Aristotle’s point is that virtue, which on his account is a form of knowledge, is originally
a matter of character rather than intellect. Furthermore, that character cannot be
acquired alone. One acquires a character as second nature through living in a society in
which standards for virtuous behaviour are embodied in practice. Aristotle’s word for
this type of socially embodied representation acquired through practical immersion in a
culture is Hexis: Bourdieu captures the same concept by a term first used by Aristotle’s
medieval translators: habitus.
As a device of exposition we can contrast Bourdieu’s conceptions of tacit linguistic
knowledge with that of Noam Chomsky. Both agree that people know how to speak
their native tongue. Furthermore, they both agree that linguistic practice falls into
patterns/structures which are recognized and reproduced by individuals who learn a
language. Those patterns can be analysed into a set of rules which are tacitly understood
by language users, that is, as a grammar for the language, which governs correct
use. Chomsky argued that the relevant rules are both formalizable and explicitly,
though unconsciously, represented. In his early works he argued that linguistic knowledge
was a body of propositional knowledge from which natural language grammatical
structure was deduced: a classic intellectualist conception of knowledge. For
Chomskians, then, linguistics is a science of the cognitive architecture of individual
minds rather than the mere detection and classification of patterns in the surface
language use of a community. For Bourdieu, however, tacit linguistic knowledge not
only is not but cannot be represented as a set of rules and symbols recursively manipulated
to produce speech. He calls this the action as execution model of rules and argues
against it on the basis that language use, like all significant human activity, is too flexible
and infinitely adaptable to novel circumstance to be produced by the execution of an
algorithm.