Tacit knowledge

(See also consciousness and other keywords)

Personal Knowledge

1. We may say we 'know' (e.g. know how to...) but the knowledge exists at a level that cannot be described.
2. When I am riding a bike my body uses knowledge that cannot be described in words.
   • Saying that we know how to ride a bicycle is not saying the knowing, in itself.
   • Nevertheless I may sit quietly and meditate on what it was like to ride a bicycle.
   • When I do so my attention focuses inwards and distracts me from events around me.
   • Conversely, when in a difficult task (e.g. winning a cycle race) I soon forget the 'inner' me.
3. But there are limits to any process in which partial truths are depended upon as a model of reality.
4. The feedback pathways that help to sustain a system are much more complex and widely distributed.
5. This means that a single agent cannot see enough - its standpoint is too fixed, partial or out of date.
6. In humans, our embodied knowledge is distributed within, and across a 'network' that is too big for us to see.
7. We can survive because most human knowledge is tacit rather than descriptive or declarative.
8. In other words, we are driven as much by bodily understanding as by cerebral decision-making.
9. It is provocative, therefore, to try to see our actions as separate strands, or pathways of behaviour.
10. As Alfred North Whitehead said: There is a togetherness of the component elements in individual experience.
11. Polanyi explains this in terms of the role of the parts in defining the whole - and vice versa:

Reflection-in-action

Donald Schön’s study of how designers and architects ‘think’ led to the conclusion that it is purposefully situated in, and ‘for’, the embodied ( physically engaged) processes of making. His term ‘reflection-in-action’ (Schön, 1985) endorses Polanyi’s assertion that all knowledge can be understood as ‘tacit knowledge’ in the sense that it emerges from making and experiencing within a specific, local and material context (Polanyi, 1969).

• Maturana & Varela also emphasise the uniqueness of each 'system' in terms of its vast complexity
• … the space defined by an autopoietic system is self-contained and cannot be described by using dimensions that define another space (1980: 89).

Further reading

Backwell, J., & Wood, J., (2009), “Mapping Network Consciousness: syncretizing difference to co-create a synergy-of-synergies”, chapter in New Realities: Being Syncretic, 11th Consciousness Reframed Conference Vienna, 2008. Series: Edition Angewandte Ascott, R.; Bast, G.; Fiel, W.; Jahrmann, M.; Schnell, R. (Eds.) 2009, ISBN: 978-3-211-78890-5
Polanyi, M., (1969), “Tacit Knowing", in "Knowing and Being", Routledge & Kegan Paul, London 1969
Schön, D., (1985), "The Design Studio", RIBA Publications Ltd., London