A DILEMMA: LEGALISM OR VOLUNTARISM?
Thus Bourdieu is apparently right to think that we might look to Wittgenstein’s explanation
of rule following for an account of the tacit knowledge social science apparently
requires to anchor it, not only in physical and economic but in psychological reality. So
his problem, like Wittgenstein’s, is to discover what the rules are and how they are
represented. Like Wittgenstein, he initially proceeds negatively, telling us what the rules
are not and how they are not represented. An eliminative procedure, which seems to
leave room for only one positive account of tacitly understood rules: a dispositional
account which treats knowledge as know-how rather than knowing that.
On Bourdieu’s account of dispositional tacit knowledge, agents learn to agree in
practice without explicitly or consciously representing concordance as a goal. Thus the
hierarchy of respect in the barrio is reproduced even though each individual is not
consciously thinking that the rule which governs his actions is to ‘preserve the hierarchy
of respect’. The idea goes back at least to Aristotle’s contrast between learning by habituation
and learning by intellectual instruction in the Nichomachean Ethics Now some think that we are made good by nature, others by habituation, others by
teaching. Nature’s part evidently does not depend on us, but as a result of some divine
causes is present in those who are truly fortunate; while argument and teaching we
may suspect are not powerful with all men, but the soul of the student must first have
been cultivated by means of habits for noble joy and noble hatred, like earth which
is to nourish the seed . . . The character, then, must somehow be there already with
a kinship to virtue, loving what is noble and hating what is base. (Nichomachean Ethics
1179b-31)