… tacit thought as an indispensable element of all knowing
and as the ultimate mental power by which all explicit knowledge is
endowed with meaning … (Polanyi 1966, p.60)
Polanyi’s famous quote about tacit
knowledge is “we can know more than we can tell” (Polanyi 1966, p. 4).
Usually tacit knowledge is discussed
together with explicit knowledge. The latter
describes knowledge we can, and have articulated, or codified; whereas
the former describes knowledge that has not been articulated, and
possibly cannot be articulated. In one famous
paper, Nonaka (1994) describes knowledge creation as “conversion” from
tacit to explicit knowledge (or vice versa), using a “spiral” mechanism.
His presentation of tacit knowledge is
representative of the way Polanyi’s notion of tacit knowing has been
appropriated by many subsequent theorists. People
commonly look at knowledge as one or the other, it is tacit or explicit
– and thus they can have ideas about conversion from one to the other.
To be more faithful to Polanyi, the two
are different essential components of knowledge – and are really a
different species. One cannot have explicit
knowledge without tacit. There is a general idea of
coming “from” tacit knowing and attending “to” explicit knowledge
(Boland 2005).
Polanyi describes two concepts: “knowing
what” and “knowing how,” and he indicates every bit of knowing contains
both of these aspects. Knowing what describes
something that is knowable, and knowing how describes something that is
only realizable in action. They are two different
things – one can be transferred discursively and the other only through
action. Tacit knowing is fundamental to each
of these forms of knowing.
Tacit knowing is very personal.
One way that Polanyi describes tacit
knowing is through the concepts of distal and proximal. Proximal
knowing is the particulars of action, whereas distal is the entire
action. For example, when riding a bike, one can
concentrate on the steering, pedaling, etc., or proximal aspects of
knowing how to ride a bike. The overall knowing how
to ride the bike is distal – greater than the sum of its individual
components.
“Our body is the ultimate source of all our external knowledge” (p. 15).
Polanyi believed that action is the
source of all knowing, because we experience knowing through our
physical experience. When we lose sight of what we
know, and use it (“in-dwelling”), that knowing is tacit. If
we are focusing on it, then we are using some other knowing to focus on
it. For example, a blind man using a stick is not
focused on the stick, but rather the meaning of what the stick touches.
The stick itself is internalized and
part of the action in gaining the explicit knowledge of the physical
reality. If the person focuses on his stick, he is
no longer using it to get meaning from the physical world. A
true understanding of the stick-in-action can only be gained from using
it and not focusing on it.
A final note is that, in the Polanyi sense, the whole is more than the
sum of its parts. That “integration of particulars”
(p.44) is important to tacit knowing. Tacit knowing
can never be known in terms of explicit knowledge, and distal knowing
can never be known in terms of proximal, as “it is impossible to
represent the organizing principles of a higher level [of reality, i.e.
tacit] by the laws governing its isolated particulars.” (p.36)
Two different ways he describes this idea:
- Processes that are expected to
achieve something have a value that is inexplicable in terms of the
processes having no such value. (p.44)
- There is a widespread opinion that scientists hit on discoveries
merely by trying everything as it happens to cross their minds.
This opinion follows from an inability
to recognize man’s capacity for anticipating the approach of hidden
truth. The scientist’s surmises and hunches are the
spurs and pointers of his search. (p.76)
Of modern organizational theorists, few
remain true to the true spirit of Polanyi’s argument. Cook
& Brown (1999) do an excellent job of addressing the distinction
between Polanyi and Nonaka (see also, Brown & Duguid 2001).
Orlikowski (2002) applies this idea of
“knowing-in-practice” to organizational routines.
Author:
Nick Berente
[This argument was brought to my attention by Ryan Baxter, then
later Dick
Boland. However, any mistakes are my fault entirely...)
References:
Boland, Dick (2005) PhD Seminar, Case Western Reserve University.
Brown & Duguid (2001) Knowledge and
Organization: A Social Practice Perspective. Organization
Science. Vol. 12.(2).
Cook & Brown (1999) Bridging
Epistemologies: The Generative Dance Between Organizational Knowledge
& Organizational Knowing. Organization
Science. Vol. 10(4).
Nonaka, Ikujiro, (1994) “A Dynamic Theory of Organizational Knowledge
Creation,” Organization Science, Vol.5 (1).
Polanyi, Michael, (1966) The Tacit Dimension.
Orlikowski (2002) Knowing in Practice: Enacting a Collective Capability
in Distributed Organizing. Organization Science.
Vol 13(3).
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