Shop Class as Soulcraft_ An Inquiry Into the Value of Work - Matthew B. Crawford [63]
To regard universal knowledge as the whole of knowledge is to take no account of embodiment and purposiveness, those features of actual thinkers who are always in particular situations. The situated or worldly character of an embodied being has implications for the way we come to know the world, and the expert knowledge of the firefighter may be regarded as a heightened version of our everyday cognition. We do not usually encounter things in a disinterested way, for the simple reason that things that have no bearing on us do not engage our attention, of which we have a finite amount. (“Having a bearing on” must be taken generously; an attractive stranger who walks down the street as we sit at an outdoor café may engage our attention quite fully. As an object of desire, he or she bears on our world in the sense of opening up potential avenues of action, even if these are pursued only in the imagination.)
The things we know best are the ones we contend with in some realm of regular practice. Heidegger famously noted that the way we come to know a hammer is not by staring at it, but by grabbing hold of it and using it. For him, this was a deep point about our apprehension of the world in general. The preoccupation with knowing things “as they are in themselves” he found to be wrongheaded, tied to a dichotomy between subject and object that isn’t true to our experience. The way things actually “show up” for us is not as mere objects without context, but as equipment for action (like the hammer) or solicitations to action (like the beautiful stranger) within some worldly situation. One of the central questions of cognitive science, rooted in the prevailing epistemology, has been to figure out how the mind “represents” the world, since mind and world are conceived to be entirely distinct. For Heidegger, there is no problem of re-presenting the world, because the world presents itself originally as something we are already in and of. His insights into the situated character of our everyday cognition shed light on the kind of expert knowledge that is also inherently situated, like the firefighter’s or the mechanic’s.
If thinking is bound up with action, then the task of getting an adequate grasp on the world, intellectually, depends on our doing stuff in it. And in fact this is the case: to really know shoelaces, you have to tie shoes. Otherwise you might make the error my father did, attributing the properties of mathematical strings to shoelaces, and airily suppose that a double knot can be untied in one stroke, regardless of the particular material the shoelace is made of.4 The economists Alan Blinder and Frank Levy have shown us the likely consequences, in an increasingly global labor market, of the fact that some jobs are inherently situated, and cannot be reduced to rule following. And I know from experience that the habits of mind of the mathematical physicist are ill suited to the realities of an old car. Let us consider more fully how it is that practical know-how is neither fully formalizable nor essentially rulelike.
Of Ohm’s Law and Muddy Boots
One of the nuggets my dad offered me as I was trying to figure out why I was getting no spark at the spark plug, in my 1963 Volkswagen, was Ohm’s law: V=IR, where V stands for voltage, I for current, and R for resistance. The equation states that these things stand in a definite relationship to one another. But in an old car, the idea of resistance as something simple and unitary, as the letter R, can get in the way of the kind of perception required to notice the actual sources of resistance, and the varied circumstances they are tied to. What mechanics say is that electrical connections need to be tight, dry, and clean of corrosion and dirt. They are constantly