A theory is what you get when somebody tries to describe to someone else what he knows. It is thus part of a communicative act between two or more people. It is therefore part of human language. It is also per definition a derivative from something else, the something else being the knowledge. Knowledge is itself not linguistic in the above sense. It is however cultural in that it is always rooted in the practices of a culture. Knowledge is therefore basically ‘know-how’. There is a big difference between ‘theory’ and ‘know-how’. The difference has been called the gap between theory and practice, which we all have to deal with some way or another. Cognitive science has had to deal with this gap a lot, because in cognitive science it translates to the question of how the mind (theory) relates to behavior (practice). Sometimes it has been implicitly assumed that all the ‘knowledge’ was to be found on the ‘theory’ side, while a practice contained no knowledge at all. That is, one assumed that theory was to be equated with knowledge and practice was everything that knowledge was not (‘mere’ behavior). If one assumes this, then this means one also needs to have a way of bridging the gap, if one ever wants to have a theory of how knowledge has impact on behavior, which is ultimately what cognitive science is about. Traditional cognitive science states that 1) theory is knowledge and that 2) theory determines (causes) practice. Your mind (theory, knowledge) tells you what to do (practice). Embodied embedded cognitive science turns this picture on its head. It tells us first that there is always already a practice (an act) before there is ever something like ‘knowledge’. Knowledge is a derivative of behavior itself, even though, once it is there, it does have a signitifant impact on (subsequent) behavior as well. Once we are able to speak of knowledge, we then see that there are multiple patterns on multiple levels of description, each with their own particular influence on behavior. One big difference is the difference I described above, between what we usually call ‘theory’ and what I call ‘know-how’. Know-how is the knowledge that is not a description of something at all. If anything, it might perhaps best be seen as a set of constraints that together guide (but do not determine) the moment-by-moment interaction between a person and his environment, in such a way that we may say that this person ‘has knowledge’, or ‘is knowledgeable’ of its environment. But this is totally unlike using a theory of the environment in order to determine what action to take. Such a theory is what you get when someone starts to describe, in language, as a communicative act, his know-how, most likely in an attempt to communicate his knowledge to someone else. (It is the kind of stuff you are reading right now, although you might be able to relate what you read from the text to your ‘know-how’, which is not in this text, but exists only in you-in-your-situation). There is no ‘gap’ between know-how and practice. Knowledge (know-how) and practice are on the same side of the divide between theory and practice, that is, they are on the practice side. There is of course the question of how it works: know-how. Is it really a ‘set of constraints’ and if so, how does that work exactly?

Lot’s of research to be done. But this research (called ‘embodied embedded cognitive science’) is not going to bridge by itself the gap between theory and practice because it is not by itself about the gap between theory and practice. Now of course we can ask a second question and that is the question: what is the relation between theory and practice? Do the words of this-or-that researcher on paper influence my behavior in any way? I should assume they do, but if so, how? Do I also entertain personal mini-theories ‘in my head’ that are not unlike the words of the researcher on paper and do these mini-theories influence my behavior in any way? Or are they only a sort of by-product of having both a practice and linguistic capacities, such that I have the irresistible urge to describe my know-how (without the descriptions having any influence on my behavior?). I should think not. I should think that this human faculty of being able to create descriptions of things that are ultimately indescribable, our capacity for making models of real processes, or making general laws out of particular happenings, of making stories of actual facts, of making a picture of a real scene, I should think that this capacity has a function, that it really does something, that it is not just an epiphenomenon. But at the same time embodied embedded cognition tells us what it doesn’t do, namely that the models and laws and stories and pictures we generate in our mind do not determine our behavior. They do not tell us what to do. Because between the abstractions and theories we create in language, and our actual behaviors, lies something called practice and this practice contains know-how and know-how drives the greater part of our actions, while theory doesn’t.

And the most confusing part is yet to come. In fact, much of our theory (the stories, the models, the pictures) actually tell us, explicitly, in language, that they do instruct us on how to act, and in our everyday experience, we tell ourselves, and we tell each other, that we are being lead into actions caused by these theories. We say: I went into the men’s room because the picture on the door of the men’s room of a man told me that this was the place I should go to, since I am a male. We say: I read in this cook-book how to bake cherry-pie and I basically just followed the recipe, and thus I baked a pie. We say: I stopped at the red traffic light because it means that you should stop, and so I did. We say: The computer told me to enter my personal code and press enter, so I did. We say: Somebody told me to take insurance for the car, and so I did. We say: my mother told me you should always wash your hands before you eat, and so I always do this. We say: the dentist told me that I should brush twice a day in order to avoid tooth-aches, and so this is what I do. But of course, what we say we do is not what we do. And even if we do it just like we say we do, we do not know if our personal explanation was the real cause of our behavior, or if it is just another story, another theory, another reasonable description of what might have been the cause. So perhaps we brush our teeth twice a day, but not on everyday, and on average, over a year, we might really brush our teeth only 1,2 times a day. And the brushing might be triggered once a year by the dentist, but subsequently it is mostly being triggered by the tooth brush just happening to be lying exactly where it is lying, that is, at the right moment at the right time during your morning and evening rituals. You simply notice the brush, pick it up, and brush. And the same kind of patterns tricks you into eating whatever there is to snack in the fridge late at night, even though your doctor has instructed you explicitly not to take late-night snacks. So, your behavior is not particularly guided by theory even though the theory itself says it does (since it starts with phrases like “you should do the following”) and even though you yourself hold the theory that it is the theory that drives your behavior. Enough of this, let’s get to work!

Popularity: 9% [?]