Reenchanting nature: Alan Garner’s children’s fiction

I recently had a conversation with someone who shares my enthusiasm for, though in fact far exceeds my knowledge of, the fiction of Alan Garner, best known for five early works of children’s books but also more recent adult fiction. Afterwards, I wondered what it was that I find so attractive in his work aside from the element of mere nostalgia for my own childhood reading.

I think the answer turns on a notion of enchantment, which is, nevertheless tricky to articulate. Of course, enchantment stands in a relation to disenchantment and reenchantment and so it is helpful to note these too. Below, I summarise the idea drawn from Max Weber and present two reconstructions as to how disenchantment might be thought to follow from the rise of natural science. I then set out the contemporary philosopher John McDowell’s argument that nature needs to be partially re-enchanted and show how minimal this is.

I then turn to Alan Garner and sketch how his fiction may seem to serve, pro tem, to re-enchant nature through the idea of signs signifying a hidden realm but in fact the real achievement is to reenchant the surface appearance of the mundane world through a disrupted sense of intransitive meaning.

Disenchantment and reenchantment

In 1917, Max Weber said:

The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the ‘disenchantment of the world.’ (Entzauberung der Welt). Precisely the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life either into the transcendental realm of mystic life or into the brotherliness of direct and personal human relations. (Weber 1946: 155)

Jason Crawford remarks about the translation:

Die Entzauberung der Welt: ‘the unmagicking of the world.’ Weber in his later writings returned to this phrase again and again. His first English translators tended to render it as ‘the elimination of magic from the world,’ and this translation captures well enough (if not very memorably) the plain sense of Weber’s formulation, with its narrow emphasis on magic and its simple structure of negation.
But most English readers have come to know this phrase as ‘the disenchantment of the world’ — and ‘disenchantment,’ as a translation of Entzauberung, is a bit of a stretch. Since the 19th century, the English word ‘disenchantment’ has, after all, signified not just an elimination of magic but a state of weariness, of entrenched disappointment, of experience against innocence. (George Eliot puts this meaning in play when in Daniel Deronda she diagnoses Gwendolen Harleth’s ‘general disenchantment with the world,’ as does Charles Dickens when in Nicholas Nickleby he describes Mr. Lillyvick as ‘a crest-fallen, dispirited, disenchanted man.’) And ‘enchantment,’ since the late 17th century, has likewise indicated not just a magic incantation but a state of innocence against experience, of delighted wonder, of rapture touched with eros. Both forms of the word come loaded with affective freight. Much more than Entzauberung, they concern themselves with the experiences of thinking, feeling persons. (Crawford https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-trouble-with-re-enchantment/)

Joshua Landy and Michael Saler confirm the dual meaning, compromising both unmagicking and disappointment, commenting, in the introduction to their edited collection The Reenchantment of the World:

Weber was in excellent company — Friedrich Nietzsche had preceded him in the 1880s, preceded in turn by the German Romantics — and he had powerful reasons to perceive Western modernity in the way he did. For while religious faith continued to exert its hold over the vast majority of industrialized souls, its claims had become considerably more modest. It now allowed secular law courts to adjudicate matters of morality; it permitted scientists to explain away the miracles of nature; it dismissed as frauds those whom it had formerly persecuted as heretics; and most of the time at least, it delegated cases of possession to psychologists and psychiatrists. Stone by stone, the more baroque buttresses on the cathedral of traditional belief were being carted away to the museum of cultural history. (Landy and Saler 2009: 1)

But then in a footnote they add:

Weber may have drawn his phrase from Schiller, whose poem ‘Die Gotter Griechenlands’ refers to ‘die entgotterte Natur.’ In the late nineteenth century, disenchantment was often used synonymously with pessimism, the latter term given currency by the vogue for the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer (ibid: 277)

While it is commonly accepted that Weber’s comment reflects something to do with the rise of a scientific world-view after the C17 so called ‘scientific revolution’ – or perhaps after the industrialisation of science in the C18 – and the rejection of the metaphor of a book of nature, except as a self-conscious metaphor, there is also a counter-current stressing the need for some sort of reenchantment. Landy and Saler comment that Weber seemed to miss the fact that ‘each time religion reluctantly withdrew from a particular area of experience, a new, thoroughly secular strategy for reenchantment cheerfully emerged to fill the void’ (ibid: 1). Crawford lists four books with the very same title (The Re-Enchantment of the World) and many others concerning the reenchantment of other broad topics including nature (Crawford https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-trouble-with-re-enchantment/).

So assuming that ‘disenchantment’ in this context carries hints of both the ‘unmagicking’ of the world and a consequent entrenched disappointment, but assuming that counter-currents exist to reenchant it, how is this experienced and what, if anything, would reenchantment be? To what might one reasonably aspire? And how might this help articulate the enduring appeal to me, at least, of Alan Garner?

Modern science and disenchantment

I can think of two ways that the rise of a natural scientific worldview – in contrast, for example, with Natural Theology (on behalf of which Newton famously devoted most of his efforts) – might be thought to contribute to disenchantment.

On one approach, the achievement of a scientific account of very many natural phenomena is enough to disenchant nature. Keats’ accusation against Newton of ‘unweaving the rainbow’ by setting out the physics of optics seems an expression of this. Simply knowing the mechanics of rainbows removes their magic or enchantment.

But this seems to go too quickly. After all, a suitably reductive view of the other obvious option for rainbows, in which a creator deity invents rainbows as a kind of cosmic billboard to record a promise, looks similarly banal. It is not so much the nature of the explanation (of rainbows and other natural phenomena) but one’s attitude to it. To some, the story of the rainbow as part of a divine covenant resonates with enchantment. But equally, the fact that the action at a distance of fundamental physics is a rainbow might well preserve its enchantment for those with eyes to see.

In other words, the availability of an explanation does not seem sufficient for disenchantment.

A more promising account of science’s role in disenchantment is this. The very success of science promotes a further metaphysical accretion: scientism. Science is thought to serve as the only metaphysical measure of what is really real. As the philosopher Jerry Fodor argues: to be real – in this scientistic picture – is either to be listed in natural science’s basic list of properties and entities or to be reducible to things on that list. Taking ‘intentionality’, meaning meaning or aboutness as his target (since this is the subject of his book), he says:

I suppose that sooner or later the physicists will complete the catalogue they’ve been compiling of the ultimate and irreducible properties of things. When they do, the likes of spin, charm and charge will perhaps appear upon their list. But aboutness surely won’t; intentionality simply doesn’t go that deep. It’s hard to see, in face of this consideration, how one can be a Realist about intentionality without also being, to some extent or other, a Reductionist. If the semantic and intentional are real properties of things, it must be in virtue of their identity with (or maybe of their supervenience on?) properties that are neither intentional nor semantic. If aboutness is real, it must be really something else. (Fodor 1987: 97)

Given the woeful record of philosophical reductionism, this promises to remove much from the realm of the real. And thus, any of this thus removed but which previously evoked enchantment will be found to be a sort of con or mistake. As a matter of fact, much – though not the rainbow – which might have thought to be enchanted will not make the grade of actually existing on Fodor’s scientistic test. (Rainbows, being reducible to physics, will.)

John McDowell, perhaps the most influential recent opponent of scientism, calls for a partial reenchantment of nature in response to just this scientistic impulse.

What is at work here is a conception of nature that can seem sheer common sense, though it was not always so; the conception I mean was made available only by a hard-won achievement of human thought at a specific time, the time of the rise of modern science. Modern science understands its subject matter in a way that threatens, at least, to leave it disenchanted, as Weber put the point in an image that has become a commonplace. The image marks a contrast between two kinds of intelligibility: the kind that is sought by (as we call it) natural science, and the kind we find in something when we place it in relation to other occupations of ‘the logical space of reasons’, to repeat a suggested phrase from Wilfrid Sellars. If we identify nature with what natural science aims to make comprehensible, we threaten, at least, to empty it of meaning. By way of compensation, so to speak, we see it as the home of a perhaps inexhaustible supply of intelligibility of the other kind, the kind we find in a phenomenon when we see it as governed by natural law. It was an achievement of modern thought when this second kind of intelligibility was clearly marked off from the first. (McDowell 1994: 70-1)

McDowell is not here attacking scientific method. Scientific method, and the self-conscious reflection which accompanies it, has, he thinks, been a genuine achievement of the modern era. But at the same time, the assumption that the disenchantment which has successfully underpinned scientific descriptions of the world also exhausts its nature is ‘not the educated common sense it represents itself as being; it is shallow metaphysics’ (McDowell 1998b: 182 cf McDowell 1994: 82).

If McDowell’s diagnosis is correct, the success of science need not imply that only what is part of, or can be reduced to, natural science is real. And that blocks the argument from scientism towards disenchantment – or rather against enchantment – that I sketched above (the second deployment of science). But what account of partial reenchantment does McDowell offer? Sadly, it is limited help here.

For Kant, the ordinary empirical world, which includes nature as the realm of law, is not external to the conceptual. In view of the connection between the conceptual and the kind of intelligibility that belongs to meaning, I have suggested that defending that Kantian thought requires a partial re-enchantment of nature. (See Lecture IV, §§3, 4.) But it does not require us to rehabilitate the idea that there is meaning in the fall of a sparrow or the movement of the planets, as there is meaning in a text. It is a good teaching of modernity that the realm of law is as such devoid of meaning; its constituent elements are not linked to one another by the relations that constitute the space of reasons. But if our thinking about the natural stops at an appreciation of that point, we cannot properly comprehend the capacity of experience to take in even the meaningless occurrences that constitute the realm of law. We cannot satisfactorily splice spontaneity and receptivity together in our conception of experience, and that means we cannot exploit the Kantian thought that the realm of law, not just the realm of meaningful doings, is not external to the conceptual. The understanding-the very capacity that we bring to bear on texts-must be involved in our taking in of mere meaningless happenings. (McDowell 1994: 97 italics added)

In what follows, there will be no requirement for a close understanding of this dense passage. But it is noticeable what a merely partial reenchantment does not involve. It does not require reading nature as a book of meanings, like a text. The world as described by natural sciences is still largely one of meaningless occurrences. Thus, the underlying claim that McDowell’s partial reenchantment requires is a kind of presupposition or necessary condition on experiencing any kind of world at all, not an enchanted one. We have to think of nature itself as ready-made for our conceptual capacities. The conceptual realm has, he says, no outer boundary. The world is coextensive with thought. It is a further aspect of this picture that it rejects scientism and thus undercuts the second argument for disenchantment sketched above. But it does not itself offer a picture of what reenchantment might be.

An a priori fictional route to reenchantment / enchantment: a book of nature

If ‘disenchantment’ is an ‘unmagicking’ of the world and a consequent disappointment with it, one obvious response to it, in fiction at least, is to conjure up a world that contains magic. Fictionally to reenchant this world requires that it is this world into which magic is injected. This, however, is a common trope of imaginative fiction and popular in children’s fiction, including Alan Garner’s.

One broad strategy is to postulate a hidden realm behind the mundane surface of the world we normally experience. Hence, in a moment of revelation, the protagonists can come upon this hidden realm. Thereafter, the ordinary world can be taken refer to the hidden world. A bracelet is really a magical component necessary for preserving the sleeping King Arthur’s knights. A rock wall is really a gate to a hidden chamber. A length of railing is really a spear. In this way, in the fiction, the world is, once again, a book of meanings.

If such a strategy works in fiction, it indicates what would have to obtain in reality, were this the route to reenchantment. But while it makes for very enjoyable children’s literature this route to reenchantment cannot really work, except fleetingly, even in fiction. The problem of the mundane surface recurs at the deeper level too.

Consider, as typical examples, Garner’s linked The Weird Stone of Brisingamen and The Moon of Gomrath (Garner 1960 and 1963). Both postulate a series of events happening in parallel with the mundane human world and only occasionally making contact. Some of the characters in this other realm have magical powers and some do not, but they all seem to have understandable motivations, plans, projects and an ordinary mix of good and bad luck. So while the discovery of the hidden realm reenchants the human world around Alderley Edge, the realm itself appears naturalistic by its own lights. Cadellin, the wizard, seems able to rely on his own powers to cast spells but his opponents have broadly similar abilities. They have conflicting ambitions, much as rivalry plays out in the human world. Even the limited ‘world-building’ in Garner’s short books begins to domesticate and and make intelligible the hidden. So is this hidden realm enchanted or disenchanted?

Three thoughts:

First, because the realm has its own version of mechanics and psychology – sufficient for the narrative to be explicable to a young reader – it seems to inherit the same threat of disenchantment as to the human realm. There’s no mystery within the realm about why and how the various characters are acting. They are not thought of, by the characters who naturally inhabit that realm, to be inexplicable. We are offered no explanation of the magical powers of wizards or warlocks, but these are presented as proper to them. They are the standard abilities of such people. On one view of things, the hidden realm is itself disenchanted.

Second, it might be that that the inevitable narrative gaps or holes lead to necessary ignorance of how things work, or what may happen, and this ignorance is itself enchanting. In other words, postulating a magical realm that will never be susceptible to natural science’s ‘unweaving’ might seem enough for enchantment. Ignorance is, however, a feature of the disenchanted real world. Whatever the promise of the idea that physics is a complete explanation of its subject matter, much of the world we inhabit cannot be explained in practice. The specific features of the geology of a landscape may form a general pattern but we lack any account of just why these particular features were formed as they were. History, too, admits of some patterns but neither exact prediction nor retrodiction. Ditto everyday psychology. And yet these everyday aspects of ignorance seem of no help in enchanting this world.

Third, we might insist that it is just of the nature of this hidden realm that it is enchanted. But on the picture so far available of what it is for something to be enchanted, this would require the postulation of a further reference in the hidden realm to some further realm initially hidden also to it. And thus a regress begins.

Despite the fact that all four of the Alan Garner’s first books postulate a hidden realm linked to signs of it in the mundane world, I do not think that this is actually how his work hints at reenchantment. Or rather, it may do this most obviously on a first reading, but it also does something else that is more lastingly satisfying.

A different route: disrupted intransitive meaning

In The Moon of Gomrath, one the children has to find a magical herb to cure his sister of a form of possession (Garner 1963). As one might expect, the herb has to be found on a mystical ‘old straight track’ and by the light of the full moon. The boy identifies the location of the track from an old family ledger containing parish records (ie a mundane resource) but it is only (magically) revealed by the light of the moon.

Suddenly through the trees and over the Beacon hill, a shimmering line had flowed, a mesh of silver threads, each glistening, alive. Colin had seen something like it once before, on a rare morning when the Sun had cut a path through the dewed invisible carpet of spiders’ webs that covered the fields. That had been nothing to the beauty he saw now. The track quivered under his feet and he gazed it as though spellbound… (Garner 1963: 60)

The appearance of the ‘old straight track’ is part of the magical hidden realm. But the description of it is likened to something else, some part of the ordinary world though inspiring some sense of enchantment: a sunbeam picking out spiders’ webs.

Immediately after a mystical discovery of the herb, the narrative returns to the human landscape:

Over Wildboarclough the cone of Shuttlingslow, stood apart from the long ridges, watchtower to the plane which lay like a sea from Rivington Pike to the surge of Moel Fammaw…
The old straight track had vanished, but below shining tour the road from Buxton began its winding drop into Macclesfield. Colin walked along the ridge to the end of the cliff, and picked his way over the rough moorland down to the road. It was midnight. The road was strange, cold, smooth and his feet after the read-clumps and boulders of Shining Tor. Once the flush of excitement had passed, and it had passed quickly with the climb from the Hill, he felt tired – and increasingly ill at ease. The night was so still, and the roads so lonely in the moonlight… Light steps. That was what you could hear: behind him. He stopped and listened. Nothing. Looked. The road was empty. It must be an echo, thought Colin, and he set off again. But now he was listening consciously, and soon he began to sweat. (ibid: 61)

In passages such as this, Garner links the hidden realm to the ordinary world, which is one of the things that makes this different from say C.S. Lewis or Tolkien, even if the latter’s world is supposed to be our own in some ancient time period. The road from Buxton to Macclesfield is a real road and yet the close link to the ‘old straight track’ forces the reader to think of it differently in this context.

What might an adult reader think of the Buxton to Macclesfield road after reading this passage? Not, I suggest, that there is any real chance that there is a genuine connection to the ‘old straight track’ under Shining Tor. Nor even that such a connection is unlikely as an empirical possibility but still some sort of possibility. In fact, given all else we know about the world – and I mean ‘know’ not ‘think we know’ – it is not any sort of possibility at all. On closing the book no scintilla of doubt is raised about our ordinary ruling out of Garner’s world of magic. It is not – it cannot be – real.

But the juxtaposition in a work of fiction of the ‘real’ world and this make-believe can change one’s attitude to the real, both in the fiction and outside it. Not one’s beliefs about what is real and what is not, but a more basic orientation towards the real. Even once the fiction has removed itself, the book closed, an echo remains.

In the fiction, there is a relation of meaning or reference between the ordinary realm and what the fictional protagonists come to learn. I assume that no adult reader can begin to reimport a sense of these fictional possibilities back into the actual world, though perhaps children can. Disbelief, for adults, is never really suspended. But a trace of something still left. What might this be?

Two familiar ideas will help, one from Heidegger and one from Wittgenstein. I will start with the latter.

The paradigmatic sense of ‘meaning’ is transitive. One word means the same as another. ‘Neige’ means snow; ‘jejune’ means meagre or scanty. In cases of ‘factive meaning’, an effect means its cause. In some circumstances, smoke can mean fire. But for those au fait with the meaning of ‘meaning’, another use of it can come to seem compelling: an intransitive notion of meaning.

We can think of things as carrying or possessing meaning even though it is not a meaning susceptible to paraphrase. Music is one such example. (Musical notes might also be used as a code, but that’s not the sense of meaning I have in mind.) To say that music has meaning in this way is to connect it to ideas of saying something, of representing, of expression. And yet it is a sense of meaning or representation that does not permit of translation into some other medium.

The same strange illusion which we are under when we seem to seek the something which a face expresses whereas, in reality, we are giving ourselves up to the features before us – that same illusion possesses us even more strongly if repeating a tune to ourselves and letting it make its full impression on us, we say “This tune says something”, and it is as though I had to find what it says. And yet I know that it doesn’t say anything such that I might express in words or pictures what it says. And if, recognizing this, I resign myself to saying “It just expresses a musical thought”, this would mean no more than saying “It expresses itself”. – “But surely when you play it you don’t play it anyhow, you play it in this particular way, making a crescendo here, a diminuendo there, a caesura in this place, etc.” – Precisely, and that’s all I can say about it, or may be all that I can say about it. For in certain cases I can justify, explain the particular expression with which I play it by a comparison, as when I say “At this point of the theme, there is, as it were, a colon”, or “This is, as it were, the answer to what came before”, etc. (This, by the way, shows what a ‘justification’ and an ‘explanation’ in aesthetics is like.) (Wittgenstein 1975: 166)

The second helpful idea is familiar in Heideggerian phenomenology. When all goes well, elements of the world can become transparent or invisible in their use or application as equipment. To a skilled carpenter hammering nails, a correctly weighted, well designed, hammer ceases to be a noticeable part of the environment.

Precisely when it is most genuinely appropriated equipment becomes transparent. When hammering a nail, ‘The hammering itself uncovers the specific “manipulability” of the hammer’…, but I am not aware of any determinate characteristics of the hammer or of the nail. All I am aware of is the task. (Dreyfus 1991: 65)

Attention passes through the hammer to the nail and perhaps through this to the tsk of fastening something. The chemist turned philosopher of science Michael Polanyi describes this as the ‘from-to’ structure of attention. In feeling the nap of a piece of material, one attends from the sensations in the fingers to the feel of the cloth. One is focally aware of the latter and only aware of the former in a subsidiary manner. (Had one’s fingers been numb, one could not feel the nap but it is the nap, not one’s finger sensations, to which one attends.) Paradigmatic cases of this transparency concern what Heidegger calls handy tools. But the attitude is more general. It is a taking of some parts of one’s environment for granted in order to concentrate on one’s projects. Such transparency is only destroyed in disruptions, such as the hammer ceasing to be rigid or the handle becoming loose. Then it stands out against whatever else remains invisible.

These two ideas taken in conjunction suggest a way in which fiction might reenchant the world. First, it is not that the hidden meanings of Garner’s supernatural realm needs to be given any actual possibility. It is enough that these purely fictional, imaginary and unrealistic possibilities have been sketched because that alone is enough to draw attention to the surface appearance of things. And then it is not that this surface – the everyday look of ordinary things, such as the Buxton to Macclesfield road – signals something behind it, as transitive meaning does. Rather the meaning lies in the surface, as music seems to have meaning though not one available to paraphrase.

On this picture, enchantment is a matter of responding to the surface features of the world as though they have intransitive meaning. The tricky content of this, such as it is, is akin to the tricky nature of using ‘meaning’ about music. It isn’t that we can say nothing meaning-laden about musical phrases but that it is difficult work.

Postscript

One September, when Lois and I lived in Cubbington – a cross between a free-standing village and the last stretch of Leamington Spa’s suburbia, before it gives way to the surrounding proper countryside – we had Lois’ Canadian cousin and his 10 year old son to stay.

One warm evening, we decided to drive for a pre-supper pint at a country pub (The Red Lion) in a nearby hamlet (Hunningham). We drove along tiny country roads but stopped short of the pub at a church gate so that the cousin could digitally record its squeak for his film-soundtrack (foley) work.

I suggested we could probably walk from there along riverside footpaths to the pub, about a mile and a half away. We thus finished the journey to the pub in the gloaming, on foot across fields, in a strong but warm wind, suggesting a storm later, but not yet. Afterwards, we hurried back to the car as the last light disappeared and the warm breeze stiffened, implying rain. We were fine, but only just.

The 10 year old son, used to living in central Toronto, found this a magical experience. He even enjoyed the boring period of sitting by the fire (unnecessary, given the warmth of the evening), in the pub, while we adults drank a pint. And we (the adults!) also found it a magical experience, partly because of his experience. He could see some meaning in it, perhaps through its contrast with his city-centre life. It resonated, though perhaps only with itself. And because he could experience it this way, so Lois and I could also look at our own familiar surroundings anew. We saw through the everydayness to something enchanted.

References

Crawford, J. (2020) ‘The Trouble with Re-Enchantment’ Los Angeles Review of Books https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-trouble-with-re-enchantment/

Dreyfus, H.L. (1990) Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger's Being in Time, Division I. Cambridge, MA MIT Press

Fodor, J. A. (1987) Psychosemantics: the problem of meaning in the philosophy of mind, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press

Garner, A. (1960) The Weirdstone of Brisingamen London: William Collins Sons

Garner, A. (1963) The Moon of Gomrath London: William Collins Sons

Landy, J. and Saler, M. (eds) (2009) The re-enchantment of the world : secular magic in a rational age Stanford, California: Stanford University Press

McDowell, J. (1994) Mind and World, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press

McDowell, J. (1998) Mind Value and Reality, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press

Weber, M. (1946) ‘Science as a Vocation,’ in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. and trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, Oxford: Oxford University Press 129–56

Wittgenstein, L. (1975) The Blue and the Brown Books, Oxford: Blackwell

 

On not having religious faith in the company of those who do

(The following was written in case I needed to manage expectations of me in the face of my partner having both a (secular) job for a local group of churches, becoming a lay minister with/for them, and also living in a rectory. It has not proved necessary.)

I think of the difference between having, and not having, religious faith as a basic cultural-anthropological datum (hence the picture above). One either sees the world a certain way, and naturally expresses that seeing in certain practices, or one does not. And if one does not, there is no point in faking it (outside religious totalitarian states where there might be external but merely prudential reasons to do that). There would, likewise if more trivially, be no aesthetic or musical point in faking a liking for Wagner if one does not see the world of music in a ‘Wagnerian’ way. 

That sketch suggests that I do not – from the outside, as it were – think of Christianity primarily as a belief system. I think of it more broadly as a set of feelings and emotions expressed in practices and tied together with some beliefs (centrally, the Creed, I guess). My talk of seeing the world isn’t meant to be primarily a cognitive matter. The quasi-factual beliefs seem to me to be the least successful and the least important bit and I wouldn’t start from them: either to endorse or disagree.

By contrast, there have been historical attempts at what might be called ‘cognitive prosthetics’ ie non-question-begging attempts to motivate, rationally, a belief-based move from a lack of faith to faith starting from premises available to anyone. Natural Theology and Pascal’s Wager are instances. But the former is an argument, at best, for a cosmic engineer (perhaps of the sort that von Däniken postulated in the heady 1970s) and the latter a way to appease a cosmic transactional Donald Trump figure. Neither yields a God worth their name. (I do think that the world - via the Enlightenment - owes a debt of gratitude to Natural Theology. Newton was more a Natural Theologist than a proto-physicist but his labours for the former helped shape the latter.) 

So that leaves the basic datum untouched. 

I think, from conversations with those who naturally have a religious outlook, that it is quite hard (for them) to conceptualise what its lack might involve. One either tends to subtract too little or too much. 

Subtracting too little yields a picture of those without religious faith as themselves experiencing a religious lack. Now there is a lack I obviously do experience. I can see how much meaning, value and reassurance that a religious outlook gives Lois. Frankly, I’m envious. But I’m envious of it as a psychological factor not a cognitive one. From my perspective, religion is a false consolation. 

Again, I don’t want to focus on the notion of falsity as attaching to beliefs. I mean: nothing about orthodox religion, whether cognitive or affective, quasi-factual or ritualistic, so much as rings true. To my ear, it clangs. But limiting the quasi factual to the Creed, lines 6, 7 and 16 might be right. That is, there are contexts in which they could state truth. But the first two are merely possibly empirical. The thirds says something morally deep but not exclusively theological.

So it is not that I experience what I take to be a lack of genuine consolation. That would be senseless (for me, that is, given the basic datum). Still, given my anthropological starting point, I can see some worldly psychological disadvantage in lacking that faith. But not having that faith, I cannot see this as an error or blindness to something real. Perceptions of truth and error follow from the basic datum. They do not underpin it. 

(This is akin to one of the paradoxes of liberalism. Liberals tend to admit that our views are historically constituted but do not see this as a reason to hold them any the less strongly. Given our historical constitution, these are our values!) 

Subtracting too much seems to yield a picture of shallow scientism. I’ve often found that religiously minded people assume that I must trim my ontology to basic natural science. It is as though one either believes in the full richness of a theological world or, austerely, just what post C17 science yields of its limited subject domains. The latter is an assumption that reductionism is coequal with realism. It is, of course, false. 

Like many philosophers, I am an Aristotelian realist. I hold that the world contains values and meanings as part of extra-human reality, to which we can, with the right education, be sensitive. Our moral judgements are made true or false in virtue of those values and meanings in much the way that our empirical judgements are made true or false by the facts. (The assumption that one needs a theology to underpin such realism - strangely, seldom made for empirical judgements - is undermined by Plato’s Euphyphro dilemma: is what is good good because it is loved by the gods or is it loved by the gods because it is good? To avoid divine arbitrariness, the latter horn is the one to go for. It still leaves a role for God as moral connoisseur: the logical limit of good moral judgement. That’s no part of Aristotle’s picture, which predates all this, but it could be made part of it for those on the first side of the basic datum who wish to accommodate this dilemma.) 

I’ve never experienced any cognitive dissonance in having a 40 year long, close relationship with someone who experiences the world very differently in this respect. It is a key part of Lois’ nature and, for her, shapes her moral and meaning-laden outlook. However, other ways of arriving at many of the same non-religious but moral and meaning-laden views are available. (To me the Christian story seems to lack depth. It is Star Trek - albeit which I love - not Shakespeare. But I grant that disagreement in aesthetics is more common than not.) But it does mean that we render unto Caesar what is his (to invert that metaphor). I would not insincerely fake a personal involvement in the faith Lois is lucky enough to possess. Equally, she does not ascribe to me a kind of inconsistent sense (ie qua cognitive blindness) of my own ‘lack’, though of course, starting from her position on the basic datum, she does also think I’m just plain wrong / missing something real. (Not thinking that would be inconsistent for her, given her position re the basic datum.) But that is all perfectly fine. 

Draft (to be co-authored) chapter on nursing skill acquisition (Dreyfus, Benner, Polanyi etc)

The role and nature of tacit knowledge in nursing practice 

Learning outcomes 

Readers will be able to: 

List some of the characteristics of skill acquisition across a range of practices. Set out some of the main differences between novices and experts according to the Dreyfus, Dreyfus and Benner model. 

Articulate some of the negative characteristics of expertise on the Dreyfus model: that is those things which expertise does not involve. 

Define very broadly ‘tacit knowledge’ and its contrast with explicit knowledge. 

Sketch a possible connection between tacit knowledge and practical know-how. 

Assess some of the answers to the question of why nursing is taught both theoretically and practically and the question of whether what is taught in these two ways is fundamentally distinct or the same but under different aspects. 

Summary of key points 

Nursing is taught both formally in lecture halls and practically and experientially in clinical settings such as wards. This raises the question of the connection between these two modes of learning and the nature of the knowledge and skills acquired. 

The five-step model from novice to expert developed by Dreyfus, Dreyfus and Benner provides one answer which privileges hands-on experiential learning for the development of expertise. 

However, the Dreyfus model yields an implausibly thin account of expertise disconnected from theoretical knowledge of rules and concepts and even from thought. 

An alternative account can be developed using Polanyi’s concept of tacit knowledge. 

A plausible account of tacit knowledge is that it is context-dependent and practical but, like explicit or theoretical knowledge, conceptually structured. Hence theoretical and practical aspects of nursing share a common conceptual structure. 

Introduction

Nursing is both a theoretical and a practical discipline. In the UK, qualification to become a registered nurse involves a university degree-level course or a top-up registered nurse degree apprenticeship. Other nursing roles are available such as nursing associates. But, since 2013 all new registered nurses have to hold a nursing degree with standards set by the Nursing and Midwifery Council. This is a recognition of the increasing importance of theoretical knowledge and analytic abilities to the practice of nursing.

However, a key component of the relevant education and training, alongside lecture-based teaching, is hands-on practical experience on hospital wards and in other clinical settings. This raises the question of the relation between these two ways of leaning or, perhaps, two forms of expertise. It prompts other, subsidiary questions such as whether it is merely a contingent matter that nursing is taught this way. Is the same knowledge taught both theoretically and practically or are there different forms of expertise?

This chapter will look at two different approaches to these questions via two different approaches to nursing expertise.

One is the model of expertise developed by Hubert and Stuart Dreyfus (eg Dreyfus and Dreyfus 1980) and promoted within nursing by Patricia Benner (Benner 1984). The other is a view of tacit knowledge, drawing on, but distinct from, the work of Michael Polanyi. While the Dreyfus and Dreyfus model suggests the primacy of practical, situation-specific expert judgement, developed on the ward, the latter approach helps to show that both practical and theoretical knowledge have a common structure. It explains more clearly how nursing involves putting theoretical knowledge into practice and thus explains how it can be a unified discipline requiring both formal and practical learning.

The Dreyfus and Dreyfus model of skill acquisition: from novice to expert

In the 1970s, Hubert Dreyfus, a philosopher, and his brother Stuart, a mathematician, developed a five-stage model of the development of expertise. On the basis of some of their unpublished papers, Patricia Benner, a professor of nursing, applied the model to developing nursing skills. The Dreyfus brothers based the model on:

the skill-acquisition process of airline pilots, chess players, automobile drivers, and adult learners of a second language and observed a common pattern in all cases… After we developed our five-stage description, a group of research nurses who had amassed considerable data about the acquisition of nursing skill found our model fitted their data very well. The results of that study may be found in the book From Novice to Expert by Professor Patricia Benner (Benner 1984). (Dreyfus and Dreyfus 1986: 20)

The model is thus empirically based but, as will be described below, is also heavily influenced by Hubert Dreyfus’ philosophical views, views that will be contested.

The five stages of the model comprise: 

1. Novice 
2. Advanced beginner 
3. Competent 
4. Proficient 
5. Expert 

 As Benner explains,

These different levels reflect changes in three general aspects of skilled performance. One is a movement from reliance on abstract principles to the use of past concrete experience as paradigms. The second is a change in the learner's perception of the demand situation, in which the situation is seen less and less as a compilation of equally relevant bits, and more and more as a complete whole in which only certain parts are relevant. The third is a passage from detached observer to involved performer. The performer no longer stands outside the situation but is now engaged in the situation. (Benner, 1984, p. 13)

In principle, if these general aspects were independent and each had two or three possible values (as it transpires they do), this would yield many more than five possible levels. But, according to Dreyfus and Dreyfus, and also Benner, they are typically not independent and empirical study yields five characteristic stages in learning skills, from novice to expert.

For the purposes of this chapter, it will be sufficient to characterise the model by outlining the first and last stage as this gives the clearest contrast. The general trajectory is moving from the novice’s explicit consultation of general and context-independent rules to the expert’s ability to read a situation correctly and see, even without conscious decision, what needs to be done. The gradual move from novice to expert is a move from rule-governed deliberate behaviour to an intuitive grasp of a situation and the actions it calls for.

Stuart Dreyfus describes the novice stage, illustrated by the cases of learner drivers and chess players, as follows.

Normally, the instruction process begins with the instructor decomposing the task environment into context-free features that the beginner can recognize without the desired skill. The beginner is then given rules for determining actions on the basis of these features, just like a computer following a program.
The student automobile driver learns to recognize such domain-independent features as speed (indicated by the speedometer) and is given rules such as shift to 2nd gear when the speedometer needle points to 10. The novice chess player learns a numerical value for each type of piece, regardless of its position, and learns the following rule: Always exchange if the total value of pieces captured exceeds the value of pieces lost…
But merely following rules will produce poor performance in the real world. A car stalls if one shifts too soon on a hill or when the car is heavily loaded; a chess player who always exchanges to gain points is sure to be the victim of a sacrifice by the opponent who gives up valuable pieces to gain a tactical advantage. The student needs not only the facts but also an understanding of the context in which that information makes sense. (Dreyfus 2004: 177)

Benner gives a very similar description of novice nurses.

Beginners have had no experience of the situations in which they are expected to perform. To give them entry to these situations… they are taught about the situations in terms of objective attributes such as weight, intake and output, temperature, blood pressure, pulse, and other such objectifiable, measurable parameters of a patient’s condition – features of the task world that can be recognised without situational experience. (Benner 1984: 20-1)

They are also taught rules to guide their clinical practice, which can also be understood in advance of any particular clinical experience. This is common to the initial stages of learning any skill. A learner driver may be taught the mantra: ‘mirror, signal, manoeuvre’ and may typically even say this aloud when first driving. An expert driver, typically, will not and may, in some situations, rightly disregard the rule if in some emergency following it is more dangerous than breaching it. More generally, they will no longer explicitly think of the rule as they drive. As Benner says, the rule-governed behaviour of a novice is ‘extremely limited and inflexible’ (ibid: 21). Developing expertise, by contrast, is learning a more flexible response to situations and transcending action-guiding rules.

As long as the beginner pilot, language learner, chess player, or driver is following rules, his performance is halting, rigid, and mediocre. But with mastery of the activity comes the transformation of the skill which is like the transformation that occurs when a blind person learns to use a cane. The beginner feels pressure in the palm of the hand which can be used to detect the presence of distant objects such as curbs. But with mastery the blind person no longer feels pressure in the palm of the hand, but simply feels the curb. The cane has become an extension of the body. (Dreyfus and Dreyfus 1977: 12 cited by Benner 1984: 33)

Benner suggests that an expert nurse’s use of clinical tools and instruments is similarly transformed.

Reflection: Is the sketch of the resources deployed early stages of skill developed accurate? And is the charge that these resources produce poor performance plausible?

Contrasting the full expert with the stage immediately before it – proficiency – Stuart Dreyfus describes the immediacy of an expert’s appraisal of a situation.

The proficient performer, immersed in the world of his or her skilful activity, sees what needs to be done but decides how to do it. The expert [by contrast] not only sees what needs to be achieved; thanks to his or her vast repertoire of situational discriminations, he or she also sees immediately how to achieve this goal. Thus, the ability to make more subtle and refined discriminations is what distinguishes the expert from the proficient performer. Among many situations, all seen as similar with respect to plan or perspective, the expert has learned to distinguish those situations requiring one reaction from those demanding another... This allows the immediate intuitive situational response that is characteristic of expertise. (Dreyfus 2004: 179-80 italics added)

This passage exemplifies the three aspects that change as a skill is developed, as set out by Benner earlier. There is, first, a movement from reliance on context-free general rules to the use of past experience of previous real clinical situations. Second, the expert sees the situation as a whole as structured in some particular salient ways. Not every aspect of it is equally important for a clinical intervention. Third, the expert experiences themselves as part of the situation. Just as those familiar with the use of a cane feel the ground beneath it rather than the handle in their hand, so the expert driver experiences themselves not as driving a car but as driving. They construe their actions not as the turning of a steering wheel (which has such and such causal effects) but as changing lanes. This immediacy explains the contrast with the merely proficient performer who sees the situation, first, and only then decides how to respond. On the Dreyfus model of expertise, reading the situation correctly involves knowing what has to be done immediately.

This final characterisation corresponds to Aristotle’s idea of ‘phronesis’, or practical wisdom, itself a concept increasingly being applied to medical practice (Aristotle 1985; Boudreau et al 2024). Phronesis is a kind of practical knowledge applied by Aristotle mainly to moral expertise. The idea is that a skilled moral agent with phronesis sees the moral demands that situations make on them, on the actions they must thus carry out, as part of their experience of the situation itself. Their experience of the situation is not value-free but ‘fraught with ought’ (Sellars 1991: 212). The Dreyfus view of expertise in general is like that.

Reflection: Can you see how expertise contrasts with novice performance across the three aspects Benner lists? What if anything is the role of rules for expert practice on this account?

It is tempting to think of the transition from novice to expert as a matter of internalising rules. The learner may consult a manual of instruction, or a memorised mantra such as ‘mirror, signal, manoeuvre’, or they may explicitly infer such rules for themselves from taught examples, while the expert has mastered them to such an extent that they have become subconscious. The philosopher Mark Wrathal describes this as the ‘traditional picture’. But the Dreyfus picture is more radical.

[O]n the traditional model, the same rules govern the actions of the beginner and the expert alike. Learning is thus thought of as coming to understand the rules which govern behaviour—of beginning with an acquaintance with specific cases and learning through experience to abstract out of those specific cases general rules which are followed in all skilful action. But the phenomenology of skill acquisition shows that learning in fact moves in the other direction—from abstract rules to the recognition of particular cases. By the time one becomes an expert in a domain, one has an intuitive ability to recognize and respond to highly particularized situations and, unlike the beginner, is in no sense applying rules at all. (Wrathall 2014: 6)

To assume that the rules we once consciously followed become unconscious is like assuming that, when we finally learn to ride a bike, the training wheels that were required for us to be able to ride in the first place must have become invisible. (Dreyfus 2014: 111)

This rejection of the role of rules also highlights the priority that the Dreyfus model ascribes to hands-on, on the ward, experience over lecture-based learning, or as Benner puts it: the distinction between the novice level ‘skilled performance that can be achieved though principles and theory learned in a classroom and the [expert-level] context-dependent judgements and skill that can be acquired only in real situations’ (Benner 1984: 21).

Benner provides some qualitative social science empirical evidence that the five stage model of progress from novice to expert fits, very well, the experiences of at least some nurses. Further, it fits the anecdotally widespread experience of student nurses who find it difficult to value academic lectures once they have had their first experience of placement. The latter can seem more real and relevant. But it is worth digging a little deeper into how Hubert Dreyfus, at least, characterises the expert stage to assess whether it is a plausible description of expertise, after all.

Reflection: Can you summarise the nature of expertise on the Dreyfus model? With what does expert practice contrast? Hint: it may help to look again at the aspects Benner lists.

What is the nature of expertise on the Dreyfus model?

One of Hubert Dreyfus’ motivations to reject the role of rules, even internalised rules, for expertise, is a philosophically-based criticism – in 1999 – of the prospects of Artificial Intelligence (AI). He illustrates the general challenge for AI by considering an apparently simple abstract task: programming a machine to select a red square from a multicoloured array of geometrical figures. Assuming that on an AI approach there must be a set of instructions or rules that fully capture the expertise involved in the task, Dreyfus considers what they might be. One might instruct a child, for example, to ‘listen to the instructions, look toward the objects, consider the shapes, make your selection’ (Dreyfus 1999: 175). But the AI approach requires more detailed instructions sufficient, for example, for identifying a square rather than a circle.

One might say: ‘Count the sides; if there are four, it is a square.’ And what about the instructions for identifying a side? ‘Take random points and see if they fall on a line which is the shortest distance between the end points,’ and so on. And how does one find these points?... ‘But you unconsciously see points and unconsciously count.’ But do you? And why do the instructions stop here and not earlier or later? (Dreyfus 1999: 175)

The underlying problem highlighted in this example is that of knowing which general rule applies to a particular case. While we know that if something is a red square then it is red and a square and if it is square then it has four equal sides, these inferences unpack our prior mastery of the concepts. The challenge of AI is to explain how such general concepts apply to particular cases: cases which are all alike in being red and square but potentially unlike in all sorts of other ways such as size, location in space and time, orientation etc. The attempt to explicate a general rule – such as the rule-governing ‘square’ – using further rules appears to initiate a vicious regress. What rules guide the application of all the subsequent rules?

Dreyfus suggests that this regress can be blocked by an appeal to situations, the same concept he applies to human experts.

Whatever it is that enables human beings to zero in on the relevant facts without definitively excluding others which might become relevant is so hard to describe that it has only recently become a clearly focused problem for philosophers. It has to do with the way man is at home in his world, has it comfortably wrapped around him, so to speak. Human beings are somehow already situated in such a way that what they need in order to cope with things is distributed around them where they need it, not packed away like a trunk full of objects… (Dreyfus 1999: 260)

Thus a philosophical objection applied to the idea of modelling intelligence in some general formal programmable AI rules informs Dreyfus’ rejection of the role of rules in describing human expertise. Stuart Dreyfus summarises this view thus:

[A] beginner calculates using rules and facts just like a heuristically programmed computer, but… with talent and a great deal of involved experience, the beginner develops into an expert who intuitively sees what to do without recourse to rules. The tradition has given an accurate description of the beginner and of the expert facing an unfamiliar situation, but normally an expert does not calculate. He or she does not solve problems. He or she does not even think. He or she just does what normally works and, of course, it normally works. (Dreyfus 2004: 180)

This suggests that on the Dreyfus and Dreyfus model, a expert does not follow rules – except on occasions where unfamiliarity undermines their expert status and they are forced to – nor do they even think. Hubert Dreyfus makes two other striking claims: the expert does not act for reasons nor is their action informed by concepts.

[P]hronesis shows that socialization can produce a kind of master whose actions do not rely on habits based on reasons to guide him. Indeed, thanks to socialization, a person’s perceptions and actions at their best would be so responsive to the specific situation that they could not be captured in general concepts. (Dreyfus 2014: 110 italics added)

[A]lthough many forms of expertise pass through a stage in which one needs reasons to guide action, after much involved experience, the learner develops a way of coping in which reasons play no role. (Dreyfus 2014: 112 italics)

Dreyfus suggests that if, after the fact, such an expert is asked why they did as they did, they are only able to offer a ‘retroactive rationalisation’ that draws on what they recall of the less expert stage of being a mere ‘competent performer’. Following that reconstruction would ‘not exhibit expertise but mere competence’ (ibid: 113). Hence expertise does not seem compatible with what can be articulated as reasons, described as rules or even consciously entertained as thought. The space of expert actions is one shared by: ‘Animals, paralinguistic [ie cooing and babbling] infants, and everyday experts’ (ibid: 118).

Such a picture of expertise emphasises a dramatic contrast between what can be achieved through learning in the lecture theatre or classroom and what is achieved through experience in clinical settings. It may even appeal to those students of nursing who suspect that nothing of value is taught in the lecture theatre! Only the latter underpins expertise but at the cost of jettisoning what was achieved in the former. Whatever the descriptive power of the Dreyfus and Dreyfus, and Benner, five-stage model of acquiring nursing expertise, there is something badly wrong with its understanding of expertise. It reduces it to the unthinking, reasonless and thoughtless action of a babbling baby. Might there be a better account?

Tacit knowledge: Polanyi’s introduction

To recapitulate: the motivating question for this chapter is why nursing is taught both through formal lectures and experiential learning. The Dreyfus model suggests an answer which explains the role of the latter in developing expertise but at the cost of playing down the role of the former. An alternative answer, the subject of this second half, is that nursing involves both explicit and tacit knowledge, the latter being acquired experientially, but both forms of knowledge are unified by their conceptual structure.

The very idea of tacit knowledge was promoted in the second half of the twentieth century by the chemist turned philosopher Michael Polanyi. (Polanyi himself talks of tacit knowing rather than knowledge though that nuance will not matter here.) He gives the following example:

We know a person’s face, and can recognize it among a thousand, indeed among a million. Yet we usually cannot tell how we recognize a face we know. So most of this knowledge cannot be put into words. (Polanyi 1967: 4)

This is an instance of what he takes to be a general phenomenon. Indeed, he begins his book The Tacit Dimension with the following bold claim:

I shall reconsider human knowledge by starting from the fact that we can know more than we can tell. (ibid: 4)

The broad suggestion is that knowledge can be tacit when it is, on some understanding, ‘untellable’. ‘Tellable’ knowledge is a subset of all knowledge and excludes tacit knowledge. But the slogan is gnomic. Does it carry, for example, a sotto voce qualification ‘at any one particular time’? Or does it mean: ever? Further, the very idea of tacit knowledge presents a challenge: it has to be tacit and it has to be knowledge. But it is not easy to meet both conditions. Emphasising the tacit status, threatens the idea that there is something – some content such as a fact – known. Articulating a knowable content, that which is known by the possessor of tacit knowledge, risks making it explicit (since the subject knows that…).

Reflection: Is the idea of tacit knowledge even possible? That is, might it be a contradiction of terms to think that there could be anything known which could not be put into words?

There is a second strand in Polanyi’s work which helps address this problem. At the start of his book Personal Knowledge he says:

I regard knowing as an active comprehension of things known, an action that requires skill. (Polanyi 1958: vii)

These two features suggest a way to understand tacit knowledge: it is cannot be made linguistically explicit and is connected to action, the practical knowledge of a skilled agent. The latter connection suggests a way in which tacit knowledge can have a content: as practical knowledge of how to do something. Taking tacit knowledge to be practical suggests one way in which it is untellable. It cannot be made explicit except in context-dependent practical demonstrations. It is not that it is mysteriously ineffable but that it cannot be put into words alone.

Polanyi also compares the example of recognition (already mentioned above) to a practical skill, likening it to bicycle riding:

I may ride a bicycle and say nothing, or pick out my macintosh among twenty others and say nothing. Though I cannot say clearly how I ride a bicycle nor how I recognise my macintosh (for I don’t know it clearly), yet this will not prevent me from saying that I know how to ride a bicycle and how to recognise my macintosh. For I know that I know how to do such things, though I know the particulars of what I know only in an instrumental manner and am focally quite ignorant of them. (ibid: 88)

In both cases, the ‘knowledge-how’ depends on something which is not explicit: the details of the act of bike riding or raincoat recognition. While one can recognise one’s own macintosh, one is, according to Polanyi, ignorant, in some sense, of how. Thus how one recognises it is tacit. Many of Benner’s examples of nursing expertise are also recognitional: judging the state of health or illness of a patient.

In the passage above, Polanyi suggests that explicit recognition of something as an instance of a type is based on the implicit recognition of subsidiary properties of which one is ‘focally ignorant’. He explains the distinction of focal and subsidiary awareness using the example of focusing attention on what a pointing finger points to. In looking from the finger to the object, the object is the focus of attention whilst the finger, though seen, is not attended to. One attends from the proximal finger to the distal environment.

One of the quotations from Dreyfus and Dreyfus above is similar. The blind person who is an expert using their cane: ‘no longer feels pressure in the palm of the hand, but simply feels the curb’. They attend from whatever feelings there are in the hand to the state of the ground at the other end of the cane. Polanyi argues that tacit knowledge always has this ‘from-to’ structure.

If this were correct, all explicit knowledge would depend on something tacit, something ‘subsidiary’. But it is not clear that this is true.

Reflection: Is the suggestion above that Polanyi’s ‘from- to’ structure does not apply across the board plausible? Think, again, about Polanyi’s example of recognising a face.

Polanyi seems to assume that the question of how one recognises something always has an informative answer and then, to cover cases where it is not obvious what this is, he suggests it can be tacit. But, firstly, whilst it sometimes may have an informative answer, there is no reason to think that it always has (cf recognising that a square is red). Secondly, even in cases where one recognises a particular as an instance of a general kind in virtue of some further properties and cannot give an independent account of those properties, it is not clear that one need be focally ignorant of them. It may be, instead, that the awareness one has of the ‘subsidiary’ properties is simply manifested in the act of recognition. One might say, “I recognise that this is a, or perhaps my, macintosh because of how it looks here with the interplay of sleeve, shoulder and colour” even if one could not recognise a separated sleeve, shoulder or paint colour sample as of the same type. Whilst it seems plausible that one might not be able to say in context-independent terms just what it is about the sleeve that distinguishes a macintosh from any other kind of raincoat (one may, for example, lack the vocabulary of fashion or tailoring) that need not imply that one is focally ignorant of, or not attending to, just those features that make a difference. Recognition may depend on context-dependent or ‘demonstrative’ elements, such as recognising shapes or colours for which one has no prior name. But if anything, that suggests one has to be focally aware, not focally ignorant, of them.

Thus Polanyi’s own account of the tacit nature of recognition faces objections. But such criticism suggests the possibility of a more minimal account of tacit knowledge.

A minimal account of tacit knowledge

Recognition, such as recognition of a diagnostic type, is tacit because it is a skill – for example, developed through repetition and critical practice and demonstrated in applications in much the way that Dreyfus emphasises – and because it can thus be articulated only in context-dependent terms such as ‘like this!’. It cannot be explicated in words alone independently of additional practical demonstrations in context.

This distinction between tacit and explicit knowledge is reflected in the contrast between the ability to recognise colours and shades that most people have and their limited general knowledge of the names for colours. For most people, the ability to recognise, think about and recall (at least for some period) particular shades of colour goes beyond what they can make explicit linguistically. The ability can instead be manifested by pointing to particular instances of colour themselves. By contrast with the fine discriminations that can be made in the presence of actual colours and shades, context-independent general colour vocabulary is vague.

Similarly, by contrast with the context-dependent discriminations of skilled clinicians made in the presence of their patients, the criteria set out in diagnostic manuals are often vague. Because they are fully linguistic, the criteria in DSM and ICD, for example, are context-independent or general (American Psychiatric Association 2013; World Health Organization 1992). There is an advantage in communication of a linguistic codification of diagnosis that floats free of particular inter-personal relations. But it is bought at the cost of precision. By contrast, the features that play a role in diagnoses made be skilled clinicians are identified in the presence of a particular patient’s or client’s psychological or physiological whole. Such recognition cannot be captured in words alone.

So far, this minimal account of tacit knowledge captures the importance that the Dreyfus bothers and Benner place on practical learning but without reducing such expertise to a merely animal, mindless and conceptless ability. But without going as far as they do to downplay the role of language and reasons, this account, too, promises to show the importance of the tacit dimension. The best way to show this is via a detour into an example that the famous twentieth century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein uses. It concerns an explicitly abstract, general, context-independent and general rule.

Wittgenstein considers teaching a pupil to continue a mathematical series correctly who ‘judged by the usual criteria…  has mastered the series of natural numbers’ and is then taught to continue series of the form 0, n, 2n, 3n, etc. for arbitrary values of n but then goes wrong.

Then we get the pupil to continue one series (say “+ 2”) beyond 1000 – and he writes 1000, 1004, 1008, 1012.
We say to him, “Look what you’re doing!” – He doesn’t understand. We say, “You should have added two: look how you began the series!” – He answers, “Yes, isn’t it right? I thought that was how I had to do it.” —– Or suppose he pointed to the series and said, “But I did go on in the same way”. – It would now be no use to say, “But can’t you see…?” – and go over the old explanations and examples for him again. In such a case, we might perhaps say: this person finds it natural, once given our explanations, to understand our order as we would understand the order “Add 2 up to 1000, 4 up to 2000, 6 up to 3000, and so on”.
This case would have similarities to that in which it comes naturally to a person to react to the gesture of pointing with the hand by looking in the direction from fingertip to wrist, rather than from wrist to fingertip. (Wittgenstein 2009: §185)

The pupil described here reacts in a divergent way (from us) to explanations of how to continue. He appears to have acted under a divergent interpretation of the expression of the rule. But if, to be successful, an explanation of a rule has to be correctly interpreted, then any expression of the interpretation might be subject to divergent understandings, whether explicitly stated in a symbolism or by examples.

“But how can a rule teach me what I have to do at this point? After all, whatever I do can, on some interpretation, be made compatible with the rule.” – No, that’s not what one should say. Rather, this: every interpretation hangs in the air together with what it interprets, and cannot give it any support. Interpretations by themselves do not determine meaning. (Wittgenstein 2009: §198)

Since any interpretation has to be specified in some way, if understanding depends on an interpretation, no specification would be sufficient in itself. Hence the concept of the ‘regress of interpretations’.

Reflection: Imagine a game in which one player tries to explain with complete clarity the rule for adding 2 and the other player has to find some way to misunderstand the instructions prompting the first player to add more instructions. Try it!

There is, however, a more promising way to respond to Wittgenstein’s regress argument which connects it to tacit knowledge. The moral of the regress of interpretations according to the philosopher John McDowell is that:

We learn that it is disastrous to suppose there is always a conceptual gap between an expression of a rule and performances that are up for assessment according to whether or not they conform to the rule, a gap that is made vivid by saying the expression of the rule stands there… We must not acquiesce in the idea that an expression of a rule, considered in itself, does not sort behaviour into performances that follow the rule and performances that do not. (McDowell 2009: 100-101)

This, according to McDowell, is the moral of §201 of the Philosophical Investigations: ‘there is a way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation, but which, from case to case of application, is exhibited in what we call “following the rule” and “going against it”’ (Wittgenstein 2009: §201). For those who are party to the relevant practices, there is no gap between the expression of the rule and being told which way to go. A signpost, for example, not merely a signpost under an interpretation, points the way. On this account, the regress of interpretations is stopped before it can start. Hence, the expression of a rule is explicit in its directions.

But it is only explicit for those with the right eyes to see, or ears to hear, an explanation: for those, in Stanley Cavell’s phrase, who share the ‘whirl of organism’ of our form of life (Cavell 1969: 52). This in turn grounds out in the applications of rules, which are context-dependent, conceptually-structured and practical. The regress of interpretations argument shows that any informative explanation of what following a rule correctly, going on in the same way, comprises soon gives out. Any general account of the relation of rules or conceptual generalities to particular judgements falls prey to the regress of interpretations. What can be made explicit in words or rules rests on the tacit because going on in each specific way simply is accord with a rule or concept. It is also context-dependent and, since it links conceptual generalities to particular cases in judgements, it is practical.

Because the relation of the tacit and explicit is subtle, it is worth giving a worked example. It is possible to make a béchamel sauce by following a recipe: to measure ingredients and to cook at a specific temperature for a predetermined time. But it is also possible to make one ‘bi t’rack o’ t’ee’ (by the reckoning of the eye) as it is said in Yorkshire dialect. One judges a rough equivalence of butter and flour, sautés the resultant roux until it looks right (so as to cook the flour) and then adds milk gradually and intermittently while stirring continually, watching the consistency fall to almost that of the added milk and then stiffen again. Gradually, the rate of returning to stiffness slows. Were one to add too much milk, it would never thicken again. Thus, the end point is fixed by a judgement that the rate of stiffening has slowed sufficiently that a final addition of a particular amount of milk will, combined with the residual heat energy of the sauce, yield the right consistency by the time it is served.

Preparing a béchamel sauce is thus an expression of a conceptual understanding of the effects of dilution, heating, stirring, thickening against the jeopardy of adding too much milk. But the expression of the concepts comprises demonstratives of the form ‘that degree of stiffness’ and ‘that quantity of additional milk’. It involves the right kind of manipulation of the sauce mixture with a spoon and the right degree of heat applied so that it bubbles thus. Although it is possible to make a béchamel sauce following an explicit recipe, the cook who makes it ‘by eye’ does so employing a form of conceptually-structured, context-dependent, practical knowledge, or tacit knowledge, on this account. Further, its expression and articulation in a practical demonstration depends for its success on the ability of the audience to see in the particularity of a few cases the generality of the rules involved. They must have ‘eyes to see’. They must share the ‘whirl of organism’.

The dual challenge for an account of tacit knowledge can be met in this way as follows. It is tacit because it cannot be codified in context-independent and general terms – it is in that sense ‘untellable’ – while at the same time it is knowledge because it is articulated in the application of general concepts to the particular case, grounded in practice, which is a form of know-how. One consequence of this account is that explicit knowledge always rests on a body of tacit knowledge.

The ward versus the lecture hall? Tacit and explicit knowledge

On the Dreyfus, Dreyfus and Benner account, expertise is a capacity shared with animals and prelinguistic children. It is an ability with little to do with reasons, thought or concepts. Thus what is learnt in practice on the ward supersedes what is learn in lecture halls. Although their five-step model of the acquisition of skills has some empirical plausibility, the detailed characterisation of expertise is implausible.

There is, however, a better picture. Experiential learning teaches tacit knowledge: knowledge that cannot be put into words alone because it is context-dependent and practical. Its demonstration requires practical application. Further, tacit knowledge underpins explicit knowledge even of such general and rule-governed concepts such as adding two. It remains, nevertheless, conceptually structured. And hence there is a common structure to tacit and explicit knowledge, to learning on the ward and in the lecture hall.

Nursing involves theoretical knowledge but also practical skills. On a correct understanding tacit knowledge for rational agents such as human adults is a genuine complement to explicit knowledge but also related to it. Both are deployments of conceptual judgement, one theoretical and one practical. The latter is a shaping of knowledgeable action. The skilled practitioner not only knows what to do in a practical case but they also know why, even though the reasons ground out in patient-specific judgments.

Further reading

The Heideggerian philosophical background of Hubert Dreyfus’s views is set out here:

Dreyfus, H.L. (1991) Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press

For a book length examination of the nature of tacit knowledge see:

Gascoigne, N. and Thornton, T. 2013. Tacit knowledge. Durham: Acumen

For a critical discussion of Hubert Dreyfus’ account of expertise as skilled coping see:

Schear, J.K. (ed.) (2013). Mind, reason, and being-in-the-world: the McDowell-Dreyfus debate. New York: Routledge.

Relevant web pages

The Collaborating Centre for Values-Based Practice promotes discussion of knowledge of values in healthcare

http://valuesbasedpractice.org/

The International Network for Philosophy & Psychiatry promotes research on the philosophy of mental healthcare more broadly

http://inpponline.com/

The Polanyi Society is dedicated to promoting Polanyi’s views of tacit knowledge

http://www.polanyisociety.org/

References

American Psychiatric Association (2013) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders Fifth Edition (DSM-5), Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Association

Aristotle (1985) Nicomachean Ethics (translated by Irwin, T.), Indianapolis: Hackett

Benner, P. (1984) From Novice to Expert: excellence and power in clinical nursing practice, Menlo Park, California: Addison-Wesley

Boudreau, D., Wykretowicz, H., Kinsella, E.A. et al. (2024) Discovering clinical phronesis. Med Health Care and Philos 27, 165–179. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11019-024-10198-8

S. Cavell, (1969) Must We Mean What We Say?, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Dreyfus, H.L. (1999) What Computers Still Can’t Do, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press

Dreyfus, H.L. (2000) Responses. In Heidegger, Coping, and Cognitive Science (eds M. Wrathall and J. Malpas), pp. 313-349 .Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press

Dreyfus, H.L. (2014) Overcoming the Myth of the Mental: How Philosophers Can Profit from the Phenomenology of Everyday Expertise in Dreyfus, H. L., & Wrathall, M.A. (2014) Skillful Coping: Essays on the Phenomenology of Everyday Perception and Action, Oxford: Oxford University Press

Dreyfus, H. L., & Dreyfus, S. E. (1977). Uses and abuses of multi-attribute and multi-aspect model of decision making. Unpublished manuscript, Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research, University of California at Berkeley.

Dreyfus, H. L., & Dreyfus, S. E. (1986). Mind over machine: The power of human intuition and expertise in the age of the computer. Oxford: Basil Blackwell

Dreyfus, S. E. (2004) The Five-Stage Model of Adult Skill Acquisition, Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society, 24: 177-181

McDowell, J. (2009) The engaged intellect. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press

Polanyi, M. 1962. Personal knowledge. Chicago: University of Chicago Press

Polanyi, M. 1967. The tacit dimension. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Sellars, W. (1991) Science, Perception and Reality. Atascadero: Ridgeview Publishing

Wittgenstein, L. 2009. Philosophical investigations. Oxford: Blackwell

World Health Organization (1992) The ICD- 10 Classification of Mental and Behavioural Disorders: Clinical Descriptions and Diagnostic Guidelines. Geneva: World Health Organization.

Wrathall, M.A. (2014) Introduction: Hubert Dreyfus and the Phenomenology of Human Intelligence in Dreyfus, H. L., & Wrathall, M.A. (2014) Skillful Coping: Essays on the Phenomenology of Everyday Perception and Action, Oxford: Oxford University Press: 1-22