picture: Michael Polanyi. Picture believed to be public domain. wikipedia commons/gnu free documentation licenceMichael Polanyi and Tacit Knowledge

Michael Polanyi (1891-1976) made a profound contribution both to the philosophy of science and social science. Born in Budapest into a upper class Jewish family, he studied at the University there (gaining doctoral degrees both in medicine and physical science) and at Karlsruhe. His initial work was as a physical chemist - undertaking significant work at the University of Berlin (and other universities) on crystal structure and reaction kinetics. With the rise to power in Germany of Hitler, Michael Polanyi emigrated to Britain and became Professor of Physical Chemistry at the University of Manchester (1933-1948). In a significant shift, following his growing contribution to the literature of social science and philosophy, Michael Polanyi then became Professor of Social Sciences at Manchester (1948-58). He also lectured as visiting professor or senior fellow at the universities of Chicago, Aberdeen, Virginia, Stanford and Merton College, Oxford.

Tacit knowledge

Central to Michael Polanyi's thinking was the belief that creative acts (especially acts of discovery) are shot-through or charged with strong personal feelings and commitments (hence the title of his most famous work Personal Knowledge). Arguing against the then dominant position that science was somehow value-free, Michael Polanyi sought to bring into creative tension a concern with reasoned and critical interrogation with other, more 'tacit', forms of knowing.

Polanyi's argument was that the informed guesses, hunches and imaginings that are part of exploratory acts are motivated by what he describes as 'passions'. They might well be aimed at discovering 'truth', but they are not necessarily in a form that can be stated in propositional or formal terms. As Michael Polanyi (1967: 4) wrote in The Tacit Dimension, we should start from the fact that 'we can know more than we can tell'. He termed this pre-logical phase of knowing as 'tacit knowledge'.  Tacit knowledge comprises a range of conceptual and sensory information and images that can be brought to bear in an attempt to make sense of something (see Hodgkin 1991). Many bits of tacit knowledge can be brought together to help form a new model or theory. This inevitably led him to explore connoisseurship and the process of discovery (rather than with the validation or refutation of theories and models - in contrast with Popper, for example).

We must conclude that the paradigmatic case of scientific knowledge, in which all faculties that are necessary for finding and holding scientific knowledge are fully developed, is the knowledge of approaching discovery.

To hold such knowledge is an act deeply committed to the conviction that there is something there to be discovered. It is personal, in the sense of involving the personality of him who holds it, and also in the sense of being, as a rule, solitary; but there is no trace in it of self-indulgence. The discoverer is filled with a compelling sense of responsibility for the pursuit of a hidden truth, which demands his services for revealing it. His act of knowing exercises a personal judgement in relating evidence to an external reality, an aspect of which he is seeking to apprehend. (Polanyi 1967: 24-5)

Michael Polanyi placed a strong emphasis on dialogue within an open community (a theme taken up later strongly by the physicist David Bohm). He recognized the strength by which we hold opinions and understandings and our resistance to changing them. Unlike many of his contemporaries he placed his thinking within an appreciation of God and of the power of worship -  especially in his later writing (see, for example, Meaning). In his earlier work (especially in Personal Knowledge) Polanyi seems to be preoccupied with 'setting forth ways to think about religious meaning as an articulate system or framework related to other articulate systems' (Mullins undated). Later Michael Polanyi attempted to extend his model to describe the nature of human knowledge found in art, myth and religion. 

Conclusion

In respect of the philosophy of science, it can be argued that Michael Polanyi helped to pave the way for Thomas Kuhn's groundbreaking work on the structure of scientific revolutions. Perhaps the strongest echo of his work that we encounter as educators comes through the work of Donald Schön and Chris Argyris on knowing in action, and in Eisner's consistent arguments for connoisseurship and criticism in evaluation. It also has parallels in Jerome Bruner's (1960) distinction between mediated and immediate cognition or apprehension.

By paying attention to Polanyi's conception of the  tacit dimension we can begin to make sense of the place of intuition and hunches in informal education practice - and how we can come a better understanding of what might be going on in different situations. Significantly, his attention to passions and commitments throws fresh light on the praxis (informed, committed actions) that stand at the heart of informal education.

Further reading and bibliography

Mullins, P. (undated) 'Michael Polanyi 1891-1976', deepsite.org, http://www.deepsight.org/articles/polanyi.htm. Visited October 2, 2003. Useful introductory overview of Polanyi's contribution with special reference to religious thought.

Polanyi, Michael (1958, 1998) Personal Knowledge. Towards a Post Critical Philosophy. London: Routledge. 428 pages. The classic statement tacit knowledge.

Polanyi, Michael (1967) The Tacit Dimension, New York: Anchor Books. (108 + xi pages). Based on the 1962 Terry lectures (Yale) this book provides an overview of tacit knowledge. He looks at tacit knowing, emergence and the significance of a society of explorers.

Polanyi, Michael (1997) Science, Economics and Philosophy: Selected Papers of Michael Polanyi. Edited with an introduction by R.T. Allen. New Brunswick (USA) and London: Transaction Publishers. Essays from 1917 to 1972 that includes an annotated bibliography of Michael Polanyi's publications on society, economics, and philosophy and summaries of unpublished papers.

Bibliography

Bruner, J (1960) The Process of Education, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Gelwick, R. (1987) The Way of Discovery: An Introduction to the Thought of Michael Polanyi, New York: Oxford University Press.

Hodgkin, R. (1991) 'Michael Polanyi - Prophet of life, the universe and everything' Times Higher Educational Supplement, September 27, page 15.

Kuhn, T. (1962) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Polanyi, Michael (1951) The Logic of Liberty. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951;Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Polanyi, Michael (1964) Science, Faith and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press

Polanyi, Michael (1964) The Study of Man. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Polanyi, Michael (1969) Knowing and Being. Edited with an introduction by Marjorie Grene. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Polanyi, Michael and Prosch, Harry (1975) Meaning. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Prosch, H. (1986) Michael Polanyi: A Critical Exposition. Albany: SUNY Press.

Scott, D. (1995) Everyman Revived: The Common Sense of Michael Polanyi, New York: William Eerdmans.

Links

Try the Polanyi Society homepage (http://www.missouriwestern.edu/orgs/polanyi/) (includes essays by Polanyi, a guide to archive material and details of The Polanyi Society Periodical).

How to cite this article: Smith, M. K. (2003) 'Michael Polanyi and tacit knowledge', the encyclopedia of informal education, www.infed.org/thinkers/polanyi.htm.

© 2003 Mark K. Smith

 

Tacit knowledge

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

  1. redirectTacit knowledge

Tacit knowledge as opposed to formal or explicit knowledge means knowledge that cannot be transferred to another person as a result of it being written down or verbalized.

For example, stating to someone that Tooting is near London is a piece of explicit knowledge that can be written down, transmitted and understood by a recipient.

However the ability to use algebra, speak a language, or design and use complex equipment requies all sorts of knowledge that is not always known explicitly, even by expert practitioners, and which cannot be explicitly transferred to users.

Whilst a simple idea, it has far reaching consequences, and does not appear to be widely understood.

[edit] Definition

With tacit knowledge, people are not often aware of the knowledge they possess or how it can be valuable to others. Effective transfer of tacit knowledge generally requires extensive personal contact and trust.

Tacit knowledge is not easily shared. Tacit knowledge consists often of habits and culture that we do not recognize in ourselves. In the field of knowledge management the concept of tacit knowledge refers to a knowledge which is only known by an individual and that is difficult to communicate to the rest of an organization. Knowledge that is easy to communicate is called explicit knowledge. The process of transforming tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge is known as codification or articulation.

Properties of tacit knowledge

The tacit aspects of knowledge are those that cannot be codified, but can only be transmitted via training or gained through personal experience. Tacit knowledge has been described as “know-how” (as opposed to “know-what” [facts], “know-why” [science] and "know-who"[networking]) . It involves learning and skill but not in a way that can be written down.

[edit] Examples

One example of tacit knowledge is the notion of language itself - it is not possible to learn a language by being taught the rules of grammar - a native speaker picks it up entirely unaware of the formal grammar which he may be taught later.

Another example is how to ride a bike this cannot be learnt by having it explained by someone who can, but only through personal experimentation.

An excellent discussion of tacit knowledge using algebra as an example is given by Collins:[1]

" algebra cannot be reduced to a set of formal rules. “all types of knowledge however pure consist in part of tacit rules which may be impossible to formulate in principle. For instance the ability to solve an algebraic equations includes such normally non articulated knowledge as that the symbol ‘X usually means the same whether it is written in ballpoint, chalk or print or spoken irrespective of the day of the week or temperature of the air. But in another sense, ‘X’ stands for anything at all and may only mean the same – exactly (e.g. 2.75 grammes, 2.75 inches etc) on coincidental and unimportant occasions. Again, sometimes a capitalised X or an italicised X may have a distinctive meaning. Capital X in the equation X = 5Y is the same as X in the equation 5Y = X, but is not the same as in X = 5Z, unless Y = Z. on the other hand, ‘X’ is being used in the same way in all the equations. This list of tacit rules as it is extended becomes more confusing and comes to resemble a list of all the examples of the uses of X which have ever been made. But such a list cannot serve at all as a guide to the use of X in the future, Learning algebra consists of more than the memorisation of sets of formal rules; it also involves knowing how do things (e.g. use ‘X’; correctly – use logical inferences) which may have been learned long before”

Collins went on to show in some detail how a particular laser (The TEA laser) was designed in America and the idea, with specific assistance from the designers, was gradually propagated to various other Universities world wide. However in the early days, even when specific instructions were sent, other labs failed to replicate the laser, it only being made to work in each case following a visit to or from the originating lab or very close contact and dialogue. It became clear that the originators while they clearly could make the laser work did not know exactly what it was they were doing to make it work and so could not articulate or specify it by means of monologue articles and specifications. But a cooperative process of dialogue enabled the tacit knowledge to be transferred.

Other examples are the Bessemer steel process – Bessemer sold a patent for his advanced steel making process and was sued by the purchasers who couldn't’t get it to work – in the end Bessemer set up his own steel company which became one of the largest in the world and changed the face of steel making.

The engineers making the home bread making machines, found they could not get the machine to work initally - they solved the problem only after working in a bread factory and becoming expert bread makers by copying other breadmakers and becomoing bread makers. The point here being that even when the original bread makers explained what they were doing, or what they thought they were doing, they could not convey all the important aspects to the machine designers.

[edit] Knowledge management

According to Parsaye, there are three major approaches to the capture of tacit knowledge from groups and individuals. They are:

Interviewing experts can be done in the form of structured interviewing or by recording organizational stories. Structured interviewing of experts in a particular subject is the most commonly used technique to capture pertinent explicit knowledge. An example of a structured interview would be an exit interview. Learning by being told can be done by interviewing or by task analysis. Either way an expert teaches the novice the processes of a task. Task analysis is the process of determining the actual task or policy by breaking it down and analyzing what needs to be done to complete the task. Learning by observation can be done by presenting the expert with a sample problem, scenario, or case study and then observing the process used to solve the problem.

There are many other techniques that can be utilized to capture tacit knowledge. They are:

[edit] References

  1. ^ H.M. Collins, The Tea Set: Tacit Knowledge and Scientific Networks, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Bath, reprinted in B. Barnes and D. Edge (eds.)Science in Context: Readings in the Sociology of Science, Open University Press, 1982. see http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0036-8539(197404)4%3A2%3C165%3ATTSTKA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-I

[edit] Further reading