Interactional expertise and embodiment

Selinger, Evan, Dreyfus, Hubert and Collins, Harold Maurice ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2909-9035 2007. Interactional expertise and embodiment. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 38 (4) , pp. 722-740. 10.1016/j.shpsa.2007.09.008

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Abstract

In this four part exchange, Evan Selinger starts by stating that Collins’s empirical evidence in respect of linguistic socialization and its bearing on artificial intelligence and expertise is valuable; it advances philosophical and sociological understanding of the relationship between knowledge and language. Nevertheless, he argues that Collins mischaracterizes the data under review and thereby misrepresents how knowledge is acquired and understates the extent to which expert knowers are embodied. Selinger reconstructs the case for the importance of the body in the initial acquisition of language and challenges Collins to show how a disembodied entity could become fluent in any language at all. Collins responds by accepting that his approach does not demonstrate quite as much about the irrelevance of the body as he thought it did but that even though he accepts all of Selinger’s claims, ‘the body’ as needed by the philosophical approach set out by Selinger is still a vestigial thing. Collins’s main point, however, is that the philosophical view of the body—the world is divided into embodied agents and unembodied entities—distracts attention from the more interesting empirically researchable question of how the ability to become socialized diminishes, if it does, as the body become more and more minimal. The right research question is not about whether a person can extrapolate from minimal sensory input but how much extrapolation is possible under different circumstances and how it is done. Dreyfus, having seen the whole of the exchange so far, agrees that both have a point but argues that Collins’s approach still misses the well established importance of bodily engagement for full understanding. Collins responds to this by trying to set out more clearly the position associated with the idea of interactional expertise.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Social Sciences (Includes Criminology and Education)
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General) Q Science > Q Science (General)
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Interactional expertise; Phenomenology; Turing test; Embodiment; Tacit knowledge; Socialization
Publisher:	Elsevier
ISSN:	0039-3681
Last Modified:	31 Oct 2022 10:51
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/86457

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