#166 Implicit understanding

     “Even though humans are more committed to language than other animals, we use more than words in every aspect of engagement with our lives. We are intricately and intimately connected with others and with the world, and most of these connections happen alongside, beneath, and in other spheres than the words we say and the propositions we formulate. We know how to say some things, and how to make claims and test them. This sort of knowledge – propositional knowledge – has been often understood as the only form of knowledge worth thinking about. We also know otherwise – we understand things that cannot be or are not spoken, and we may suspect that this form of understanding is important. In this book, I attend to this second form of knowing, which I call ‘implicit understanding.’ I argue that various forms of knowing otherwise than propositionally are vital to current possibilities for flourishing, expressing dignity, and acting.

     I have two main aims: first to delineate the differences and the connections among four sorts of implicit understanding, and second to show how they are crucial to personal and political transformation. Indeed, it is often at points of transition that the work of implicit understanding is most palpable – when people shift their gender enactment, when they take up new political orientations, when they aim to create new social relations.”

       Shotwell A. Knowing otherwise. Race, gender, and implicit understandings. The Pensylvania University Press, PA, 2011.   http://alexisshotwell.com/

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