Harry Collins > Quotes

“To say that the first casualty of war is truth is to miss the rather more important point that a principal weapon of war is lies.”
― Harry M. Collins, The Golem at Large: What You Should Know about Technology

“once a thing is committed to writing it circulates equally among those who understand the subject and those who have no business with it; a writing cannot distinguish between suitable and unsuitable readers. And if it is ill-treated or unfairly abused it always needs its parent to come to its rescue; it is quite incapable of defending or helping itself. (Socrates, in Plato, Phaedrus, 275d5-275e5)”
― Harry Collins, Tacit and Explicit Knowledge

“If one is concerned with the transmission of knowledge between humans, one must be concerned, willy-nilly, with what is fixed.”
― Harry Collins, Tacit and Explicit Knowledge

“To make sense of what people do, one must share their society or form of life. Therefore machines ought to be the strangest of strangers.”
― Harry M. Collins, The Shape of Actions: What Humans and Machines Can Do

“What the mistaken claim that all knowledge is tacit does indicate is that, mostly, explicit knowledge is harder to understand than tacit knowledge. Most writing on tacit knowledge takes it to be the other way around. Though the tension between tacit and explicit goes back at least as far as the Greeks, it was modernism in general and the computer revolution in particular that made the explicit seem easy and the tacit seem obscure.”
― Harry Collins, Tacit and Explicit Knowledge

“The mistake is to believe that understanding human experience is the route to understanding knowledge. Rather, to understand human experience one must start by trying to understand all the things that might count as knowledge and then work out how humans might use them. The growth of automation has provided new problems and more demanding questions about what knowledge might be even though it remains the case that, in the last resort, humans are the only knowers.”
― Harry Collins, Tacit and Explicit Knowledge

“The claim associated with the idea of interactional expertise is that mastery of an entire form of life is not necessary for the mastery of the language pertaining to the form of life”
― Harry Collins, Rethinking Expertise

“We show that the boundary between humans and machines is permeable at least insofar as humans often find reason for acting in machinelike fashion. We explore the possibility of shifts in the position of the boundary between humans and machines: If humans changed the ways they acted, they could make the very boundary between themselves and machines disappear.”
― Harry M. Collins, The Shape of Actions: What Humans and Machines Can Do

“The problem with experiments is that they tell you nothing unless they are competently done, but in controversial science no-one can agree on a criterion of competence.”
― Harry Collins, The Golem: What You Should Know about Science

“Everything that has been discovered during these decades about the degree of indeterminacy in the interpretation of a string remains true and a central, and a still unresolved puzzle, is how there can be any fixedness at all.”
― Harry Collins, Tacit and Explicit Knowledge

“There is, then, nothing strange about things being done but not being told-it is normal life. What is strange is that anything can be told.”
― Harry Collins, Tacit and Explicit Knowledge

“A lot of it is a matter of stating the obvious-but stating the obvious is not always easy when one begins with a confused domain.”
― Harry Collins, Tacit and Explicit Knowledge

“Higher-level capture devices, because they are complicated and involve novel applications of new technologies, tend to fail in unexpected ways. Thus, only after some years was it realized that Hot Spot may not work well if the weather is very hot and that it may fail to detect a slight contact if the edge of the bat is greasy.”
― Harry Collins, Bad Call: Technology's Attack on Referees and Umpires and How to Fix It

“studies of science that began in the 1970s revealed that even the paradigm of explicit knowledge-scientific data or the algebraic expressions of theory-can be understood only against a background of tacit knowledge. This has revealed that the idea of the explicit is much more complicated than was once believed.”
― Harry Collins, Tacit and Explicit Knowledge