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.

Posted on February 6, 2010