j.1467-954x.2006.00611.x

On the limits of a realist conception ofknowledge: a pragmatist critique ofArcherian realism

Osmo Kivinen and Tero Piiroinen

Abstract

In her book Being Human (2000), Margaret Archer presents intriguing pragmatistemphases on practice, embodiment and non-linguistic knowing-how, as regards tounderstanding humanity. However, as Archer attempts to conjoin these ideas withthe morphogenetic realism she has been working on for the last few decades, sheends up holding on to a subject–object dualism, which makes things complicated.The authors’ alternative pragmatist account defended in the article flows fromDeweyan pragmatist and Rortian antirepresentationalist insights. The main issuesin the article concern Archer’s complicated tripartite concept of knowledge, whichis contrasted with a (Deweyan–Rylean) distinction between linguistic knowledge-that and embodied knowing-how. It is argued that knowledge is a natural, sophis-ticated tool that human organisms use when coping with their environment; it isalways acquired on the strength of embodied knowing-how, from some actor’s pointof view, but the term ‘knowledge’ itself should be reserved for the propositional,linguistic knowledge-that.

Margaret Archer is known as one of the leading scholars in the British criti-cal realist school (cf. Archer, Bhaskar, Collier, Lawson and Norrie (eds),1998). For a few decades now she has been developing her morphogeneticapproach and realist social theory (Archer, 1982; 1995), explicating differentorders of reality (natural, practical, social) in terms of realist ontological dis-tinctions (Archer, 2000a, 154–90). Lately Archer has also laid stress on prac-tice and embodied humanity, thus adopting pragmatic if not pragmatist linesof thought (cf. Archer, 2000a). However, Archer herself does not admit havingchanged her mind, although, as will be demonstrated below, her pragmaticlines of thought are hardly in congruence with ontological realism.

In this article we will investigate the ontological underpinnings of Archer’srealism, contrasting them with our own pragmatist devices that are Deweyanin origin. We will compare the realist idea that all knowledge claims, beingreferential about reality, make ontological commitments, with our pragmatistway of conceiving knowledge as a tool of communicating and coordinating

© The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 2006. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.,9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, 02148, USA.

actions. Following Donald Davidson (1990a; 1990b, 303–5) and Richard Rorty(1979; 1991, 1–12), we understand knowledge in an antirepresentationalistvein, not in terms of the metaphor of seeing or mirroring, but as a linguistictool human organisms use when coping with their environment.

The idea of avoiding ‘epistemic fallacy’ plays a crucial role as regards toArcher’s realist concept of ontology, for in order to avoid this alleged fallacyshe separates the ontological (reality as it really is) from the merely episte-mological, and tries to be referential about the ontological. Thus her positionis a kind of an antithesis of the methodological relationalism set forth herein(see Kivinen and Piiroinen, 2004; 2006). As methodological relationalists, webelieve in antirepresentationalist and antiobjectivist considerations whichhave been given their fullest explication in the late 20th century, especially byRichard Rorty (1979; 1991; 1998), but which sprout from the seeds planted bythe classics of pragmatism already in the late 19th and early 20th century. Givingup the ideas of things-in-themselves, John Dewey (MW 12; MW 14; LW 1)particularly emphasised the pivotal role of practice, but Dewey proceeded ina straightforwardly pragmatist manner, while Archer remains committed torealism.

The key questions guiding our realism–pragmatism comparisons will be:What is it that can intelligibly be referred to as knowledge and where are weto draw its limits? Whereas Archer’s theoretical system presupposes three dis-tinct kinds of knowledge – embodied, practical and discursive – and elabo-rates the relations they have with each other and with the correspondingorders of reality, our pragmatist standpoint for the purposes of social scien-tific research employs just one, linguistic kind of knowledge(-that). As prag-matists, we start with the idea that, since nobody can step outside of one’sown action, knowledge is only attainable from an actor’s point of view. To putit slightly bluntly, we are afraid that as long as Archer insists on combiningher well-articulated insights about action, knowing-how and embodiment withthe realist morphogenetic approach, her pragmatist ideas will not live up totheir prospects; instead she is in danger of articulating both the acquisition ofknowledge and the idea of knowledgeable subject in a way that tends to reifystructures and anthropomorphise lifeless objects into actors.

Archer’s morphogenetic theory

There is a close resemblance between Archer’s morphogenetic realism andRoy Bhaskar’s transformational critical realist model (cf. Archer, 1995:136–40); in fact, Archer’s theory is based on Bhaskarian ontology (see Cruickshank, 2004: 567). Both Archer and Bhaskar hold it that social struc-tures exert causal influence on social interactions, while the actions of individuals and groups affect social structures by modifying them. Morpho-genetically understood, structure pre-dates action which, in turn, reproducesor transforms the structure (and, therefore, pre-dates that particular form of

On the limits of a realist conception

© The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 2006 225

structure in the production of which it participates). (Archer, 1995: 15, 167–9;see also Bhaskar, 1979: 42–9.)

The emergent properties of agency and structure are ‘distinct from eachother and irreducible to one another’ (Archer, 1995: 14). Thus, Archeriansocial reality is stratified: structures have their own irreducible properties,emergent consequences of past actions. Structures exert causal influencesupon subsequent interactions by shaping the situations in which later gener-ations of people find themselves; structures are generative mechanisms thatoperate, do something. (See Archer, 1995: 66–7, 71, 89–90.) Although speak-ing in the name of analytical dualism, Archer makes her distinctions in astrong ontological sense: people and the parts of society ‘are not differentaspects of the same thing but are radically different in kind’ (Archer, 1995,15; see also Bhaskar, 1979, 42). Like Bhaskar, Archer denies that the causalpowers of macro-structures could be explained in terms of interwoven indi-vidual acts, done by individual people.

As Anthony King (1999, 207, 211) points out, Archer is at risk of driftinginto reifying metaphysics and philosophical – instead of merely analytical –dualism, because she is ontologising time so that the actions of people in thepast, described as individual actions while happening, become irreduciblystructural once they have receded into history. Archer herself does not admitreifying anything, of course. She believes she has circumvented the issue ofreification through her ‘methodology based upon the historicity of emergence’:in effect, through making society irreducible to the people of present time butdependent on the – often long dead – people of the past (Archer, 1995, 66,148).

In Culture and Agency (1988), Archer first introduced her analyticaldualism specifically in order to emphasise the difference between her ownposition and the Cartesian kind of dualism presupposing two separate enti-ties. She then maintained that structures and agents are only analytically sep-arable. (Archer, 1988: xii–xvii.) By the mid-1990s, however, the emphasis thatstructures and agents may not have to be thought of as two metaphysicallydistinct entities, had effectively been reversed to the claim that ‘ontologicallythey are indeed different entities with different properties and powers’(Archer, 1995: 63–4). The analytical dualism of investigating the strata ofagency and structure as separate is now grounded on a realist and emergen-tist social ontology, and needs to be so – ‘or the slippage into instrumentalismis fatal’ (Archer, 1995: 14–5, 161; see also 1998, 194). Archer’s earlier merelymethodological grounds for distinguishing structures and agents have givenway to a more Bhaskarian (1986, 6) prioritising of ontology over epistemol-ogy (cf. Archer, 1998, 194–5; 2000a, 189; 2000b, 469–70). This is apparentlydue to her urge to avoid the dreaded ‘epistemic fallacy’.

According to Archer, there could be no social science if intransitive socialentities were not presupposed and granted an existence independently ofthem being identified by us. ‘This precludes any collapse of the ontologicalinto the epistemological and convicts those who endorse this move of the


226 © The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 2006

“epistemic fallacy”, namely confusing what is with what we take it to be’.(Archer, 1998: 195.) In order to avoid the epistemic fallacy, Archer (2000b,469–70) emphasises that fallible human knowledge must be ‘about’ a separateontological reality that should not be conflated with mere transitive interpre-tations (see Cruickshank, 2004, 580). It is hard to avoid the impression thatArcher’s methodological distinctions are actually subordinated to her meta-physical distinctions (see Fuchs, 1997), for she repeatedly recommends a‘realist ontology which upholds transfactual structures and intransitive cul-tural properties and encourages their investigation as emergent entities’(Archer, 1995, 63); an ontology which ‘acts as both gatekeeper and bouncerfor methodology’ (Archer, 1995, 22).

As Justin Cruickshank (2004) notes, critical realists in fact tend to have atleast two different concepts of ontology, using one or the other depending onwhat is at issue. When criticised for pursuing metaphysics that would groundknowledge of the world as it really is from a God-like standpoint, theyrespond by emphasising the transitivity and fallibility of their ontology; butwhen debating with individualists, or arguing against constructivists, they aresure of having reached something more than just one description amongothers. Cruickshank (2004, 580) remarks that Archer seems to think that onlyher own realist ontology pertains to the intransitive domain, and other ontolo-gies are wrong because they fail to mirror the essential features of reality,defined by the realist ontology. Nigel Pleasants’ (1999, 8–9) somewhat pointedview is that the critical realists’ combination of ontological realism and epis-temological relativism is but a ‘conjuring trick’ – in a profoundly un-self-critical manner they seem to assume that the principle of epistemological relativism applies to all but their own ontological hypotheses. Revealingly,Archer (1995, 135; also 1998, 191–2) criticises Walter Buckley for the fact thathe, after introducing the idea of morphogenetic processes, ‘withdrew theirontological underpinnings, by construing emergent properties as heuristicdevices . . .’ Archer seems to think that emergent properties are sufficiently‘real’ only to the extent that they are something more than mere heuristicallyuseful descriptions – only to the extent that they have ‘ontological underpin-nings’ to back them up. But then the ‘analyticity’ of Archer’s dualism is indanger. How are we to understand it now that the concept of emergent socialstructures is obviously meant to be something more than just another heuris-tic tool?

According to Archer, every social theorist has a social ontology, becauseall concepts have referents that ‘pick out features held to belong to socialreality’ (Archer, 1995: 12; 2000b, 464). Bhaskar (1993, 228, 230) has articu-lated the underlying realist way of thinking even further by claiming that thereis no kicking of a football, no drinking of a cup of coffee, no doing anythingwithout presupposing a realist ontology. We see little to be gained throughthese ambitious, all-embracing claims that strive at making realist ontology aprecondition for everything else. If you ask a ball player or the man in thestreet whether this football or that coffee cup really exists, he will see little



point in the question, and will not be likely to engage in any lengthy onto-logical debates with you about these objects. Rather, ontology is a languagegame enjoyed by a certain breed of philosophers, most of whom call them-selves realists – a game that pragmatists find rather useless for even philoso-phers to participate in, not to mention sociologists. (Kivinen and Piiroinen,2004: 238–9.)

The whole discussion about prioritising either ontology or epistemology isa useless one. We take a more Rortian standpoint that ‘pragmatists haveneither an epistemology nor an ontology’, and so there is no question aboutwhich one comes first (see Rorty and Searle, 1999: 50). We follow DonaldDavidson in abandoning the idea of reference relations. ‘Words have no func-tion save as they play a role in sentences: their semantic features areabstracted from the semantic features of sentences, just as the semantic fea-tures of sentences are abstracted from their part in helping people achievegoals or realize intentions’ (Davidson, 1984: 220). Concepts and sentencesshould be seen as tools for coordinating activities and coping with the world,not as representations (Rorty, 1999: 64–5). When the idea of referents, as wellas the epistemological and ontological subject–object dichotomy is given up,it will also be in order to abandon the idea of founding scientific inquiries onsome philosophical ontologies, including both critical realist and reductionistones. Thus, as methodological relationalists, we avoid the whole dichotomy ofreduction versus emergence, which belongs to the realist discourse whereinindividualists and collectivists debate over what is the ‘correct’ ontology toadopt (cf. Archer, 1995: 20–6). As pragmatists, we prefer to sociologise thesephilosophical issues, rather than philosophise over the metaphysical basis ofsociology – a choice of general approach we have discussed in more detailelsewhere (Kivinen and Piiroinen, 2006).

Knowing-how, embodiment, and practice

We do not see any gain to be made through the Archerian realist project ofcirculating the explanations and preconditions of action via ontologised‘emergent’ structures. To stretch the point somewhat, it is as if the realistthought that if she yesterday dug a hole into which you fall today, there is nodirect connection between her deed and your accident, since she has merelyaccompanied the transformation of a structure, which then operates the dayafter to produce your mishap. However, we certainly agree with Archer’s(1995, 72) conception that people are born into a social world that is not oftheir own making. As John Dewey (MW 14: 15–16, 43–45, 69–75), a trueclassic of pragmatism, emphasises, some community, customs, and languagealways precede each of us, and it is through acting within these contexts thatpeople adopt their habits; the customs of a community are passed on fromone generation and one individual to others in interaction, within an unin-terrupted stream of action. ‘Our habits are links in forming the endless chain



of humanity’ (Dewey, MW 14: 19). The material resources and modes of actingbelong to the daily practices of a community, and action within shared prac-tices guarantee the continuity of a community.

In her book Being Human, Archer argues, much in a pragmatist vein, thatpractice is pivotal – what is central to human beings are doings, not abstractmeanings. The use of language is but one practice among others. ‘There is apractical order which is more extensive than the linguistic’. (Archer, 2000a:159, 189.) The primacy of knowing-how is manifested in many of the activi-ties of everyday life. Riding a bicycle, for instance, is practical knowing-how,learnt by doing and weighed in action. There is no point in trying to explicatelinguistically all one’s knowing-how of riding a bicycle, firstly because ridinga bicycle does not require that, and secondly because complete explicationwould be an impossible assignment (see Ryle, 1949; Polanyi, 1969). Archerrefers to Michael Polanyi’s observation that a pianist would hardly be able toplay at all if she shifted her attention from the music to what her fingers aredoing. The pianist’s knowing-how is the result of hard work with the instru-ment that eventually might lead to virtuosity, to a ‘feel’ that cannot be brokendown and communicated to others. (Archer, 2000a: 170.)

One of the examples Archer mentions concerns Polynesians, who some3,500 years ago performed remarkable feats of navigation: relying solely ontheir knowing-how, their ancient skills of land-finding in the Pacific, theywould set out on 2,000-mile sea voyages without the faintest idea of even thebasics of trigonometry, to say nothing of charts and instruments of localisa-tion and orientation – indeed their whole world-view (considered from today’svantage point) was all wrong. (See Archer, 2000a: 180–1.) The pre-Europeancraft of navigation relied on stars, swell patterns, winds, birds, clouds andwave-reflections, so that the ancient Polynesians knew how to navigate in theircanoes out in the open sea (see Lewis, 1994), even though they did not haveany idea about modern geography and meteorology, and their conception ofthe shape of the planet Earth was incorrect. The beliefs – habits of action –on the strength of which the Polynesians travelled, were good for their pur-poses, although by our present-day scientific standards they were theoreticallycompletely wrong.

Archer (2000a, 162) is right in saying that there is a lot of knowing-how(which she calls knowledge) recorded into each human body in transactionswith the environment. There is no reason not to concur with her in thinkingthat embodied knowing-how can be understood as an ability to solve prob-lems. In order to live, any organism needs to do things, obtain nourishment,avoid threats, hide from predators, etc. Archer (2000a, 161) starts with theidea that each human being has plenty of embodied knowledge, only arbi-trarily distinguishable from the embodied knowledge of animals. People areseparated from animals by virtue of their practical knowledge concerning theinvention and use of artefacts. Archer’s (2000a, 127–37) ideas about bothembodiment and the pivotal role of practice owe a great deal to MauriceMerleau-Ponty, which is shown, for example, in the way Archer demonstrates



how desks and chairs do not become meaningful to us only by being namedin speech, but gain their meanings in use, when people sit on the chairs andwrite at the desks (Archer, 2000a: 156–7). Archer’s emphasis on practice hassuch a pragmatic, even pragmatist tone that one could term Being Human asArcher’s pragmatist turn, were there not also in that book repeated articula-tions of realist conviction.

Pragmatism is action-centred to the core. C.S. Peirce (1986, 263–6), forinstance, articulates this in terms that a belief is a habit of action. And Deweystates that facts are operational, not complete in themselves but selected anddescribed for some purpose (Dewey, LW 12: 116). For example, ‘no eventcomes to us labelled as “cause” or “effect.” An event has to be deliberatelytaken to be cause or effect. Such taking would be purely arbitrary if there werenot a particular and differential problem to be solved’. (Dewey, LW 12: 453.)We human beings inevitably limit our viewpoint, notes another classic of prag-matism, William James. ‘Just so an astronomer, in dealing with the tidal move-ments of the ocean, takes no account of the waves made by the wind . . . Justso the marksman, in sighting his rifle, allows for the motion of the wind, butnot for the . . . motion of the earth and solar system’. (James, 1979: 166.)Dewey (LW 1: 100–61) described richly how every thing gains its meaning inuse, in action and communication, and was in this respect a forerunner ofWittgenstein (1953, §43), who stated that the meaning of a word is its use inlanguage. As José Medina remarks, Wittgenstein’s notion of language gamewas meant exactly to underline the intimacy of the bond between actions andwords; similarly for Dewey, language was primarily a mode of action. For bothof these thinkers, words are meaningful only in the context of a shared prac-tices and use, of social cooperation. (Medina, 2004: 343–4.)

Antirepresentationalism and antiessentialism in fact go hand in hand withthe pragmatist understanding that any idea can only be weighed in action. AsLouis Menand remarks, for Dewey, all ‘ideas and beliefs are the same ashands: instruments for coping’. This is why it is no more interesting to inves-tigate the ontology of the concept of social structures than it is to study themetaphysics of, say, forks and spoons. ‘When your fork proves inadequate tothe task of eating soup, it makes little sense to argue about whether there issomething inherent in the nature of forks or something inherent in the natureof soup that accounts for the failure. You just reach for a spoon’ (Menand,2001: 361).

Interestingly, Archer (2000a, 166) states that there is a form of procedural– rather than propositional – practical knowledge, which is to a great extententwined with doing things. Although Archer makes good points here, thereare crucial differences between Archerian practical knowledge and the prag-matist idea that a belief is a habit of action. Most importantly, Archer’s prac-tical knowledge is a form of tacit Knowledge with a capital K, by virtue ofwhich one is supposed to understand (within action) something about reality.As such, it lies within the tradition that Nigel Pleasants (1996) ascribes toBhaskar and Giddens among others – a tradition according to which people



are knowledgeable and conscious about what they do even when they cannotexplicate what it is that they are doing. This realist way of thinking furthermaintains that implicit rules also have an objective reality, guaranteed by theirtranscendental existence, and that people follow these rules knowledgeablyby virtue of their tacit knowledge. ‘Tacit knowledge, or practical conscious-ness, is depicted as a natural cognitive power which enables individuals tounderstand, interpret, and apply these rules’. (Pleasants, 1996: 238–9.)

For Archer, practical knowledge is always tied to a human body, being‘knowledge from somewhere rather than being part of detached scientificobservation’. As an embodied creature, a human being examines ‘the objectfrom a particular point of view’ where action, perception and understandingcome together. (Archer, 2000a: 166.) At first sight, one could take this as justanother way of explicating the pragmatist view that anything can only bethought of from an actor’s point of view, but the way Archer contrasts ‘knowl-edge from somewhere’ with ‘detached scientific observation’ is troubling,because all propositional knowledge, too, is possible only from an actor’s pointof view; hence, the difference between embodied knowing-how and scientificknowledge-that is not best explained in terms of more or less ‘detachedness’.How it is best explained will be considered next.

Drawing distinctions: how many forms of knowledge?

We find it unfortunate that Archer combines her perceptive observationsabout human embodiment, practice and non-linguistic knowing-how with herrealist morphogenetics, emphasising that all the properties and powers of sub-jects are only understandable in relation to an independent reality. To a realistlike Archer, consciousness and other ‘inner states’ are always about somestates of affairs, having some objective referents. (See Archer, 2000a: 154.)This idea of objective referents supposedly entailed by our inner states leadsto a rather complicated ontology. As illustrated in Figure 1, Archer distin-guishes ‘natural order’, ‘practical order’ and ‘social order’ from each other,suggesting that each of these orders contains a certain form of knowledge ofits own.

As pragmatists, we prefer to understand the distinctions in Figure 1, alikeany other conceptual distinctions, not as referring to some description-inde-pendent, metaphysical divisions of reality, but simply as descriptions that canbe evaluated only through weighing them in action, through seeing how usefulthey turn out to be in practice. The question then is: how useful a tool is theArcherian Figure 1 for social scientists’ purposes?

All three orders of reality and their respective forms of knowledge receivea minute elaboration by Archer (cf. 2000a, 154–90). Natural order and socialorder are presented as two overlapping spheres, the shared overlap therebeing the sphere of practical order, which thus forms the essential intermedi-ary between the other two. Within natural order there is nature and embod-



ied knowledge, within social order propositional culture and discursive knowl-edge, and within practical order material culture and practical knowledge. Thispicture, which exhibits obvious similarities with an earlier one presented byBhaskar (1986, 115 Figure 2.3.), in effect mixes up Archer’s useful remarksabout the centrality of action with arbitrary distinctions between differenttypes of action and their various relations.

When Archer (2000a, 165–6) says she has found an interface betweennatural order and practical order – an interface that serves as a link betweenembodied knowledge and practical knowledge – we cannot but ask: Why sep-arate embodied knowing-how and practical knowing-how in the first place,only to then ‘find’ this interface? Due to the unnecessary distinction betweenembodied and practical knowledge, Archer starts searching for examples ofhow to ‘translate’ them into each other. To illustrate such translations, sheutilises the Polynesians-example mentioned above, telling us how CaptainCook collaborated with a Polynesian navigator to produce a map – an arte-fact – of numerous Pacific islands (Archer, 2000a: 182). What Archer does notemphasise is that this collaboration was (of course) linguistic by nature (seeLewis, 1994: 8–10); it was actually not a case of translating embodied knowing-how into practical or propositional forms of knowledge, but just communica-tion of linguistic knowledge-that all along. Cook did not gain access to the



NATURALORDER

PRACTICALORDER

SOCIALORDER

NatureMaterialculture

practicalrelations

Propositionalculture

discursiverelations

embodiedpotentialities /

liabilities

naturalrelations

practicalknowledge

discursiveknowledge

embodied

knowledge

Figure 1 Three orders of reality and their respective forms of knowledge(Archer 2000a, 162 Figure 5.1.)

Polynesian art of knowing-how to navigate – developing the appropriatehabits would have taken him years of persistent training with patient guid-ance from Polynesian navigators – instead, he gathered some knowledge-thatabout where such and such islands were located.

Whereas Archer’s realist theory talks about three different orders of realityand forms of knowledge, our pragmatist approach only discusses actors andtheir environment, and distinguishes only one form of knowledge, the propo-sitional knowledge-that. For the pragmatist’s scholarly purposes, the basicevolutionary story can be told using the concept of an organism in transac-tions with the environment. As Dewey stresses, a living human being actsincessantly; life simply is organism’s transactions with the environment. Anorganism acts on the strength of habits which take shape when transactionswith the environment change the dispositions conditioning the habits oforganism’s future action. (Dewey, MW 14: 15–16, 31, 84; Kivinen and Ristelä,2002: 421–3.) The majority of organism’s transactions do not, of course,require any complex instruments: simply breathing is already a form of trans-action with one’s environment. Transactions progress from simpler to morecomplicated ones, all the way through to activities that proceed by virtue ofhighly multi-phased series of actions (and habits), demanding plenty of prac-tice with different instruments – the craft of carpentry, say, or the art of playingthe violin. Concentrating on such purposeful activity also means taking anactor’s point of view to the issues involved, for all standpoints are alwaysdelimited by the practices in which the person participates. Some skills can beboosted by conscious linguistic processing and thinking; however, language isbut one among a variety of useful tools. By speaking one learns, first and fore-most, to talk better, to communicate better, to coordinate actions better thanbefore, but by speaking one will not learn how to swim, for example. The onlyway to learn how to swim is to get into the water and swim, at first with somedifficulty but gradually better and better. Nevertheless, as an instrument ofcommunication and coordination of action, language has a special role to playin any human community.

Cognition is possible only for language users (Rorty, 1998: 297). There isjust one kind of knowledge and understanding – the linguistic kind. Thus con-ceived, there will be no mind–body ‘problem’ or ‘mystery’ of consciousness,as human awareness is demystified into a matter of language (see Sellars, 1997:63). It would be strange if one could legitimately claim to be aware of some-thing when not having the slightest idea about what it is that one is aware of,or if one could reasonably argue to know something that utterly escapes lin-guistic characterisation. Language is the tool of communicating to oneself aswell as to others, and if one is to know and understand that which one sup-posedly knows and understands, one must have the means to describe andcommunicate it to oneself in some language.

Of course, people do say things like: ‘I know how to ride a bicycle’, but thiskind of knowing-how should be strictly distinguished from the propositionalknowing-that, because a careless identification of these two different kinds of



abilities under the title ‘knowledge’ only leads to misunderstandings. Whattacit knowledge is there to be grasped when, say, riding a bicycle? To ‘stayupright’ and ‘keep peddling’, perhaps? (Cf. Pleasants, 1996: 248.) Already aquarter of a century before Gilbert Ryle (1949), whose name is the one mostoften mentioned in the connection of the knowing-how / knowing-that dis-tinction, Dewey put it as follows:

We may, indeed, be said to know how by means of our habits. We . . . do athousand useful acts without thinking of them. We know something,namely, how to do them. . . . But after all, this practical work done by habitand instinct in securing prompt and exact adjustment to the environmentis not knowledge, except by courtesy. Or, if we choose to call it knowledge. . . then other things also called knowledge . . . knowledge that things arethus and so, knowledge that involves reflection and conscious appreciation,remains of a different sort, unaccounted for and undescribed. (Dewey,[1922] MW 14: 124–5.)

The distinction is crucial because, for example, it makes it unnecessary toconstruct complicated conceptual apparatuses – such as Archer’s – aboutvarious kinds of knowledge, their place and role in the world, and possibletranslations between them. It is then quite enough to say that there is only oneform of knowledge, the linguistic kind, which is one of the most elaborate toolspeople have developed to aid their action, their coping with the environment.

Although Archer (2000a, 160) characterises non-linguistic knowledge(knowing-how) quite aptly in terms of tacit information, skills, and know-how,she then goes on to burden these concepts with the idea that ‘embodied knowl-edge is real knowledge’ since it contains a ‘regulative’ element (Archer, 2000a:164). According to Archer, incorrect ways of doing things, pointed out by ourbodies, bring out the existence of ‘embodied rules’ – as people make mistakesor succeed in something they get feedback, punishments or rewards from theoutside, and from this they learn whether their actions were right or wrong.Archer’s examples here include the kind of bodily feelings people have whenthey try to drink from a bottle that is empty or mistakenly climb an extra stepin a staircase. The human body registers that something went wrong, and peoplegain embodied, non-linguistic knowledge about it. (Archer, 2000a: 164–5.)

We fail to see any benefit in naming non-linguistic, bodily sensations ofsomething going wrong ‘knowledge’; surely a term like ‘neurophysiologicalalarms’ (cf. Dennett, 1993: 177–80) would be more appropriate. Does a cathave knowledge that it should cover its droppings with litter; does a bird haveknowledge about how to build a nest? Does an earthworm have knowledgethat it should come up to the ground when it is raining? Archer (2000a, 189)certainly touches on an important point when she accentuates that ‘many ofthe things that humans know have not been filtered through meanings belong-ing to the discursive order’. But we think the point could be put by sayingsimply that all human knowing-how develops in transactions with the envi-ronment, and most of it is not articulated linguistically – only all knowledge



is. Most importantly, when knowledge is understood as thoroughly linguistic,there will be no room left for Archer’s (2000a, 161) claim that practical knowl-edge somehow ‘authentically discloses part of reality which is beyond thelimits of language’ – a claim which explicates what is often only a hiddenassumption in realist doctrines, that people could somehow have a ‘direct’ cog-nitive access to the real things of the world ‘undistorted’ by language. Becausenon-linguistic knowing-how and the things done in virtue of it can be madeobjects of cognitive inquiry only through describing them linguistically, thewhole idea of practical knowledge ‘authentically disclosing’ the things of thedescription-independent reality remains foreign to us. That is, we do not agreewith Archer (2000a, 160) when she claims that ‘both nature and artifactsencode information about possible practices, given the way that the world isand the way in which we are constituted’. For us, the concept of ‘information’already implies a linguistic community – a group of language-users interpret-ing something as information. There is no information as such, waiting forpeople ‘out there’ beyond all language.

We also disagree with the Archer’s (2000a, 168) claim that artefacts‘become independent of their makers, because practical meanings are carriedby the objects themselves and their causal powers are built into them’; in con-trast, for us pragmatists, artefacts (as well as any part of the ‘nature’, for thatmatter) are understandable only through the various uses we have for them,none of which is the ‘objectively correct usage’. So, pace Archer (2000a,168–9), the human-made artefacts have no ‘quality of knowledge without aknowing subject’, or a ‘meaning’, which they could ‘communicate’ to usthrough enabling and constraining us. People do of course encounter all sortsof restrictions and possibilities in action, but they can only gain knowledgeabout these restrictions and possibilities as they articulate them in some lan-guage. One should remember Dewey’s (LW 1: 241) examples of the many usesand names of the artefact we most often name ‘paper’. This one and the sameobject can be something made out of wood-pulp, something to light a fire with,a means of payment, something produced for financial profit, etc. None ofthese named uses is more real than the others.

Being human

An important advantage gained through the distinction between (embodied)knowing-how and (linguistic) knowing-that is a sharpened understanding ofhuman being – the very topic of Archer’s book Being Human. As humanawareness is demystified into a matter of language, it is thereby reconciledwith the Darwinian conception of human evolution, which leaves no room foremergent mental entities causally interacting with the physical world. Aware-ness is simply one of the linguistic, social tools the human organism has developed in the course of evolution for the purposes of coping with its envi-ronment. (See Dewey, LW 1; also Dennett, 1993; 1995.)



According to Archer, in contrast, ‘the human being is both logically andontologically prior to the social being, whose subsequent properties andpowers need to build upon human ones’. Language only has a role to play in the more developed ‘persons’ that emerge from the selves after havingdetermined themselves via internal conversation. (Archer, 2000a: 190, 257.)Archer’s approach, leaning on her emergentist realist ontology, is designed,among other things, to avoid ‘conflations’ that emphasise that social world issimply social practices in which human beings are crucially formed. Archer(1995, 117) thinks that conflating social world and social practices would makethe human being ‘relentlessly active’ and ‘unremittingly social’, leaving us withan ‘under-stratified’ conception of man, suitable perhaps for describing‘actors’, but certainly not ‘agents’ and ‘persons’. Pace Archer (1995, 117–32),however, we maintain that understanding humanity and social life does notrequire a complex, stratified ontology of agents, actors, persons, and theirrespective emergent powers and properties. In a Deweyan vein, people areseen as just incessantly acting organisms that can – due to their shared socialtool of language – provide stories about themselves and other people.

Although maintained pivotal, the Archerian ‘practice’ is not all that social.Her ‘realist account starts in “privacy”, in human exchanges with the naturalworld, rather than in the public domain of social relations’, and the very basisof humanity – the ‘sense of self’, also called ‘self-consciousness’ – emergesfrom one’s embodied and practical relations to the environment, not beingdependent on language (Archer, 2000a: 3, 116). Furthermore, since realiststhink that language must be about something, it can only be learnt in refer-ence to the independent reality, in relation to which it also gains its meanings.‘It follows that there must be some non-linguistic access to reality, which isprior to language acquisition’, states Archer. ‘If the expressive uses of lan-guage are also “about” things in, or states of, the world, then there must besome worldly emotional practice which necessarily precedes our ability tolearn to voice our feelings’. (Archer, 2000a: 155.)

There is a stark contrast here to our Deweyan understanding of language.‘The heart of language is not “expression” of something antecedent, much lessexpression of antecedent thought. It is communication; the establishment ofcooperation in activity in which there are partners, and in which the activityof each is modified and regulated by partnership’. (Dewey, LW 1: 141.) AsNigel Pleasants (1996, 251) concludes his discussion about Wittgensteinianrule-following, there is no other criteria for correct rule-following than public,observable, accountable actions displayed in practices. Whatever objectivitythere might be in standards, it is due only to their being collectively set. Inthis respect objectivity cannot be anything but intersubjectivity. This alsoexplains why a Deweyan–Wittgensteinian pragmatist contextualist need notworry about accusations of linguistic idealism. The meanings of words are ofcourse not ‘decided’ by language users to mean whatever they choose. Rather,it is the consensus of action in shared practices that makes words meaningful.(Medina, 2004: 364.)



While our pragmatist way of thinking leads us to conclusions altogetherdifferent from Archer’s ontological realism, epitomised by her statement that‘things are as they are and not just as we take them to be’ (Archer, 2000a:227), we are by no means denying the world around us in some ultracon-structivist way. There is a world, certainly, but there is no point in speculatingwhether things are this way or that independently of how we describe themto be. Furthermore, we do not doubt that there are external causal pressuresimposing limits on how to act and how to describe actions intelligibly. ‘Thesepressures will be described in different ways at different times and for differ-ent purposes, but they are pressures none the less’, says Rorty (1999, 33). Asantirepresentationalists, we do not doubt that most things in the universe arecausally independent of us; but since we know no way to decide which descrip-tion of an object captures its ‘intrinsic’ features, we find it wisest to discardthe claim that beliefs ‘represent’ (Rorty, 1998: 86). Given that there is a prioragreement on a language game, an object can cause us to hold some beliefs,‘but it cannot suggest beliefs for us to hold’ (Rorty, 1991: 83). Some descrip-tions are better than others, but this is a matter of utility, not ‘correspondencewith reality’. Better descriptions are simply more useful than others foraccomplishing some purposes. (Rorty, 1999: 54, 65.)

The pragmatist conception of language as a shared practice and tool of com-munication does away with the Archerian hypothesis that there should be adirect cognitive connection of sorts between pure, non-linguistic mental statesof a solitary knowing subject and the things-in-themselves of the object world.As Dewey understood, meaning is no mental phenomenon but primarily aproperty of distinctive, cooperative behaviour. To understand something is notto capture some non-linguistic essence of a thing-in-itself. ‘To understand is toanticipate together, it is to make a cross-reference which, when acted upon,brings about a partaking in a common, inclusive, undertaking’. By the sametoken, ‘to misunderstand is to set up action at cross purposes’. (Dewey, LW 1:141–2.) In a Deweyan–Wittgensteinian vein, the idea of minds or meanings inabstraction from the actual linguistic practices makes no sense; social life andcommunication precedes the articulation of any ‘mental contents’. There is noneed to suppose mental entities as guides of human action. (See Medina, 2004:348; also Kilpinen, 2000.) As incessantly acting organisms, people need no par-ticular ‘reasons’ or ‘motives’ for their actions.

Archer (2000a, 185–6), in contrast, points to emotions as ‘the basis formoving us’, and suggests they involve knowledge as well. Due to their cogni-tive element, emotions may ‘get things wrong’ in relation to ‘objective stand-ards’, and these objective standards are often independent of language usingcommunities. People can ‘in the privacy of the subject–object relationship’emotionally experience feelings of competence that ‘embody the standards ofthe inanimate object that cannot lie’. A lone golfer, for instance, cannot behappy with her scores if she does not count all her strikes. Such an emotionalcommentary ‘is, as it were, the object’s judgement of competence or incom-petence upon the subject’s dealings with it’. (See Archer, 2000a: 197–8,



207–13.) Here Archer’s thinking goes so that ‘distinct tracts of our emotion-ality are internally linked to equally distinct kinds of real world objects, whosethree different kinds of imports register themselves as commentaries on threecorrespondingly different kinds of concerns’. (Archer, 2000a: 197). Thisimplies anthropomorphising overtones, for instance, when Archer (cf. 2000a,163 ff.) describes problem-solving in terms of subject–object dichotomy. Sheis tempted to use the vocabulary of ‘nature setting us problems’ and ‘operat-ing on us’. Of course, Archer denies anthropomorphising, but those tenden-cies are inbuilt into the realist conception of separate subject and objectinteracting with each other.

Why not put it simply that people find there to be problematic situationsfrom their actors’ points of view? After all, only human actors set and solveproblems linguistically and thus consciously, and tell stories in order to com-municate, explain and anticipate their doings. It is in congruence with her wayof dividing reality into three orders that Archer (2000a, 215) draws the tri-partite division of standards, suggesting that there is a distinctive class of stan-dards for each order. This is why, according to Archer, a considerable numberof standards exist outside language. But we think it is reasonable to speak ofstandards only as something articulated in human communication. Only lan-guage users may explicate to themselves and to others that something is astandard and discuss how appropriately it can be used to evaluate this or that.Dogs have no standards because they have no language and, a fortiori, nomeans of discussing about a standard, no tools for widening their under-standing of a standard through relating it with other standards, nor the optionof consciously and knowingly deciding where and when to apply the standard(cf. Davidson, 1985).

People develop linguistic standards for purposes of evaluating what kindof performances shall be described as excellent, good, or satisfactory. Obvi-ously an actor can feel more or less competent in her actions, but why shouldthis feeling be based on the relationship between subject and object alone?Why should the standards of playing golf be separated from the commentsmade by other people? Surely it is not the case that some inanimate objects(golf balls, clubs, and holes) could tell in themselves – ‘in the privacy of thesubject–object relationship’ – some objective standards for the subject toknow how well she plays golf (or whether or not she is cheating in reckoningthe score, since this, too, depends on the rules of golf which are, obviously,defined by people). Rom Harré (1997, 182) has got it right when he says, ‘Idon’t and indeed can’t decide what my actions mean. Only you and I [andothers who may be concerned] can do that’.

Concluding remarks

Roughly categorised, there are two kinds of toolsets that human actors,including social scientists, need. First, there are tools used in the actual process



of inquiry and exploration – the non-linguistic habits of acting. Just as thePolynesians knew how to navigate on the strength of a ‘feel’, without theo-rising, by virtue of trained habits and customs learned from more experiencednavigators, so also the work of scientists proceeds largely by virtue of non-linguistic knowing-how and habits learnt by doing in practice and followingmore experienced scientists. This comes naturally, unthinkingly. ‘The sailor isintellectually at home on the sea, the hunter in the forest, the painter in hisstudio, the man (sic) of science in his laboratory’ (Dewey, MW 14: 123).Second, there are tools used in the presentation of inquiry. Writing up a reporton one’s inquiry requires sophisticated linguistic knowing-how in order tocope with the relevant scientific language game, and knowledge-that aboutthe previous discussions. It is only in this reporting phase that scientific knowl-edge proper gains its well-articulated form as propositional knowledge – andbecomes a target for the scientific community’s future references. Gaining thestatus of social scientific knowledge is all about receiving the intersubjectivestatus of warranted assertability in the social scientific discussions, of descrip-tions that do not (for the time being) need any more justification.

Scientific inquiry differs from layman inquiry in that scientists participatein scientific language games in which the conventions are different fromlayman language games. This is not to say that non-scientific standpoints aresomehow inferior as compared to scientific ones – we rather concur with P.F.Strawson’s (1985, 38) remark that the whole idea of settling contradictionsbetween these points of view in a ‘neutral’ fashion, ‘arises only if we assumethe existence of some metaphysically absolute standpoint from which we canjudge between the two standpoints . . . But there is no such superior stand-point . . .’ Moreover, both scientific knowledge and lay knowledge must ulti-mately be tested by acting accordingly, and both are acquired from someactor’s point of view.

We join Archer in emphasising the pivotal role of practice as problem-solving. Scientific research (as well as any other kind of human inquiry) alwaysstarts out with a situation seen as problematic and calling for solution. ButArcher’s realist inclination toward theorising about the intrinsic ontologicalnature of social reality does not lend itself to solving these problems, becausemetaphysical settings can hardly be operationalised as solvable research problems and consistent series of actions. We recommend moving fromphilosophising sociology toward sociologising philosophy; it is time to ‘seehow metaphysical mysteries might be converted into decidable problems’(Fuchs, 2001: 6; Kivinen and Piiroinen, 2006). Moreover, as Archer is bewareof committing the epistemic fallacy, she accepts only a secondary cognitiverole for linguistic descriptions, holding on to the realist subject–object dualismwhere the knowing subject is in direct, non-linguistic interrelationship withthe known object. She thus fails to appreciate the social nature of practice.

A central theme in this article has been the Archerian conception of varioustypes of knowledge, which we have contrasted with our pragmatist view ofjust one, thoroughly linguistic kind of knowledge. We want to devote the term



knowledge to sets of linguistic descriptions that people use as tools for copingwith their environment – descriptions that are not to be taken as referring toor representing ‘reality as it is in itself’. As pragmatists, we are satisfied withthe idea that human beings are knowledgeable actors since they use linguis-tic descriptions for purposes of communicating and coordinating actions,coping with the problems they perceive from their actors’ points of view. Thus,we may adapt a well-known phrase and conclude by saying that the properlimits of knowledge are the limits of language.

University of Turku Received 11 March 2004Finally accepted 19 August 2005

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