It bears emphasis here that Heidegger's point in all of this is not simply that in our everyday activities we possess "tacit knowledge" that makes these activities possible. Heidegger's point goes further than that. Heidegger's unusual claim is precisely that there is a type of noncognitive foundation to intelligibility, a type of intentionality that is neither conscious nor propositional in form. Heidegger's claim is, in Hubert Dreyfus's happy phrasing, that "'mindless' everyday coping skills [are] the basis of all intelligibility.' The Background for Heidegger is not a tacit belief system, an implicit theory, but a learned way of acting-or "coping" with things and situations-that renders the world meaningful.

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