Tacit Knowledge

The concept of tacit knowledge is sometimes presented as a type of knowing with two dimensions: It is acquired through experience rather than [Page 839]direct instruction, and the knower is unable to articulate it or, as the now familiar phrase goes, “We know more than we can tell.” However, a broader importance of the concept must be recognized because it represents a historic rupture in many social scientists' understanding of the nature of knowledge. Developed by chemist and philosopher Michael Polanyi, the concept contributed to what has been called the “interpretive turn” in the social sciences, as well as to the reconceptualization of curriculum studies.

In the mid- to late 20th century, some social scientists began a shift away from positivism, the belief that there can be any scientifically neutral, impersonal perspective, and toward interpretivism, the belief that all human endeavors, including the scientific, are unavoidably embedded in cultural traditions and prejudices. Polanyi was one of the early voices protesting the notion of the possibility of detached objectivity. His work, arguing that all knowledge is based in tacit or “personal” knowledge, provided fertile ground for early reconceptu-alist theorizing. A look at the 1975 classic Curriculum Theorizing: The Reconceptualists, edited by William Pinar, shows that seven of the chapters draw on Polanyi's theory of knowledge. Although Polanyi is only occasionally cited in current curriculum studies literature, his ideas helped make much of it possible, including, but not limited to, discourses based on the political (e.g., the hidden curriculum), the aesthetic, the spiritual, hermeneutics, autobiography, and narrative. Some of the most explicit development of the implications of tacit knowing for curriculum work can be seen in James Macdonald's political work, as well as in his transcendental developmental ideology, and in Michael Connelly and D. Jean Clandinin's work on personal practical knowledge.

Polanyi illustrated tacit knowing as a triad: First, there are the subsidiaries (e.g., senses) we employ in focusing on the second element: the object of our attention. The knower is the third necessary factor, for the individual integrates the subsidiary and the focal in the active process of tacit knowing. Polanyi emphasized that the tacit knowledge of any person or scientific community provided a matrix within which all inquiry occurs. As such, it supplies taken-for-granted assumptions, rules of evidence and procedure, and a sense of what is appropriate or inappropriate to investigate. He found the ideal of a strictly explicit knowledge to be self-contradictory, noting that if all words, formulae, and graphics were stripped of their tacit properties, they would be meaningless. Therefore, because all knowing requires the knower's continual integration of even explicit knowledge into the tacit, Polanyi concluded that all knowing is personal knowing.