How Professionals Think in Action

The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action
by Donald Schon

The three principal doctrines of Positivism:
• First, there was the conviction that empirical science was not just a form of knowledge but the only source of positive knowledge of the world.
• Second, there was the intention to cleanse men’s minds of mysticism, superstition, and other forms of pseudoknowledge.
• Third, there was the program of extending scientific knowledge and technical control to human society, to make technology, as Comte said, “no longer exclusively geometrical, mechanical or chemical, but also and primarily political and moral.”

The example about the construction and building of a road was very interesting in this reading, and made it somewhat easier to understand after reading a bunch of historical garble that I did not seem to understand what it had to do with the article.

This example about the road building, "they deal usually with a complex and ill-defined situation in which geographic, topological, financial, economic, and political issues are all mixed up together." Yet when they perhaps reach a neighbourhood, all of the issues arise yet again and problem solving and problem "setting" take control.

There are actions, recognitions, and judgments which we know how to carry out spontaneously; we do not have to think about them prior to or during their performance.
We are often unaware of having learned to do these things; we simply find
ourselves doing them. In some cases, we were once aware of the understandings which were subsequently internalized in our feeling for the stuff of action. In other cases, we may never have been aware of them. In both cases, however, we are usually unable to describe the knowing which our action reveals. It is in this sense that I speak of knowing-in-action, the characteristic mode of ordinary practical knowledge.