The Vocational Sense

Why Heidegger and why vocational education?

It is my intention in this paper to not only show that the

increasing influence of Heidegger’s work in work based learning

and cognate areas (WBL) will continue, but that it has the

potential to introduce a paradigm shift in our way of

understanding and establishing vocational education training

systems themselves (VET).

It is the contention of Heidegger scholars that the current

dominance of a particular conception of vocational education and

training by economic and business interests has not helped in

shifting a focus from the academic to the vocational.1 This is for

three reasons I believe.

First, why would academic researchers study what is not only an

alternative mode of learning but one that is subject to external

factors and forces (eg. investment, vested interest, influence)?

1 See Gibbs (2012); Fairfield (2013). This approach is sometimes called ‘new vocationalism’ which aims to value vocational education precisely because of itseconomic and utilitarian worth. That is not my argument, though such praise should not be dismissed as being entirely irrelevant for it may hide a deeper insight that work matters, professional identities matter, and to follow Arendt,the notion of ‘work’ has many facets and periods of phenomenological understanding.

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The debate about contract research would be an obvious debating

point in this, as well as the focus on ‘market intelligence’ or

‘action research’ (laudable as this may be in itself), and,

finally, the assumption that research must show quantitative

‘impact’ measures for it to be most easily funded.

Second, the dominance of economic and business interests, either

by OECD parameters or, as in England, greater employer ownership

of the skills system via funding (Employer Ownership Pilots which

are shifting post 19 funding streams to employer interests and

away from colleges) and even qualification design (the proposed

‘Techbaccs’ currently under construction), could render academic

research and views on the nature of vocational expertise and

knowledge as marginal and, largely, unimportant.

And, thirdly, more significant to my argument here, is that it is

a largely undeveloped notion that the use of phenomenology as a

starting point into understanding vocational expertise, skill

development, and education could supply us with the needed scope

and range of focus that is needed to auger anything like a

paradigm shift. Something that even Heidegger scholars may have

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assumed and lowered their expectations while continuing to work

within current parameters.2

So, the challenge is not a small one and the tools of use are not

the easiest or most obvious to use. That is, the texts of

Heidegger. An obscure philosophical writer, with a questionable

personal history, and a grandiose aim, the question of Being.

But, there are even more concerns that must be addressed if we are

to meet the intentions of the paper.

First, that it could be thought that there is no need for a

paradigm shift or anything like it. We already have enough

concepts and understanding to develop a better understanding of

the processes, the pedagogy, of vocational learning and teaching

and, more to the point, vocational practice.

Secondly, that what Heidegger offers is not as original as one

might think, nor as significant, therefore any claims made can be

2 I am referring to the work of Hubert Dreyfus whose notion of skill acquisitionactually leaves untouched vocational practice (its learning and pedagogies); ultimately his work in this area merely highlights the ‘intuitions’ of the expert and leaves us asking more questions than answers.

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either placed within current research ideas or rejected piecemeal

as not being helpful.

Thirdly, that if we did need to explore the paradigm of WBL or VET

(and this itself needs raising as a distinction at some point,

along with the continuities to informal learning and, even,

lifelong learning) we, again, have enough recommended ways of

going forward, and, indeed, ones that already successfully

encompass previous debates and views to render them as more

obvious and more credible potential candidates.

Fourthly, that if we were to entertain another and more obscure

way forward, such as Heidegger, that would take us some time to

develop the common concepts and resources that researchers would

need in order to make any difference, at least for a long time.

Therefore, we would be proposing a method that may only be proven

and effective in the distant future. A fairly poor prognosis when

we have so many urgent issues that are already tabled:

globalisation, economic competitiveness, and a VET system

castigated for wasting learners’ time and denying them

employability routes.3

3 See the Wolf Report (2012)4

These challenges, or tests, must be faced when proposing anything

like a paradigm shift - even if it is to discount particular

methods, assumptions, concepts. In this paper I can only go so far

to make a number of points of departure on key concepts that I

maintain are highly relevant to current debates on WBL and VET and

that would be deepened and enriched by turning to Heidegger. My

proposal, in short, is that Heidegger’s philosophy can supply the

necessary elements for a paradigm shift in our understanding of

vocational education and, indeed, by implication, education,

itself.

Now, I would like to address the extent of Heidegger’s current

influence and the reasons why I am proposing that this work should

be carried forward.

The Turn to Heidegger

An ‘education through occupations...combines within itself more of

the factors conducive to learning than any other method.’ (Dewey q

Quay (2013) xxiii)

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The introduction of Heidegger’s thought to vocational education,

and education generally, has been sparse so far, but it is,

markedly, through an engagement with the work of John Dewey in

Fairfield (2012) and Quay (2013). It can be seen in major attempts

to apply Heidegger to the area of work based learning in Gibbs

(2012) and in VET (Lum (2012), and also in broad educational

theory (Thompson 2009). A singular collection of applying

Heidegger to education can be found in Peters (2005) and, of

course, there is the more broader phenomenological literature

which is less helpful, but Dall’alba (2009) is more than useful.

The most influential intervention has been via Dreyfus’ model of

skill acquisition (Dreyfus and Dreyfus 1980), which has, in turn,

influenced debates in nursing and care and so introduced

Heideggerian concepts such as ‘care’ (Sorge) into those areas.

This may be more serendipitous than logical, for the same model of

skill acquisition has not disturbed thinking in other domains of

skill formation.

Discursive interventions into WBL and VET are hampered by research

context, and stakeholder influence and interests, then, but they

are also compounded by two further strands of thinking, which have

taken these influences and interests as being not only the

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obstacle for establishing a coherent and robust VET system in

England (underpinned by adequate theory and concepts), but as

setting the agenda: VET is seen by all as a utilitarian policy

arena.

Debates then circle the view that vocational ‘knowledge’ (let’s

suppose there was such a thing!) is really a pure outcome of

utilitarian policy. So, for learners, one studies vocational

subjects in order ‘to do’ something, either engage one in activity

that is different to the academic (because, of course, one cannot

do the academic; one must use one’s hands, not brains) or, more

positively, but only just, that it will lead to a job, an

occupation that you have a passion for (still a lowly aim, of

course, for the Platonic).

And even when vocational knowledge is referred to it is defined

within the sole orbit of work and the interests of the workplace.

Now this needs unpacking, because there is an obvious link to

work, but it is not because of the purpose of teaching vocational

‘knowledge’ (at least, not directly), but because the forms that

vocational ‘knowledge’ takes, while it enables and participates in

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the world of work, is arguably derived from what Heidegger calls

‘coping’ or ‘circumspection’ (Umsicht).

I must make a point about the translation explicitly here.

Umsicht, literally, means ‘to look about’ and that ‘sense’ is what

I want to entertain here. I want to say that this ‘looking about’

is a disposition that drives social practices and, when refined,

develops into particular skills, and then formations of skill that

reveal occupational expertise. And, let me add, one ‘looks about’

as any one (das Mann) looks about, as Heidegger might put it. For

Dasein (Being-there), is always already social, ‘with others’

(mitsein). However, Dreyfus, prefers ‘coping’ while others use

‘circumspection’. Deeper still, and very pertinent to my

exploration, others argue that Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle

provides a transformation of Aristotle’s notion of ‘phronesis’

(practical wisdom) into Umsicht. But there are other Heideggerian

terms that vie for such use (Verstehen (understanding);

Entschlossenheit (resoluteness); and Gewissen (conscience).4

‘Umsicht,’ for Heidegger, refers to all practices that enable one

to get about in the world and it appears in his work in everyday

examples of turning a door handle, fetching water, even checking 4 Bernasconi (1989) 3

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the picture is hung straight. But it is also is given a singular

focus in regard to tool use, to equipment and to places of work

and the workshop. It is most clearly presented, as are the notions

of tools as ‘ready to hand’ (Zuhandenheit) and things (when taken

out of their context or theoretically looked upon as ‘present at

hand’ (Vorhandenheit), environment (Umwelt) and worldliness

(Weltlichkeit) in Heidegger’s seminal text Being and Time,

sections 11-15.5

The ‘ready-to-hand,’ ‘present-at-hand’ and ‘being there’ make up

Heidegger’s three modes of being that will enable him to introduce

a disclosure (erschlossenheit) of tools, equipment, environment

(the relations to dasein and tools/equipment) and the way dasein

understands its world (worldliness). This threefold supplants and

undermines the binary opposition that have been assumed in western

philosophy and taken, historically, the forms of

substance/properties; universals/particulars;

necessity/contingency. Heidegger relates such binary oppositions

to epochs of Being - that which reflects our understanding of

ourselves, things and world about us. Hence the importance and

5 Bernasconi (1989) 1, sets out the importance of this section for Heidegger’s work, his approach to ontology, the interest of scholars on this section, and that its key concepts Umsicht and worumwillen (‘for the sake of’ which is how Heidegger describes how we go about our purposes in life) are drawn from Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle in his 1921-3 lecture series.

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correctness I would argue of Hager’s point of departure: that the

understanding of learning and knowledge is inextricably tied to

our understanding of what we take as knowledge, knowledge bearers,

and the types of things that knowledge is of.

I will have to leave to another time a more detailed reading of

these issues and their relevance to Being and Time. Here, I wish

merely to introduce and, perhaps, provoke the question that we

need a paradigm shift in understanding vocational ‘knowledge’ that

is distinct from academic knowledge (which we assume to be the

defining concept of ‘knowledge’ i.e. the logical sequence of

propositional statements that make up true justified belief,

again, for brevity, I will use the classical formulation found in

Plato’s Theaetatus).

Unfortunately, Heidegger’s formulation of the disclosure of the

world, and the way commentators have taken it, is that they have

concentrated on specific tasks that ‘coping’ evidences and so have

followed Heidegger in talking of instances of ‘hammering’, or,

assumed that the activity is merely a sum of all the hammering

that goes on. This is to largely ignore the whole web of meanings

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and references that Heidegger says plays a part in Umsicht. I will

take this up another time.

What is of immediate concern here is that Heidegger does not tell

us how such general coping or ‘looking about’ reaches a more

refined sense when we participate in more complex practices.

Heidegger appears to be fairly indiscriminate when it comes to the

types of ‘coping’ he gives as examples. This is not surprising as

Heidegger is more intent on describing how the world appears to

‘human beings’ (I will this as a shorthand here. Heidegger’s term,

more precisely, is ‘dasein’ or ‘being there’). And he thinks that

the network of practices and dispositions that dasein is

imbricated in reveals a type of being that has been ignored and

forgotten in the philosophical tradition. In short, that we have

emphasised the subjectivist, individualist, interpretation of

human being that was so well expressed by Descartes in the

Seventeenth Century.

So, when we turn to vocational knowledge, we may see it as the

articulation of how we ‘cope’ (Umsicht) when we have equipment, a

workplace, a system of references for the work that is set out and

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not simply a generalised notion of ‘coping’ which it actually sits

within.

I want to suggest that there is a ‘vocational sense’ that opens up

and reveals fields of interest that become places in which one

works or that enables institutions to develop work. These places

become like ‘home’ to those occupied in them because they are

actually analogous to the generalised everyday coping that

Heidegger says makes up our being-in-the-world. If this is on the

right lines then it may help explain why certain environments are

more conducive to innovation, passion, and learning than others.6

It may also aid an understanding of professional, occupational and

even self-identity, that is, why one ‘feels at home’ in certain

situations or workplaces, as well as in particular occupations.

The notion of vocational sense, then, is the link between

Heidegger’s general theory of ‘coping’ and, what I am terming for

the moment to emphasize its role, vocational ‘knowledge’ or

‘sense’ (we shall see why the term ‘knowledge’ is problematic and

actually obfuscates the debates later). Indeed, why I am using the

term, ‘sense,’ is to try and forge a positive and singular

identity. 6 See Unwin and Fuller (2004) and Evans (2004a) and (2004b).

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The vocational sense aims to combine a general (and classical)

sense of perception (sense) and meaning (sense) in order to open a

positive space that allows a dialogue about what happens when we

do things ‘in-the-world’, when we exist, when we project

ourselves, when we interpret and judge. The vocational sense is

nothing less than the narrowing of our sense of being, as we

‘cope,’ toward a more refined notion of an institutional,

collective and individual assemblage of interests, expertise and

concerns.

One of the problems in introducing Heidegger’s terminology, and

indeed adding terms, is that they fall foul of current and

understood terms of use. But we find that the terms of use around

‘practice’ in work and in vocational expertise is not at all

filled with clear terms of use. In fact, we have ‘practice,’

‘implicit.’ ‘tacit,’ ‘know how,’ ‘understanding,’ experience,’

‘tacit dimension,’ ‘tacit knowledge,’ and even the use of a

Japanese concept of ‘Ba.’7

7 ‘Ba’ is derived from the existentialist philosophy of Kitaro Nishida and the application to work settings of Ikujiro Nonaka.

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While some of these terms have been fairly positive, ‘tacit

dimension,’ ‘tacit knowledge,’ and ‘Ba’ they are often framed

against the prevailing orthodoxy of explicit knowledge.

Hager describes the form that such explicit knowledge takes in

educational circles. He describes its principal element as: ‘there

is one best kind of learning.’ Hager thinks this is the key

foundation stone of a number of assumptions about learning, that

it is individually based, that it is mental, that it is

propositional in form. The learning that Hager8 refers to is that

of the classical notion of ‘wisdom’ as contained in ‘ideas.’ This

assumption, shared by Plato, Aristotle and reformulated for a mass

audience in French (not the Latin of the day) by Descartes,

becomes the yardstick for what we think of as ‘knowledge,’ the

form it takes, the way it is transmitted and the uses it has.

This conception of ‘knowledge’ sees it as universal, systematic,

and permanent. These positive characteristics are then fed into

the importance of theory (which meets these criteria) over

practice. Theory, of course, can fit the idea that such ideas are

accessed ‘mentally’ and, even ‘individually.’ They need not, but

we are dealing with an assumption, a way of understanding our 8 Hager (2002) 2

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being, and not something that is self-evident or, now,

uncontested.

Hager’s formulation of the problem is incredibly helpful, whether

it needs further refinement in regard to how we establish another

paradigm is one of the tests this paper is subject to. And not

everybody would agree with this need anyway, so there is a real

amount of work to be done.9

Clues to a way ahead

If we take, as an example, a clue as to why Heidegger may be

important and relevant, we could do to reflect on some debates

around ‘Knowing how.’

Such debates could be seen as a false friend to debates on

vocational education, precisely because it is framed in a

supplementary logic. Knowing how is not only defined in opposition

to ‘knowing that,’ famously by Ryle, but it soon became a synonym

for ‘practice’ itself which was still held in opposition to

theory. It was meant to disturb the Cartesian view that knowledge

9 Winch, Lum and even Gascoigne and Thornton would all demur at the need for a new paradigm preferring a case by case basis (Winch), a more circumspect way forward (Lum) and a less speculative and radical proposal (Gascoigne and Thornton).

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is all ‘mental’ or all propositional, but it merely shone a light

on practice that was considered to be deficient according to the

criteria of reason: it wasn’t objective, couldn’t be articulated,

and had no obvious criteria of correctness.

Further attempts to reveal an ‘other’ form of ‘knowledge,’ such as

tacit knowledge are also deficient. Not only do they not contest

the ground of ‘knowledge’ as the dominant form of understanding

and ‘sense’ we make of the world, but they may fail to demand any

other significant terrain. Once more, tacit knowledge is

supplemental to explicit and propositional knowledge. It must fit

in or desist from trying.

It is, therefore, contestable that the radicality of Polanyi, or

even Dewey, could potentially undermine current dominant thinking

and steer us toward an other beginning, to what we conceive of as

‘knowledge,’ so setting us out on a path that better frees

‘dasein’ to a more flourishing sense of personal and collective

human development. This would be extremely doubtful to do if we

insist that any answers must be delimited by traditional concepts

of the subject, of freedom, or of knowledge itself. Therefore

their approaches may suffer from moving too quickly, or not far

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enough, from assumptions about what sort of ‘knowledge’ claims

they are seeking to contest and why.

This is why Heidegger may provide a significant way forward as his

thinking resists such traditional assumptions, while still drawing

on familiar concepts and work (Nulty (2006); Taylor (2002); and,

to an extent, Gascoigne and Thornton (2013)).

We can see in these recent and important contributions that those

authors having a point of departure in the analytic or pragmatic

traditions struggle to overcome the binary oppositions of knowing

that/knowing how; theory/practice; propositional/non-propositional

disclosure. I am referring here to Christopher Winch and Neil

Gascoigne and Andrew Thornton. Both works offer serious insights

into the debate and help elaborate thinking in this area, but both

suffer from the assumption that there is a domain of propositional

knowledge which provides the binary opposition to tacit knowledge

(I am not saying tacit knowledge is not itself a useful conceptual

distinction to make at certain points). This determines the view

that there is not, ontologically, any other possible alternative

to propositional knowledge. Itself framed within the ontological

presuppositions of Western epistemology. In other words, whatever

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know-how is it is an element within ‘knowledge’ as defined in

modern and classical philosophy as true justified belief. So what

is transmitted in vocational learning and work is a mode of this

notion of knowledge. Winch coming from a focus on vocational

education and training is more sensitive to the wider elements

that such transmission might be subject to (virtue, workplace

context and so forth). Gascoigne and Thornton, though, have

attempted to insert a rational subject which filters ‘personal’

knowledge in a particular context in a vain, but gallant attempt,

to get out of the constraints of Western discourse. They do this

knowingly. They do not want to rid themselves of constraints that

they may see as positive.

‘Knowing how’, tacit knowledge, personal knowledge, are all

relevant terms at some levels of these debates, but they have

clouded the real thrust of what Heidegger is offering in his

notion of coping (Umsicht). Unfortunately, Dreyfus’ pragmatic

reading has encouraged this obfuscation and his construction of a

model of skill development has been erected on an erroneous

premise - that ‘skill’ is co-terminous with coping in general and

that there is a generic model of skill development (which he gives

in five stages of development from novice to expert). The

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difficulty here may be that if skill were co-terminous with coping

then ‘skill’ would simply be a synonym for any social practice

which is too vague to be of real use.

In Heidegger’s work coping (Umsicht) is a particular form of

dasein’s disclosure (erschlossenheit) of the world and, while it

is the basis for ‘skill’ or what I will refer to as the

‘vocational sense’, it cannot be an already formed stage in skill

development. It is the condition for skill development, not a

stage in it.

So, I am trying to draw attention to an intermediary ontological

level of analysis. We have the transcendental condition of

‘coping’ which Heidegger gives as the significant element in our

being-in-the-world, but we then have the suggestion that another

process must emerge that determines the field of practices and

meanings of particular vocational areas and their expertise.

Finally, and on that basis, we would then have at the level of the

ontical (empirical, if you wish) actual training schemes (which is

where debates are mostly found in Evans (2004), Unwin and Fuller

(2004), for examples). When framed in this way these works become

even more significant and fundamental, I believe.

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This is also why Drefyfus’ examples of ‘know how’ can thoroughly

confuse. The ‘practice’ of driving is not an example (solely) of

coping, it is also an example of ‘skill.’10 Driving a car is often

used as an example of pure know how or practice (meaning it is not

a propositional form of knowledge), but it is a skill in the sense

of somebody having learned how to do it. Most social practices, or

examples of coping, we would not call a ‘skill’ because we do not

need to ‘learn’ any particular form of their manifestation. Hence,

‘manners’ when eating at a table is not seen as a ‘skill’ but

simply a way of eating that is culturally informed. Politeness is

not a skill, but, again, a cultural manifestation of a form of

behaviour. Opening the door is not a skill as it relates to mere

physical co-ordination, but it does contain further meaning and

reference to other tasks, activities or purposes (as do all of

these examples). This is why a wider horizon is needed in respect

of our ‘being-in-the-world’ when we talk of skill and expertise

and, indeed, one that is not necessarily anthropologically based.

There is debate here as to when ‘skill’ or some such term needs to

be used to identify the task at hand, but it is not (I am

straining to say here) at the level of the task itself, but is 10 Winch, quite rightly, questions the use of this portmanteau term in his work.

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best identified in the assemblage of practices that we say

encompass those tasks. This is the vocational sense as it

manifests itself and picks out relevant objects, tasks and

dispositions.

Dreyfus, while wishing to remain focused upon Division 1 of Being

and Time and explicate a theory of ‘expertise’, has assumed that

what Heidegger says about coping as such is the same as what he

might say about ‘skill’.

This may be incorrect for two reasons. The first is that an

elaboration of ‘skill’, and its relation to education and

learning, remains within the specific purview of a regional

ontology, called education or, more expansively, vocational

education and training. That regional ontology would drawn on

specific research, as well as being grounded in Heidegger’s

philosophy (and not just in Division I of Being and Time,

necessarily). But I must leave that discussion for another

occasion.

The second reason is that ‘coping’ is not the same as ‘skill’ or

‘skill formation’. In fact, there may be a more direct relation

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than even Dreyfus imagined here. The ‘beginner’ may not, in fact,

need any instruction to achieve competency, skill and,

potentially, mastery, as their development may be a part of the

way that they disclose the world in the first place. One embedded

in the practices of a particular skill, occupation or area of

activity, would not necessarily need formal learning in order to

achieve what someone else may do through formal learning and

experience in the field. This debate would be followed by an

exploration of these terms in regard to informal and formal

learning.

Heidegger’s philosophy, perhaps like no other, supplies a direct

connection between informal and formal learning as he sees skill

development based on a prior disclosure of world, including

equipment, others and contexts. In Dreyfus’ most influential

interpretation of Heidegger’s employment in this area he ignores

this level of ontological disclosure completely. Dreyfus attempts

to present a fairly standard, though informative, set of steps

that dasein could develop in order to be ‘trained’ in a particular

set of skills.

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But he thinks it is only when mastery is achieved is there a sense

of dasein as a ‘coper’ in the world and the need for propositions

and rules (explicit knowledge) aborted. I will say more about this

on another occasion.

In Heidegger, contrariwise, the ‘coper’ is dasein at every turn.

Even if the expert is thought of as someone who performs

‘naturally’, just as one would if one were not even thinking ‘like

a riding a bicycle’, we know that this is not how things are at

all. This is the level of personal judgement, not the point of

skill formation or skill utilisation. Judgement is a moment of

expertise, not the whole story.

But two things follow if we begin to inquire into this issue

rather differently. The first is that prior disclosure means that

any other derived or ‘grounded’ area of dasein’s world be

considered secondary (eg propositional knowledge). The second is

that such a disclosure would entail that what one could say about

what one is doing would be restricted to a later elaboration and

one that would always already be thought of as ‘hindsight’. Much

like a piece of music, theatre or art, what one is experiencing

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would be more holistically conceived and so never fully

‘tellable’.

While one could see such a formulation being the same as what

Gascoigne and Thornton call the Principle of Articulacy (PA), that

is, that one can say something about one’s practice but not

everything because of either self-constituting

(judgement/character) factors or context dependent factors, thus

avoiding both their Principle of Inarticulacy (PI), where one can

say nothing because the notion of tacit is too other to reason and

so ‘mysterious’ or nebuluous; and the Principle of Codifiability

(PC) (that everything we call ‘knowledge’ can be stated).

Here, we are saying, that PA rests not on a limited notion of

‘saying’ what could be said, that is, if the counterfactuals could

be removed e.g., context, character, which are themselves limiting

factors. We could rather say that contextual and personal

knowledge is being passed on as well as independent non-

contextualised knowledge (it is difficult to imagine only the

former or the latter being passed on which is Gascoigne &

Thornton’s problem); rather, we are saying, that it rests on the

richer sense of doing as meaning. We cannot ‘say’ what tacit

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knowledge is in the same way we cannot say what Shakespeare is or

Hamlet is or Guernica ‘is’. It is a hermeneutic question. As

Gascoigne and Thornton admit this would, as Rorty puts it, be

‘hermeneutics all the way.’ (2013 30)

There is another reason why tacit knowledge is not PA and that is

that the determining factors, the conditions of its success, are

at the level of the social (which includes the personal here and

thus articulated by Heidegger’s concept of dasein). Attempting to

render the epistemological basis of skills, the tacit dimension,

practice, active comprehension or what have you as ‘tacit

knowledge’, that is positing it as ‘knowledge’ is doomed to fail

as the concept is irretrievably social and ontological.

There are other considerations here as to the appropriate level of

analysis. For example, Polanyi talks of the ‘tacit dimension’, not

knowledge. Dreyfus talks of the way of making judgements of the

expert, not knowledge. And Ryle appears not to discuss ‘knowledge’

per se, as true justified belief, only in the modes in which it is

manifest, and, indeed, the particular linguistic and logical

expressions that may fool us into imagining that ‘knowledge’ sits

in a Cartesian ego dislodged from the world (the ‘Orthodox’ view).

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For Searle and Taylor, who talk of a ‘background,’ are doing so

often to avoid the constraints of traditional epistemologies. What

all of these approaches do share, and which is positive, is the

idea of proposing a regress argument in which any explicit or

propositional statements (knowledge) they argue presuppose, or

regress to, a ‘background’ set of practices, networks, sociality

or what have you that enable the emergence of an other domain. The

error made in these approaches is assuming that the outcome of

those processes (explicit propositional knowledge) is the final

and best form for ‘being human.’ This may sound odd so let me

unpack a little further.

If we do think that the Cartesian cogito (the central villain

here) has influenced thinking to the extent that it is assumed

that the subject is detached from the world (that is,

philosophically, in terms of credibility of view, authority over

itself and its views and behaviours, legitimacy to act as it sees

fit) then it would also be taken that the form its authority took

would also be significant and it is. In this case, thought as

expressed in logical statements makes up the most clear and

distinct form of expression for that subject. That, after all, is

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how it came to prove its own philosophical existence in the first

place.

So, in counterposing another beginning, another place, to inquire

and to express what it is to be human is bound to meet with robust

challenges. The idea, common to modernism, that an apocalypse of

sorts will be unveiled if any other beginning is sought is, of

course, what happens when one suggests that Heidegger, or the

legacy of Heidegger’s rethinking of the tradition, has a

contribution to make.

But this does not mean it tells us nothing or is simply ad hoc

belief, rather its work is in supplying the ‘truth’ of how things

are in respect to things, people and purposes. Not only holistic

in character, it is dynamic in orientation: hence the introduction

here of an alethic disposition.

To be clear, ‘knowing how’ is not a useful distinction or term for

Heidegger’s concept of coping. Heidegger is not offering an

alternative, or an oppositional term, to propositional knowledge

per se, but showing how it emerges from coping. Secondly, coping

is not then, simply, a form of knowing how and neither is it

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‘undeveloped’ skill or, more specifically, a disposition for skill

formation. It is a condition for the possibility of lived

experience itself.

I will argue that ‘coping’ as the condition for the possibility of

lived experience is, as Heidegger argues, equiprimordial with

other conditions for the possibility of lived experience (language

and understanding). All three are based on Heidegger’s conception

of ‘being-in-the-world’ and therefore should be understood as

opening up a logically anterior space for our use of language, our

employment of the understanding, and how we find ourselves in the

world ‘in the first place.’

In this sense, and this sense only, the distinction of knowing

that and knowing how is not helpful, for both should, on this

reading, originate in an ‘other’ beginning. One in which what we

call in an everyday fashion ‘knowing how’, ‘practice’, has

priority in regard to disclosing things, but is really most

properly seen through the lens of ‘being-in-the-world’, one which

shapes the emergence of ‘knowing that’ as, first, a concern with

things (unavailability, obstruction, useless - all ‘quasi-

28

articulated’ - ‘oh,’ or simply in a gesture, ‘one’s hands drop’),

and then, with an explanation (articulated as ‘too heavy’ ) and,

finally, theoretically (the mass is too great and the leverage too

small for x to move it).

There are a number of distinctions then that need to be made in

order to render the current accounts of what I am calling the

vocational sense to be clarified and then, hopefully, deepened and

explored further. This will mean that current terms of use that

relate to Heidegger, and those that refer to vocational education

and training and so forth will need to be unpacked into a more

coherent order.

Tacit Knowledge as ‘Taciticity’

We are most helped here by the work of Haugeland, Lum, Winch,

Gibbs and Gascoigne and Thornton’s work, particularly, in Tacit

Knowledge which provides an entirely lucid and fruitful breakdown

of tacit knowledge from a pragmatic and, I would argue, a strongly

epistemological focus, though their conclusions reach depths of

analysis that suggest a form of socially situated knowledge is at

work when one talks of ‘tacit knowledge’ for them. However, this

aspect of their analysis is not emphasised and it is what I want

29

to do here in order to propose a Heideggerian reading of ‘tacit

knowledge’ as ‘taciticity.’ The reason that I need to introduce

the term is in order to relate to the cogent analyses of what is

‘tacit’ but also extend them into Heidegger’s own analysis. It is

the work of both analyses that suggest that a new term is

necessary. For Gascoigne and Thornton’s analysis: tacit knowledge

is not knowledge and must be expressed rather differently, but

within the confines of the epistemological tradition. The question

to pose is how far would their definition disturb education, VET

or WBL? I believe they may well be justifying a credible way of

formulating what happens in VET or WBL but in such a way that

actually demotes it as ‘personal but important knowledge.’ And

isn’t this what is really meant by tacit knowledge anyway? I am

arguing that what we say about ‘tacit’ is a clue to another mode

of knowledge, Knowledge is founded on taciticity.

For Heidegger’s analysis, coping is not sufficient to enable a

clarification of what happens when one learns a skill, develops

expertise, or, even, begins to theorise within a community of

inquirers. ‘Taciticity,’ therefore, is employed to fill that gap

in both analyses.

30

...we have argued that the idea of tacit knowledge should be

thought of as context dependent but conceptually structured

practical or personal knowledge....

The equation of ‘personal’ and ‘practical’ flags the fact that

such knowledge can only be articulated practically and from

within. It requires not just a context, which would be

sufficient for context-dependent spectator knowledge, but also a

skilled agent both to perform the practical demonstration (in the

role of the teacher) and also to have ‘eyes to see’ the import of

the demonstration (as the ‘learning-ready’ pupil) (Gascoigne and

Thornton (2013) 167) emphasis added.

This formulation of tacit knowledge, while founded on an

accumulation of clues found in Polanyi, Ryle, Heidegger and

Wittgenstein Collins and Dreyfuss, but rendered distinct from

them, contains some key elements that need to be drawn out in

order to see the full import of the argument and its conclusions.

1. The notion that tacit knowledge is ‘knowledge’

2. The idea that it is rendered ‘from within’

3. That it is context-dependent

31

4. That it can be articulable

5. At times, it can be articulable in context-independent terms

6. That it is found in the social interaction of, for example,

teacher and pupil

7. That there is an expert who provides the evidence or

performance

8. That there is a willing pupil who has ‘eyes to see’.

There are elements here that are undetermined from the previous

arguments in the book up to this point. Though there are two

fundamentally illustrative examples of what the authors call

‘tacit knowledge’ used in the text, which are the chick-sexers and

the Polynesian fishermen, the idea that they show a notion of

‘tacit knowledge’ as transmitted in work is ignored. And yet, the

conclusions reached here suggest that that is what has exactly

been accomplished. The point being that the ‘practices’ the

‘taciticity’ of what the authors take as tacit knowledge is always

already in play.

The arguments in the book, generally, have great relevance to an

understanding of the epistemological concerns around tacit

knowledge and go some way to showing that the insights of key

32

thinkers have a contribution to make, but they do not, arguably,

impinge on the most proper level of analysis, the social itself.

Of course, that is not the aim of a book concerned with

epistemology, but it does beg the question of the use of such

illustrative examples.

My point of departure, then, is from that other side. I want to

say that those examples show very different things about tacit

knowledge and that, as examples, perhaps they are not the best to

employ in this particular text. However, they provide an

opportunity for Gascoigne and Thornton to go and develop their

work in an area of growing philosophical interest, vocational

education and training (including work based learning), and one

which much needs such insight.11

Furthermore, the assumption that the phenomenon of tacit knowledge

is known ‘from within’ suggests that a more charitable reading of

a phenomenological approach is called for. Though, such an

approach drawing on Heidegger, would remove the authors from their

predilection for a ‘rational’ subject. Indeed, this seems to be a

major constraint in formulating a more radical and, arguably, more

11 See Gibbs (2012) 14 for proposing a new ‘field’ of study.33

appropriate explication of tacit knowledge or what I am suggesting

may be called the vocational sense.

There is then the element of the duality of the performance: the

expert and the willing novice. Again, while understandable in

terms of the examples (but this is doubtful as a ‘chick-sexer’ has

so few identifiable skills to accomplish), one may wonder if they

could be classified as an ‘expert’ in the field?

Gascoigne and Thornton later draw on Collins to delve into the

social situation that could be found in the transmission of such

‘knowledge.’ In doing this they are accepting that the issue of

‘tacit knowledge’ (whatever it is) is not epistemological but

ontological; that is, has purchase on reality as it is revealed in

the world. While in their view this is via the engagement of the

rational subject (in its conceptual structure), here, I am

proposing, it is via the engagement of dasein as a being-in-the-

world (in-der-welt-sein). Hence the difference in nuance when they

refer to testimony as a traditional form of knowledge sharing

(assuming linguistic practice is the dominant mode) and the point

of departure of dasein analysis that promotes the idea of

discursive and material practice as being the modes of

34

transmission. That is, equipmentality, referentiaility, and

purpose (Worumwillen or ‘for the sake of which’). Moreover, dasein

must deal with its finitude (it is a ‘being-toward-death’), with

its possible projects, experience12 and understanding13.

One way that dasein answers this call is to imagine itself as

having answered the charge of its finitude. It is to project its

possibilities on to itself - one of which is its social identity

found most clearly in its occupation or its way of doing things

(Umsicht).

What Heidegger does not describe is the multitude of ways that

that response to finitude can take place - he was fond of accusing

the social world of levelling down everything and preserving the

promise of dasein internally (qua authenticity).

But Heidegger also tells another story of how everything that is

laid before dasein is for dasein, for others, and understood as

being ‘with others.’ This other story implants dasein in the

12 See Quay (2013) and his proposal for a new basis for the educational curriculum, 13 See Lum (2012) for his view that Heidegger’s notion of ‘understanding’ (verstehen) its possibilities is crucial for VET.

35

social world and reveals a process that is multiform in practices

and meanings (linguistic, symbolic and practical).

Heidegger never explores further how dasein transmits its

understanding to or with other dasein.14

However, the voice of conscience, that moment that describes the

interrogation of dasein by dasein itself; when dasein questions itself

as the being it is, is, I am suggesting, a form of internal

testimony that may help explain the judgements and intuitions of

the expert and the reason why the beginner may think they

understand the expert at any one time; for the expert, like the

beginner, can, and usually will, address the issue at hand anew.

The greater criterial difference being that this is not the case

at all times, of course. This may give one of the reasons why

context is not sufficient itself to explain ‘tacit knowledge’, as

it is the expert who reveals the continuity of practice within,

and without, a particular context. For example, an ‘expert’ could

find themselves in a very different context, one unrelated to

their ‘referentiality’ and discover a solution to what they find

is actually a related problem or ‘the expert’ could move to a

14 See Raelin (1997) for the challenge that needs to be covered in explaining howHeidegger can contribute original insights.

36

different context. It’s not the context but the expert recognizing

the context, disclosing the context, that is. While they could do

this ‘without thinking,’ an observer might wonder how they came to

a particular view or conclusion. This point relates to the issue

of tacit knowledge because it may show that whatever it is, and

I’m not convinced it is ‘knowledge’ per se, that it is more

related to ‘meaning’ and the uncovering of truth about things;

hence, my apologies, in regard to introducing ‘taciticity’ to

signal this change. The point is that if the ‘tacit’ is not

knowledge as true justified belief, and if it is something more

than the reverse of what is ‘explicit,’ then we may need to

introduce a signal concept.

There is a further reason for wanting to develop a space for a

concept of ‘taciticity’ and that is the work being done in various

contributions to the work based learning and VET debates. For

example, Paul Hager, who in his work neatly summarises the general

debates, suggests that a notion of ‘practice(s)’ is fundamental to

a new paradigm around WBL and VET.15 Gerard Lum proposes a

Heideggerian intervention by way of recommending that

‘understanding,’ as conceived by Heidegger as the projection of

possibilities of dasein, is key to a definition of occupational 15 Hager (2013)

37

expertise.16 And, further afield, David Beckett argues for an level

of analysis that supersedes the individual and gives a forceful

explanation of collective outcomes and practices that enable the

emergence of new properties in social life irreducible to

individual practice (eg project work).17

And, philosophically, McNulty puts the issue like this: ‘what I am

arguing for is a broadening of the nature of Davidsonian holism to

involve practical know-how, exhibited through shared ways of non-

propositional coping with the environment.’ (McNulty 2011 84)

Conclusion by way of an excursus

All of this work suggests that a new paradigm in WBL and VET is

being explored or, is being prompted, that shares few of the

assumptions of the previous educational paradigm, at least as

Hager describes them and as given above. This would mean that new

levels of analysis, new terms are needed, that clarify,

distinguish and explain, the phenomenological clues we have - it

is notable there are these particular phenomenological clues in

16 Lum (2009)17 See Beckett in Gibbs (2013); Crowther (2013) (forthcoming).

38

our time that relate to work as a site of learning, as, partially,

an intrinsic good in the form of ‘lifelong learning’ (this, in

turn, could result in a return to, and superseding of, Arendt,

perhaps?).

The terms of use that I have suggested are appropriate and could

usefully play a part in a Heideggerian approach to WBL and VET

are: coping/circumspection or ‘practice’ (Umsicht);

phronesis/phronemos; the voice of conscience (gewissenheit);18 and

truth (aletheia). But there are others that would reveal that the

figure of a ‘Heideggerian Aristotle’ may help debates further.

I have also proposed that these terms developed adequately (and

each would need their own singular attention) could supply a form

of disclosure which best captures the variety of demands that have

been made on social and mainly unconscious processes in workplaces

and in complex tasks (navigation, for example)19.

18 This link is supported by Dreyfus and other commentators by reference to Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle which is left implicit in 1927 in Being and Time, but was explicit in his lectures in 1921-23. See Smith (2003) and Hyde (1994) whoalso pick up the relation of Heidegger’s concept of ‘conscience’ and phronesis. Bernasconi (1989) also shows the contentions that exist in the Heidegger literature around ‘circumspection.’19 A debate taken up in Prauss (1999).

39

In regard to the notion of ‘disclosure’ (erschlossenheit) and

Heidegger’s notion that a breakdown in disclosure reveals the need

for theorisation entails an undoubted relation to the emergence of

knowledge (as formulated by Gascoigne and Thornton as either PC,

PI or PA). While Gascoigne and Thornton wish to define and delimit

a concept of tacit knowledge as being within the epistemological

tradition, I am going to go on and argue that the underpinning,

and necessary, articulation, as Haugeland rightly insists and

makes clear, needs to be made at the ontological level (that is,

which equates to ‘the Being question’).

Coping, which is the term for all practices, leads to vocational

coping only when expertise and tacit networks of beliefs and

dispositions (‘taciticity’) are formed and become fields of

interest. For example one could see a resemblance to such a

process in Foucault’s The Order of Things or, indeed, in any of

his works, arguably.

Taciticity would be the suggested condition for the assemblage,

relations, instruments, tools, that dasein begins to usher in the

various ‘in order to’ relations, various ‘being with’ relations

that, constituted by ‘being-in-the-world,’ also refine that

40

disclosure into a particular sphere of activity and concomitant

recognition of ‘success’ in the sphere (expertise).

The existential analytic supplied by Heidegger in Being and Time,

division 1, combined with the generative ideas in his later work,

around technology and art, suggest that what he was working on was

nothing less than the emergence of Being in a variety of practices

and domains (what I see as ‘regional ontologies,’ again,

apologies, but yet another debate to consider).

And so the ‘telling’ in forms of tacit knowledge, as Gascoigne and

Thornton maintain, is ‘more than can be known’ because it

resembles the notion of an alethic disposition which can only

promise what is to come in the performance or what may have been.

Analogous to the concept of a performative utterance as formulated

by Searle, and in the mouth of a phronemos, would run ‘I promise

that the truth of what I am telling you will be such. Here is how

to do it.’ This alethic disposition then is shaped by formed and

forming practices, and it holds a similar temporal structure to

that found in Augustine which Heidegger explores.

41

In Augustine the shape of a performance (his example is song) is

made up of the past (what has been performed), the future (what is

to be performed) and this leaves the ‘present’ as the space where

both past and future collapse. In Heidegger’s formulation this

becomes the clue to dasein’s general temporal structure and so

should inform any of dasein’s performances (with suitable

delineations around the particular ‘cycles’ or ‘periods’ that

dasein has judged appropriate eg annual, daily, hourly, tempo).

Furthermore, the performance is also a mode of ‘being-with.’ A

more pointed and relevant sense of the ‘concrete’ or ‘practice’

than found in broadly realist approaches20. Whereas in Searle’s

concept the performative utterance attains its meaning by being

performed, here, the performance, has to be that of the other. The

performance has to be the other’s perception, or judgement of the

performance, as they understand it. It is, as it were, an

asymmetrical demand of truth (the success of the phronemos is only

in the future of the performance in others, they can never be

symmetrical), hence it is always already a disclosure, not a

proposition about the state of affairs (though it often parades as

20 See Young for a fascinating and relevant discussion of a realist sociological approach.

42

this: ‘Look!’). Even the phronemos themselves is performing as ‘not

yet.’

The temporal and performative aspects of a vocational sense, then,

lend themselves to such a classification. Not only must we act in

order to instantiate the ‘truth’ of the performative utterance,

but over time it may change. Our actions change the disclosure of

things, much as they shape our disclosure.

We retain the notion of ‘objective knowledge’ but in a way that

also embeds the need for the performance of truth itself and, with

it, the normative functions that are inextricably linked to

action.21 The phronemos brings forward a tradition, a way of doing

things, that is as much about the manner of the action as about

its efficiency or even effectiveness and, hence, its performative

truth. These are some of the great distinctions with propositional

knowledge and the reasons why what has been detected and explored

as ‘tacit’ is a clue to a different and more fundamental

disclosure of the world - because it relates to coping qua

ontological disclosure, and not to the abstract perceptions of an

isolated being as expressed in the cogitans (the thinking thing).

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43

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