from Hubert Dreyfus "Being In The World" chapter 4 'Availableness and Occurrentness'

Вопрос себе - являются ли программные инструменты (программы вообще) "подручным" в хайдеггеровском смысле? Обдумать.

 From Hubert Dreyfus preface:

Sein will be translated as being (with a lower-case b). Being is "that on the basis of which beings are already understood." Being is not a substance, a process, an event, or anything that we normally come across; rather, it is a fundamental aspect of entities, viz. their intelligibility (see chapter 1). There are two basic ways of being. Being-human, which Heidegger calls Dasein, and nonhuman being. The latter divides into two categories: Zuhandenheit and Vorhandenheit. These terms are standardly translated as "readiness-to-hand" and "presence-at-hand." To convey a sense of the two modes of intelligibility that Heidegger is singling out, we have chosen availableness and occurrentness. The entities that have these ways of being are called available and occurrent.

В переводе Бибихина соответственно "подручное" и "наличное".

Weltlichkeit. The German literally means worldliness not worldhood. Worldliness, understood as the way of being of the world, is in no way connected with the ordinary sense of worldliness as a way of life opposed to the spiritual.


In approaching Chapter III it is important to keep in mind that for Heidegger there are two basic questions:
(1) Which mode of being, that of mere objects or that of equipment, makes the other intelligible?
 and
(2) What way of being makes possible every type of encountering, including encountering both objects and equipment?
We shall see that Heidegger not only inverts the traditional interpretation that the disinterested attitude and the entities it reveals are more basic than the interested attitude and the entities it reveals, but he also changes the ontological question itself. It is no longer a question of which sorts of entities can be built up out of which other sorts of entities. This question makes sense only if ontology is a question of reduction, which assumes that entities are reducible to some basic substance or building blocks. Heidegger calls this whole traditional problematic into question. He describes two modes of being, which he calls availableness and occurrentness, and two modes of comportment, dealing with (Umgang) and cognition (Erkennen), that reveal them. He then asks which mode of being and which mode of comportment is directly intelligible to us and in what sense the other mode is a modification of the one which is most readily intelligible. But, even more basically, he points to a way of being called existing which accounts for both these ways of encountering beings and their priority relations.

The mode of argument will have to change along with the questions. Heidegger does not expect to prove his theses and thereby overcome the traditional subject/object distinction, or its more recent variations such as the internalist/externalist debate concerning meaning. "An analytic does not do any proving at all by the rules of the `logic of consistency"' (363) [315]. But he does not think his inability to provide proofs results in a standoff, such as, for example, John Searle and Donald Davidson confronting each other over whether to do philosophy from a first-person, subjective or a third-person, objective perspective. Heidegger proposes to get out of this traditional Cartesian confrontation by focusing on the more basic way of being that he calls existence. He will seek to show that the traditional picture is prima facie implausible and will sketch out an alternative, viz. that subjects and objects can be understood only in terms of being-in-the-world. This alternative is to be "concretely demonstrated" (359) [311].

Heidegger proposes to demonstrate that the situated use of equipment is in some sense prior to just looking at things and that what is revealed by use is ontologically more fundamental than the substances with determinate, context-free properties revealed by detached contemplation. (This is the subject of this chapter.) But to see why the traditional model of self-sufficient subjects related to self-sufficient objects by means of mental content is never appropriate we need to look more deeply. Thus, Heidegger seeks to supplant the tradition by showing that the ways of being of equipment and substances, and of actors and contemplators, presuppose a background understanding of being-originary transcendence or being-in-the-world. (See chapter 5.)

To begin with, we need to recall that the stand Dasein takes on itself, its existence, is not some inner thought or experience; it is the way Dasein acts. (What makes a japanese baby a Japanese baby is first and foremost what it does and how things show up for it, and only derivatively its thoughts, assuming it has any.) Dasein takes a stand on itself through its involvement with things and people.

In everyday terms, we understand ourselves and our existence by way of the activities we pursue and the things we take care of. (BP, 159) To exist then means, among other things, relating to oneself by being with beings. (BP, 157) (BP-Basic Problems of Phenomenology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982))

So Heidegger begins his phenomenological account of Dasein by turning to the beings with which Dasein is involved and the way in which it is involved with them.

I.  Absorbed Intentionality as Prior to Representational Intentionality

A. Equipment - The Available

Since we cannot take the traditional account of subjects knowing objects for granted as the basis for our investigation of being-in-the world, we must look instead at what we do in our everyday concernful coping. ("to dealing with" У Х. этого термина, видимо, нет - вариант перевода на русский - "переживание")

The being of those beings which we encounter as closest to us can be exhibited phenomenologically if we take as our clue our everyday being-in-the-world, which we also call our "dealings" in the world and with intraworldly beings. (95) [66-67]

It is this mode of everyday coping which is constantly closest to us. "The kind of dealing which is closest to us is... not a bare perceptual cognition, but rather that kind of concern which manipulates things and puts them to use" (95) [67].

But, as we have noted, Heidegger does not want simply to privilege the practical; he wants to describe a more fundamental involvement of people with things than the traditional relation between self-referential mental content and objects outside the mind. He calls this more basic directedness "ontic transcendence" in The Metaphysical Foundation of Logic, "comportment-towards" in Basic Problems and "being-towards" in Being and Time.

Heidegger first notes that we do not usually encounter (use, talk about, deal with) "mere things," but rather we use the things at hand to get something done. These things he calls "equipment" [Zeug], in a broad enough sense to include whatever is useful: tools, materials, toys, clothing, dwellings, etc.

We shall call those entities which we encounter in concern "equipment."In our dealings we come across equipment for writing, sewing, working, transportation, measurement. The kind of being which equipment possesses must be exhibited. (97) [68]

 The basic characteristic of equipment is that it is used for something. "Equipment is essentially `something-in-order-to'" (97) [68]. It is important to note, however, that Heidegger is not defining equipment merely in terms of its in-order-to. A chimp using a stick in order to reach a banana is not using equipment. Equipment always refers to other equipment. "In the `in-order-to' as a structure there lies an assignment or reference of something to something" (97) [68]. An "item" of equipment is what it is only insofar as it refers to other equipment and so fits in a certain way into an "equipmental whole."

Equipment - in accordance with its equipmentality-always is in terms of its belonging to other equipment: inkstand, pen, ink, paper, blotting pad, table, lamp, furniture, windows, doors, room. (97) [68] 

For something to function as equipment in Heidegger's sense, then, there must be a nexus of other equipment in which this thing functions.

Taken strictly, there "is" no such thing as an equipment. To the being of any equipment there always belongs an equipmental whole, in which it can be this equipment that it is. (97) [68]

 A piece of equipment is defined in terms of what one uses it for:
What and how it is as this entity, its whatness and howness, is constituted by this in-order-to as such, by its involvement. (BP, 293)
The functionality that goes with a chair, blackboard, window is exactly that which makes the thing what it is. (BP, 164)

Take a chair, for example. What do we know when we know what it is to be a chair? (a) We might just know some facts like the physical description of the shape, material, and the relations among the parts of those objects we call chairs. But chairs come in all sorts of shapes and materials. Think of bean-bag chairs. (b) We might have an image of a prototypical chair and compare other objects to it as more or less distant from the prototype. But would a traditional Japanese or a Bushman, who had this image and could use it to pick out similar objects, know what a chair was? (c) We could add a function predicate, such as a chair is a portable seat for one, but so is a bicycle seat. It is not just what a chair is for in some narrow sense but how it fits in with tables and all the rest of our activities which is crucial. We pick it out as a chair by recognizing its place in the whole:

The specific thisness of a piece of equipment, its individuation... is not determined primarily by space and time in the sense that it appears in a determinate space-and-time position. Instead, what determines a piece of equipment as an individual is its equipmental character and equipmental nexus. (BP, 292)

"The fact that it has such [an] involvement is ontologically definitive for the being of such an entity, and is not an ontical assertion about it" (116) [84]. Heidegger calls the way of being of those entities which are defined by their use in the whole, "availableness" (114) [83].

B. Dasein's Way of Encountering Equipment

1. Manipulation

We normally know what a thing is in terms of its functioning, but how can we study this functioning? Perception, when this means just staring at objects, cannot be our mode of access.

No matter how sharply we just look at the "outward appearance" of things in whatever form this takes, we cannot discover anything available. (98) [69]

Rather, since what a piece of equipment is is its place in a context of use, i.e., how it is used in order to accomplish something, our most basic way of understanding equipment is to use it.

Where something is put to use, our concern subordinates itself to the "in-order-to" which is constitutive for the equipment we are employing at the time; the less we just stare at the hammer-thing, and the more we seize hold of it and use it, the more primordial does our relationship to it become, and the more unveiledly is it encountered as that which it is - as equipment. (98) [69]

Heidegger calls this mode of understanding "manipulating."

Of course, we know what plows and crutches are without necessarily having used them. Heidegger would call this second-hand understanding "positive" but not "primordial. "As becomes clear in Chapter IV, a piece of equipment like a chair is defined by what it is normally used for by a normal user in a culture where such objects have an established function. Thus actual use by someone is essential to a primordial understanding of what a piece of equipment is, but one can have a positive understanding of equipment if one is merely familiar with its normal function.

2. The Transparency of Equipment

When we are using equipment, it has a tendency to "disappear." We are not aware of it as having any characteristics at all.

The peculiarity of what is primarily available is that, in its availableness, it must, as it were, withdraw in order to be available quite authentically. That with which our everyday dealings primarily dwell is not the tools themselves. On the contrary, that with which we concern ourselves primarily is the task - that which is to be done at the time. (99) [69]

Consider the example (used by Wittgenstein, Polanyi, and MerleauPonty) of the blind man's cane. We hand the blind man a cane and ask him to tell us what properties it has. After hefting and feeling it, he tells us that it is light, smooth, about three feet long, and so on; it is occurrent for him. But when the man starts to manipulate the cane, he loses his awareness of the cane itself; he is aware only of the curb (or whatever object the cane touches) ; or, if all is going well, he is not even aware of that, but of his freedom to walk, or perhaps only what he is talking about with a friend. Precisely when it is most genuinely appropriated equipment becomes transparent. When hammering a nail, "The hammering itself uncovers the specific `manipulability' of the hammer" (98) [69], but I am not aware of any determinate characteristics of the hammer or of the nail. All I am aware of is the task, or perhaps what I need to do when I finish:

We do not always and continually have explicit perception of the things surrounding us in a familiar environment, certainly not in such away that we would be aware of them expressly as available.... In the indifferent imperturbability of our customary commerce with them, they become accessible precisely with regard to their unobtrusive presence. The presupposition for the possible equanimity of our dealing with things is, among others, the uninterrupted quality of that commerce. It must not be held up in its progress. (BP, 309)

Partly as a joke but also in dead seriousness Heidegger adds that this withdrawal or holding itself in is the way equipment is in itself. "It is in this that the phenomenal structure of the being-in-itself of entities which are available consists" (106) [75]. This is a provocative claim. Traditional philosophers from Plato to Husserl have been led to claim that the use-properties of things, their function as equipment, are interest-relative so precisely not in themselves. They reason that, since the same thing can be both a hammer and a door-stop, the thing as it is in itself cannot be either. There must be something that underlies these two subjective perspectives and their respective use-predicates, and that must be the thing as a substance, independent of our subjective projections. As Husserl puts it in an unpublished note called "This is against Heidegger":

Theoretical interest is concerned with what is; and that, everywhere, is what is identical through variation of subjects and their practical interests.... Anybody can verify (if he takes a theoretical attitude) that this thing here counts for subjectA as such and such a piece of equipment, for B as quite a different one, that anything can be woven into equipmental nexus of many kinds, both for the same and for different subjects.... Whatever is cognized, it is a being that is cognized; and a being is something identical, something identifiable again and again.'

In chapter 6 we shall see how Heideggerwould answer this objection. Roughly he would agree that in the theoretical attitude substances can be viewed in abstraction from their functioning as equipment, but he would argue that equipment cannot be made intelligible in terms of objective substances plus subjective use-predicates. Since equipment is in no way derivative, and since involvement is as genuine a mode of access as theory, we can say that equipment in use is equipment as it is in itself.

3. The Transparency of Dasein

Not only is equipment transparent; so is the user. Heidegger calls the user's grasp of his environment in his everyday way of getting around, "circumspection." He describes for his class this everyday activity as a kind of "sight" which does not involve deliberate, thematic awareness:

(HD note:

The term circumspection (Umsicht) is not used consistently by Heidegger. Here it clearly means nonthematic awareness of the environment, but in Being and Time Heidegger restricts circumspection to direct transparent coping and uses disclosure to name our nonthematic awareness of context:
It [the environment] is itself inaccessible to circumspection, so far as circumspection is always directed towards entities... (105) [75]
I shall use circumspection for both these forms of awareness, since the point is to contrast them with the thematic intentionality studied by Husserl and Searle.
)

The equipmental nexus of things, for example, the nexus of things as they surround us here, stands in view, but not for the contemplator as though we were sitting here in order to describe the things.... The view in which the equipmental nexus stands at first, completely unobtrusive and unthought, is the view and sight of practical circumspection, of our practical everyday orientation. "Unthought" means that it is not thematically apprehended for deliberate thinking about things; instead, in circumspection, we find our bearings in regard to them.... When we enter here through the door, we do not apprehend the seats, and the same holds for the doorknob. Nevertheless, they are there in this peculiar way: we go by them circumspectly, avoid them circumspectly,... and the like. (BP, 163)

An extreme case of such nonthematic, non-self-referential awareness is the experience athletes sometime call flow, or playing out of their heads.

A person in the midst of the flow experience is both keenly aware of his or her own actions and oblivious to that awareness itself. One rock climber remarks, "You are so involved in what you are doing you aren't thinking of yourself as separate from the immediate activity.... You don't see yourself as separate from what you are doing. "

Aron Gurwitsch, who was both a student of Husserl's and a perceptive reader of Heidegger, gives in his interpretation of Being and Time an excellent account of the sort of self-less awareness which accompanies any masterful coping:

What is imposed on us to do is not determined by us as someone standing outside the situation simply looking on at it; what occurs and is imposed are rather prescribed by the situation and its own structure; and we do more and greater justice to it the more we let ourselves be guided by it, i.e., the less reserved we are in immersing ourselves in it and subordinating ourselves to it. We find ourselves in a situation and are interwoven with it, encompassed by it, indeed just "absorbed" into it.'

According to this philosophically unprejudiced description of everyday skillful coping, there is awareness but no self-awareness. That is, there is no self-referential experience of acting as this is understood by Searle (and would have been understood by Husserl), i.e., no experience of volition with the conditions of satisfaction that this experience of acting cause the action. As Heidegger puts it:

Self and world belong together in the single entity, Dasein. Self and world are not two entities, like subject and object... but self and world are the basic determination of Dasein itself in the unity of the structure of being-in-the-world. (BP, 297)

Or, even more directly, "Dasein... is nothing but... concerned absorption in the world." (HCT, 197) (History of the Concept of Time (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985))

We should try to impress on ourselves what a huge amount of our lives-dressing, working, getting around, talking, eating, etc. - is spent in this state, and what a small part is spent in the deliberate, effortful, subject/object mode, which is, of course, the mode we tend to notice, and which has therefore been studied in detail by philosophers. John Dewey introduced the distinction between knowing-how and knowing-that to make just this point:

We may... be said to know how by means of our habits.... We walk and read aloud, we get off and on street cars, we dress and undress, and do a thousand useful acts without thinking of them. We know something, namely, how to do them.... If we choose to call [this] knowledge... then other things also called knowledge, knowledge of and about things, knowledge that things are thus and so, knowledge that involves reflection and conscious appreciation, remains of a different sort.'

 Lest it appear that Heidegger's account of everyday dealings and the circumspective taking account of the environment which makes them possible, denying as it does self-referential mental states, is committed to interpreting action as mindless, mechanical behavior, one needs to see that everyday comportment, while not deliberate action, differs in at least five ways from the mechanical behavior of a robot or an insect:

1. Circumspection is a mode of awareness. It is a form of experience, opening onto the world and the things in it. Heidegger actually uses the term experience (Erfahrung) in saying that "in the mode of everydayness... something has already been experienced ontically" (86) [59]. But this experience can be characterized only as openness. It is not mental, inner, first-person, private, subjective experience (Erlebnis, Husserl's term), separate from and directed towards nonmental objects.

2. Comportment is adaptable and copes with the situation in a variety of ways. Carpenters do not hammer like robots. Even in typing, which seems most reflex-like and automatic, the expert does not return to the home keys but strikes the next key from wherever the hand and fingers are at the time. In such coping one responds on the basis of a vast past experience of what has happened in previous situations, or, more exactly, one's comportment manifests dispositions that have been shaped by a vast amount of previous dealings, so that in most cases when we exercise these dispositions everything works the way it should.

3. Comportment reveals entities under aspects. Husserlian intentionality is sometimes called "aboutness," because mental content is directed toward an object under an aspect. Heidegger's more primordial intentionality is also appropriately called aboutness, but in this case it is not the mind which is directed but the person going about his or her business. This aboutness, like the kind described by Husserl, is directed towards things under aspects. I can be going about my business in such a way as to use my desk in order to write on or to read at or to keep things in. Thus depending on what I am about, i.e., upon what Heidegger calls the "towards-which" of my activity, I am directed towards and reveal things under different aspects.

4. If something goes wrong, people and higher animals are startled. Mechanisms and insects are never startled. People are startled because their activity is directed into the future even when they are not pursuing conscious goals. Dasein is always ahead of itself (see chapter 11).

5. If the going gets difficult, we must pay attention and so switch to deliberate sulject/object intentionality. Then one has the sense of effort described by James and Searle. One will also have expectations, and so one can be successful, or fail and be surprised.

II. Deliberate Action: Representational Intentionality and Its Objects

The above description of the skilled use of equipment enables Heidegger to introduce both a new kind of intentionality (absorbed coping) which is not that of a mind with content directed toward objects, and a new sort of entity encountered (transparent equipment) which is not a determinate, isolable substance. If this introduction of a more primordial level of phenomena is to be convincing, however, it cannot ignore the traditional account of subjects and objects but, rather, must show its limited legitimacy. We shall see that there are subjects and objects but that the tradition has introduced them too early in the analysis and, moreover, has mischaracterized them so as to give them a foundational function they cannot perform.

Digging out Heidegger's account of the emergence of thematizing mental states and their proper domain will require what may look like a forced reading of Heidegger's text, since in the published part of Being and Time Heidegger does not explicitly try to do justice to the traditional account of intentionality. That he intended eventually to face this issue, however, is shown by a comment on Dilthey on effort. "Within the same consciousness," Heidegger writes in explanation of Dilthey, "the will and its inhibition emerge." Heidegger then asks, "What kind of being belongs to this `emerging'? What is the sense of the being of the `within'? What relationship-of-being does consciousness bear to the real itself? All this must be determined ontologically" (253) [209]. But Heidegger puts off the promised discussion, and refers to it again only on the last page of Being and Time where he asks: "What positive structure does the being of `consciousness' have..?" (487) [437] So it is never clear to what extent Heidegger would accept a Husserlian/Searlean account of deliberate action. I shall nonetheless try to reconstruct Heidegger's account of the stance which reveals subjects and objects, i.e., mental content and its referent, and his explanation of how a misinterpretation of the shift to this stance leads to the mistakes of traditional epistemology.

In Being and Time Heidegger gives a hint of how thematic consciousness and its objects emerge.

Being-in-the-world, according to our interpretation hitherto, amounts to a nonthematic circumspective absorption in references or assignments constitutive for the availableness of an equipmental whole. Any concern is already as it is, because of some familiarity with the world. In this familiarity Dasein can lose itself in what it encounters within the world. ... The occurrentness of beings is thrust to the fore by the possible breaks in that referential whole in which circumspection "operates"... (107, my(HD) italics) [76]

Thus Heidegger leaves open a place for traditional intentionality at the point where there is a breakdown. For example, if the doorknob sticks, we find ourselves deliberately trying to turn the doorknob, desiring that it turn, expecting the door to open, etc. (This, of course, does not imply that we were trying, desiring, expecting, etc. all along.) With disturbance, a new way of Daseining comes into being. Dewey had already pointed out the same phenomenon:

It is a commonplace that the more suavely efficient a habit the more unconsciously it operates. Only a hitch in its workings occasions emotion and provokes thought.

Although he concentrates on the special case of breakdown, Heidegger's basic point should be that mental content arises whenever the situation requires deliberate attention. As Searle puts it when discussing the place of intentional content, "Intentionality rises to the level of skill. "The switch to deliberation is evoked by any situation in which absorbed coping is no longer possible-any situation that, as Heidegger puts it, requires "a more precise kind of circumspection, such as `inspecting,' checking up on what has been attained, [etc.]" (409) [358]. Deliberate attention and thus thematic intentional consciousness can also be present, for example, in curiosity, reading instruments, repairing equipment and in designing and testing new equipment. Heidegger, however, concentrates on the specific experience of breakdown, that is, on the experience we have when ongoing coping runs into trouble.

A.Three Kinds of Disturbance: The Unavailable

Once ongoing activity is held up, new modes of encountering emerge and new ways of being encountered are revealed. When something goes wrong with my hammer, for example, I am forced to attend to the hammer and the hammering. According to Heidegger three modes of disturbance-conspicuousness, obstinacy, and obtrusiveness (заметность, упрямство и навязчивость) -progressively bring out both Dasein as a thoughtful subject and occurrentness as the way of being of isolated, determinate substances.

The modes of conspicuousness, obtrusiveness, and obstinacy all have the function of bringing to the fore the characteristic of occurrentness in what is available. (104) [74]

Heidegger does not distinguish clearly the different functions of each of these three modes of breakdown. I shall reorder and selectively interpret what Heidegger says, however, to show that in line with his disagreement with Husserl and the traditional understanding of intentionality, as well as with his goal of showing the proper place of Husserlian subjectivity, we can see these three modes of breakdown as increasingly serious disturbances in which a conscious subject with self-referential mental states directed towards determinate objects with properties gradually emerges. (The role of breakdown in revealing the world will be discussed in chapter 5.)

This reading of the three modes of breakdown gives more importance to the unavailable than the immediate text warrants. Still, it is clear that two of Heidegger's three modes, which I shall call temporary breakdown and total breakdown, reveal two new modes of encountering entities and two new ways of being of entities unavailableness and occurrentness - both of which play an important role in the overall structure of Being and Time. The other kind of breakdown, malfunction, provides a preview of these two. In laying out the steps that lead from the available to the unavailable and then on to the occurrent, I will selectively use the text to relate my detailed description to Heidegger's sketchier account.

1. Malfunction (Conspicuousness)

When equipment malfunctions, Heidegger says, we discover its unusability by the "circumspection of the dealings in which we use it," and the equipment thereby becomes "conspicuous." "Conspicuousness presents the available equipment as in a certain unavailableness" (102-103) [73]. But for most normal forms of malfunction we have ready ways of coping, so that after a moment of being startled, and seeing a meaningless object, we shift to a new way of coping and go on. "Pure occurrentness announces itself in such equipment, but only to withdraw to the availableness of something with which one concerns oneself" (103) [73].

Another response is to ask for help. Heidegger mentions this possibility in his later discussion of language. Coping with malfunction "may take some such form as [saying] `The hammer is too heavy,' or rather just `Too heavy!,' `Hand me the other hammer!' ... laying aside the unsuitable tool, or exchanging it, `without wasting words'" (200) [157]. If I get help, transparent circurnspective behavior can be so quickly and easily restored that no new stance on the part of Dasein is required.

2. Temporary Breakdown (Obstinacy): From Absorbed Coping to Deliberate Coping to Deliberation

Temporary breakdown, where something blocks ongoing activity, necessitates a shift into a mode in which what was previously transparent becomes explicitly manifest. Deprived of access to what we normally count on, we act deliberately, paying attention to what we are doing.

When equipment breaks down, its various references show up. When, for example, the hammer I am using to pound nails is too big or too heavy to perform the task and I cannot reach another hammer, "the constitutive assignment of the `in-order-to' [this hammer is something one uses to pound nails] to a `towards-this' [pounding the nails into the wall to hold these shelves in place] has been disturbed" (105, my (HD) gloss in brackets) [74]. Heidegger claims that when things are functioning smoothly, "the assignments themselves are not observed; they are rather `there' and we concernfully submit ourselves to them. But when an assignment has been disturbed - when something is unusable for some purpose then the assignment becomes explicit" (105) [74].

When there is a serious disturbance and even deliberate activity is blocked, Dasein is forced into still another stance, deliberation. This involves reflective planning. In deliberation one stops and considers what is going on and plans what to do, all in a context of involved activity. Here one finds the sort of reasoning the tradition formalized in the practical syllogism.

The scheme peculiar to [deliberating] is the "if-then"; if this or that, for instance, is to be produced, put to use, or averted, then some ways and means, circumstances, or opportunities will be needed. (410) [359]

Deliberation can be limited to the local situation or it can take account of what is not present. Heidegger calls such long-range planning "envisaging."

Deliberation can be performed even when that which is brought close in it circumspectively is not palpably available and does not have presence within the closest range.... In envisaging, one's deliberation catches sight directly of thatwhich is needed but which is unavailable. (410) [359]

Envisaging seems to have the kind of aboutness or directedness of something in the mind to something beyond the local situation, which Husserl calls referring to distinguish it from indicating. Heidegger warns, however, that the tradition has not paused to describe this phenomenon carefully, and so has found itself caught in a famous pseudoproblem: How can a mental state be directed to an object that is not even present? The traditional account supposes that a subject is related to an object by means of some self-sufficient mental content. On this account of intentionality, mental representations are assumed to be special entities in the mind of the subject that can be described in complete independence of the world, while the objects of such representations are equally independent referents. In Ideas Husserl calls the entities which make intentionality possible, senses or noemata, and claims that the phenomenologist can study them by performing the phenomenological reduction, i.e., by bracketing the world and reflecting directly on these senses. Heidegger rejects any version ofa mentalistic account of our ability to refer to objects. "Circumspection which envisages does not relate itself to `mere representations"' (410) [359].

Heidegger substitutes for Husserl's reduction to the noema a shifting of attention from a being - a hammer, for example - to Dasein's ways of understanding of, i.e., ways of coping with, being unreadiness-to-hand, for example.

For Husserl the phenomenological reduction, which he worked out for the first time expressly in Ideas Toward a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy (1913), is the method of leading phenomenological vision from the natural attitude of the human being whose life is involved in the world of things and persons back to the transcendental life of consciousness and its noetic-noematic experiences, in which objects are constituted as correlates of consciousness. For us phenomenological reduction means leading phenomenological vision back from the apprehension of a being, whatever may be the character of that apprehension, to the understanding of the being of this being.... (BP, 21)

Heidegger does not, however, want to deny that when skillful coping reaches its limit and requires deliberate attention, a subject conscious of objects emerges; he wants, rather, to describe this subject accurately, and interpret it anew.

For what is more obvious than that a "subject" is related to an "object" and vice versa? This "subject-object-relationship" must be presupposed. But while this presupposition is unimpeachable in its facticity, this makes it indeed a baleful one, if its ontological necessity and especially its ontological sense are left in the dark. (86) [59]

To what extent then are representations involved when we run into a disturbance? Some sort of mental content is surely involved, we do have beliefs and desires and experience effort - but these need not involve the sort of self-sufficient mental entities philosophers since Descartes have supposed. The essential characteristic of representations according to the tradition is that they are purely mental, i.e., that they can be analyzed without reference to the world. Mind and world, Husserl holds, are two totally independent realms of reality. Heidegger focuses on this claim concerning mental content:

This distinction between subject and object pervades all the problems of modern philosophy and even extends into the development of contemporary phenomenology. In his Ideas, Husserl says: "The theory of categories must begin absolutely from this most radical of all distinctions of being - being as consciousness [res cogitans] and being as being that `manifests' itself in consciousness, `transcendent' being [res extensa]. Between consciousness [res cogitans] and reality [res extensa] there yawns a veritable abyss of sense." (BP, 124-125, Heidegger's brackets)

Heidegger rejects this traditional interpretation of the mental. Even deliberation is not the pure detached theoretical reflection described by the tradition. Rather it must take place on the background of absorption in the world.

Holding back from the use of equipment is so far from sheer `theory' that the kind of circumspection which tarries and "considers" remains wholly in the grip of the available equipment with which one is concerned. (409) [357-358]

Even when people have "mental representations," i.e., mental content, such as beliefs and desires, and make plans, and follow rules, etc., they do so against a background of involved activity. Since, as we shall see in chapter 5, Heidegger holds that deliberate action and even theoretical contemplation always take place on the background of the world, he can say:

If, in the ontology of Dasein, we `take our departure' from a worldless "I" in order to provide this "I" with an object and an ontologically baseless relation to that object, then we have `presupposed' not too much, but too little. (363) [315-316]

Heidegger's point can be best illustrated by looking at the role rules play in dealing with the unavailable. Take speech-act rules for example. When I am acting transparently-for example, making a promise - I do not need any rules at all. I have learned from imitation how to promise, and I am a master promiser. But if something goes wrong, I may have to invoke a rule-for example, the rule that one must keep one's promise. But the important thing to notice is that this is not a strict rule whose conditions of application are stated in the rule itself. It is a ceteris paribus rule. In the case of an unfulfilled promise there are allowable excuses, such as I was sick, or I saw that what I promised would hurt you. The rule "always keep your promise" applies "everything else being equal," and we do not, and could not, spell out what everything else is nor what counts as equal. Moreover, if we tried to define each exception, such as being sick, we would again have to bring in further ceteris paribus conditions. These ceteris paribus conditions never capture, but rather presuppose, our shared background practices. These practices are an aspect of our everyday transparent ways of coping. Thus, understanding is not in our minds, but in Dasein-in the skillful ways we are accustomed to comport ourselves. Thus even when mental content such as rules, beliefs, and desires arise on the unavailable level, they cannot be analyzed as self-contained representations as the tradition supposed. Deliberative activity remains dependent upon Dasein's involvement in a transparent background of coping skills.

Traditional philosophers, then, were right in thinking that human beings have some sort of privileged role in revealing objects, but this role is played not by subjects, but by Dasein. Therefore Heidegger sometimes refers to Dasein as "the subject" (in quotes):

If, then, philosophical investigation from the beginning of antiquity... oriented itself toward reason, soul, mind, spirit, consciousness, selfconsciousness, subjectivity, this is not an accident.... The trend toward the "subject" - not always uniformly unequivocal and clear - is based on the fact that philosophical inquiry somehow understood that the basis for every substantial philosophical problem could and had to be procured from an adequate elucidation of the "subject." (BP, 312)

This would require an elucidation of the "subject's" way of of being, existence. But traditional philosophy failed to make what Heidegger sees as this obvious next move:


It will be expected that ontology now takes the subject as exemplary entity and interprets the concept of being by looking to the mode of being of the subject  - that henceforth the subject's way of being becomes an ontological problem. But that is precisely what does not happen. The motives for modern philosophy's primary orientation to the subject are not fundamental-ontological. The motive is not to know precisely that and how being and being's structure can be clarified in terms of Dasein itself. (BP, 123)

Heidegger adds:


Intentionality, self-relation to something, seemed at first sight to be something trivial. However, the phenomenon proved to be puzzling as soon as we recognized clearly that a correct understanding of the structure has to be on its guard against two common errors which are not yet overcome even in phenomenology (erroneous objectivizing, erroneous subjectivizing). Intentionality is not an occurrent relation between an occurrent subject and an occurrent object but is constitutive for the relational character of the subject's comportment as such.... Intentionality is neither something objective nor something subjective in the traditional sense. (BP, 313-314)

If we work out a phenomenological ontology of the "subject," we find that, contrary to the tradition, mental states are not basic. We have seen that, in dealing with the available, Dasein is transparently absorbed in equipment without experiencing its activity as caused by a "mental state. "We have now added that temporary breakdown calls forth deliberate action and thus introduces "mental content," but only on the background of nonmental coping.

On the side of entities, there is no longer transparency either. Just as temporary breakdown reveals something like what the tradition has thought of as a "subject," it also reveals something like an "object," and just as the "subject" revealed is not the isolable, self-sufficient mind the tradition assumed, but is involved in the world, so the "object" revealed is not an isolable, self-sufficient, substance, but is defined by its failure to be available. In breakdown "the available is not thereby just observed and stared at as something occurrent; the occurrentness which makes itself known is still bound up in the availableness of equipment. Such equipment still does not veil itself in the guise of mere things" (104) [74]

This means that the unavailable necessarily shows up in a practical context:


When something cannot be used - when, for instance, a tool definitely refuses to work - it can be conspicuous only in and for dealings in which something is manipulated. Even by the sharpest and most persevering "perception" and "representation" of things, one can never discover anything like the damaging of a tool. (406) [354]

To see what Heidegger is getting at, consider a malfunctioning radio. To say that the radio does not work is to say that it has ceased to function with respect to Dasein's dealings. The electrons, however, continue to function perfectly; that is, they continue to obey the laws of nature. Mere careful listening cannot determine that the static coming out of the radio does not fit into Dasein's everyday activities.

Involved use, however, can reveal unavailable characteristics. Indeed, when equipment temporarily breaks down and circumspection becomes deliberate, involved users no longer encounter equipment as transparent, but as having specific characteristics that are different from those they counted on. For instance:

When we are using a tool circumspectively, we can say... that the hammer is too heavy or too light. Even the proposition that the hammer is heavy can give expression to a concernful deliberation, and signify that the hammer is not an easy one - in other words, that it takes force to handle it, or that it will be hard to manipulate. (412) [360]

Thus a way of being of equipment is revealed which is more determinate than transparent functioning and yet whose way of being is not that of an isolated, determinate, occurrent thing with occurrent properties.


When the hammer I am using fails to work and I cannot immediately get another, I have to deal with it as too heavy, unbalanced, broken, etc. These characteristics belong to the hammer only as used by me in a specific situation. Being too heavy is certainly not a property of the hammer, and although the philosophical tradition has a great deal to say about properties and the predicates that denote them, it has nothing to say about such situational characteristics. There are one-place predicates, like heavy, and relational predicates, like heavier than, but no set of fixed logical relations captures situational characteristics like "too heavy for this job." Indeed, although we spend a great deal of our lives dealing with things in terms of the characteristics they reveal when there is a disturbance, there is no philosophical term for these characteristics. Heidegger, therefore, refers to them by putting the term property in quotation marks, as in its second occurrence below:

The term "property" is that of some definite character which it is possible for things to possess. Anything available is, at the worst, appropriate for some purposes and inappropriate for others; and its "properties" are, as it were, still bound up in these ways in which it is appropriate or inappropriate. (114-115) [83]

I shall call these situational characteristics overlooked by the tradition aspects, to distinguish them from the decontextualized features that Heidegger, following the tradition, calls properties.

(It is important to note an asymmetry here. Aspects illuminate something about the object in the situation which was already the case. The hammer was too heavy before I noticed it. But as we have just seen, when I start to deliberate, I do not just notice mental states that were already there; I start to have beliefs and desires. Thus, in a Heideggerian vein one might hold, and, indeed, Sartre in Transcendence of the Ego did hold, that the subject/object distinction characteristic of Cartesianism results when we treat deliberation and reflection on the same model as the noticing of aspects. Then we assume that the self-referential mental states that show up when we reflect on our deliberate activity have been on the periphery of our consciousness causing that activity all along.)

There are many kinds of aspects. Disturbance can, for example, lead us to notice the functional aspects of a piece of equipment. This, in turn, enables us to pick out its parts. One can pick out (Heidegger would say "free") the seat and back of a beanbag chair, to take an extreme example, only when one is already relating to it as a chair. Or, to take a purely perceptual example, if we are looking for something red, we may notice the woolly, warm red of a sweater, or the shiny, cold red of a fire engine. These aspects are not contextfree properties expressible in predicates. The sweater and fire engine could, however, be seen as having identical properties by matching the warm, wooly red and the cold, metallic red to a color chart and discovering that both match the same context-free color patch. Heidegger hints at this when he speaks of the way a property "gets loosened, so to speak, from its unexpressed inclusion in the entity itself' (199) [157]. This brings us to the sort of isolated entities and their isolable properties that are the building blocks of scientific theory and traditional ontology.

3. Total Breakdown (Obtrusiveness): Transition from Involved Deliberation and Its Concerns to Theoretical Reflection and Its Objects

A situation in which a piece of equipment is missing can be the occasion for a transition from the unavailable to the occurrent. Heidegger points out that in such cases the elements in the situation that are not missing lose the character of availableness and reveal themselves in the mode of mere occurrence.

The more urgently we need what is missing, and the more authentically it is encountered in its unavailableness, all the more obtrusive does that which is available become - so much so, indeed, that it seems to lose its character of availableness. It reveals itself as something just occurrent and no more... (103) [73]

Once our work is permanently interrupted, we can either stare helplessly at the remaining objects or take a new detached theoretical stance towards things and try to explain their underlying causal properties. Only when absorbed, ongoing activity is interrupted is there room for such theoretical reflection.

 Нет, я вам доложу, утрата,
     завал, непруха
     из вас творят аристократа
     хотя бы духа.

If knowing is to be possible as a way of determining the nature of the occurrent by observing it, then there must first be a deficiency in our having-to-do with the world concernfully. (88) [61]

This is what Heidegger usually means when he says that the theoretical attitude presupposes a withholding of the practical attitude. Heidegger, however, sometimes seems to say that the theoretical stance is merely what is left over after the cessation of practical activity. In this extreme view, the only stance that is left when we withhold our present concern and relinquish our immediate project is just staring at things.

When concern holds back from any kind of producing, manipulating, and the like, it puts itself into what is now the sole remaining mode of being-in, the mode of just tarrying alongside.... This kind of being towards the world is one which lets us encounter intraworldly entities purely in the way they look.. (88, my (НD) italics) [61]

This account would equate theoretical knowing with mere staring. Heidegger retracts this implication in a marginal note: "Looking away from is not looking at. The latter has its own origin and has as a necessary result this looking away from. Observation has its own primordiality" {83}. That is, observing is not just staring. Once there is a break in our ongoing activity we can just stare at objects, but we can also engage in a new activity, theoretical reflection, which operates by "depriving the world of its worldliness in a definite way" (94) [65]. As we shall see, there are, according to Heidegger, two distinct modes of "just looking": gazing with curiosity for the sake of distraction, and observing with the wonder that leads to theory. The isolation of properties required by theory (looking away from their context) is independently motivated and requires its own kind of skill. For Heidegger, scientific theory is an autonomous stance. It is not mere curiosity, nor is it based on an interest in control. Science is not instrumental reason. Here Heidegger is more traditional than pragmatists such as Nietzsche, Peirce, or early Habermas.

Heidegger turns to the special character of the theoretical attitude later in Being and Time when he introduces his account of theoretical science.

When in the course of existential ontological analysis we ask how theoretical discovery "arises" out of circumspective concern.... we are asking which of those conditions implied in Dasein's being make-up are existentially necessary for the possibility of Dasein's existing in the way of scientific research. This formulation of the question is aimed at an existential conception of science. (408) [356-357]

To begin with, theory requires decontextualizing characteristics from the context of everyday practices. For example, we move from encountering the hammer's aspect, heaviness, to encountering what philosophers call the property, heaviness. Even though we may use the same words-"The hammer is heavy"-in both cases, in the case of properties,


this proposition can mean that the entity before us, which we already know circumspectively as a hammer, has a weight - that is to say, it has the "property" of heaviness: it exerts a pressure on what lies beneath it, and it falls if this is removed. When this kind of talk is so understood, it is no longer spoken within the horizon of... an equipmental whole and its involvement-relationships. (412) [360-361]

In the "physical" assertion that "the hammer is heavy" we overlook... the tool-character of the entity we encounter... (413) [361]

Here we find a new attitude that reveals a new way of being, occurrentness. Heidegger sums up this important changeover.

Why is it that what we are talking about - the heavy hammer - shows itself differently when our way of talking is thus modified? Not because we are keeping our distance from manipulation, nor because we are just looking away from the equipmental character of this entity, but rather because we are looking at the available thing which we encounter, and looking at it "in a new way" as something occurrent. The understanding of being by which our concernful dealings with intraworldly entities have been guided has changed over. (412) [361]

Once characteristics are no longer related to one another in a concrete, everyday, meaningful way, as aspects of a thing in a particular context, the isolated properties that remain can be quantified and related by scientific covering laws and thus taken as evidence for theoretical entities. "By reason of their being-just-occurrent-and-no-more... entities can have their `properties' defined mathematically in `functional concepts"' (122) [88]. For example, heaviness is related by the law of gravity to the attraction of the earth. Likewise, isolated properties with no contextual meaning can be combined according to the predicate calculus and used in formal models. Laws and formal models provide a new, essentially meaningless, context for occurrent properties.


Heidegger wants to stress three points.
(1) It is necessary to get beyond our practical concerns in order to be able to encounter mere objects.
(2) The "bare facts" related by scientific laws are isolated by a special activity of selective seeing rather than being simply found.
(3) Scientifically relevant "facts" are not merely removed from their context by selective seeing; they are theory-laden, i.e., recontextualized in a new projection. In Newtonian theory, for example,

something constantly occurrent (matter) is uncovered beforehand, and the horizon is opened so that one may be guided by looking at those constitutive items... which are quantitatively determinable (motion, force, location, and time). Only "in the light" of a nature which has been projected in this fashion can anything like a "fact" be found and set up for an experiment regulated and delimited in terms of this projection. The "grounding" of "factual science"was possible only because the researchers understood that in principle there are no "bare facts." (414) [362]

(Note that Heidegger's account of theoretical projection here has nothing to do with the notion of projection introduced in chapter 11.)


It is important to note Heidegger's derivation of the theoretical attitude and the scientific entities and relationships it reveals, because it is often mistakenly said that he has no account of theoretical knowledge. In fact, Heidegger provides a sophisticated account of science which, like Kuhn's, emphasizes the role of scientific skills and theory in producing data, but, unlike Kuhn's, still leaves room for scientific realism. (See chapter 15.)

Theory requires a special attitude Heidegger calls thematizing.

The scientific projection of any entities which we have somehow encountered already lets their kind of being be understood explicitly.... The articulation of the understanding of being, the delimitation of an area of subject-matter..., and the sketching-out of the way of conceiving which is appropriate to such entities-all these belong to the totality of this projecting; and this totality is what we call "thematizing." Its aim is to free the intraworldly entities we encounter, and to free them in such away that they can "throw themselves against" a pure discovering-that is, that they can become "objects." Thematizing objectifies. (414) [363]

It might look as if Heidegger's account of thematizing as objectifying puts his whole project in jeopardy, in that his "thematic analysis of being-in" (169) [130] would have to objectify Dasein. Husserl actually made this objection when reading Being and Time. This criticism of philosophical reflection, however, though applicable to Plato or Descartes, radically misunderstands Heidegger's undertaking in Being and Time. We must be careful to distinguish objectifying thematizing from simply noticing something unavailable, which Heidegger calls thematic consciousness. Heidegger's method in Being and Time is a systematic version of everyday noticing and pointing out. Heidegger finds himself already having away of being (existence) that he only dimly understands. He is trying, in a mode of concern, to detach himself from his local, practical context but nonetheless to clarify this understanding from within, by pointing out its various aspects.

But as we have just noted, the natural scientist too is concerned with his work and dwells in the world of his discipline. How, then, does his objectifying stance differ from Heidegger's hermeneutic stance? The answer is clear if we see that the scientist is detached from and so is able to thematize and objectify his object, nature, while the hermeneutic ontologist makes his theme precisely the shared background understanding in which he dwells and from which he cannot detach himself. (See chapter 11.) Indeed, Heidegger would probably claim that his hermeneutics is a special form of involved deliberate attention - an authentic response to anxiety, a special form of disturbance. (See chapter 10.) If this is so, then Heidegger must mean to distinguish his involved thematic analysis of existence, which reveals that in which we always already dwell, from the detached, objectifying thematization characteristic of any discipline from physics to factual history.

III. Transition from Theoretical Reflection to Pure Contemplation


Although he is detached from the everyday practical context, the scientist is interested in his work and dwells in the "disciplinary matrix" that forms the basis of his skillful observing and theorizing. Another possible stance in the absence of involved activity, however, is pure, disinterested contemplation. This stance, "letting entities be encountered purely in the way they look" -unlike theory - is pure staring and can, indeed, be called a merely deficient mode of involvement.

Given the distinction between theoretical projection and mere contemplation Heidegger can distinguish the wonder, which motivates theoretical reflection to try to understand by finding new abstract relationships, from the curiosity that just stares at things.

In rest, concern does not disappear; circumspection, however, becomes free and is no longer bound to the world of work.... When curiosity has become free, however, it concerns itself with seeing, not in order to understand what is seen... but just in order to see.... Curiosity [thus] has nothing to do with observing entities and marvelling at them... (216, HD italics) [172]

Heidegger claims that pure contemplation provides the basis for traditional ontology. "Being is that which shows itself in the pure perception which belongs to beholding, and only by such seeing does being get discovered. Primordial and genuine truth lies in pure beholding. This thesis has remained the foundation of Western philosophy" (215) [171]. Heidegger grants that this sort of stance is possible, but claims it does not have the foundational status traditional philosophy has supposed. As we shall see in chapter 6, Heidegger, in opposition to traditional philosophers from Plato to Husserl, denies the philosophical relevance of what shows up to pure beholding.

IV. Philosophical Implications


A. Summary of Four Ways of Being of Entities Other than Dasein

Let us first review the four ways Dasein can cope with beings and the four ways of being of the entities thus revealed. (See Table 3 on pages 124-125.)

1. Dasein can simply cope. Or, if there is a problem, Dasein can just switch to some other mode of coping and keep on going. In both cases all that is revealed is the manipulability of the available, i.e., availableness.

2. Dasein can confront its equipment in context as somehow defective and try to fix or improve it and get going again. Dasein thus emerges as a "subject" with "mental content" directed at independent things with aspects whose way of being is unavailableness.

3. Dasein can decontextualize its object. Then it reveals context free features or properties. These can be recontextualized in formal models and in scientific theories. The scientist is, however, still an involved skillful subject, not an autonomous, detached subject as in the traditional account of theory. What is revealed is occurrentness.

4. Dasein can just stare without recontextualizing. Such disinterested attention and the isolated entities it reveals gives rise to traditional ontology - a constantly renewed but unsuccessful attempt to account for everything in terms of some type of ultimate substances on the side of both subject and object. Thus we get the phenomenon mistakenly characterized by traditional philosophy of mind as an isolated, self-contained subject confronting an isolated, self contained, object - two examples of a fictive way of being Heidegger calls pure occurrentness.

One might wonder whether later Heidegger still held that availableness and occurrentness were the basic ways of being of entities other than Dasein. Already in Being and Time he did not think they were the only such ways of being (see the discussion of the primitive view of nature in chapter 6), and with his later discussion of things and works of art he introduced detailed accounts of several other ways. But he never gave up or historicized the two basic modes of being laid out in Being and Time. In his last published work, On Time and Being, he singles out availableness and occurrentness as "modes of presencing."

B. The Question of Priority

We can now ask, what sort of priority does Heidegger claim for the level of everyday coping, and what sort of argument does he have to back up his claim? I have to speak for Heidegger here, since he does not directly address the issue. I think he would make two related claims concerning the inadequacy of the traditional epistemological account of occurrent subjects with mental contents directed towards occurrent objects.

1. Subjects with inner experience standing over against outer objects do not necessarily arise in Dasein's way of being. Dasein could simply be absorbed in the world. A simplified culture in an earthly paradise is conceivable in which the members' skills mesh with the world so well that one need never do anything deliberately or entertain explicit plans and goals.

2. In our world subjects often need to relate to objects by way of deliberate action involving desires and goals, with their conditions of satisfaction. But even if Searle is right that this can be best described in terms of self-referential mental contents, all thematic intentionality must take place on a background of transparent coping. In order even to act deliberately we must orient ourselves in a familiar world.12 (See chapter 5 for details.)

If one were determined to defend the epistemological tradition, and thus the priority of mental content, one could still argue, as Husserl did argue in Crisis (148-151), and as cognitive scientists argue today, that even in everyday transparent, skillful coping a person is following unconscious rules, and that our everyday background practices are generated by an unconscious or tacit belief system. Leibniz, for example, thinks of skills as theories we are not yet clear about. He says, "the most important observations and turns of skill in all sorts of trades and professions are as yet unwritten.... Of course, we can also write up this practice, since it is at bottom just another theory." That is, the way we cope with the available is based on the application of occurrent rules to occurrent facts - all knowing-how is really knowing-that, only we are not clear about what we are really doing. Jurgen Habermas still holds this cognitivist view: "In goal-directed actions... an implicit knowledge is expressed; this know-how can in principle also be transformed into a know-that." The work of Seymour Papert of the M.I.T. Artificial Intelligence Laboratory is an example of the cognitivist culmination of this tradition. Papert claims that even physical skills such as bike-riding and juggling are performed by following theories. One would be better able to learn bike-riding if one followed the steps of a bike-riding program. According to Papert, when one sees one's skills as programs "the reward is the ability to describe analytically something that until then was known in a global, perceptual-kinesthetic way."

Against this claim Heidegger can give no knock-down argument, if an argument has to deduce conclusions from agreed upon premises; but Heidegger can and does claim to have given a concrete demonstration of his position, by showing that when we carefully describe everyday ongoing coping activity we do not find any mental states. Thus we must not take for granted, as Daniel Dennett for example does, that people going about daily tasks such as making a turkey sandwich are solving problems by forming beliefs about what will happen if the refrigerator door is opened and how well turkey sticks to bread. Likewise, we cannot assume, as traditional philosophers from Aristotle to Davidson and Searle have done, that, simply because our concept of action requires that an action be explainable in terms of beliefs and desires, when we don't find conscious beliefs and desires causing our actions, we are justified in postulating them in our explanations.

The traditional approach to skills as theories has gained attention with the supposed success of expert systems. If expert systems based on rules elicited from experts were, indeed, successful in converting knowing-how into knowing-that, it would be a strong vindication of the philosophical tradition and a severe blow to Heidegger's contention that there is no evidence for the traditional claim that skills can be reconstructed in terms of knowledge. Happily for Heidegger, it turns out that no expert system can do as well as the experts whose supposed rules it is running with great speed and accuracy." Thus the work on expert systems supports Heidegger's claim that the facts and rules "discovered" in the detached attitude do not capture the skills manifest in circumspective coping.

All this does not prove that mental states need not be involved in everyday activity, but it does shift the burden of proof to those who want to give priority to mental representations, since they are now in the unphenomenological, although rather typical, philosophical position of claiming that in order for their theories to be true, our way of being must be totally different from what it appears to be.