and Simon had demonstrated with both psychological experiments and computer programs. Dreyfus agreed that their programs adequately imitated the skills he calls "knowing-that". Knowing-how, on the other hand, is the way we deal with things normally. We take actions without using conscious symbolic reasoning at all, as when we recognize a face, drive ourselves to work, or find the right thing to say. We seem to simply jump to the appropriate response, without considering any alternatives. This is the essence of expertise, Dreyfus argued: when our intuitions have been trained to the point that we forget the rules and simply "size up the situation" and react. The human sense of the situation, according to Dreyfus, is based on our goals, our bodies, and our culture—all of our unconscious intuitions, attitudes, and knowledge about the world. This "context" or "background" (related to Heidegger's Dasein) is a form of knowledge that is not stored in our brains symbolically, but intuitively in some way. It affects what we notice and what we do not, what we expect, and what possibilities we do not consider: we discriminate between what is essential and inessential. The things that are inessential are relegated to our "fringe consciousness" (borrowing a phrase from William James): the millions of things we are aware of but are not really thinking about right now. Dreyfus did not believe that AI programs, as they were implemented in the 1970s and 1980s, could capture this "background" or do the kind of fast problem solving that it allows. He argued that our unconscious knowledge could never be captured symbolically. If AI could not find a way to address these issues, then it was doomed to failure, an exercise in "tree climbing with one's eyes on the moon." Examples of postcognitivist thinking Action-specific perception Activity theory Autopoiesis Direct realism Discursive psychology Distributed cognition Dynamicism Ecological psychology Embodied cognition Embodied embedded cognition Enactivism Group cognition Neurophenomenology Postcognitive psychology Situated cognition Notes References Costall, A. and Still, A. (eds) (1987) Cognitive Psychology in Question. Brighton: Harvester Press Ltd. Costall, A. and Still, A. (eds) (1991) Against Cognitivism: Alternative Foundations for Cognitive Psychology. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Potter, J. (2000). "Post cognitivist psychology", Theory and Psychology, 10, 31–37. Stahl, G. (2015). The group as paradigmatic unit of analysis: The contested relationship of CSCL to the learning sciences. In M. Evans, M. Packer & K. Sawyer (Eds.), The learning sciences: