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. Copying the visible behavior that is the counterpart of an observed action is unlikely to reproduce the action unless it is a mimeomorphic action, because in the case of polimorphic actions, the right behavioral instantiation will change with context.

existing work fails to separate three phenomena, all known as tacit knowledge, which are quite different and which I refer to as weak, medium, and strong tacit knowledge. These have to do, respectively, with the contingencies of social life (relational tacit knowledge), the nature of the human body and brain (somatic tacit knowledge), and the nature of human society (collective tacit knowledge)-RTK, STK, and CTK.1

Being a terrible scholar myself, I contrived to get them to do some of my work for me, but the end result is my responsibility, as is the fact that there is no attempt in the book to do the kind of review of the literature that would give proper recognition to everyone who deserves it.

Tacit knowledge is knowledge that is not explicated. In this book, tacit knowledge will be analyzed and classified by reference to what stops it being explicated; there are three major reasons why tacit knowledge is not explicated; therefore, there are three major types of tacit knowledge.

we can know how to ride a bicycle without being able to tell anyone the rules for riding, and we seem to learn to ride without being given any of the rules in an explicit way-our knowledge of the ability to ride a bike is tacit. This book will have a lot to say about the bicycle example, as it is one of the sources of confusion about the meaning of tacit knowledge, confounding knowledge embodied in the human body and brain-somatic tacit knowledge-with knowledge "embodied" in society-collective tacit knowledge.

Sociologists such as myself have highlighted what is here called collective tacit knowledge-which is located in society. In later chapters, my own early studies will be criticized for not paying enough attention to the different types of tacit knowledge and the different ways of passing them on that were ready to be examined if I had thought about it.

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.

But nearly the entire history of the universe, and that includes the parts played by animals and the first humans, consists of things going along quite nicely without anyone telling anything to anything or anyone.' There is, then, nothing strange about things being done but not being told-it is normal life. What is strange is that anything can be told.

While humans encounter bodily abilities as strange and difficult because we continually fail in our attempts to explicate them, there is nothing mysterious about the knowledge itself. It is knowledge that, in principle, can be understood and explicated (in one sense of table 4) by the methods of scientific analysis.

The cheapest and easiest way to enhance peoples' abilities is to tell them things. You can tell people things by giving them books to read or sending them messages over the Internet or, at worst, sitting them in classrooms and talking at them. But these methods will not work unless the thing that is to be transferred can be transferred via a medium such as print or talk.

questions about the nature of tacit knowledge are tied up with questions about the transfer of tacit knowledge, and questions about the transfer of tacit knowledge are tied up with questions about converting the one type of knowledge into the other.

"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.

in spite of the fact that translation can rarely be done without loss or transformation, this is not what is emphasized here. This book emphasizes that which is not lost in translation.'

This approach, then, is in tension, with most of what has gone on in the broad area of science and technology studies and semiotics over the last three decades or so, but it is not in opposition to it. Rather, a new kind of question is being asked of the same materials-instead of stressing the flexibility of interpretation, attention is turned to the fixedness.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A language cannot be transformed. A language can only be translated, and translation always involves the risk of irremediable loss or change of meaning. There is no physical mechanism that can be deployed to ensure that losses of meaning are always avoided or remedied. There is no "meaning theory" that, like "information theory" can guarantee complete or almost complete loss-free transmission or even measure the losses.

A string is just a physical thing and physical things, the second law of thermodynamics aside, can be changed into one another and back without loss of the information they contain. Even in the absence of the second law of thermodynamics meaning translation without loss cannot be guaranteed.

loss cannot be avoided with certainty even in the case of conversations within one natural language. Imagine I read a paragraph to someone and ask them to rewrite it. Assuming the "someone" was not an expert in memory techniques so that they could not, as it were, "inscribe" the paragraph on their brain, the way they would remember the paragraph would be via its meaning. When they rewrote it, they would almost certainly use at least some different words and this would likely result in a small change of meaning.

Perfect trans- formability can come only with meaninglessness and the second listening is meant to substitute transformation for translation.

because strings are always present when language is being used it is easy to mistake language for strings and therefore easy to mistake the meaningful world of language for the physical world of strings.

Transformation of strings is what happens inside computers. Computers, then, deal with strings not languages! Even though it is said that "this" computer can deal with the language C++ and that "that" computer can deal only with the language BASIC, the term "language" is being used metaphorically; it is all a matter of strings.

if all the work that is today done with computers was done with elaborate versions of Charles Babbage's Difference Engine, with its clunking gears and ratchets-and it is only logistics that prevents it being so-it would be much ...

Somehow, the ability that has to be transferred to engender fluent language use has to be flexible-it has to be an ability that can respond to social cues and contexts.21

the term "explicit knowledge" still has meaning: it means a string that, when appropriately transformed, affords, say, the Mona Lisa for those who know how to interpret it (that is, those who know how to see the smile).