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James
C. Scott, “Practical
Knowledge” Mētis:
The Contours
of Practical Knowledge 1.
Comparing
forms of knowledge embedded in local experience with moral
general, abstract knowledge
deployed by states or bureaucracies and their technical
agencies. 2.
Example: Squanto:
plant corn when the oaks leaves are the size of a
squirrel’s eye. a)
Practical
knowledge of this sort can be translated into more
universalistic, scientific
terms (but is that useful or practical?) 3.
Mētis:
indigenous technical knowledge, fold wisdom, practical
skills,
judgment-about-particulars, cunning, cunning intelligence,
ability to adapt to a
constantly shifting situation and craft successful
strategies for facing them a)
Skills
that require adapting to a capricious physical environment b)
The
acquired knowledge of how to sail, fly a kite, fish, shear
sheep, drive a car,
ride a bicycle, build a house, play a violin (and tune it
constantly and still
play it if a string breaks) c)
Hand-eye
coordination, capacity to “read the waves, the win, or the
road and make the
proper adjustments” d)
Difficult
to teach apart from doing the activity (coaching, not
didactic teaching or
reading books; apprenticeship) — practice makes perfect e)
Some
people get the hang of a skill pretty quickly, still, long
experience of many
situations is generally better f)
Examples: Firefighters,
rescue squads, paramedics,
mine-disaster teams, doctors in hospital emergency rooms,
crews that repair
downed electrical lines, teams that extinguish fires in
oil fields, farmers:
there are ‘rules of thumb’ that apply, but
half the battle is knowing which rule of thumb to apply in
which order and when
to throw the book away and improvise (cf. Sully) 4.
Mētis:
relation of people to environment; relation of people to
other people a)
Interacting
with others socially (reading them, responding to their
cues) b)
Interacting
with others in competition (boxing, fencing, basketball,
football) c)
Team
dynamics d)
War,
diplomacy: What can we control? What can
we not control? e)
All
but defies being communicated in written or oral form
apart from actual
practice 5.
Definition,
Description of Mētis: a)
Most
applicable to broadly similar but never precisely
identical situations
requiring a quick and practiced adaptation that becomes
almost second nature to
the practitioner b)
May
involve rules of thumb, but such rules are largely
acquired through practice
and a developed feel or knack for strategy c)
Resists
simplification into deductive principles which can
successfully be transmitted
through book learning because the environments in which it
is exercised are so
complex and non-repeatable that formal procedures of
rational decision making
are impossible to apply [which doesn’t make it irrational, merely not deductively
rational; it lacks mathematical certitude] 1.
Knowing
how and when to apply rules of thumb in a
concrete situation is the essence of mētis
because the situations where it is needed are mutable,
indeterminate (some
facts are unknown) and particular 2.
Example: work of the
harbor pilot, whose experience is
locally superior
to the general rules
of navigation (or navigation out on the open seas) 3.
Mark
Twain: Navigating on the Mississippi 4.
Local
guides 5.
The
practice and experience reflected in mētis is almost
always local or
particular 6.
Long
experience with different materials will have the effect
of making such adjustments
quasi-automatic. 7.
Each
loom or potter’s wheel.
Each guitar or
violin. Each
piano. Each
type of wood or clay.
Various types of paint. 8.
While
something can be said about forestry, revolution, urban
planning, agriculture,
and rural settlement in general (and dealing with people),
this will take us
only so far in understanding this forest,
this revolution,
this battle, this farm, this company, this child.
The more general
the rules, the more they require in the way of translation
if they are to be
locally successful. 9.
The
rule of thumb is akin to formal grammar, whereas mētis is more like actual speech.
A knowledge of the rules of speech by themselves is
compatible with a
complete inability to speak intelligible sentences. The assertion
that the rules of grammar are derivative
of the practice of actual speech is nearer to the truth.
[How about rules of
human conduct? Rules
as rules that
virtuous people have learned. But you
would need to become one of them to (a) understand them
fully and (b) be able
to apply them properly. 10.
Best
learned by daily practice and experience.
Socialized to a trade = so too to a way of life. 11.
Any
formula that excludes or suppresses the experience,
knowledge, and adaptability
of mētis risks incoherence and failure. 12.
But
note: This is
NOT relativism. You
are not saying, “I want to do sailing my way” or “I
want to do carpentry my way.”
If you turn your sails a certain way, you will capsize.
If you treat
the wood a certain way, it will break. If you don’t
line up the bricks a certain
way, the wall will
fall down. You
are mastering a craft, a tradition of
practices that has been shown to be effective.
Will there need to be modifications to fit changed
circumstances? Yes.
But this is reapplying the general principles to
new situations. I
may have an engine instead of a sail, but I
still don’t want to turn the boat sideways in heavy waves. 13.
Question:
Can machines (or computers) take away the need for mētis? (Say, for
example, auto-pilot systems in
airplanes?) The
Relation with
Episteme and Techne 1.
Deduction;
scientific: Is this knowledge useless?
No. It has an important role to play, but we can’t
expect it to make up
our mind for us. 2.
Knowledge
of rules AND knowledge of particulars — broad experience 3.
Scientific
knowledge vs. scientific discovery: the
necessity of making judgments 4.
Scientific
knowledge: impersonal,
universal, and
completely impervious to context vs. mētis involving
situations which are
transient, shifting, disconcerting, and ambiguous,
situations which do not lend
themselves to precise measurement, exact calculation, or
formal deductive,
analytic logic. 5.
A
recurrent theme (and dream) of Western science has been
the attempt to
formulate systems of knowledge in order to bracket
uncertainty and thereby
permit the kind of logical deductive rigor possessed by
Euclidean
geometry: get
the data, gather the
evidence, do the math, make the deductions, get THE answer 6.
Even
chance (probability), it is assumed, can be brought into
mathematical precision 7.
Formulas
of efficiency, production functions, and rational action
are specifiable only
when the ends sought are simple, sharply defined, and
hence measurable. 8.
The
problem, as Aristotle recognized, is that certain
practical choices cannot “even
in principle, be adequately and completely captured in a
system of universal
rules. Navigation
and medicine: responsiveness,
improvisation, and skillful,
successive approximations are required. Practical
Knowledge
Versus Scientific Explanation 1.
Note
the valuable knowledge that high-modernist schemes deprive
themselves of when
they simply impose their plans as “scientific” (nothing
but “scientific”
discourse is acceptable) 2.
Vernacular
measures were often designed to achieve a local purpose or
to express an
important feature rather than to accommodate some
universal unit of measurement. 3.
Such
measures apparently often conveyed more information than
an abstract measure
could and more information that was locally
relevant. 4.
The
litmus test for mētis is practical success.
Did the navigator make the trip safely?
Did the medicine cure the wound?
If a technique works effectively and repeatedly for
the purpose
intended, the practitioners of mētis do not pause long to
ask why and how it
worked, to define the precise mechanism of cause and
effect. 5.
Hence
innovations will often run out ahead of scientific cause
and effect
reasoning. Innovations
will typically
represent a recombination of existing elements; farmers
did not invent the
tractor to solve their problems of traction power. By the same
token, the recombination of
practical knowledge has often produced complex techniques
that work admirably
but that science has not (yet?) understood. 6.
The
power of practical knowledge depends on an exceptionally
close and astute
observation of the environment. 7.
By
people who have a vital, direct stake in the results of
close observation (skin
in the game). 8.
The
value of having people who live year in and year out, day
in and day out “in
the field of observation.”
He or she
will likely know things that neither an absentee
cultivator nor a research
scientist would ever notice. 9.
Member
of a community that serves as a living, oral reference
library for
observations, practices, and experiments — a body of
knowledge that an
individual could never amass alone. 10.
How
often local knowledge, trial and error, produced practical
solutions without
benefit of scientific method. 11.
Combination
of passionate interest, close observation, and large
numbers of amateur
specialists trying different possibilities, all willing to
learn from one
another. 12.
Mētis
might be replaced by deeper knowledge or at least fostered
by it, but by the
same token, mētis is the mode of reasoning most
appropriate to complex material
and social tasks where the uncertainties are so daunting
that we must trust our
(experienced) intuition and feel our way. 13.
Water
management in Japan:
No more is
attempted than Nature has already done in the region. The engineer
recognizes that he is dealing
with an art of one valley.
Each prudent,
small step, based on prior experience, yields new and not
completely
predictable effects that become the point of departure for
the next step Virtually
any complex task involving many
variables whose values and interactions cannot be
accurately forecast belongs
to this genre: building a house, repairing a car,
perfecting a new jet engine,
surgically repairing a knee, or farming a plot of land 14.
Especially
where the interactions involve not just material
environment but social
interaction as well — building and populating new villages
or cities, organizing
a revolutionary seizure of power or reorganizing farming. 15.
Communicating
not merely (perhaps not primarily) the blueprint for a new
house, but an
understanding of the experience that made it at all
possible to build under
various circumstances:
here are the
problems we encountered and things we didn’t expect and
things that really
helped Learning
Beyond the
Book 1.
Breaking
down the process into more manageable, “agile” steps 2.
But
note, this does not mean that a novice can take over: only
someone with wide
experience will be able to interpret the results of and
reactions to an initial
step in order to determine the next step. 3.
With
more experience and wisdom, the repertoire of responses
would be larger, their
judgment in reading the environment surer, their sense of
what surprises might
await them more accurate. 4.
This
is hard to teach: it is something that comes with long
practice and experience 5.
Any
experienced practitioner of a skill or craft will develop
a large repertoire of
moves, visual judgments, a sense of touch, or a
discriminating gestalt for
assessing the work as well as a range of accurate
intuitions born of experience
that defy being communicated apart from practice: the
studied, “practical” eye
[cf. Malcom Gladwell, 6.
‘Heat
the oil until it is almost
smoking.’ They
Dynamism and
Plasticity of Mētis 1.
“Traditional
peoples” will embrace techniques that solve vital
problems. 2.
A
certain understanding of science, modernity, and
development has so
successfully structured the dominant discourse that all
other kinds of
knowledge are regarded as backward, static traditions, as
old wives’ tales and
superstitions. 3.
High
modernism needed this “other,” this dark twin, in order to
rhetorically present
itself as the antidote to backwardness. 4.
Mētis,
far from being rigid and monolithic, is plastic, local,
and divergent. It
is in the fact the idiosyncrasies of metis,
its contextualness, and its fragmentation that make it so
permeable, so open to
new ideas. 5.
No
traditional way of behavior, no traditional skill ever
remains fixed. It
history is one of continual change. The changes are
likely to be small and
gradual (incrementalism) rather than sudden and
discontinuous. (Unless a
tradition becomes static and dead. The
Social Context of
Mētis and its Destruction 1.
What
is needed is a social context in which knowledge is
discovered and maintained
in the context of lifelong observation and a relatively
stable,
multigenerational community that routinely exchanges and
preserves knowledge of
this kind. 2.
Social
conditions necessary for the reproduction of comparable
practical knowledge. a)
Community
of interest b)
Accumulated
information c)
Ongoing
experimentation d)
What
kind of social structures (and physical structures) allow
this? 3.
Two
of the great ironies of metis: a)
Metis
is not democratically distributed; depends on the social
structure of the
society whether it gets shared and expanded b)
However
plastic and receptive metis is, some forms of it seem to
depend on key elements
of preindustrial life for their elaboration and
transmission 4.
The
loss of metis: sometimes
for the
purposes of simplification of life. But it would be a
serious error to believe
that the destruction of metis was merely the inadvertent
and necessary by-product
of economic progress.
As a ‘project,’ it
is the object of constant initiatives which are never
entirely successful, for
no forms of production or social life can be made to work
by formulas alone —
that is, without metis.
The logic
animating the project, however, is one of control and
appropriation,
administrative order and fiscal appropriation, discipline
and profit. 5.
Efficiency
and control: Who
profits? a)
The
crucial advantage of the factory from the boss’s point of
view as that he could
more directly fix the hours and the intensity of the work
and control the raw
materials. b)
The
genius of modern mass-production methods: destroying metis
and turning a
resistant, quasi-autonomous artisan population into more
suitable units, or “factory
hands” with greater clarity.
c)
Under
scientific management … the managers assume … the burdens
of gathering together
all of the traditional knowledge which in the past has
been possessed by the workmen
and then of classifying, tabulating, and reducing this
knowledge to rules,
laws, formulae…. Thus
all of the
planning which under the old system was done by the
workmen must of necessity
under the new system be done by management in accordance
with the law of
science. d)
In
the factory, only the factory manager had the knowledge
and command of the
whole process, and the worker was reduced to the execution
of a small, often
minute, part of the overall process. e)
And
yet, metis cannot be completely engineered out. f)
More
than one plantation sector has made up what it lacked in
efficiency by using
its political clout to secure subsidies, price supports,
and monopoly
privileges. The
Case Against
Imperial Knowledge 1.
What
has provide to be truly dangerous to us and to our
environment is the combination
of the universalist
pretensions of epistemic knowledge and authoritarian
social engineering. 2.
Universalist
claims seem inherent in the way in which rationalist
knowledge is pursued.
Is there a door in this epistemic edifice
through which metis or practical knowledge could enter on
its own terms? Hard
to see how. It is this imperialism that
is troubling. 3.
The
great failure of rationalism is not its recognition of
technical knowledge, but
its failure to recognize any other. -
Consider: the “science” of
medicine vs. “ethical
considerations” which are “opinions” and which can be
handled in a weekend
seminar 4.
Authoritarian,
high-modernist states in the grip of a self-evident (and
usually half-baked)
social theory have done irreparable damage to human
communities and
individuals. 5.
The
danger was compounded when leaders came to believe that
the people were a “blank
piece of paper” on which the new regime could write. 6.
Each
generation, indeed each administration, shall see unrolled
before it the blank
sheet of infinite possibility, and if by chance this
tabula rasa has been
defaced by the irrational scribblings of tradition-ridden
ancestors, then the
first task of the rationalist must be to scrub it clean.
As
opposed to: Remaking
Ourselves into God’s image (Acting toward God and God’s
law as “Father” by
becoming like “the Son” — becoming “like Christ”
(selfless gift of self) — made
possible because we are animated by God’s Spirit. We are
animated (in our “spirit”)
by the Love shared between the Father and the Son. We participate
in the divine love. -
What
drives the machine? What
spirit breathes
life into the organism?
-
I
care enough to observe closely and in an unbiased manner. I am attentive
to the world as it
is and to other people as they are —
noticing both positive
things and problems. -
Getting
over my self-interested or selfish biases. -
Having
the humility to discipline myself to being mentored in a
tradition -
Admitting
mistakes and learning from them -
Realizing
that “freedom of excellence” comes with discipline,
self-awareness, care,
concern, attention, openness, and a constant search for
greater insight and
wisdom
-
Flourishing
is not simply my making myself according to my wishes or
whims. Excellence
comes from working with and for
others, in accord with the rhythms and reality of the
world as it actually is.
I don’t create it; I discover it and act
accordingly.
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