Tacit and Explicit Knowledge

by Harry Collins

Polimorphic actions are actions that can only be executed successfully by a person who understands the social context.

confounding knowledge embodied in the human body and brain-somatic tacit knowledge-with knowledge "embodied" in society-collective tacit knowledge.

The tacit cannot be understood without first understanding the explicit, and these chapters are an exploration of what "explicit" means.

A lot of it is a matter of stating the obvious-but stating the obvious is not always easy when one begins with a confused domain.

in Polanyi's usage, "tacit" is knowledge that cannot be made explicit.

The mistake is to believe that understanding human experience is the route to understanding knowledge. Rather, to understand human experience one must start by trying to understand all the things that might count as knowledge and then work out how humans might use them. The growth of automation has provided new problems and more demanding questions about what knowledge might be even though it remains the case that, in the last resort, humans are the only knowers.'

studies of science that began in the 1970s revealed that even the paradigm of explicit knowledge-scientific data or the algebraic expressions of theory-can be understood only against a background of tacit knowledge. This has revealed that the idea of the explicit is much more complicated than was once believed.

Polanyi's very formulation shows that a distinction between tacit and explicit has to be preserved, though it doesn't show us exactly where...

What the mistaken claim that all knowledge is tacit does indicate is that, mostly, explicit knowledge is harder to understand than tacit knowledge. Most writing on tacit knowledge takes it to be the other way around. Though the tension between tacit and explicit goes back at least as far as the Greeks, it was modernism in general and the comp...

There is, then, nothing strange about things being done but not being told-it is normal life. What is strange...

If "all knowledge is either tacit or rooted in tacit knowledge," the explicit seems to be parasitical on the tacit-which it is to the extent that the explicit is without significance in the absence of the tacit. But the reverse is true when we consider not the knowledge itself but our idea of the tacit.

Metacognition and self reference comes into play here

The idea of the tacit is parasitical on the idea of the explicit.

The pioneers of the idea of tacit knowledge, reacting to the enthusiasm for science and computing typical of the 1940s and '50s that made the explication of everything seem easy-no more than a technical problem on its way to being solved-had to fight to create space fo...

It is knowledge that, in principle, can be understood and explicated (in one sense of table 4) by the methods of scientific analysis. In practice it may be hard to describe the entire picture but it is hard to develop a complete scientific explanation of many things.

One of the main projects of this book is to demote the body and promote society in the understanding of the nature of knowledge.

There is a second reason the discussion of tacit knowledge is parasitic on explicit knowledge: the need to transmit knowledge from person to person. We want to know the most efficient ways to get people to be competent at doing new things. The cheapest and easiest way to enhance peoples' abilities is to tell them things.

"Explicit knowledge transfer" involves communication via strings of the ability to accomplish new tasks. Strings are the building blocks of what semiotics refers to as signs, symbols, and icons; strings, however, do not begin with the freight of inherent meaning that makes the notion of signs, symbols, and icons so complicated.

There is a crucial distinction between "strings" and "languages." A language is a set of meanings located in a society, whereas, to repeat, strings are just physical objects. A condition for the existence of languages is some kind of approximate representation of meaning by strings; strings are the means by which languages are shared and there can be no language without sharing.

If one is concerned with the transmission of knowledge between humans, one must be concerned, willy-nilly, with what is fixed.

Everything that has been discovered during these decades about the degree of indeterminacy in the interpretation of a string remains true and a central, and a still unresolved puzzle, is how there can be any fixedness at all.

a writing cannot distinguish between suitable and unsuitable readers.

Another unusual feature of the analysis is that very little attention is paid to transmitting entities; nearly all the work of analysis concerns strings and their impact on things with the producers of strings being part of the background.

Technically, a string always contains "information" in the sense connoted by "information theory."' Information content is a physical feature of a string that refers to the number and arrangement of its elements. Strings, though they always contain information, are not always used to transmit information.

Strings, in our manner of speaking, sometimes interact with entities. They can affect entities in four ways. (1) A string is a physical thing, so it can have a physical impact. (2) A string is a pattern, so it can impress, print, or "inscribe" a similar pattern on an entity in many different ways. (3 and 4) A string can change an entity in a more fundamental way than mere inscription-it can cause it to do something or give it the ability to do new things that it could not do before. This is called "communicating," and it can be done in two ways: (3) a string can communicate "mechanically," as when a new piece of code is fed into a computer or a human reacts to a sound in a reflex-like way; and (4) a string can communicate by being interpreted as meaningful by a human.

Discussions of explicit knowledge generally concern themselves only with interpretation (column 4 of table 1) and that is why terms such as sign, icon, and code play such a central role. Unfortunately, the exclusive use of terms like these, which connote meaning and interpretation, encourages the mechanical impact of strings on entities to be confused with the interpreted impact.

a string cannot have an effect that involves inscription or communication unless it also has an initial causal effect on the entity.

Sometimes inscription is mistaken for proper teaching. A poignant example is illustrated in box 1, where a deaf boy describes his misery at having to learn meaningless words-meaningless because, without being immersed in the bath of speech from an early age, deaf children have difficulty in acquiring native spoken languages.

Here a communication is defined as follows: A communication takes place when an entity, P, is made to do something or comes to be able to do something that it could not do before as a result of the transfer of "a string.

An act of communication is like jumping across a gap between two buildings. Sometimes the gap is narrow enough to be jumped without anything special needing to be done. But very often, communication fails because the gap, as first encountered, is too wide to jump. In a subset of the difficult cases, something can be done to improve the jumping ability or to narrow the gap. One can sometimes increase the success rate by modifying the string so it can jump further or one can improve the chances by building out from the far side so there is less far to jump.

there are five enabling conditions of communication.

condition 1, nothing has to be done to "enable" communication. An example is when a computer responds to the typed command 10 x 2.54 and produces the result 25.4 or a human is asked to...

The more interesting conditions are 2, 3, 4, and 5, because the communication fails in the first instance and something has to be cha...

It is a physical transformation of a string that enables it to have the causal impact on an entity which is the precondition for communication. The example that has already been discussed is magnifying a microdot. As it stands the microdot cannot "jump the gap," because it has no causal...

anything tacit can be made explicit so long as the strings are long enough is so seductive. It seems from these examples as thought it is just a matter of making the strings longer.

In string transformation we try to create "redundancy" by endeavoring to transmit the same string more than once. Even if the strings are not transmitted cleanly but distorted by noise, a mathematical procedure can compare the repeated instances treating similarities between them as "signal" and differences between them as "noise." Attempts to render meaning clear, on the other hand, involve repeating the message using many varied strings in an attempt to make interpretations cohere; sending the same string over and over again will add nothing to meaning transfer, however useful it was in the case of information transfer.10