ch 8, throwing out the tacit rule book,

ch 8, throwing out the tacit rule book, 

Not quite sure what to do with this chapter. In it, my sense is that Turner is inveighing against what I would call social constructionism, or this idea that there are conventions that we both share in advance that make communication possible. I don't even know if I could think of an example. Who thinks this though? Who is a proponent of this?

Still can't think of anyone. I know that this is probably getting at the process versus post-process split. So maybe the process theorists? Yea, I guess that makes sense actually. There is a writing process, it goes like this, and we all share it. OK, so the boogie men/women would be people like Ken Macrorie, Peter Elbow, Janet Emig, and so on. Macrorie especially. I'm a pro writer. This is how I write. If you want to become a better writer, write like me, the expert. So social constructionism (SC) makes a split between expert and novice, and the goal of the latter ought to be to mimic the former. 

Here, too, in SC, we must be in a place where, contra Wittgenstein, the rules DO contain rules for their own application. 

So underneath these process assumption there is an assumption of sharing, which makes sense. That being said, Turner is out to disprove that there is a tacit rule book to be shared. Again, like with the process theorists, there are these tacit rules, let's excavate them and then give them to novices so that they can replicate them. Turner says no. 

But how? 

I can't tell if Turner is for or against connectionism. But I looked it up on Google and it gave me some ideas. When you put "problems with connectionism" into Google, the first thing that pops up is

One complaint is that connectionist models are only good at processing associations. But such tasks as language and reasoning cannot be accomplished by associative methods alone and so connectionists are unlikely to match the performance of classical models at explaining these higher-level cognitive abilities

I think this is kind of like my complaint about techniques of close reading. When you closely read, usually, you discover patterns of similarity or difference across texts. A talked about X, B talked about X, C talked about X, so it must be important and I should flag it as a theme. But you can also just as easily invent through practices of randomness and juxtaposition. Why does everything have to be associational? and isn't even disassociation a form of association? 

I bet you this complaint gets at the distinction between weaving and splicing too (Spinuzzi). 

I was also thinking of the "I music you" from Lyotard, which is probably an example of splicing. 

Oh yea, and the threshold concept thing from Turner. This is from a PDF about a book on the problems of connectionism in cognitive science, I believe. 

units at different levels of analysis cannot be captured: some linguistic generalizations apply to individual sounds, some to their combinations, some to the combinations of words, and so on. They also question the actual success of the model. It does not, for example, stabilize on correct usage; it continues to produce many past-tense errors, whereas adults do not. It makes errors no one makes. Perhaps most devastatingly, Pinker and Prince point out that the model makes, and apparently must make, certain assumptions about the changing input to children that are factually incorrect. Early on, the model is given a sample of present and past forms of eight irregular verbs and two regulars. During this time, the model, like children, makes no overregularizations such as breaked. Then the input is changed to hundreds of verbs, in the reversed ratio 80 percent regular to 20 percent irregular, and overregularizations are now produced. But Pinker and Prince's inspection of children's transcripts shows no such radical change in regular-irregular ratios in either the environment for children or children's own vocabularies as they pass from accurate to overregularization uses. Thus children's performance changes without the corresponding dramatic changes in environmental input needed by the model.

Hence the importance of threshold concepts. 

Acquire. 

Ok, so it looks like Turner is trying to distance himself from the idea that he's too much of an individualists, because he gets taken to task in this book. He gets a lot of shit for the habits argument:

‘Practices’ talk, I have argued elsewhere, gets into trouble over the notion of ‘sharing’ (1994). The idea that there are ‘shared’ practices requires some sort of notion of how they come to be shared, and this notion in turn dictates how practices can be conceived. If we decide that these difficulties are insurmountable, I argued, we can dispense with the notion of sharing altogether. Practices without sharing, to use a phrase favored in the nineteenth century, are habits— individual rather than shared. Habits are simply the part of the phenomenon described by the term ‘practices’ that remains when the idea of people possessing the same shared thing is eliminated. ‘Habits,’ however, is a potentially misleading term, especially if ‘habit’ is thought of as a generic alternative explanation rather than simply as the residue of the concept of practices once its objectionable elements have been eliminated. In what follows I will try to avoid this potential misunderstanding by restating my argument against the ‘social’ conception of practices in somewhat different terms, without appealing to ‘habit’ as a concept, and by locating the argument in relation to recent work in cognitive science. 

x

The usual understanding of what is involved in the case of language is this: we communicate by virtue of sharing in the possession of this highly structured whole, a language, including the nonlinguistic learned conditions for the use of the language, the practices. This notion can be put in a much more cautious way, as for example Davidson does when he speaks of ‘sharing a language, in whatever sense this is required for communication’ (1977:166). The ‘required sense’ of sharing may be minimal, and may not consist of shared tacit rules. In what follows, I propose to deal with the question of what the ‘required sense’ is, and how it can be squared with a plausible account of learning. 

Maybe that's old Davidson?

And what is that ‘required sense’ of sharing? and what is Turner's account of learning?

Also wait. Isn't the whole argument against cognitivism (like Flower and Hayes) that the mind is NOT structured like a computer?

‘Connectionism’ refers to the claim that the appropriate model for the computation that occurs in the brain is not, as a once dominant viewpoint had it, the operation of logic machines that process symbols, but rather is the parallel distributed processing that is used on a variety of actual computer applications (such as flight simulators) and requires very substantial computing power. The ‘symbolic processing’ model worked as follows: the mind acquires, either by genetic pre-programming or learning, rules for processing inputs, in a way that is familiar from ordinary computing, in which symbols come in well-defined forms. and the computer program operates as if computational ‘rules’ are ‘applied’ to them mechanically to produce predictable outputs. Connectionist models work differently. The computer is given a learning algorithm, but no detailed ‘rules.’ The computer is then ‘trained-up’ by feeding it data and then giving feedback for ‘correct’ answers. This is very much a Humean rather than a Kantian machine. Everything that is inside, except for the most basic capacity for forming ‘expectations’ is a result of inputs, or experience. The inputs are not symbolic, but simply impulses originating from various sensory sources, which are distributed through the brain in pathways made up of ‘connections’ that are formed statistically, by the association of impulses of one kind with impulses of another kind 

Looks like this is more on the lines of machine learning, but I suspect they're not the same thing. I'll keep going

These are modeled mathematically as ‘weightings’ of the impulses, which travel from ‘node’ or pathway link to ‘node’ and which modify the link by passing through it, just as a person walking in the forest makes a path, increasing the likelihood of future impulses of a similar kind being distributed in a similar way. The changes in the likelihoods are ‘learning.’ These computer methods actually work: this is a model based on actual computer achievements, in which parallel distributed processing systems learn to do such things as detect cancers by being trained entirely empirically with inputs of images and feedback for correct predictions. No theory is needed, and no rules are identified or used in this method. The processes are statistical, and the capacities and outputs of the computer depend on what has been fed to it in the form of data and feedback. 

It looks like Turner is speaking favorably of connectionism here. 

The problem for modelers attempting to deal with human cognition is whether this approach is capable of accounting for higher mental processes. The general explanatory problem is the question of ‘how...competence that is highly systematic, coherent, compositional, and productive’ can be achieved with the specific kinds of ‘finite and fixed resources’ that connectionism employs (Smolensky, Legendre, and Miyata 1993:383). The highly influential paper by these authors from which these quotations are taken presents some technical results that bear on this problem. Indeed, in the opinion of most cognitive scientists and philosophical observers, these results represent a decisive turning point in the resolution of the issues. Briefly, what Smolensky, Legendre, and Miyata establish is that a connectionist account can be given of certain kinds of grammatical rules previously thought to be impossible to account for without reference to internalized formal rules. Their strategy is to show how ‘a fully distributed pattern of numerical activities’ of a connectionist kind can be ‘the functional near-equivalent of a symbolic structure’ (1993: 382). That is, they show how something like ‘rules’ can be the product of ‘learning’ through the simple mechanisms of spreading activation employed by connectionist accounts of the brain. The key idea in their analysis is that there is a kind of purposive process which occurs ‘when the...activation spreading process satisfies certain mathematical properties’ (1993:383), a process they call maximizing Harmony. The strategy of the paper is to make rule acquisition, by which they really mean the acquisition of functional equivalents to a rule, into a special case of connectionist learning generally. This raises an obvious possibility: that practices too may be special cases of this kind, or, alternatively, that practices may be better understood not as a special case of the same kind, but in light of the general properties of connectionist learning. In what follows, I will suggest that the latter is the most plausible conclusion. 

Def still seems like Turner is speaking of connectionism favorably. 

The implication of this that bears on the theory of social practices or the idea of shared practices is that two individuals with an ability to perform the general kind of task may go about it in ways that are quite different on the level of neuro- cognitive description. Put more simply, if we throw out the idea that there is a rule book that people tacitly master in order to, say, communicate, we also throw out the idea that there is some single thing that people must all have in order to communicate. The approach taken by Smolensky, Legendre, and Miyata modifies this implication, for it suggests that something very much like ‘the same’ rules of grammar may result from the fact that there is, in effect, a common end point to the process of mastering a grammar, namely maximal Harmony. But the approach also raises the question of when and where this notion of functional equivalence is applicable or relevant. 

That's the second time maximal Harmony has come up. It also seems like Turner is using connectionism to solve a problem in practice theory, the problem of how we can speak the same language???? or why it appears as though there is something like a shared grammar????

Not in the reading. 

While connectionism, a theory of cognitive psychology that holds that the brain operates almost exactly like a computer, has fallen out of favor with educational psychologists in recent years, those working with the competing “symbolic” approach to cognition have designed cognitive architectures such as ACT-R (Adaptive Control of Thought-Rational” that read like “programming language[s].” date=2010

Back to Turner: 

We cannot, of course, answer questions about the existence of shared functional rule equivalents directly. But some light can be shed on them by considering the ways in which ‘rules’ are learned. Consider the child’s acquisition of the ability to perform simple arithmetical tasks. What is it to ‘be able’ to add 2+2? Is it merely to parrot the correct answer? Presumably not. Indeed, there may be no ‘criteria’ in a Wittgensteinian sense for the possession of this competence. Obviously, a child does not master arithmetic immediately or all at once in the sense that the capacity is turned on like a switch. Other

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things must be mastered first, like counting, and these are often things that it is quite unproblematical to suggest are mastered in different ways. Some children may count on their fingers. Others may learn through singing the numbers, and others may master a great deal of material by rote without knitting it together, and only later make connections between the numbers of a mathematical kind. In short, students come to the learning of 2×2=4 from different starting points. They are then put through a series of experiences, and of course each student’s experience is slightly different and each classroom’s experience is different.

The differences, however, are not supposed to make a difference in the performance of the capacity. There are right answers, and the point of the various experiences with students having various prior experiences is that the experiences taken together transform the child cognitively in such a way that the child is able to perform the cognitive task correctly. Almost everybody manages to do this. At the period prior to mastery, the cognitive architecture which supports the child’s efforts will be, according to the picture I have given here, different. Different children will have different experiences on the way to mastery and the cognitive architecture will be a product of the path and the experiences along this path that the child takes from its starting point to the goal of mastery of the cognitive task. The purposes of children will vary as well. There may be a complex heterogeneity with respect to the goals. Some children may wish to avoid the embarrassment of being brought before the blackboard and humiliated for making mistakes. Other children may have a more positive experience of mastery and pride in achievement. These differences, like differences in the history of learning, do not have any effect on the competence itself.

The question is why? On the account of mastery that fits best with the tacit rule book model, the reason for this is essentially as follows: mastery is no more and no less than ‘getting’ the basic rules of arithmetic, which are the same for everyone. The student tries this and that, gets corrected, gets told the answer is correct, and does all of this without understanding. But at some point something clicks, and the student ‘has’ the rule. The history of acquisition is irrelevant because the important moment is the moment of clicking on to the rule, of getting the rule. This model of learning, what I will call the snap-on model, makes the history irrelevant. There is a radical difference of kind between the period before acquiring the rule and the period after, and the learning events of the first period have no effects in the second. 

Threshold concepts, like I was saying. Maybe. But this is also pushing back against studies like Rounsaville and maybe even Haas. Why do we study incomes rather than outcomes (Gold, Bawarshi and Reiff)? Why do they matter? Because we are trying to get a lesson to "click"?

This is obviously an appealing story. It fits well with a certain view of

Wittgenstein, and indeed may—though I doubt it—represent the most plausible

explication of his notion of rule-following. I do not wish to take the issue up

directly here, but I will note that in the history of the reception of

the Philosophical Investigations there was a period in which something like the

account I have given here was purveyed by Wittgenstein’s students and

1

interpreters. Nevertheless I think it misleads us about practices generally, misleads us into looking for ‘criteria’ or ‘agreements’ where there is nothing of the sort to be found. The main reason for this is that mastery—however one wishes to think of it—is in most cases not the same thing for different people under different circumstances. It is purpose-relative, and the purposes of individuals involved in the activity vary. It is also situation- or experiencerelative, in the sense that it depends on the materials to which the rules are applied. 

Ok, so we're back in Rounsaville territory. So we don't want a radical break. 

Also keep in mind the idea from composition that mastery is a no no. Take Downs and Wardle. We want students to be able to teach us about our own scholarship. And Dylan Dryer too. 

Differences in purposes lead to differences in experience, and this means differences in the information that is fed into the system. Diversity is the normal result, but diversity is nevertheless consistent with a great many kinds of cooperation, and indeed, I think, with communication. In what follows I will consider some examples, and suggest that most of those we call practices are more plausibly thought of as the common activities of people with diverse learnings than as activities made possible by the sharing of the same rule-like structures. Obviously there is no room here for knock-down arguments. Indeed, the complexity of the processes involved ensure, I think, that they will always be opaque to analysis. But something may usefully be suggested about the probable effects of differences in purposes on the cognitive side of practices.

Notice a few unusual features of instruction in arithmetic. Children are tested on their mastery of multiplication tables and there is clearly a right and a wrong answer to such questions. Children are then disciplined or drilled in these right answers, and indeed in days gone by, the multiplication tables were simply mastered by rote and no attempt was made at giving the child some sort of conceptual understanding of multiplication. This kind of training is anomalous if we consider the universe of ‘practices.’ Whatever this universe might be taken to consist of, presumably it includes such ‘practices’ as the standards of etiquette that Norbert Elias describes, the habits of moderation and compromise that are the means of assuring the fruitfulness of parliamentary discussion that thinkers from John Austin to Michael Polanyi and Michael Oakeshott have supposed to operate at the heart of British parliamentary politics, and perhaps many other things as well, such as the means by which laboratory scientists identify objects, as well as the examples I have given here of flirting and house-painting. 

Does the snap-on account of learning fit these cases as well? One difference is this: in these more complex cases, perhaps with the exception of flirting, there is a large spoken or explicit element, a vocabulary of appraisal or even theory about the activity, in addition to its tacit base. In the case of elementary arithmetic there are theories, but they are known to mathematicians alone and are not part of the activities of making change and the like in which elementary arithmetic is used. [like back in H.M. Collins, with the bike example from Karl Polanyi] Another difference with the case of arithmetic is that in these ‘complex’ cases the means by which information about right and wrong are conveyed is different, and the purposes that the parties to the practice have are diverse and lack a common core, like making correct change. So it would be a bit surprising if a model in which these differences had no place made much sense of the learning of the practice. If we see the teaching of arithmetic as the employment of various behavioral technologies that are designed to produce absolute consistency of response, it is no surprise that such things as the

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differences in purpose between learners have no effect on what is learned—that is one of the incidental consequences of a behavioral technology that is designed to eliminate differences. But the behavioral technologies that serve to convey information about right and wrong with respect to these other bodies of practice do not work in this way. 

The yellow part goes back to something he was saying in the intro. 

‘Practices,’ for the sake of the following, is defined as those nonlinguistic conditions for an activity that are learned. By ‘a practice’ I will mean an activity that requires its genuine participants to have learned something of this tacit sort in order to perform. What I intend to discuss are some general features of learning that constrain our conception of practices and therefore of a practice which depends on them. Ordinarily, the tacit stuff is not all there is to a practice. Most cases of a practice involve explicit communication or even explicit rules. Rules are not self-applying, so in the case where there are explicit rules, such as the law, the relevant practices are the practices that enable a person to follow the rules, for a lawyer or judge to interpret the law, for example. Sometimes there are no explicit rules, but there is explicit discussion. Painting a house, for example, can be done correctly or incorrectly, and there is a fairly elaborate vocabulary of evaluation and description of mistakes. Some kinds of ‘knowing how’ that might be called ‘a practice’ may have no such elaborate vocabulary of appraisal, and perhaps may have none at all. The practice of flirting, for example, before it was theorized about, presumably lacked such a vocabulary, and small children who flirt presumably have no vocabulary with which to

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discuss it—but it nevertheless has to be learned. My concern throughout will be with the tacit parts of a practice. 

Are these differences the differences in question? the differences between practices with and without a metalanguage?

Grammar is learned without behavioral technologies of the same explicit kind. But, like arithmetic, the effects of diversity of purposes [like trying not to get hit with a ruler or actually wanting to learn or not wanting to be embarrassed] are overwhelmed by the quantity of redundant information and, perhaps, by the structure of the information on which learning operates. Flirting, in contrast, is information-poor, and the starting points of individuals vary enormously. So it would be odd to find functionally equivalent rules there. Nevertheless, flirting, or at least a personal way of flirting and responding to flirting, is learned, and thus fits the model of a practice with which I began. Similarly for politics. One simply does not have the vast amount of experience necessary to overwhelmx2 the diversifying effects of differences in experiences, difference in starting points and differences in purposes. The explicit rather than the tacit parts of politics, the vocabulary of appraisal, the body of political and historical discussion, and explicitly formulated beliefs of various kinds, do the work of making the practice hang together. A practice such as scientific discovery, built around training that is oriented to enabling a person to participate in discussions involving highly specialized terms and employing common apparatus, may in some respects be more like arithmetic [so we're still hung up on the different kinds of learning, that learning different things are different?], with its explicit behavioral technology of tests, at least with respect to the mastery of techniques. But scientific discussion itself often skates on the border of mutual intelligibility, and not infrequently goes beyond it. And explicit discussion, not the training base, pulls the practice in new directions and toward new goals and experiences. 

Look at that, "Grammar is learned without behavioral technologies of the same explicit kind", so maybe that difference was important. 

This is from the Swidler vis-a-vis Parsons, not Polanyi. 

Talcott Parsons took this attempt to integrate an understanding of how material and ideal factors interact in processes of social causation to its most sophisticated level. Parsons (1966), followed by Jeffrey Alexander (1983), argued that material and ideal factors are both essential to social causation, but they operate in fundamentally different ways. According to Parsons’ ‘cybernetic’ model, some causal factors (ideas, symbols, values—culture in general) are high in ‘information’ but low in ‘energy.’ An example might be an architect’s plans, which provide information about how to build a house, but which cannot, by themselves, provide shelter, or even cause a house to be built. Other causal factors, lower down in the ‘cybernetic hierarchy,’ are higher in ‘energy’ and lower in information—in essence, they are the unformed matter, like the pile of bricks, boards, and mortar necessary to build a house, or the energy of a potential worker. But without some input of information, these are no more likely to become a house than to become a wall, a set of projectiles, or simply an impediment. So ‘material’ factors are necessary conditions for action (like the motive energy provided by the engine of interests in Weber’s ‘switchmen’ metaphor), and in that sense they have the greater power in determining action. But ideas (or information) direct action, and in that sense have the final say in shaping the particular kind of action that occurs. 

Totally different thing now. Switching. 

§

Different day. 

I wonder if functional equivalence is like, I don't know the rule per se but I can manage to enact the capacity. 

Back on the difference of the examples. 

Why should this make any difference to the question of whether there is a tacit rule book of beach attire, or flirting? Arithmetic problems are odd in that optimal mastery is necessary with respect to the large number of usual goals, such as avoiding humiliation, that children bring to the situation of learning elementary arithmetic. Ordinarily matters are different: different goals dictate different results, because the pursuit of the goals leads to experiences that are different in kind. Sometimes, however, there are intermediate goals that are the same, or demand functionally equivalent conduct or understandings. Language seems to be a case like this. Intelligibility is an intermediate goal that is shared by a large

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number of people. The mastery of a language is necessary for the achievement of this goal. People have very diverse linguistic experiences. But the quantity of linguistic data with which they operate is so immense that it obliterates many of the differences. In the case of beach attire, matters are quite different. It is simply an overstatement of the case to say that people have to internalize a norm of dress in order to participate in the activity. There is no single ‘norm’ that corresponds to the various ‘mastering’ strategies that people exhibit in the course of responding to the problem of appropriate beach attire. Not only do people have different explicit ideas about what is appropriate and what is not, they respond differently. And their different experiences lead them to have quite different kinds of information on which to operate, information that is different in kind, and not redundant and overwhelming in such a way as to produce the same results. Yet there will be something recognizable to us, as analysts, as a social practice. 

$It's like he's testing the idea of the tacit rule book to show you that, while it doesn't really make sense ever, it makes more sense in certain scenarios. 

If people are ‘master’ learners who start from different points and acquire what they learn through different sets of experiences and who satisfice according to different goals which may change over time and thus direct the path of experiences and learnings in different ways, it may appear that the real mystery here is how there could be any such things as social practices or ‘social order’ at all unless there is massively redundant information structured in the appropriate way to produce functional equivalents of the same rule in all parties to the practice. I think that this is indeed the right question and the answer to this question needs to be not that there is a tacit rule book and that the problem is to figure out how people acquire it but rather that the kinds of patterns and regularities we regard as social practices are nothing more than that which people learn, in a rather heterogeneous way, are the best ways or the satisfactory ways to negotiate the paths toward the fulfillment of whatever purposes they might have. What this suggests is that what people acquire that sociologists call practices are lessons that enable them to do particular things, such as go to the beach and be comfortable with the responses of other people or at least get from them responses that they are satisfied with.

THROWING OUT THE TACIT RULE BOOK 139

This gives us the basis for a crude taxonomy of practices. The learning of some practices is indifferent to the purposes for which they are learned, or, rather, ‘optimizing Harmony’ makes them the same for everyone. For other practices, in contrast, mastery is purpose-relative. Neither case, I have suggested here, requires the model of a common tacit rule book [so I was right,  see$]. It is mistaken in the cases in which mastery is purpose-relative because it is simply the imposition of the sociologist—no one learns it, and there is no plausible way for a complex scheme of tacit rules of the hypothesized kind to be learned. It is mistaken in the case in which optimizing Harmony results in the sharing of rules that are functionally the same for everybody because it involves a mistaken inference from the explicit form of an activity to a supposed cognitive basis with a similar form. 

Just before I forgot, I wonder if this is kind of like the Clayton Christensen equivalent to education or learning, i.e., that milkshakes do things for people. Likewise, math does things for people, it's not just a set of rules to learn? What does math do for you? Learning math can be

• to avoid embarrassment in front of one's peers
• to seem smart
• to become better at math
• to get a better allowance
• etc.

But why does that matter?

I also get the emotivism feel a little bit when reading this. Will have to look into it. 

I wish I could remember back to my masters comp and the distinction between acquisition and ... what? I know this has to be related to the ... oh, I bet you this goes back to the expert versus novice thing. It's not that there are novices and they have to acquire what the experts know, it's that what makes the expert an expert is his being able to be a novice? I'm thinking of the expert as novice paradox (Sommers and Saltz). 

This is also giving me an uptake feel. Like we don't acquire rules that are the same, we just happen to be able to make the same connections using memory differently. 

Then, at the same time though we have to recognize the problem that this whole ch turns on, which is the problem of social order, or as Turner says, "the real mystery here is how there could be any such things as social practices or ‘social order’ at all" Yes. A tacit rule book is one way to explain social order, to naturalize the mystery. 

But what is another way to explain social order? It probably has to do with "massively redundant information structured in the appropriate way to produce functional equivalents of the same rule in all parties to the practice."

This is where I get the whole emotivism thing:

The characteristic way in which sociologists have analyzed social practices in the past has been in terms of patterns which are observed, in which the analyst can say that people behave as if they are following a particular rule, and in which the analyst can point to some sort of sanction or response to violations of the ‘as if’ rule that indicates that some behavior is deviant. Expressing disapproval is a much different means of conveying information than correcting arithmetic tests. Take the practice of dressing for the beach. Beachdressing practices differ from country to country and place to place. They differ more or less systematically. What is appropriate in one place, or for one sort of person, is not appropriate for another. There is no place in which one can look up these ‘rules.’ One may be entitled, from this, to conclude that there is among beach-goers in particular places some sort of tacit ‘code’ which forbids certain kinds of attire or defines appropriate attire. But this is a very peculiar sort of conclusion. It seems to be little more than shorthand for saying that if one does various things, some people will express disapproval. One can get quite an elaborate account of the whole

THROWING OUT THE TACIT RULE BOOK 137

business of approval and disapproval, of the distinctions that are implicit in the pattern of disapproval and approval, and so forth.

But it is far less clear that we are all attempting to master the same tacit rule book, or indeed that there is some sort of common thing that is being mastered here. Are we simply trying to dress for the beach in accordance with various purposes, one of which may be—but may not be—to avoid disapproval? Could it be that the apparent structure of the activity is simply the results of different people with different purposes and a variety of attitudes acting and expressing approval and disapproval? The tacit rule book model requires us to think that, as with arithmetic exams, we face social life as an exam which we respond to in terms of approval and disapproval. If we meet with approval, we may take it as a sign that we have not violated the tacit rule book. Disapproval represents failure in mastering the tacit rule book. We learn from the experience what is in the tacit rule book or how to apply the tacit rules. If we retain the image that what we have here is a vast tacit rule book of great complexity then we can think of individuals as having, though not very satisfactorily, mastered elements of or approximations of this tacit rule book, that is to say as having incomplete or unsatisfactory mastery. 

But I looked it up and didn't find anything. 

Grammar is learned without behavioral technologies of the same explicit kind. But, like arithmetic, the effects of diversity of purposes are overwhelmed by the quantity of redundant information and, perhaps, by the structure of the information on which learning operates. Flirting, in contrast, is information-poor, and the starting points of individuals vary enormously. So it would be odd to find functionally equivalent rules there. Nevertheless, flirting, or at least a personal way of flirting and responding to flirting, is learned, and thus fits the model of a practice with which I began. Similarly for politics. One simply does not have the vast amount of experience necessary to overwhelm the diversifying effects of differences in experiences, difference in starting points and differences in purposes. The explicit rather than the tacit parts of politics, the vocabulary of appraisal, the body of political and historical discussion, and explicitly formulated beliefs of various kinds, do the work of making the practice hang together. A practice such as scientific discovery, built around training that is oriented to enabling a person to participate in discussions involving highly specialized terms and employing common apparatus, may in some respects be more like arithmetic, with its explicit behavioral technology of tests, at least with respect to the mastery of techniques. But scientific discussion itself often skates on the border of mutual intelligibility, and not infrequently goes beyond it. And explicit discussion, not the training base, pulls the practice in new directions and toward new goals and experiences. 

I don't get how math overwhelms in the sense he's getting at. 

I wonder if this could connect to Bazerman and accountability. He's concerned with how a secondary literature constrains what science can do, how new work has to account for the facts of the old. This could connect to what Turner was talking about earlier with regard to activities that have or lack explicitly thought out meta-languages (like science, or perhaps even like painting, though not like flirting). So it seems what Turner is doing is he's picking examples on different ends of a continuum (science versus flirting) in order to show (a) that you don't need the rule book metaphor in either but (b) that information rich? practices? like science or math are different because they .. how are they different?

It seems like diversity of experience matters more in the one (flirting) whereas something along the lines of maximum harmony--though I don't know really what that is--is more important in the other. 

So...the answer to the question, how do you account for order without a tacit rule book is... connectionism? that the mind is like a certain? kind of computer? or that we're all like idiosyncratic computers?

I feel like it def points to the individuation of learning, no matter what. You have to find your own way to do it. My way won't work for you, but... we all want to get to the same place???