Abstract The concept of tacit knowledge is widely used in social sciences

to refer to all those knowledge that cannot be codied and have to be

transferred by personal contacts. All this literature has been affected by two
kind of biases: (1) the interest has been focused more on the result (tacit
knowledge) than on the process (implicit learning); (2) tacit knowledge
has been somehow reduced to physical skills or know-how; other possible
forms of tacit knowledge have been neglected. These two biases seem
interconnected one with each other. A greater consideration of the role and
relevance of implicit learning allows us to consider tacit knowledge as
something more than pure physical skills or know how. This is the rst step
in order to develop more detailed categorisation of the different forms that
tacit knowledge can assume.
Keywords Implicit learning Knowledge theory Skills Tacit knowledge
1 Tacit knowledge and its role in scientic reasoning
The belief in the fact that any attempt to model scientic reasoning should
take into consideration the role of tacit knowledge is spreading throughout
the community of research. As a matter of fact, tacit knowledge research is
currently witnessing a tremendous interest by many scholars belonging to
different disciplines such as philosophy, cognitive sciences, neurosciences,
social sciences, economics and so on. The number of books and scientic
papers that deal with tacit knowledge shows a kind of exponential growth,
A. Pozzali (&)
Department of Sociology and Social Research, University of Milan, Bicocca, Milan, Italy
e-mail: andrea.pozzali@unimib.it
1 3
Mind Soc (2008) 7:227237
DOI 10.1007/s11299-007-0034-6
ORI GI NAL ARTI CLE
Tacit knowledge, implicit learning and scientic
reasoning
Andrea Pozzali
Received: 18 January 2006 / Accepted: 19 September 2006 / Published online: 28 February 2007
Fondazione Rosselli 2007
and the same holds for the number of new authors approaching this eld.
1
Yet, despite all this current excitement and the signicant advances the eld
has made in the last few years, we still are very far from developing a clear
denition and categorization of tacit knowledge itself.
One of the reasons for this can be due to the fact that the literature has
been concerned more with tacit knowledge as a product than with tacit
knowing as a process. Tacit knowledge research was thus constrained to
operate within the framework provided by the standard theory of knowledge
and its classical categorization of knowledge in competence, acquain-
tance and justied true beliefs (Lehrer 1990). In this categorization, tacit
knowledge was considered almost exclusively as competence and was thus
identied with skills, know-how and physical abilities. The possibility that tacit
knowledge could also assume other forms was somehow ruled out and this did
not help both empirical and theoretical research. Focusing on tacit knowing as
a process not only seems to be more in line with Polanyis original work, but it
could help to develop a better understanding of tacit knowledge itself, as I will
try to argue. As we are concerned here mainly with modeling scientic rea-
soning, I will try to illustrate my thesis by focusing only on a very specic eld
of analysis that is the role of tacit knowledge in science. Anyway, the general
conclusions I draw from this analysis can be applied to tacit knowledge re-
search as whole.
As already mentioned, the concept of tacit knowledge was rst intro-
duced in the epistemological debate by Michael Polanyi (1958), who used it to
refer to all those kinds of scientic knowledge that cannot be expressed in
explicit form (spoken words, formulae, maps, graphs, mathematical theory
and so on). Even if a great part of overall scientic knowledge is stored in
laws, theories, formulae and so on, another part of it consists of practices,
abilities, personal insight and expertise that cannot be codied and still rep-
resent the working toolbox of every skilled researcher.
The concept of tacit knowledge has been further on developed in philos-
ophy and sociology of science in order to incorporate it within a more com-
prehensive theory of practices and their role in social reality (Lynch 1993;
Schatzi et al. 2001): Practices are held to be a condition of understanding that
cannot itself be understood in fully explicit terms. We know more that we can
say as Polanyis slogan puts it (...). In the case of an activity, such as producing
a particular kind of scientic observation, the notion of practice (...) describes
what it is that practitioners of a technique possess that enables them to per-
form, but which is not and perhaps cannot be formulated in a cookbook
description of the technique (Turner 1999, p. 149).
1
A quick research performed on the main databases for social sciences (Econlit, PsycINFO,
Social Services Abstract and Sociological Abstract) on the period going from 1960 to 2006 gives
the following results: the papers dealing with tacit knowledge are 590 (163 of which carrying the
exact phrase tacit knowledge in the title). If we limit ourselves to consider only the last seven
years (from 1999 to 2006), we nd 356 papers dealing with tacit knowledge and 91 carrying tacit
knowledge in the title. In other words, more than half of all the papers dealing in one way or
another with this topic have been written in the last seven years.
228 A. Pozzali
1 3
Research on tacit knowledge in science has not been limited to philo-
sophical analysis. It has also tried to perform an empirical analysis of the
actual role of tacit knowledge in the processes of scientic and technological
development. Many eld studies have been conduced on this topic, ranging
from laser building (Collins 1992) to nuclear weapons invention (MacKenzie
and Spinardi 1995), from biological procedures (Cambrosio and Keating 1988)
to veterinary surgery (Pinch et al. 1996). Other interesting contributions come
from history of technology, in particular for what concerns engineering
developments (Vincenti 1990; Ferguson 1992). In all these cases, tacit
knowledge has been shown to be highly inuential in the processes that led to
scientic invention and to technological development. Unfortunately, this
literature seems to be affected by a sort of bias, as it has mainly identied
tacit knowledge with implicit skills and kinaesthetic abilities (often dened
also as know-how); other possible forms of tacit knowledge have been ne-
glected. A few examples will sufce to show how this reduction of tacit
knowledge to skills actually goes on.
Collins (1992, p. 56), talks of tacit knowledge as of ... the name given by
Michael Polanyi (1958) to our ability to perform skills without being able to
articulate how we do them. The standard example is the skill involved in riding
a bicycle. (...) Tacit knowledge usually nds its application in practical settings
such as bike riding or other skilled occupations. Even if he recognizes that
tacit knowledge can also be applied to mental activity, Collins equates these
last activities with a sort of social skill (the whole of social knowledge that
enables a given subject to be part of the cultural and social life of the com-
munity he belongs to and that differentiates him from strangers, that do not
have this knowledge, and from newborns, that still have to acquire it). Also
MacKenzie and Spinardi (1995, p. 45) refers to tacit knowledge mainly as a
sort of physical skill, and once again bike riding is used to provide a standard
example: Motor skills supply a set of paradigmatic examples of tacit knowl-
edge in everyday life. Most of us, for example, know perfectly well how to ride a
bicycle yet would nd it impossible to put into words how we do so. There are
(to our knowledge) no textbooks of bicycle riding, and when children are taught
to ride, they are not given long lists of written or verbal instructions. Instead,
someone demonstrates what to do and encourages them in the inevitably slow
and error-ridden process of learning for themselves.
In a more recent empirical work on tacit knowledge, Collins tried to de-
velop a new categorisation, that was specically ... intended not to deepen our
understanding at a philosophical level but to explicate the idea clearly and draw
out its implications for scientic practice (Collins 2001, p. 71). This categor-
isation identied ve different kinds of tacit knowledge (concealed knowl-
edge, mismatched salience, ostensive knowledge, unrecognised knowledge
and uncognized/uncognizable knowledge) and this in turn seemed to provide
the possibility to consider tacit knowledge as something more than purely
physical skills. Unfortunately, the results of the empirical eldwork performed
by Collins were not strong enough to provide a clear support for this cate-
gorisation. Much of the tacit knowledge Collins identied fall in fact in the
Tacit knowledge, implicit learning and scientic reasoning 229
1 3
category of ostensive knowledge, that seems to represent just an alternative
denition for skill-like knowledge. Moreover, at the end of his paper Collins
once again reverts to the identication of tacit knowledge as a whole with skill,
by using also the well-known analogy with bike-riding: Knowing how difcult
a skill is, is another important part of learning to master it. If one believed that
bike-riding could be mastered in one minute, a few minutes of falling off would
lead one to distrust claims that bikes could be ridden at all, and one would never
learn to ridestill more so with, say, playing a musical instrument (Collins
2001, p. 82).
2 Tacit knowledge versus tacit knowing
As I have already mentioned, tacit knowledge research has always been more
focused on the product (tacit knowledge) than on the process (tacit knowing).
This sounds quite paradoxical, as long as all this literature makes reference to
the seminal work by Polanyi, who was by himself much more concerned with
tacit knowing than with tacit knowledge. The evidence for this is quite
overwhelming: not only he used the expression tacit knowing much more
often than tacit knowledge in all his major works, but he also considered
knowledge as ... an activity which would better be described as a process of
knowing (Polanyi 1969a, p. 132): I shall always speak of knowing, there-
fore, to cover both practical and theoretical knowledge (Polanyi 1966, p. 7).
To understand what does this tacit knowing really consist of a few clari-
cations will be needed. Polanyis epistemology was quite complex and was
based on a model of perception derived from gestalt psychology. In a few
words, in his model all forms of perception require the integration of focal
and subsidiary elements into a whole. While the focal elements are
explicitly known, the subsidiary elements of perception are tacitly known.
We can here make reference directly to the original example Polanyi used in
order to clarify this distinction between focal and subsidiary awareness:
When we use a hammer to drive in a nail, we attend to both the nail and
hammer, but in a different way. We watch the effect of our strokes on the nail
and try to wield the hammer so as to hit the nail most effectively. When we bring
down the hammer we do not feel that its handle has struck our palm but that its
head has struck the nail. Yet in a sense we are certainly alert to the feelings in
our palm and the ngers that hold the hammer. They guide us in handling it
effectively, and the degree of attention that we give to the nail is given to the
same extent but in a different way to these feelings. The difference may be stated
by saying that the later are not, like the nail, objects of our attention, but
instruments of it. They are not watched in themselves; we watch something else
while keeping intensely aware of them. I have a subsidiary awareness of the
feeling in the palm of my hand which is merged into my focal awareness of my
driving in the nail (Polanyi 1958, p. 55).
The two forms of awareness are mutually exclusive. Shifting our focal
awareness from the general nature of a determined action to the single details
230 A. Pozzali
1 3
that the action is composed of produces in us a sort of impediment, or self-
consciousness, that most of the time will make it impossible for us to go on
doing the action we have undertaken. This is what happens, for example, to a
pianist when he shifts his focal awareness from the piece he is playing to the
details of the movements of his hands: it is likely that at this point he will
become confused to the point that he has to interrupt his performance. What
is destroyed, in these cases, is the sense of context.
The process of tacit knowing can be then described as the process of
integrating all the different focal and subsidiary elements into a coherent
whole. As the initial examples of the hammer and the nail, or of the pianist,
could somehow be misleading, it is important to point out that Polanyi applied
this model of knowing, based on the two-fold structure of focal and subsidiary
awareness, not only to physical skills and to the pattern detection skills
characteristic of experts, but to a wide range of activities, that included im-
plicit learning, visual perception, scientic research and discovery, speech and
language and the formation of class concepts: ... a scientic discovery reduces
our focal awareness of observations into a subsidiary awareness of them, by
shifting our attention from them to their theoretical coherence. This act of
integration, which we can identify both in the visual perception of objects and in
the discovery of scientic theories is the tacit power we have been looking for. I
shall call it tacit knowing (Polanyi 1969b, p. 140). Tacit knowledge in itself
seems to be quite residual in Polanyis interest and as such it is fully identied
with tacit knowing.
This difference on emphasis between tacit knowledge and knowing may
seem trivial at rst sight, but in reality it may carry on signicant consequences
for research. As long as we focus almost exclusively on tacit knowledge, we
are in fact bound to operate within the framework provided by standard
theory of knowledge. As it is well known this theory identies three main
kinds of knowledge:
Knowledge as justied true beliefs: This is also known as propositional
knowledge as it involves the ability to recognize the truth-value of prop-
ositions. To have this kind of knowledge is to recognize that a given
information is correct and to have justied reasons to hold it as correct. I
know that 2 + 2 = 4 because I possess the information that 2 + 2 = 4, the
information is correct, I consider it to be correct, and I have a good idea
why I think it is correct.
Knowledge as competence: An individual may possess this kind of
knowledge when he knows how to perform a given activity. Competence
can be the result of unconscious instinct (for example in breathing) or it
can be acquired with a lengthy apprenticeship. This kind of knowledge is
also called as know-how (as opposed to know-that, Ryle 1949/1984) or
procedural knowledge (as opposed to declarative knowledge, Anderson
1983).
Knowledge as acquaintance: An individual may be said to know that with
which it is acquainted. To say that one knows something in this sense is to
Tacit knowledge, implicit learning and scientic reasoning 231
1 3
say that it has had some experience with what it knows. Acquaintance has
a great importance in sociology, as it is considered as the background, pre-
theoretical knowledge that individuals share as members of a given com-
munity (Berger and Luckmann 1966). It is acquired mainly through soci-
alisation and it can also be considered as making up a large part of the
social capital that is embedded in a given social and institutional context
(Granovetter 1985).
If we take this standard classication for granted, how can we categorize tacit
knowledge? It seems evident that it cannot be considered as a kind of justied
true beliefs, or of propositional knowledge. The processes of justication and
truth-testing are in fact not possible for tacit knowledge: we cannot hold a
justied true belief that is both unspoken and unspeakable. An alternative
could be to consider tacit knowledge as a kind of acquaintance, especially in
the sense that it can represent a sort of background knowledge that is
shared among a given community of research. This is maybe what Collins
refers to when he speaks of tacit knowledge as the social skill that forms
the foundation upon which formal learning rests (Collins 1992, p. 56).
The point here is that this kind of tacit knowledge is a social and not an
individual attribute. It is something that is spread in a given social context and
it is not something that individuals can fully develop on their own. The pro-
cesses of creation and diffusion of new tacit knowledge of this type are likely
to involve a great deal of time, and they rst require that a given type of new
tacit knowledge is developed at the individual level. For this reason, tacit
knowledge as social skill usually does not hold much explanatory power if
we are to explain the processes of development of new scientic discoveries
and of technological innovations. The accumulation and diffusion of tacit
knowledge in the form of acquaintance is in fact something that normally
follows and not precede scientic discovery and technological progress. Even
if we consider that social capital or path dependency phenomena are
relevant explicatory variables to explain scientic and technological paths of
development, I dont think that they can be useful in modeling processes of
scientic cognition that take place mostly at the individual level. They can
help us in understanding why a scientic discovery has taken place in Silicon
Valley and not in Paris, for example, but they cannot help us to reconstruct
and model the path that actually led to the real discovery.
If tacit knowledge cannot be considered as a type of propositional knowl-
edge and if tacit knowledge as acquaintance is a sort of residual variable,
lacking explanatory power, we are bound to consider that the most important
type of tacit knowledge falls into the category of knowledge as competence.
This is precisely the tacit knowledge as skills, know how, kinesthetic and
physical abilities that we nd at plenty in sociology of science case studies as
the ones we have seen and that represents the object of analysis of modern
theory of practice.
Two questions arise at this point: the rst one concerns the possibility that
tacit knowledge can be considered as something more than purely skill-like
232 A. Pozzali
1 3
abilities or residual, social acquaintances (are there forms of tacit knowledge
that cannot be considered as skills and that can play a relevant role in
processes of scientic discovery?). The second one is whether the analysis of
these last types of tacit knowledge can be helped by shifting our focus from
the study of tacit knowledge as a product to the study of tacit knowing as a
process.
3 Implicit learning in language and problem solving
The rst, well-known example of a kind of tacit knowledge that cannot be
considered as a pre-theoretical, skilled expertise can be found in language
competence (Chomsky 1986, pp. 263273). Knowledge of language is not
usually understood to constitute a skill, but rather is meant to be a properly
cognitive system, dened in terms of mental states and structures that cannot
be articulated with words or described in a complete formal system. The
hypothesis that knowledge of language cannot be equated with skilled
expertise can be supported if one thinks at the example of transient aphasic
subjects. As these subjects can recover their capacity of speaking, this means
that what has been lost is the linguistic competence, not the linguistic
knowledge. The system of mental states and of cognitive structures that rep-
resent the knowledge of language has been maintained, even if subjects
have temporarily lost their linguistic skills. Knowledge of language can thus be
considered as the paradigmatic example of a kind of tacit knowledge that has
nothing to do with physical and kinesthetic abilities or with skilled-like
knowledge in a broad sense.
The tacitness of this kind of knowledge is moreover conrmed by the fact
that a language, as Chomsky has pointed out, cannot be properly taught,
but must in a proper sense be learned: Language is not really taught, for
the most part. Rather, it is learned, by mere exposure to the data. No one has
been taught the principle of structure-dependence of rules (...), or language-
specic properties of such rules (...). Nor is there any reason to suppose that
people are taught the meaning of words. (...) The study of how a system is
learned cannot be identied with the study of how it is taught; nor can we
assume that what is learned has been taught. To consider an analogy that is
perhaps not too remote, consider what happens when I turn on the ignition in
my automobile. A change of state takes place. (...) A careful study of the
interaction between me and the car that led to the attainment of this new state
would not be very illuminating. Similarly, certain interactions between me and
my child result in his learning (hence knowing) English (Chomsky 1976, p.
161).
If knowledge of a language is more than partially tacit, we nd here a kind
of tacit knowledge that realistically should play a great role in processes of
scientic discovery and of technological processes. The development of new
conceptual categorizations and of new linguistic terms, that are both more
precise and exible than the ones used in ordinary language, can in fact be
Tacit knowledge, implicit learning and scientic reasoning 233
1 3
considered as one of the most important characteristics of scientic progress
(Gopnik and Meltzoff 1996). Unfortunately, even if research on categoriza-
tion processes and on linguistic developments is a quite developed eld of
research, these studies have not as a whole paid enough attention to the
importance of tacit knowledge.
Other instances of tacit knowledge that cannot be considered as compe-
tence or know how can be found if we look at the literature on implicit
learning. Implicit learning research is a eld that has witnessed a great
development in the last years (Cleeremans 1997; Cleeremans et al. 1998;
French and Cleeremans 2002). The rst works trace back to the second half of
the 1960s, and were developed mainly by the research group of Anthon Reber
(cfr. Reber 1993), using experiments of articial grammar and of probabilistic
sequence learning. A typical experiment of articial grammar learning is to
expose subjects to strings of letters governed by hidden rules and others,
which are not governed by any rule and are thus completely random. The
subjects are later shown further sets of letters and are asked to say which are
grammatical and which not. Usually, subjects tend to be able to distinguish
between grammatical and non-grammatical strings, even if they do not know
how they do it. In a certain sense, they are able to use the hidden structural
features of the articial grammar without being in any case able to describe
them explicitly. The same seems to happen when strings of letters are replaced
by stochastic sequences of signals, as in probabilistic sequence learning
experiments. Even more interesting experiments in the eld of implicit
learning require the subjects to learn to control articial complex systems by
exploiting the structural hidden laws that regulate the behavior of the systems
(Broadbent et al. 1986). In the most common experiment, subjects are re-
quired to control a simulated rm by deciding the level of input and output.
Even if the prot function is kept hidden, subjects usually succeed in reaching
the point of equilibrium.
What all these experiments seem to demonstrate is that subjects are nor-
mally able to exploit the hidden structural features of given environments or
to solve complex problems without having to rely on forms of explicit
knowledge. The processes of pattern recognition and of problem solving are
dealt with on a fully implicit way. This eld of research seems to give inter-
esting suggestions for the study of tacit knowledge in science. Surely, a great
part of scientic work can be considered as a matter of recognizing hidden
regularities and structures in nature. Moreover, the overall process of scien-
tic discovery can be described as an activity of problem solving, as many
works in cognitive philosophy of science have clearly shown (Langley et al.
1987; Klahr 2000). If implicit learning plays a signicant role in general pro-
cesses of problem solving and pattern recognition, it could be possible to
assume that this can hold also when we consider the application of these
processes to the specic eld of scientic research. Unfortunately, it seems
that this possibility has not been since now examined with enough attention by
the community of research. In the last part of this paper, I will try to explain
234 A. Pozzali
1 3
how this fact can be linked to the already mentioned dichotomy between tacit
knowledge and tacit knowing.
4 Conclusion: is it possible to reconcile the analysis of implicit learning
with classical knowledge theory?
How can we try to categorize the types of tacit knowledge that lie at the basis
of our language, or that are the results of processes of implicit learning as the
ones we have seen? Surely this knowledge cannot be considered as compe-
tence or acquaintance, but can we consider it as a justied true belief? The
answer to this question is obviously no, but this can represent a relevant
problem, if we are to develop a comprehensive theory of knowledge. As a
matter of fact, the examples given above are instances of a type of knowledge
that cannot t into the traditional partition in justied true belief, competence
and acquaintance that lies at the basis of every theory of knowledge. So what
can we do?
The answer sounds quite provocative, but I think that in order to analyse
tacit knowledge in its real features, one has to shift the focus of attention from
knowledge to knowing, and has to free himself from traditional knowl-
edge theory. To be honest, this kind of remark is not new in epistemology, as it
is well known. In their Knowing and the known, Dewey and Bentley seem to
provide a good example to follow in this direction: The word knowledge, as a
name, is a loose name. We do not employ it in the titles of our chapters and shall
not use it in any signicant way as we proceed. (...) We shall rate it as no. 1 on a
list of vague words to which we shall call attention and add from time to time in
footnotes. Only through prolonged factual inquiry, of which little has been
undertaken as yet, can the word knowledge be given determinable status with
respect to such questions as: (1) the range of its application to human or animal
behaviours; (2) the types of its distribution between knowers, knowns, and
presumptive intermediaries; (3) the possible localizations implied for knowl-
edges as present in space and time. In place of examining such a vague generality
as the word knowledge offers, we shall speak of and concern ourselves directly
with knowings and knownsand, moreover, in each instance, with those par-
ticular forms of knowings and knowns in respect to which we may hope for
reasonably denite identications (Dewey and Bentley 1949, p. 48).
Dewey and Bentley dene knowing as a behavior that entails either
signing or sign-process (that is the reaction to given signs, coming from the
environment). There are three types of signs: signal (perception, manipu-
lations, etc.), designation (in this case organized language is employed as a
sign), and symbol (as in mathematical language). In this framework, we
can consider tacit knowing/knowledge as corresponding to signaling, while
explicit knowing/knowledge would entail the use of designations or symbols.
One thing that should be highlighted is that the ability of dealing with non-
verbal signs cannot be equated with a purely physical ability or skill: it is also
the ability to recognize given patterns of observations and to perform
Tacit knowledge, implicit learning and scientic reasoning 235
1 3
accordingly in order to achieve the desired results (for example in the process
of developing a medical diagnosis, or in the implicit learning examples we
considered).
In scientic activities, this can also imply for example the ability to classify
given sets of non-verbal and non-numerical data (for example: visual and
other purely sensory data) into a sign that can be assigned a precise meaning, a
means to an end (for example in biotechnology, recognizing the similarities of
DNA structures and assigning functions to them). All these activities require a
type of knowledge that cannot be made explicit but is not a purely physical
skill or know-how. It is a cognitive, non-physical, kind of tacit knowledge that
cannot be considered a belief, a competence or an acquaintance but can play a
relevant role in scientic work. If we look only at knowledge as a product we
would maybe never be able to characterize it according to traditional
knowledge theory. If, on the other hand, we start to pay more attention to the
processes that lead to this type of knowledge, and we shift our focus of
analysis to the knowings and knowns Dewey and Bentley referred to, we may
be able to develop our empirical inquiries in a more promising and productive
way.
Acknowledgments This article is a revised version of the paper presented at the International
Conference Model-Based Reasoning in Science and Engineering (MBR04), held at the University
of Pavia, Italy (1618 December 2004) and chaired by Lorenzo Magnani.
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