FINAL PAPER
Ryan Lehmann
PHIL 2540: Science, Technology, & Ethics
May 12th, 2015
Question #10: Explain the tacit and personal knowledge of the firefighter and chess champ;
explain the very different knowledge–if that’s what it is–of Deep Blue; and explain whether and
how Searle’s Chinese room experiment discredits the idea that computers will ever come to
think.
In the book titled, “Shop Class as Soulcraft”, Matthew B. Crawford’s brings up the idea
of tacit and personal knowledge. Crawford relates this kind of knowledge to the craft that a
firefighter and a chess master possess. He also details how a computer is programmed to react
much differently than the firefighter or chess master would. Crawford then uses the example of
Searle’s Chinese room thought experiment to further prove how computers will never be able to
use this same tacit knowledge that a human uses. According to Crawford, human knowledge is
unique and cannot be replicated by a computer.
In chapter seven of Crawford’s book, he starts off by stating, “Experienced firefighters
know when to flee a burning building; it is not uncommon for them to leave moments before one
collapses.”(p.160) Crawford is asking the question how do firefighters know when to get out of a
burning building? Do firefighters somehow know that a building is seconds from collapsing?
According to Crawford, this is the firefighter’s tacit knowledge of their certain craft. The
firefighters explain that they somehow have a sixth sense which tells them that a building will
soon be crashing down. To Crawford, this is the thing that you cannot learn from a book of set
rules. When training to be a firefighter, you do not know when a building is about to collapse
until you are literally thrown into the situation. There are so many things that need to be
considered before a firefighter decides to leave a potentially decaying building. Later in the
chapter, Crawford claims, “The situated or worldly character of an embodied being has
implications for the way we come to know the world, and the expert knowledge of the firefighter
may be regarded as a heightened version of our everyday cognition.”(p. 162) Crawford is trying
to say that even though we may “know the world”, there is always more which can be
understood through experience. He uses the example that one cannot know a hammer by only
looking at it, he says that you must actually use it.
Similar to the firefighter, Crawford also emphasizes that the chess expert recognizes the
