Abstract
An evaluative contrast between learned expertise and lay knowledge is a pervasive and longstanding feature of modern culture. Occasionally, the learned have pointed to folkish proverbs to illustrate the inadequacies of common-sense reasoning and judgement. Proverbs are said perspicuously to display the superficiality, the imprecision, and even the logical contradictions of common-sense thinking. I offer an interpretation of proverbs in their naturally occurring settings as epistemically powerful, mnemonically robust, practically pertinent, and referentially flexible. My purpose is not just to recuperate the value of proverbial reasoning but, ultimately, to show the relevance of such reasoning to a revised appreciation of modern technical practices, including science, technology and medicine. To that end, the paper concludes with some speculative remarks about the linguistic forms in which the heuristics of present-day technical practices are expressed and transmitted.
Highlights
Proverbial EconomiesMany proverbial sentences can be thought of as rule-like propositions, used to regulate judgement and counsel action in a range of situations
Learned expertise describes and commends itself as it describes and condemns vulgar knowledge.' This state of affairs is pervasive at the present time and it belongs to a long historical tradition
Sometimes the learned pointed their fingers at common linguistic forms in which vulgar knowledge was cast and which revealed its superficiality and incoherence in a clear way
Summary
Many proverbial sentences can be thought of as rule-like propositions, used to regulate judgement and counsel action in a range of situations. Too, a particular speaker in a particular setting has got to point out, if necessary iteratively, just what it is about, for example, rolling stones and moss in general that competently applies to this aspect of human behaviour at hand This 'matching up' or 'correlation' can draw on any and all aspects of the present scene, but one very potent scenic element is, once more, the embodied attributes and authority of the one who speaks, who invokes the proverb, and who adds his or her personal and generic authority to those of the nameless ancestors for whom he or she speaks.59One cannot properly talk about how proverbs are true and pertinent without talking about the capacity of certain kinds of people in certain kinds of scenes to identify what is to count as truth and pertinence. Just as Aristotle said that you should not utter proverbs until you reached a certain age, so he recognized the 'character' of a speaker as 'almost the most effective means of persuasion he posse~ses'.~~
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