Expertise Initiation into

Learning, Not Knowing

Michael Luntley
Experienced practitioners across a wide range of professions seem to
know a lot. It is because they know a lot that they perform so well. Their
practice is a knowing practice. It is what they know that makes them expert
professionals. Knowledge matters for professional practice. Experienced
nurses who can perform advanced bandaging techniques do so because
of what they know. Experienced social workers who manage their clients
with care and subtly nuanced interventions and support do so because of
,what they know about their clients needs across a spectrum of emotional
psychological, financial, social, housing and other concerns. It is knowledge
.that informs practice and makes it wise
However, to a great many writers it has seemed that in order to make
sense of all this knowledge, we need to countenance types of knowing
that are distinct from ordinary propositional knowledge. This view is now
,orthodox in the literature on professional wisdom (Dreyfus and Dreyfus
.(Dreyfus and Dreyfus, 2005; Benner, 1984; Eraut, 1994; Eraut, 2000 ;1986
Whatever the details of this orthodoxy, its key move is to proliferate types
of knowing. Some of these non-propositional types of knowing are almost
ineffable. In the Dreyfus and Dreyfus taxonomy of the trajectory from
.novice to expert, the final stage of expert knowing is intuitive knowledge
The literature is, however, quite profligate, and includes: experiential
knowing, craft knowing, know-how, tacit knowing and personal knowing
Central to this proliferation .(Dreyfus, 2005; Dreyfus, 2007; McDowell, 2007 )
is the thesis that propositional knowledge does not suffice to capture the
knowledge that informs practice. The key claim in this chapter is that this
.thesis is wrong: there is no need to proliferate types of knowing
I call the position that I defend epistemic conservatism: ordinary
propositional knowledge suffices for an account of the knowledge that
,informs practice across a wide range of professional activities (Luntley
,We do not need the categories of know-how, tacit knowledge .(2009
personal knowledge or intuitive knowledge. Good old-fashioned
Towards Professional Wisdom 28
propositional knowledge will do. Furthermore, not only will propositional
knowledge suffice, it is the only type of knowledge fit for the purpose of
.making sense of the idea that it is knowledge that makes practice wise
A key element of my argument will involve clarification of the concept
of propositional knowledge. The epistemic conservatism that I defend will
seem so unorthodox that it is almost bound to offend. I suspect that is mostly
because the literature to date on professional knowledge has operated with
,an impoverished concept of a proposition. No one has taken time out to ask
What is a proposition? But until that is done, there is no basis for dismissing
knowledge of propositions as the model for professional wisdom. I shall
show how propositions can themselves be the sorts of things constituted
.by our perceptual and manipulative engagements with the environment
Propositions are not just things that fill books; they can be things that fill the
forms of our actual real engagements with the physical, social, emotional and
ethical environments that we manage. It is a mistake to restrict propositions

to the clearly articulate structures that fill our heads and our books; they
,can include the conceptual forms of our active engagements with things
.forms whose structure can only be articulated in the context of engagement
Thinking in the moment is still propositional thinking (there is no other
kind that makes performance reasonable), but it is thinking with timely and
.contextually engaged propositions
The structure of my argument will be as follows. First, I will outline
the case for epistemic conservatism; then I will provide a diagnosis of why
the virtues of epistemic conservatism have been missed due to a failure
,to clarify the sense in which expert knowledge can be difficult to codify
and lastly I will outline the case for saying that limits on codifiability
support a sense in which the knowledge used by experts can fall outside
the normal rules and protocols for performance. There are important ways
in which propositional knowledge can resist codification because of the
complex social and experiential conditions that need to be in place to for
it to exist. This does not make the knowledge non-propositional; it just
makes it difficult to articulate independently of our real engagements with
the worldly domains that we manage. And it means that there is scope to
acknowledge a real creative developmental responsibility that is part of the
.wisdom of professionals
Further to the core outline and defence of epistemic conservatism, there
are two further themes running through my argument. The first of these
concerns the concept of initiation. The proliferation of types of knowing can
make it unclear what rigour is left to the idea of non-propositional types
of knowing. And if we are not clear what this stuff is, then the complex
business of initiating new members into professional practice can too easily
elide into mere socialisation of behaviour. I think it is important that the
concept of initiation amounts to more than a descriptive tag for something

that is otherwise left inarticulate beyond a vague sense of learning the ropes
.(Luntley, 2010)
Secondly, my defence of epistemic conservatism challenges the view of
.the relationship between novice and expert found in the orthodox account
The orthodox view treats the role of the expert as the exception, something
to be contrasted with the everyday epistemic of the novice. It can then be
tempting to look for something very distinctive and out of the ordinary in the
epistemology of expertise. Hence the appeal of seeing expert knowledge as
intuitive, an almost intangible form of know-how that is so embedded in the
subjects engagement with the moment that it cannot survive the attempt to
render it in propositions. For reasons that I will rehearse in the n