In this book, we have outlined a conception of tacit knowledge as context-dependent, conceptually structured, practical knowledge. We have taken as two key clues Polanyi's early emphasis on the importance of personal knowledge as “active comprehension of things known, an action that requires skill” and his slogan that we can know more than we can tell. Tacit knowledge is practical knowledge or know-how. Further, in some sense at least, it resists being put into words. Respecting this second element is more difficult than the first, however, because of a dilemma that an account of tacit knowledge faces.

Any plausible account of tacit knowledge must respect its status both as tacit and as knowledge. But if one addresses the former by adopting what we called the principle of inarticulacy and assuming that there are states of subjects that are cognitive but which are not articulable, then one makes a mystery of how such states should count as knowledge. What is the content of such knowledge? For that reason, we have defended a view of tacit knowledge according to which it does have a content, but not one that can be captured in context-independent or purely linguistic terms. The articulation of the content requires practical demonstration. But, following late-twentieth-century developments in the philosophy of language and thought, this does not imply that the content lies outside the space of concepts.

INTRODUCTION

Drawing on two key slogans from Michael Polanyi and “regress arguments” for the priority of practical knowledge over theoretical knowledge (or practical knowledge-how over knowledge-that) put forward by Polanyi, Gilbert Ryle, Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein, we have argued that the idea of tacit knowledge should be thought of as context-dependent but conceptually structured practical or personal knowledge.

The stress on balancing conceptual structure with both context-dependence and practical knowledge addresses a potential worry that knowledge has to have a content. Tacit knowledge is knowledge. Thus, unlike accounts of context-dependent skilled coping, our account of tacit knowledge presupposes a rational subject. At the same time, unpacking the conceptual structure requires both context-dependent demonstratives and practical demonstration. It cannot be put into words alone. Tacit knowledge is tacit.

The equation of “personal” and “practical” flags the fact that such knowledge can only be articulated practically and from within. It requires not just a context, which would be sufficient for context-dependent spectator knowledge, but also a skilled agent both to perform the practical demonstration (in the role of the teacher) and also to have “eyes to see” the import of the demonstration (as the “learning-ready” pupil).

This chapter considers what might appear a surprising connection: a positive relation between tacit knowledge and language. It might seem surprising because we have approached what is tacit by a suitable contrast with what is “tellable” or what is explicit, and what can be codified in general (i.e. context-independent language) has been paradigmatic of the explicit.

INTRODUCTION

In Chapter 1 we introduced three thinkers whose accounts of human nature and knowing have a bearing on our understanding of tacit knowledge. Having dealt at length with the debate that has arisen around Ryle's distinction between knowing that and knowing how, we turn now to considerations that give succour to the idea that in so far as tacit knowledge is associated with the latter it characterizes a distinct mode of being of creatures like ourselves. The key idea was introduced in §”Regress redux” in relation to Heidegger. It is that the “familiarity with the world” that is our “understanding of being” forms what Hubert Dreyfus characterizes as the non-intentional “background” (BB) to both the fundamental intentionality (FI) of the know-how that comprises our ongoing coping practices, and the representational intentionality (RI) of the states characterized by having disengaged reflectively from our practices and associated with the knowledge-that of what is present-at-hand.

At the time we noted that Heidegger's distinction between the “ur” know-how of the background and the more intramundane know-how of our practices was not something we wished to uphold. It is also, of course, a source of embarrassment to phenomenologists of a Dreyfusean persuasion. Like Polanyi, for example, they want to argue that the knowledge-how that exhibits the “naturalness” of our natures should be understood to denote a mode of being shared with other animals (and consequently illuminated by the sort of experimental finding Polanyi was so fond of).

INTRODUCTION

In Chapter 1, we examined three historical resources for an account of tacit knowledge: the work of Polanyi, Ryle and Heidegger. We argued that through a shared opposition to a Cartesian approach to knowledge they also share an emphasis on the priority of both practical knowledge over theoretical knowledge and the importance of the person and the personal. All three also deploy a regress argument against a view of theoretical knowledge. Taken together, this suggested a clue for thinking about tacit knowledge. Tacit knowledge is practical knowledge or know-how. But this left the nature of what is known and the precise sense in which it is tacit undetermined.

In Chapter 2, we examined Ryle's regress argument and his account of know-how in more detail. We defended the regress argument against recent criticism by defenders of “intellectualism” But we conceded to them two important points. First, there is no general semantic marker for practical knowledge: practical knowledge-how has to be distinguished from theoretical knowledge-how in context. But that does not threaten the distinction. Second, practical knowledge has a conceptually structured content that can be articulated “from within”. To that extent, practical knowledge is more like theoretical knowledge or knowledge-that than might at first be thought. So if tacit knowledge is construed as practical knowledge there is, nevertheless, a content known. But unlike theoretical knowledge (and contra the new intellectualists view), there is, as Ryle asserts, a close connection between practical knowledge and ability.

MAKING IT TACIT

We live in an age of explicit rules and guidelines; of aims and objectives; of benchmarks and performance indicators, standardized tests and league tables. Systematization abounds in the criteria specifying good practice and the delivery of public services; in the charters that outline rights and responsibilities in both civic society and in society's microcosms. A university's once unspecified expectation that its students will attend lectures and prepare work is often now formalized in contracts, and in return students are informed of the explicit “outcomes” of their learning activities. Likewise, in the UK at least, patients' expectations of the quality of care from the National Health Service (NHS) are increasingly constituted by waiting times and the availability of choice. Such reforms aim to replace a tacit or implicit understanding of practices with something explicit and codified. They are expressions of what Max Weber calls “intellectualization”: the sentiment that one can “in principle, master all things by calculation” (1946: 139).

Weber traces the “disenchantment” (ibid.) of the world that this presages to the very origins of systematic epistemological inquiry, and in The Craftsman Richard Sennett similarly identifies as longstanding a suspicion of merely implicitly understood standards:

INTRODUCTION

Chapter 1 introduced tacit knowledge through the work of Polanyi, Ryle and Heidegger. We highlighted an initial connection between Polanyi's slogan that “we can know more than we can tell” and an emphasis both on the personal and practical. One indicator of this connection is a shared concern to undermine an overly (“Cartesian”) impersonal and intellectual conception of the knower and of their cognitive achievements and a method characterized by the deployment of versions of a regress argument. The purpose of the regress arguments can be seen in the light of the three competing principles to which tacit knowledge might be subject:

The regress arguments target a conception of knowledge constrained by PC. Their purpose is to demonstrate that we are entitled to the concept of explicit knowledge only if we acknowledge that its achievement is grounded in something more fundamental. That leaves open the competing possibilities marked by PI and PA. Rejecting PI, we suggested that tacit knowing, construed in terms of context-dependent knowing how (the sort of activity-dependent understanding that is manifest in practice), resists codification in purely linguistic context-independent terms but can be regarded, nevertheless, as fully determinate (thus satisfying PA) under the appropriate analysis.