The Crawford chapter today presents the idea that there is a difference between "knowing that" and "knowing how". In class on Wednesday, I was thinking that sometimes I'm too quick to relate the topics of this class to my own life, and perhaps I should be a little more reserved about doing so. But the way I see it, if there is any place to relate our reading to my own life, it is probably these blogs. So hopefully if I can get it out of my system here, I'll be able to approach our class discussions more objectively. That said, I'm going to talk about how Crawford's chapter relates to two activities I enjoy: painting and baking cookies.
When I read the section about the tacit knowledge of the chess player and firefighter, I immediately thought about painting. According to Crawford, tacit knowledge is acquired by experts who are intimately familiar with how a thing works. It is difficult to articulate this tacit knowledge, so it is often removed from the world of instruction manuals; it requires demonstrations, not explanations. I think painting works the same way. I can read a book about how to achieve a certain effect or color with paint, and I can even look at detailed diagrams that show how the effect is done. But until I actually squeeze out some paint, mess around with colors, and make some mistakes I will not be able to really know how it works. This also makes me think of baking cookies.
The real reason I am currently thinking about baking cookies is because I am, in fact, baking cookies. They are in the oven at this very moment. Those of us who eat at the Clearing tonight are going to be enjoying them. Thinking about this chapter while baking cookies further cemented Crawford's point in my head. When I bake, I follow the recipe pretty accurately...until it comes to the baking time. You see, for some reason my Kedzie apartment oven does not like to bake things as fast as it is supposed to. When I bake anything, I usually pull it out after the specified time, poke it, and then put it back in the oven for a few more minutes. Sometimes I have to do this multiple times. I'm not sure if it's related to baking gluten-free, or just my oven's contrariness. But baking cookies requires a tacit knowlege. If I lacked this tacit knowledge, I would pull these peanut butter balls out of the oven after ten minutes, set them on the stove, and then end up with a bunch of gooey, half-baked cookies. (The timer just rang. I took them out.) But since I have a tacit knowlege of both how cookies are supposed to be and the eccentricities of my oven, I can produce some quality, fully-cooked cookies. It's not precise, and it's nothing my recipe can prepare me for. It's just instinctive. I think Crawford is right; we don't fully understand how our minds grasp the world. But as long as I can keep painting and turning out good cookies, I don't really mind.
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We humans are unique for our ability to rationally think and learn how to do things in an efficiant manner. I think this is something that God instilled in us. We have free will to think outside of the box. Our mind allows us to do amazing and yummy things like know when to take out cookies at the right time. Your cookies would not have been the quality they were last night if you had just let a machine do it all and it had followed what the directions had said. I never want to become as passive as to allow "intelligent technology" to take over. It would be more than a loss of freedom; our cookies wouldn't be the same.
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