn 1970, p. 275. This seems also to be the idea taken up by David Bloor when he writes: predicates are learnt on the basis of a finite number of instances. These are provided by teachers or authorities who must simultaneously inform and control the behaviour of the learner. The learner's task is to acquire a sense of the similarity between the cases to which he is exposed as instances of a given concept. His sense of similarity and difference must be matched to those of other language users. This involves grasping the conventions which are involved in the judgements about similarity and difference. (Bloor 1981, p. 88) The parallels (and differences) between Oakeshott and Kuhn are illuminatingly brought out in an essay by M. D. King of 1971. Kuhn, King writes, states emphatically that the term 'paradigm' denotes not a world-view but a specific example of actual scientific practice which serves as a model for a research community and implicitly defines the legitimate problems and methods of a research field for successive generations of practitioners . . . Faithfulness to the traditions which spring from paradigms or sets of paradigms is the hallmark of genuine 'science•. To break faith with established tradition is to risk being labelled a crank, a charlatan, or being made an 'outlaw'. A sociologist reading Kuh n's attack on scientific 38 i 1 4 J t t t;. !r j'.ce ' :* *, ::_.:** Tradition and Practical Knowledge rationalism can hardly fail to be struck by how closely it resembles Oakeshott's famous onslaught against political rationalism; Kuhn's science like Oakeshott's politics is subject to authority of concrete traditions rather than that of abstract 'reason'. Both are seen as practical activities that, to use Oakeshott's distinction, involve not merely technical knowledge (or technique) which 'is susceptible of formulation in rules, principles, directions, and maxims' and which may therefore be learned from a book and thereafter 'applied', but also practical knowledge which cannot be reduced to rules, cannot be written down and therefore 'can neither be taught nor learned, but only imparted.• (The Oakeshott reference is to his essay "Rationalism in Politics" of 1947 .) 8. Feyerabend 1978. p. 26. 9. Von Wright 1982, p. 178. 10. Cf. Haller 1982, p. 184. 11. The crucial passages are Philosophical Investigations, I, 85, 198-208, 239-42. J 2. This is how Plato seems to have conceived the matter: see the reconstruction in Wieland 1982, esp. p. 254: 'Of course knowledge of this kind' e.g. the expert knowledge possessed by craftsmen - 'will be transmitted always only through a process of instruction and practice. It will never be capable of being transferred like an object. It is paradigmatic of the knowledge of the craftsman that he who possesses it cannot distance himself f ram it ... It cannot be objectified, because as a happy metaphor of Plato's has it it is as it were grown into the action itself.' 13. Personal Knowledge, pp. 49f. 14. Ibid., pp. 54f. 39 Tradition and Practical Knowledge 15. Fleck 1935, p. 72 (p. 53 of translation). Incidentally, the notion of practical knowledge is, in modern literature, foreshadowed in the work of Max Scheler, who presumably had some, direct or indirect, influence on Fleck (cf. Fleck 1935, p. 64, n. 29). As Scheler wrote in his 11Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik" of 1913: There is something like 'practical' obeying and 'disobeying' of laws, but not of laws which 'control' natural acting as natural laws control, in the sense that natural acting would conform 'to' them in an objective manner. The laws that we have in mind are not at all given as laws (in a form of perception, of 'being conscious of . . .'); they are experienced as fulfilled or broken in the execution of acting. And it is only in these experiences that they are given. In this sense the acting artist is 'controlled' by the aesthetic laws of his art without 'applying' them; nor does he realize their fulfillment or violation only in the effect, i.e., in the work of art produced. In this sense, too, it belongs to the essence of the 'crime' that he who breaks laws experiences himself as breaking them while acting; these are laws with which he reckons in practice, whether he or others are concerned, without having to have the slightest knowledge of such laws, and without having to have 'thought' about them (pp. 141f. of the translation). The notion approximated here is of course not the 'practical-technical intelligence' described by Scheler in his 1980, esp. p. 79. 16. Ibid. 17. Feigenbaum and McCorduck 1984, p. 67. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid., p. 82. 20. Critique of Pure Reason, A132-4. 40 Tradition and Practical Knowledge 21. Ibid. 22. The Concept of Mind, pp. 29f. 23. Science, Faith and Society, p. 14. 24. Hayek 1967, p. 62. 25. See, e.g., Philosophical Investigations, I, 82-6 and 198ff. 26. The Concept of Mind, p. 56. 27. Ibid., p.26. Similarly Feyerabend: 'What is called "reason" and .. practice" are ... two different types of practice' ( 1978, p. 26). Also Arnold Gehlen, even if on the basis of some rather crude arguments: 'Human knowledge is ... almost to be defined as a phase of action' (1940, p. 52). 28. See e.g. the discussion in Coleman, .. Is There Reason in Tradition? .. (1968), cf. esp. pp. 242ff. 29. Popper 1948, pp. 130f. 30. Rationalism in Politics, p. 109. Recently the same point was made by Oswald Schwemmer. One participates, writes Schwemmer, in the 'Handlungskultur', i.e. in the universally available forms of activity of a given group or society; and by the very possibility of such participation the rational character of those forms is established: 'the capacity of he who acts of being able to act in a way intelligible to others ... thereby lends his actions an elementary rationality'. (Schwemmer l 984, p. 191) 31. Science in a Free Society, p. 7. 32. Rationalism in Politics, p. 102. 33. In Berger and Luckmann's The Social Construction of Reality, a book which amply stresses the significance of the 'pretheoretical level' of knowledge in society (e.g. on p. 65), mention is made of Halbwachs' category of 'col41 Tradition and Practical Knowledge lective memory' (ibid., p. 202) but not of his combining 'memory' and 'tradition' with reason. 34. Quoted from the German edition, pp, 348£. and 383. Halbwachs' suggestion actually represents a third way between the usual alternatives of either equating rationality with an attitude having some unique, standard structural characteristics, an attitude marred only by false logic, traditions, and emotions; or by accepting as rational any views or positions that are felt by the groups or persons holding them to be appropriate under the obtaining circumstances. These are the two alternatives called rather misleadingly the "traditionelle Rationalitfltskonzeption" and the 'anti-traditionalistisches Rationalitfitskonzept' by Karl Acham, in his essay of I 984. 35. The essay was first published in 1917. Quoted from Eliot I 960, pp. 56-9. 36. From Burke's "Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful" (l 756/7), pp, 246-52. 37. Ibid. 38. Halbwachs, Das Gedfl.chtnis, p. 355. 39. Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, pp. 207f. 40. On Certainty, 161. cf. also 493. 41. Wittgenstein 1980, p. 76. 42. Wilkins 1967. p. 61. A similar opposition between the artificial and the arbitrary is defended by Hayek in his "'Three Sources of Human Values" (appendix to Hayek 1979). 43. Fleck 1935, p. 9. 44. Hauser 1951, pp. 28, 30, 21. 42 Tradition and Practical Knowledge 45. Halbwachs contrasts the 'purely conventional' with the 'purely traditional' (Das Gedfichtnis, p. 389). 46. Leiser 1969, pp. 7-47. 47. Burke, .. Reflections on the Revolution in France" ( 1790), pp, 346f. 48. Mach 1943, p. 214. 49. Ibid., p. 232. 50. Ibid., p. 227. 51. Ibid., p. 232. 52. The Man Without Qualities, Vol. I, p. 52. 53. This is especially so if it actually fails to rise above, or indeed falls below. the dictionary level, as when Edward Shits writes: Tradition means many things. In its barest, most elementary sense, it means simply a traditum; it is anything which is transmitted or handed down from the past to the present. It makes no statement about what is handed down or in what particular combination or whether it is a physical object or a cultural construction; it says nothing about how long it has been handed down or in what manner . . . The degree of rational deliberation which has entered into its creation, presentation, and reception likewise has nothing to do with whether it is a tradition .... Tradition that which is handed down includes material objects, beliefs about all sorts of things, images of persons and events, practices and institutions. It includes buildings, monuments, landscapes, sculptures, paintings, books, tools, machines, ... practices and institutions made up of human actions. {Shils 1981, p. 12.) 54. Hobsbawm 1983, p. 1. 43 Tradition and Practical Knowledge 55. Pocock, pp. 209 and 212. 56. Cf. e.g. Sampson 1979. pp. 7 and 105. 57. Slobin and Bever 1982, esp. pp, 229 and 253. 58. See Oakeshott's Rationalism in Politics, and Popper's paper of 1948. 59. See esp. the Gutting and Lakatos-Musgrave volumes (see Kuhn 1970), as well as Kuhn 1977. 60. Hollinger 1980, pp. 196ff. 61. Ibid. 62. Ibid., pp. l 97f. 63. ••comment on the Relations of Science and Art", in Kuhn 1977, pp. 346 and 348. 64. Ibid., p. 349. 65. Ibid. 66. The Sociology of Art, pp. 30f. 67. Wittgenstein 1967, p. 6. A similar thesis, incidentally. lies at the root of Arnold Schoenberg's conception of musical development and is echoed also in the paper by Smith, below. 68. There are concepts, Musil writes in 1934, which for the poet constitute the concepts which he has inherited, with whose help he has painstakingly consolidated his personal self. He does not even need to be in agreement with them all, he can strive to change them, yet he will still remain tied to them all much more than he istied to the ground on which he walks. The poet is not only the expression of a momentary state of his soul even 44 Tradition and Practical Knowledge should it be one that will introduce a new epoch. What he hands down is not decades but millenia old. (Musil 1978, p. 1250.) Or, as he put in an essay of 1931, even the most independent writer does not produce anything •which could not be shown to be almost without remainder dependent upon what has been handed down, both in farm and in content'. Thus: •one can only speak of originality where there is a tradition also.' (Ibid., p. 1207) The connection between creativity and underlying traditions is explored in greater detail in Grassl and Smith 1986. 69. The Sociology of Art, pp. 31 and 21. 70. Popper 1976, p. 58. 71. Menger 1883, p. I 73. Menger's ideas in this connection were inspired also by the work of Carl van Savigny, chief representative of the German historical school of legal theory. 72. Ibid. 73. Ibid., p. 91. 74. Hayek 1979, p. 167. 75. Gadamer 1965, p, 35. 76. Hart 1963, p. 90. 77. See ch.III of his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and also the paper "The Essential Tension: Tradition and Innovation in Scientific Research" (1959), in his 1977. 78. "The Essential Tension", pp. 226ff. 79. 'Only a dictionary,' wrote Wittgenstein in his Preface, 'makes it possible to hold the student completely responsible for the spelling of what he has written because it 45 Tradition and Practical Knowledge furnishes him with reliable measures for finding and correcting his mistakes, provided he has a mind to do so.' Wittgenstein 1977, p. XXXI. 80. Cf. e.g. Bennett 1976. Current West-German perceptions are especially instructive. There, in the early 1970s, it was declared that 'broadening of linguistic competence' should supplant 'training in the norms of "standard German'" in general and the 'learning of orthography' in particular. The results, as the progressive weekly Spiegel tells us, are by now catastrophic. Standard German was seen by the proponents of reform as the language of a certain class and as having been employed by this class as a means for the stabilisation of the existing structure of society. The effect of their reforms, however, has been that the ability of young Germans to write correctly, to read, and indeed to express themselves, has deteriorated drastically. And what sort of democracy is this, asks the Spiegel, where citizens are not capable of articulating their views? (Issue of 9 July 1984.) 81. 'What makes an individual a member of society and gives him claims is that he obeys its rules', writes F. A. von Hayek. 'Wholly contradictory views may give him rights in other societies but not in ours. For the science of anthropology all cultures or morals may be equally good (though I doubt that this is true), but we maintain our society by treating others as less so.' (Hayek 1979, p. 172) 82. 'Instead of being automatically united by a shared history, men ... cannot share the historical events through which they live, unless they are already in some sense united.' (Deutsch 1953, p. 5.) On some important material determinants giving rise to feelings of nationalism see also Gellner 1964. 83. Wittgenstein. Cu/lure and Value, p, SO. 46 Tradition and Practical Knowledge References Acham, Karl 1984 "trber einige RationalitAtskonzeptionen in den Sozialwissenschaften", in H. Schnldelbach, ed. Bennett, Neville 1976 Teaching Styles and Pupil Progress, London: Open Books. Berger, Peter L. and Luckmann, Thomas 1967 The Social Construction of Realily, Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books. Bloor, David 1981 "The Strengths of the Strong Programme", as repr. in: J. R. Brown, ed., Scientific Rationality: The Sociological Turn, Dordrecht: Reidel, 1984. Burke, Edmund 1756/57 "A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful", as repr, in Burke, The Works: Twelve Volumes in Six, 1887, Vol. I. I 790 "Reflections on the Revolution in France", as repr. in Burke, The Works: Twelve Volumes in Six, 1887, Vol. III. Coleman, Samuel 1968 "Is There Reason in Tradition?'" in Preston King and B. C. Parekh, eds., Politics and Experience, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Deutsch, Karl W. 1953 Nationalism and Social Communication: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Nationality, Cambridge. Mass.: M.I.T. Press. Eliot, T. S. 1960 The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism, as repr. London: Methuen. Feigenbaum Edward A. and McCorduck, Pamela 1984 The Fifth Generatio11, New York: Signet. 47 Tradition and Practical Knowledge Feyerabend, Paul, 1978 Science in a Free Society, as repr. London: Verso, 1982. Fleck, Ludwik 1935 Entstehung und Entwicklung einer wissenschaftlichen Tatsache: Einfflhrung in die Lehre vom Denkstil und Denkkollektiv, as repr. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1980, Eng. trans. as Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1979. Gadamer, Hans-Georg 1965 Wahrheit und Methode, 2nd ed., TO.bingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck). Gehlen, Arnold 1940 Der Mensch, Berlin: Junker und D0nnhaupt. Ge liner, Ernest I 964 .. Nationalism", in Thought and Change, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Grassl, Wolf gang and Smith, Barry 1986 "A Theory of Austria", in J. C. Nyiri, ed., From Bolzano to Wittgenstein. The Tradition of Austrian Philosophy, Vienna: mnder-Pichler-Tempsky. Gutting, Gary ed. 1980 Paradigms and Revolutions: Appraisals and Applications of Thomas Kuhn's Philosophy of Science, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Halbwachs, Maurice 1925 Les cadres sociaux de la memoire, Paris (German ed. as Das Gedlichtnis, Berlin: Luchterhand, 1966). Haller, Rudolf 1982 Urteile und Ereignisse: Studien zur philosophischen Logik und Erkenntnistheorie. Freiburg: Alber. Hart, H. L. A. 1963 The Concept of Law, 2nd ed., Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hauser, Arnold 1951 The Sociology of Art, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. 48 ':t Tradition and Practical Knowledge d * * Philosophy Hayek, Friedrich August von 1967 Stu ,es m d Kegan P~ul. Politics and Economics, London: Routledge an . . d L 'b ty vol 3 London: 1979 Law, Legislation an 1 er • * ' Routledge and Kegan Paul. Hobsbawm Eric 1983 "Introduction: Inventing Tr~di- / • d R eds The Invention o tions", in Hobsbawm an anger, :• . Tradition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. H 11. D 'd 1980 "T. S. Kuhn's Theory of Science o mger, av1 . G fn ed and Its Implications for History"• m: ut 1 g, * K. M D 1980 "Reason Tradition, and the Progressi~~!~ss ~f Science" (1971), ;s repr. in Gutting, ed. Kuhn, T. S. 1962 The Structure of ~cienti/ic Revolutions, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. C * * ., * n Imre Lakatos 1970 "Reflections on my nucs • 1 / and Alan Musgrave, eds., Criticism añ the _Growth o Knowledge, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ___. 1977 The Essential Tension: Selected Studie~ in h. • The Umver-Scientific Tradition and Change, C icago. sity of Chicago Press. 69 C Law and M oralitY: Leiser Burton M. 19 UStam, • . d Cty Confli~t and Continuity in Social Behavior, Gar en 1 • N.Y.: Anchor Books. Mach, Ernst 1943 Popular Scientific Lectures (1895). 5th ed., La Salle, Illinois: Open Court. Menger, Carl 1883 Untersuchu'!gen ab~ f/e :,1Jt::,00~~::1 Sozialwissenscha/ten, as repr. 10 The 1 ° 2 e~~ndon: The Carl Menger, ed. F. A. von Hayek, vo * • London School of Economics, 1934. Musil, Robert 1931 "Literat und Literatur", as repr. in Musil 1978. 49 Tradition and Practical Knowledge 1934 "Der Dichter in dieser Zeit" as repr. in Musil 1978. 1930 The Man Without Qualities, transl. by E. Wilkins and E. Kaiser. 3 vols., London: Panther Books, 1968. 1978 Gesammelte Werke, ed. by Adolf Frise, Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, vol.8. Oakeshott, Michael 1962 Rationalism in Politics. London: Methuen. Pocock, J. G. A. 1968 "Time, Institutions and Action: An Essay on Traditions and their Understanding", in King and Parekh, eds., Politics and Experience, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Polanyi, Michael 1958 Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy, as repr. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, J 983. 1964 Science, Faith and Society, enlarged ed., Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Popper, Karl R. 1948 ''Towards a Rational Theory of Tradition", as repr. in Popper I 972. 1972 Conjectures and Refutations, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. 1976 Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography, rev. ed., London: Fontana/Collins. Ryle, Gilbert 1949 The Concept of Mind. London: Hutchinson. Sampson, Geoffrey 1979 Liberty and Language, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 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Wittgenstein, Ludwig 1953 Philosophical Investigations, Oxford: Blackwell. 1967 Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belie/, ed. by C. Barrett, Berkeley: University of California Press. 1969 On Certainty, Oxford: Blackwell. 1977 Wl)rterbuch ffJr Volksschulen, ed. by A. HObn_er et al., Wien: HOlder-Pichler-Tempsky. 1980 Culture and Value, ed. by G.H. von Wright, Eng. trans. by Peter Winch, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Wright, Georg Henrik von 1982 Wittgenstein, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. 51 Practical Knowledge: Outlines of a Theory of Traditions and Skills, J. C. Nyíri and B. Smith (eds.), London/New York/Sydney: Croom Helm, 1988 Tradition and Practical Knowledge Ziman, John 1968 Public Knowledge: An Essay concerning the Social Dimension of Science, Cambridge; Cambridge University Press. 52 Theory and Practice: The Point of Contact Roderick M. Chisholm 1. Endeavour What follows is a highly theoretical discussion of the point of contact between theory and practice. My hope is to describe these things clearly and precisely and with the use of as few undefined terms as possible. Theory and practice come together when a person's intentional attitudes determine the way he acts upon the world. Our 'theory' is constituted by the beliefs that we have, and our 'practice' by our endeavours. Endeavour, like believing and judging, is an intentional act or attitude, and it exhibits all those features commonly associated with intentionality. An example of endeavour is expressed by the following locution: S endeavours to bring it about that so-and-so. An alternative is: S endeavours to be such that so-and-so. The phrase replacing 'so-and-so' may be said to describe the content of the endeavour. This content may be expressed in such well-formed sentences as 'there is peace