Tacit Knowledge

Neil Gascoigne, Tim Thornton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317547259
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Tacit knowledge is the form of implicit knowledge that we rely on for learning. It is invoked in a wide range of intellectual inquiries, from traditional academic subjects to more pragmatically orientated investigations into the nature and transmission of skills and expertise. Notwithstanding its apparent pervasiveness, the notion of tacit knowledge is a complex and puzzling one. What is its status as knowledge? What is its relation to explicit knowledge? What does it mean to say that knowledge is tacit? Can it be measured? Recent years have seen a growing interest from philosophers in understanding the nature of tacit knowledge. Philosophers of science have discussed its role in scientific problem-solving; philosophers of language have been concerned with the speaker's relation to grammatical theories; and phenomenologists have attempted to describe the relation of explicit theoretical knowledge to a background understanding of matters that are taken for granted. This book seeks to bring a unity to these diverse philosophical discussions by clarifying their conceptual underpinnings. In addition the book advances a specific account of tacit knowledge that elucidates the importance of the concept for understanding the character of human cognition, and demonstrates the relevance of the recommended account to those concerned with the communication of expertise. The book will be of interest to philosophers of language, epistemologists, cognitive psychologists and students of theoretical linguistics.

1. THREE SOURCES FOR TACIT KNOWLEDGE

1976 AND ALL THAT

In this chapter we will offer a preliminary explication of the concept of tacit or personal knowledge by focusing on aspects of the work of three thinkers: Michael Polanyi, Gilbert Ryle and Martin Heidegger. Having given this book its theme, the inclusion of Polanyi requires little justification; likewise that of Ryle, since, as we remarked in the introduction, there are good prima facie reasons for associating tacit knowledge with both knowing that and knowing how, yet it cannot seemingly be both. For some readers Ryle’s anti-intellectualist argument for the primacy of knowing how will be sufficient to explain the introduction of Heidegger. To this can be added both the interest Ryle took at one time in the development of phenomenology and the isomorphism between Polanyi’s work and that of one of Heidegger’s scions, Merleau-Ponty. However, what follows is not intended as mere background. Polanyi et al. share a concern and a method, which serve both to illuminate the concept we are proposing to elucidate and to diagnose why competing views fall into the trap that (we will in subsequent chapters claim) they do. It is in the account given of Heidegger that this becomes clearest.

At its most basic, the concern is to rebut what is construed as an unacceptably Cartesian or Intellectualist conception of knowing. The method then has two characteristic moments: a negative phase involves the deployment of a regress argument against that conception, and a positive phase: the instatement of some progressive alternative. One important feature of this is the relationship between the two phases, of which two interpretations are immediately forthcoming, one sceptical the other transcendental. According to the former, the opposed conception of knowing is shown to give rise to a regress because it presupposes a process or activity of cognition that is itself question-begging. According to the latter, the conception of knowing is taken to be legitimate only in so far as its purview is restricted and the progressive alternative acknowledged as an account of how things must be at a “deeper” level. On the sceptical interpretation the progressive alternative is proffered as just that – as an alternative. On the transcendental interpretation it is advanced as a solution to the regress problem. Crucially, then, although the transcendental strategy can radicalize our understanding of knowing in so far as it shows that the opposed conception is incomplete, its authority derives from redeeming some element of that conception.

Key to the position advanced in this chapter is the idea that the regress arguments to be examined take their form from Kant’s in the schematism chapter of the Critique of Pure Reason. The schematism concerns the way concepts are applied in experience or, in Kant’s term, to intuitions. The worry is that any account of how this can be a rule governed application of the concept to the intuition threatens a regress when it comes to selecting the right rule to match the right concept and intuition. As we will see (§“Schemata”), the account of the schematism of concepts is presented by way of a (transcendental) solution to the threatened rule-regress. But the form that the regress takes is in turn conditioned by the specific character of the understanding’s judgements that Kant desires to legitimate. From this perspective, Heidegger, Ryle and Polanyi are viewed as undertaking the same task: offering their own versions of how to think about the work of schematism by offering their own responses to the rule-regress. As noted, this is most evident in the work of the early Heidegger (see §§“Being in the world” to “A world well lost?” below); but what is obvious there serves to clarify what is less so in the work of Ryle and Polanyi. It is to Polanyi, however, that we will turn first and to the view that the path to understanding tacit knowledge is signposted not “know thyself” but “we can know more than we can tell”.

VARIETIES OF OBJECTIVITY

Michael Polanyi¹ made important contributions to several areas of physical chemistry before turning his attention to economics, politics and – increasingly – the philosophy of science.² To reflect this change in his interests he resigned the chair of physical chemistry at Manchester in 1948 in favour of a specially created professorship in social studies. Although occasionally cited by contemporary philosophers (cf. Johnson 2007: 4), Polanyi’s work has not been given any significant critical evaluation;³ although since even the most ardent of his admirers concede that his writings are at best “rather rapid-fire sequences of insights … without much pause for examining … possible counterarguments” (Sen 2009: 15) and at worst “often obscure, sometimes mistaken, and couched in a rhetoric that most philosophers find it hard to tolerate” (Grene 1977: 167), he did little to obviate such a fate. Nevertheless, Polanyi was much admired during his lifetime, not least for his defence of science’s speculative autonomy against the rival conceptions of two rather contrasting opponents: on the one hand, that of the Stalinists; on the other, that of the positivists. Since these “defences” offer a convenient way into the topic, we will examine them briefly.

In relation to Soviet science, the issue is with how, given the logical gap between evidence and theory, one might distinguish a Lysenko from a Dobzhansky (see TD: 3; Dobzhansky 1955). For Polanyi, the understanding of the “nature and justification of scientific knowledge” (PK: vii) that made the crude Soviet instrumentalization of inquiry possible is itself based on the presupposition that “believing what I might conceivably doubt” entails a “self-contradiction” that is more than just “apparent” (PK: 109). The key to exposing Stalin’s pseudo-scientific abettors, then, is to undertake the “conceptual reform” (PK: 109) required to resolve the apparent self-contradiction that makes their position seem plausible. That reform turns on the “novel idea of human knowledge” (TD: 4) summarized in the slogan referred to in the introduction, to the effect that our knowledge outruns the limits of what we can report.

Since the underlying worry here is a variant of the demarcation problem that exercised, among others, the logical positivists and Karl Popper, one might suppose that Polanyi would find common cause with such approaches. However, when critics write admiringly of Polanyi’s post-empiricist philosophy of science, they have in mind the following sort of stance: “I agree that the process of understanding leads beyond … what a strict empiricism regards as the domain of legitimate knowledge; but I reject such an empiricism” (TD: 21).

For Polanyi, the reductive empiricist’s blindness to the creative, non-codifiable dimension of inquiry turns out to be yet another manifestation of the cultural malaise that found expression in Lysenkoism. In the terms introduced above, the concern is to overcome an intellectual worldview still in thrall to the quest for the “purity” of an objective conception of knowledge in response to a global sceptical doubt: “The method of doubt … trusts that the uprooting of all voluntary components of belief will leave behind unassailed a residue of knowledge that is completely determined by objective evidence” (PK: 269).

The implication here is familiar from pragmatist and other narratives of the distorting effect of a Cartesian “quest for certainty”: an unreasonable doubt determines epistemic criteria that set the bar for knowledge beyond the reach of finite, embodied creatures. Since this undermines any cognitive distinctions among dubitable beliefs, the threat is that one is left with no criterion with which to disambiguate genuine scientific inquiry from ideological usurpation. Of course, this threat would be obviated if one could regroup around the idea that the subjective is the source of doubt, to be contrasted with a realm of objective observation statements; that scientific theories are economical summaries of experience, which by definition they can never transcend. For Polanyi, the exacted cost of this false dichotomy (cf. PK: 300) between a disavowed subjectivity and a “strict objectivity” (PK: 18) is a conception of science that denies the “personal participation of the knower in all acts of understanding” (PK: vii).

Crucially – and we will return to this below – the consequence of this denial is that it renders inexplicable the very objectivity towards which it aspires. For Polanyi, then, the genuinely objective is not the converse of the subjective; rather, it is that towards which we understand ourselves to be striving when we undertake responsibility for our attempts to comprehend the world. According to this “conceptual reform’, once we recognize that objectivity only becomes intelligible through its relation to the personal we will come to acknowledge the extent and ineliminability of the tacit dimension of knowledge; of all the mute skills, expertise and connoisseurship that cannot be made explicit and yet without which no explicit knowledge would be possible.

At this point it will be useful to recall the three principles that might be invoked in characterizing a position on the status of tacit knowing:

PC	All knowledge can be fully articulated, or codified, in context-independent terms.
PI	There can be knowledge that cannot be articulated.
PA	All knowledge can be articulated, either in context-independent terms or in context-dependent terms.

Although from the foregoing it appears that Polanyi would reject PC, we are not yet in a position to fully classify his position. In order to do so we must first determine why an “objectivist” “ideal of scientific detachment” is held to be both self-defeating and to “falsif(y) our whole outlook far beyond the domain of science” (PK: vii). The reason for this is obvious enough: if tacit knowing is in some sense personal knowing we need to ascertain how, in opposing the personal to the “objectivist ideal”, Polanyi avoids it becoming merely the (old) subjective and thus undermines its cognitive bona fides. Referring back to the point about method, then, he must

(a) negatively undermine the “objectivist” account of knowing,

and

(b) positively advance an account of personal knowing.

As noted above, Polanyi is not one for pausing much over alternatives, and although his texts contain a vast array of empirical examples, many on which he was exemplarily well qualified to comment, his interpretations often beg the question at hand. Nevertheless, he does present more formal considerations aimed at impugning “objectivism” (a), the most important of which⁴ is hinted at above: a regress argument to the effect that if we accept PC and assume that the subject matter of all inquiries can be fully codified or “intellectualized” (is “capable of being clearly stated”; TD: 22) then we will never be able to establish that we know anything. Here’s one version, which we will refer to as (I):

(I) Consider, as part of one’s inquiry into how the world is, one’s knowledge claim that the Earth is round. If one wishes to explicate this claim one must understand that in making it one is committing oneself to it, asserting it, holding it to be true: “the acceptance of any of our own utterances as true involves our approval of … a skilful act of our own – the act of knowing” (PK: 70–71). Since that commitment or appraisal of our own – our personal – “art of knowing” (ibid.: 70) is an act that takes place in the world it is consequently an aspect both of the world and of the knowing that one wishes to explicate. However, to explicate that one must understand that in making it one is committing oneself to it, asserting it … and so on.

Although the terms in which it is couched are less familiar, this presents us with something akin to the traditional Agrippan argument against evidentialism. If in order for S to be justified in believing that p she must be aware that her evidence in favour of p has the justificatory force it does one might naturally inquire what justifies S in her conviction that her evidence does in fact favour p.⁵ In other words, if, in order to know that p, S must know that she knows that p then presumably she has to know that she knows that she knows that p (etc.). Internalist solutions to this sort of threatened regress are traditionally either foundationalist or coherentist. Polanyi’s has something of the character of the first: “we always know tacitly that we are holding our explicit knowledge to be true” (SM: 12), where such knowledge is understood to be “unformulated knowledge, such as we have of something we are in the act of doing” (ibid., emphasis added). Accordingly, we are left in the paradoxical situation with respect to PC that its affirmation presupposes the sort of knowledge it repudiates: “tacit knowing is in fact the dominant principle of all knowledge, and … its rejection would … involve the rejection of any knowledge whatever” (SM: 13).

In the terms introduced at the beginning of this chapter, it is evident enough that (I) constitutes a transcendental solution to the regress. So the negative and positive phases of the methodical attack on the “objectivist ideal” go together. There is nothing contradictory in believing what can be doubted because doubting, as a reflective action, presupposes a structure of personal commitments that cannot, on pain of regress, be subjected to recursive scrutiny. We are knowers, then, but we are inescapably tacit knowers. Our reflective, “tellable” – for Polanyi, explicit – knowledge is possible only on the basis of the sort of “untellable”, “unformulated” knowledge that we exemplify when engaged in worldly activities. Moreover, the colloquy between heroic epistemologist and sceptic takes place only (and therefore futilely) against the backdrop of this knowledge “hidden” from doubt. This sounds rather Kantian, of course, but not for nothing is Personal Knowledge subtitled Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy. Although not judged as culpable as Descartes, then, Kant is nevertheless complicit in the “objectivist ideal” through his insistence that “reason must in all its undertakings subject itself to criticism” (Kant 1996: B766; quoted at PK: 271–2). For Polanyi, it is this emphasis on critical reflection that leads to an obsessive insistence on the “objectivity” of explicit knowledge at the cost of remaining ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Three sources for tacit knowledge
• 2. Knowing how and knowing that
• 3. Wittgenstein's regress argument and personal knowledge
• 4. Being in the background
• 5. Second natures
• 6. Tacit knowledge and language
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index