Tacit Knowledge

The term tacit knowledge was coined by Michael Polanyi to describe the elements of scientific knowledge that cannot be, or normally are not, set out explicitly but that are nevertheless essential to the activity of science and indeed all other human activity. Polanyi's slogans included the statements “We know more than we can say” and “All knowledge is either tacit knowledge or rooted in tacit knowledge.” The range of application of the concept and the ground for tacit knowledge are matters on which users of the term differ, but the starting point—the most common motivation—is this: Some activity, inference, or communicative act depends on both the user and the recipient possessing some skill, inferential element, or mechanism that allows them to understand, anticipate, cooperate, or coordinate with another.

The standard example of tacit knowledge is the knowledge one needs to ride a bicycle. It is essential to the activity: Some people acquire it, and others do not acquire it. We normally use questions like “Do you know how to ride a bicycle?” so it is not odd to call this “knowledge,” however much it departs from the paradigmatic definition of knowledge as justified true belief. We cannot articulate this knowledge and therefore cannot transmit it through words, though we may be able to coach a person learning to ride a bicycle.

Tacit knowledge is itself a paradoxical term. Standard philosophical usage treats knowledge as “true belief.” But tacit knowledge is neither belief, which implies something explicit or self-conscious, nor necessarily “true”—indeed it is odd to think of calling something that cannot be derived from or contradict a true statement either true or false. The term itself is an analogical term, which likens the content in the tacit background to content whose character we understand, namely, explicit belief. Yet the term has caught on, for good reasons. The paradoxical language points to the fact that this kind of “knowledge” is unlike other “beliefs” in many ways because it is tacit: It cannot be examined and revised in the same way, it is not open to discussion, and it is not open to justification.

The term is an attempt to designate something that is familiar and difficult to deny. Consider a simple example: The police stop me after I thread my motorcycle through traffic and ask, “Do you know how fast you were going?” I cannot tell what was on the speedometer, but I had to know how fast I was going to successfully negotiate the traffic—if I didn't know, I would have crashed. This is not only tacit but also “nonconceptual” knowledge. In this, case, what I know is not something I could articulate even if I wanted to. These cases, which might be called the “bicycle cases”—after their paradigmatic instance, knowledge of how to ride a bicycle—constitute a large class. There is a dispute about whether this class should be taken as a model for other forms of tacit knowledge. But the existence of this kind of knowledge and its external properties, for example, the fact that it is learned as a skill, with some coaching or interaction but largely through experience, is not a matter of dispute.

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