Here’s what I learned from the Pragmatists (mostly via Richard J. Bernstein, who has probably had a deeper and more practical impact on how I think, work and live than any other author I’ve read): An awful lot of what we do is done under the guidance of tacit know-how.

After we complete an action we are sometimes able to go back and account for what we did, describing the why, how and what of it — and sometimes our descriptions are even accurate. But to assume — as we nearly always do — that this sort of self-account is in some way identical to what brought these actions about or even what guided them after they began is an intellectual habit that only occasionally leads us to understanding. Many such self-accounts are only better-informed explanations of observed behaviors of oneself, not reports on the actual intellectual process that produced the behaviors.

To explain this essential thoughtlessness in terms of “unconscious thoughts” that guide our behavior as conscious ones supposedly do in lucid action is to use a superstitious shim-concept to maintaining this mental/physical cause-and-effect framework in the face of contrary evidence. I do believe in unconscious ideas that guide our thoughts and actions (in fact I’m attempting to expose one right here), but I do not think they take the form of undetected opinion or theories. Rather they take the form of intellectual habits. They’re moves we just make with our minds… tacitly. Often, we can find an “assumption” consequent to this habitual move and treat this assumption as causing it, but this is an example of the habit itself. It is not the assumption there is a cause that makes us look for the cause, it is the habitual way of approaching such problems that makes us look for an undetected opinion at the root of our behaviors. We don’t know what else to do. It’s all we know how to do.

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I’m not saying all or even most behavior is tacit, but I do believe much of it is, and particularly when we are having positive experiences. We generally enjoy behaving instinctually, intuitively and habitually.

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Problems arise mainly when one instinct or intuition or habit interferes with the movements of another. It is at these times we must look into what we are doing and see what is unchangeable, what is variable and what our options are in reconciling the whole tacit mess. The intellectual habit of mental-cause-physical-effect thinking is an example of such a situation. Behind a zillion little hassles that theoretically aren’t so big — no bigger than a mosquito buzzing about your ears — is the assumption that we can just insert verbal interruptions into our stream of mental instructions that govern our daily doings without harming these doings. As I’ve said before, I do think some temperaments operate this way (for instance, temperaments common among administrators and project managers), but for other temperaments such assumptions are at best wrong, and at worst lead to practices that interfere with their effectiveness.

Software design and business processes guided by this habit of thought tend to be sufficient for verbal thinkers accustomed to issuing themselves instructions and executing them, but clunky, graceless and obtrusive to those who need to immerse themselves in activity.

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It is possible that the popular “thinkaloud” technique in design research is nothing more than a methodology founded on a leading question: “What were you thinking?” A better question would be: “Were you thinking?”

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The upshot of all this: We need to learn to understand how the various forms of tacit know-how work, and how to research them, how to represent them in a way that does not instantly falsify them, and how to respond to them. And to add one more potentially controversial item to this list: how to distinguish consequential and valuable findings documentation versus mere thud-fodder which does nothing in the way of improving experiences, but only reinforces the psychological delusions of our times. If research can shed this inheritance of its academic legacy — that the proper output of research is necessarily a publication, rather than a direct adjustment of action — research can take a leaner, less obtrusively linear role in the design process.