Chapter 5 - In Defense of How Things Seem

Summary

If some of our knowledge cannot be articulated, how does it make itself manifest? It will not surprise anyone who has followed the argument of this book up to now that there are things that we can do with knowledge besides talking about it. Millikan, as we saw, used his knowledge of experimentation and of professional discourse to guide his exemplary investigations of the charge of the electron. Neither was something he made explicit; I doubt that he (or anyone) could have. No practitioner who looked at Millikan’s work found any basis for these accusations, because their training endowed them with a knowledge only available to practitioners. They all made effective use of this knowledge, despite not being able to articulate its content. That kind of knowledge manifests itself not in the form of beliefs, but rather in the scholar’s sense of how things seem.