Tacit Mechanisms and Heuristic Theorizing: Comments on Ryszard Wójcicki’s “Is There Only One Truth? An Introduction to the Pragmatic Theory of Knowledge Acquisition”

Abstrakt

The purpose of this paper is two-fold. First, it aims at developing a preliminary typology of subconscious, tacit mechanisms that underlie the conscious exercise of practical skills as well as the formation and functioning of conscious mental representations such as perceptual experiences, mental images, explicitly held beliefs and explanatory hypotheses. Second, it employs the typology to consider whether these tacit mechanisms can be examined and explicated by what Ryszard Wójcicki calls heuristic theorizing or heuristic reasoning, i.e., by a cognitive procedure whose job is to study one's tacit or personal knowledge.

The paper consists of two sections. Section 1 outlines the general structure of what Michael Polanyi calls personal knowledge or tacit knowing. It also discusses a few examples of tacit knowing — in action, perception and cognition — and argue that they all have to be explained in terms of implicit mechanisms rather than in that of implicitly held beliefs or theories. Section 2 start with an observation that despite having the same structure, the implicit mechanisms consideration in section 1 fail to form a homogeneous class: there are mechanisms that operate on propositional representations such as tacitly held beliefs and theories, mechanisms that involve nonpropositional representations such as perceptual experiences and topographic or classificatory cognitive schemas, and mechanism whose characteristic feature is their using specific processing rules reflecting the structural properties of a given stimuli domain. In other words, it is argued that what Polanyi calls personal or tacit knowlAbstracts 161 edge may take either the form of representational states — propositional or nonpropositional — or the form of processing rules. Finally, it is demonstrated that these and similar differences are significant for understanding the role of heuristic theorizing in the acquisition and justification of objective knowledge.