Shop Class as Soulcraft_ An Inquiry Into the Value of Work - Matthew B. Crawford [66]
The success of Deep Blue would seem not to shed much light on how expert chess players do what they do. It might well be objected, “of course it doesn’t; it’s a computer!” This objection strikes me as just the right response, but sometimes common sense needs to be defended by an elaborate argument. We are constantly tempted to regard ourselves in the distorting mirror of technology, and in fact the “computational theory of mind” prevails in cognitive psychology (though it is becoming quite embattled).12 An entire academic field has its origin in the idea that we are computers.13 Further, the computer comes to represent an ideal, in light of which real thinking perversely begins to look deficient.14 Thus, when the postindustrial visionary reasons from the fact that complex systems involve “the interaction of too many variables for the mind to hold in correct order simultaneously” to the conclusion that “one has to use algorithms, rather than intuitive judgments, in making decisions,” he argues from the fact that the mind does not do what a computer does to an assertion about the incompetence of the mind. This seems to express an irrational prejudice against people. For, in fact, highly cultivated human minds can get to be pretty good at sussing out a burning building, playing chess, chasing down intermittent gremlins in a car’s electrical system, and who knows what else.
The fact that a firefighter’s knowledge is tacit rather than explicit, and therefore not capable of articulation, means that he is not able to give an account of himself to the larger society. He is not able to make a claim for the value of his mind in the terms that prevail, and may come to doubt it himself. But his own experience provides grounds for a radical critique of the view that theoretical knowledge is the only true knowledge.
Personal Knowledge versus Intellectual Technology
Tommy, my former shop mate, currently works at Pro Class Cycles, an independent shop on Richmond’s south side that has been there since the mid-1980s. It is the place to go for used parts—the shop has about an acre of junk bikes. Bob Eubank, the proprietor, is known for good work at a fair price. The dealerships send him work that they know he can do more efficiently than their own employees, who are often recently out of the Motorcycle Mechanics Institute—building wheels, for example. Street bikes went to cast aluminum wheels in the late 1970s, but dirt bikes continue to have spoke wheels, and lacing one up can be a bewildering exercise in geometry. Bob’s brother Lance, who also works there, is known to the dirt bike crowd as the guru for suspension tuning in central Virginia. He keeps his secrets even from his brother.
Bob is used to looking at something, say an internal engine part, and making a judgment about it based on experience—for example, looking at the first signs of glaze on a cylinder wall and judging whether it needs rehoning. Pressed to justify his decision, he might say, “I’ve seen them look like this and go another ten thousand miles without any loss of compression.” The experience Bob relies on is very much his own; he is not following a set of instructions. When a mechanic makes this kind of judgment, he is relying on a tacit integration of sensual knowledge, by which he subconsciously refers what he sees to patterns built up in his mind through long experience. He does just what a firefighter and a chess master do.
Some modern motorcycles have begun to include onboard, computerized self-diagnostic functions, just as cars do. But they haven’t eliminated the kind of judgment mechanics exercise. If we can understand why they haven’t, this will help illuminate further the limitations inherent in the idea of an “intellectual technology,” and the perversities that get laid upon work when those limitations aren’t heeded.
Car manufacturers are supposed