In the case of tacit linguistic knowledge it is worth making the following two
comments on Bourdieu’s criticisms of the Chomskian program since those criticisms are
emblematic of his approach to tacit knowledge in general.
Firstly, Chomsky is describing linguistic competence, the cognitive architecture of the
brain, not performance, actual language use in context, the intuitive judgements of
language speakers or their introspective reports (Chomsky, 1991). Consequently, any
objection to his project must be an argument that a particular type of cognitive architecture
cannot do the job for which it is postulated, and here the issue is empirical. The
same must surely be true of the mental representation of the information on which the
reproduction of culture depends. (See later in this article, in the section ‘Psychology and
Social Science’.)
On the second point, the imputation of psychological reality to rules abstracted by
the theorist from his observation of actual behaviour, we need only note the following.
If it is a fallacy to assume that agents represent rules inferred by a theorist from the observation
of overt behaviour, then Bourdieu also commits it. Like Chomsky, Bourdieu
imputes to agents tacit knowledge of the rules he postulates in order to interpret their
behaviour. The difference is that Bourdieu has a different account of the nature of rules
and their representation. The issue between Bourdieu and Chomsky as Bourdieu defines
it is not the presence of tacit knowledge of rules but is whether we should try and understand
tacit knowledge in an intellectual or practical way: as knowing that or knowing how.
Bourdieu’s real objection to legalism, as a general theory of social action, is that
treating tacit knowledge as knowledge that leaves us with an impoverished notion of
agency. Legalism reduces the agent to an impossible homo economicus subjecting his decision making to rational calculation,
its actors performing roles or acting in conformity with models or its speakers selecting
from among phonemes. (Bourdieu, 1977: 30)
In other words pure legalism makes agents robotic executors of a program encoded via
their experience of the social world but inaccessible to them in that experience. It leaves
out the fact that agents experience themselves as active originators of their actions rather
than as passive executors.