Abstract
In this chapter, I offer an overview of the classical, phenomenological approach (Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Gurwitsch) to implicit cognition, examining such key concepts as passive syntheses, pre-predicative knowledge, habits, and horizon-consciousness. Husserlian phenomenology has a very distinctive approach to ‘pre-theoretical’ experience. Knowledge is explicit in propositions that encapsulate judgments but there is also a deeper, prior pre-predicative knowledge that is passively synthesized. Merleau-Ponty elaborated on Husserl’s accounts of this pre-theoretical, preconscious experience with specific attention to the habitual skillful knowledge implicit in embodiment. The phenomenological tradition, with its detailed analyses of perceptual syntheses (including passive synthesis), bodily incorporated knowledge, habitual skillful action, intuitive awareness of the focal point (‘theme’) and also of the horizons of our objects and actions, as well as the overall implicit awareness of culture and tradition, offers an extremely rich discussion of implicit cognition that deserves closer scrutiny by the cognitive sciences and philosophies of mind and action.
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