Why implicit knowledge?

There seems to be a consensus in the field of second language acquisition that implicit language knowledge is better than explicit language knowledge. The target for a lot of learners is to be fluent - that is to be able to quickly and automatically use their second language, in other words implicit knowledge (Whong et al. 2013). This is an argument from pedagogy.

There is an argument from philosophy of language which gives a reason as to why implicit knowledge is primary.

The primacy of implicit knowledge follows from the nature of rules and rule following. Rules in language are like rules in chess in that both are constitutive of themselves - the rules of chess are what make chess chess. But rules in language are unlike rules of chess in that they are not explicit. If they were explicit then that would lead to an infinite regress because in order to follow one rule R1 we need a rule for its proper application R2, and R2 would need its own rule of application R3 and so on.

Brandom (1994) says we need:

"a notion of primitive correctnesses of performances implicit in practice that precede and are presupposed by their explicit formulation in rules and principles." Brandom 1994: 21

Brandom goes onto draw on the distinction between know how and know that, knowing how is a practical ability - a practice, that is presupposed by knowing that - a principle.

The path to advocating task based language teaching is easy to see from this perspective.

References:

Brandom, R. (1994) Making it Explicit. Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Whong M, Gil KH and Marsden H. (2013) How we can learn from acquisition: The acquisition-learning debate revisited. Proceedings of the 12th Generative Approaches to Second Language Acquisition Conference (GASLA 2013). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project. In Cabrelli Amaro J, Judy T and Pascual y Cabo D (eds), 203–210.