Objectivism -- Which areas still need work?

The Anomalous Status of Skill

We have seen how difficult implicit concepts were for Rand, but her struggles with the implicit are actually most evident in her treatment of skill. As Sciabarra (1995, 212) has emphasized, skill plays absolutely no role in her formal epistemology; according to Peikoff (1990–91, Lecture 12), Rand had no more use for the notion of "know-how" than she had for explanations of human behavior in terms of instincts. Yet Rand had a lot to say about the kinds of skill required in fiction and nonfiction writing. Her discussions of writing and literary style abound with sensitivity to skill, yet their epistemic vocabulary is clumsy and impoverished.
 
Rand recognized that the acquisition of skill often begins with rules learned consciously, but proceeds by making what was controlled automatic, or what was conscious subconscious:

To learn to type, more is required than merely listening to a factual lecture: you have to practice. First you learn how to move your fingers and strike the keys—slowly and by conscious effort. Learning to type then consists of automatizing this skill.
At first you have to think of how to crook your fingers, how far to reach each letter, how to keep in tempo. Then you practice, faster and faster, so eventually, when you look at a page of copy which you have to type, your fingers do the rest "instinctively." If an experienced typist were to ask herself, "How do I do it?" she would answer "I just do it."
The same is true of dancing, or playing tennis, or any physical skill. First it is learned consciously—and you are in command of the skill when it becomes automatic, so that conscious attention is no longer required. (Rand 2000, 51)

In other words, becoming skilled means acquiring more and more implicit knowledge. Consequently, hands-on experience is crucial, and the role of explicit instruction is limited.

You sit down to write, the sentence comes out a certain way, and with editing you can improve it—but you cannot compose the sentence consciously in the way that you can pass an examination in physics by stating the facts as you have learned and understood them.
That is why the process of writing cannot be taught—not because it is a mystical talent, but because so complex an integration is involved that no teacher can supervise the process for you. You can learn all the theory, but unless you practice—unless you actually write—you will not be able to apply the theory. (52)

Rand will occasionally lay down a hard rule for novices: "No beginner should write without an outline" (2001, 41). In most areas of writing, however, she denies that there are any useful explicit rules, not even simplifications for beginners. "Judging your audience is a complicated issue. But its very complexity eliminates the need for detailed rules" (18). "If you hesitate about whether to include a particular detail, the ultimate judge should be you as a reader, because there are no absolute rules in such a case applicable to every article" (23). "There are no rules about how long or detailed an outline should be" (44). "There can be no rules about this [mulling-over] process" (79). "There is no rule about how often you need to read your article [while editing]" (91). "There is no rule about when or how often to concretize" (117). "There cannot be a rule that only one choice of words will communicate a given thought" (118). "Every rule of this kind has exceptions. In fact, stylistic rules are made to be broken" (123). "There are no rules about a book’s length . . . Nor are there rules about how to divide a book into various parts, chapters, or sequences" (158). "Short of avoiding deliberate obscurity, there really are no rules for selecting a title" (173). "There are principles that will help you with style, but this long preface was necessary, because I want to stress that you must not memorize everything I am going to say, nor think about it while you are writing" (109).
 
In her lectures on writing, Rand continually emphasizes the importance of hands-on practice, the gradual development from conscious application of rules to "automatic" exercise of skill, and the constant need for skilled judgments made by an individual in a context. Precisely the same themes are stressed in many contemporary studies of expertise and how it develops (Benner 1984; Dreyfus and Dreyfus 1986; Campbell, Brown, and Di Bello 1992; Bereiter and Scardamalia 1993; Feldman 1993; Campbell and Di Bello 1996; Di Bello 1996).
 
Rand was well aware, in fact, that much in the realm of writing cannot be achieved via conscious intention:

No matter what the number of people who share the same philosophy, no one ever need be imitative of another’s style. In the selection and order of words, so many possibilities exist that you never have to worry about whether you will achieve an individual style. You will achieve it; but only if you do not aim at it consciously.
Style is the most complex of the elements of writing, and must be left to "instinct." I have explained why even plot and characterization cannot be created fully by conscious calculation, but depend on subconscious, automatized premises. This is even more true of style.
. . . what determines your style is your purpose—both in the book as a whole and in each paragraph or sentence. But given the number of issues involved in even the simplest story, there is no way to calculate the function and form consciously. Therefore, you have to set your literary premises and then write without self-consciousness. Write as it comes to you, on such premises as you have. (2000, 91–92)

The prospects for conscious error correction in the stylistic realm are limited, from Rand’s point of view. Any intervention will have to take place after the writer has established a style:

If, after some years of work, you feel that your way of expression is not right, you have to do more thinking about what you do and do not like in literature. Identify what your style is missing, what category the error belongs to; then identify the right premise, which will enable you to express things more exactly or colorfully. (92)

Rand condenses her recommendations about style into an epigram worthy of Yogi Berra:

The first thing to remember about style is to forget it. Let it come naturally. You acquire style by practicing. First learn to express your ideas clearly on paper; only then will you notice one day that you are writing in your own style. But do not look at the calendar waiting for that day. (Rand 2001, 109)

 

...
Despite all of the insight they contain, Rand’s discussions of writing and style bear witness to pronounced discomfort. Rand is short of vocabulary for describing skill. And much of the terminology that she does employ she feels obliged to put in scare-quotes. Rand never liked saying that anyone "just knows" something. She rejected instinct as an explanation for human behavior. She even resisted notions of innate aptitude or talent. Yet in her account of skill she keeps falling into modes of speaking that she found philosophically objectionable. "Instinct" and "instinctive" recur and recur in The Art of Fiction and The Art of Nonfiction, nearly always with quotation marks around them. For Rand, the specter of mysticism—of knowledge acquired "nohow"—was always looming. She feared that adopting articulated moral principles at odds with an unarticulated sense of life would harm the lives of individuals and degrade entire cultures. For her, "the only alternative is to act on the basis of rational conviction and articulated understanding or on the basis of raw emotion and tacit sense of life" (Sciabarra 1995, 214). Wherever Rand encountered unexplicated knowledge, she sensed the danger of inexplicable knowledge.
 
So every time a passage in The Art of Fiction or The Art of Nonfiction begins to look as though it might elicit nods from a hermeneuticist, or a believer in "situated cognition," or an adherent of Hayek’s (1973) conception of unarticulated rules, Rand snaps the reader sharply back to conscious explication, even to formal logic. Many of Rand’s efforts at explanation in psycho-epistemology relied on the notion of a premise. But premises are part of an analysis of argument forms in formal logic; there is no assurance that human reasoning, even when it produces results that conform to the rules of logic, has actually been following those same rules to get to that destination. Populating the subconscious with premises impedes our recognition of grades of implicitness, and makes implicit knowledge too much like explicit knowledge. For Rand, however, a subconscious mind populated with premises has the distinct virtue of leaving no room for the inexplicable and offering no comfort to the mystics.

The first thing one notices once one has looked at this list is that a 'skill' can involve kinesthetic learning, muscular learning, and conceptual activity integrated in different forms and in different proportions, and that there is no bright line between a 'skill' and conscious, conceptual learning of, say, an academic topic.

Nor are skills always 'implicit' in how they are acquired or practiced. Often there is a conscious learning process followed by automatization, which Rand quite accurately describes in both her fiction and her non-fiction writing classes. Not that she was the first to notice this.

I am always suspicious of any academic approach or style which is not as concretely grounded as would be an Aristotle-like methodical chewing and microscopic perusal of the concretes.