Abstract The concept of tacit knowledge is widely used in social sciencesto refer to all those knowledge that cannot be codified and have to betransferred by personal contacts. All this literature has been affected by twokind of ‘‘biases’’: (1) the interest has been focused more on the result (tacitknowledge) than on the process (implicit learning); (2) ‘‘tacit knowledge’’has been somehow reduced to physical skills or know-how; other possibleforms of tacit knowledge have been neglected. These two ‘‘biases’’ seeminterconnected one with each other. A greater consideration of the role andrelevance of implicit learning allows us to consider tacit knowledge assomething more than pure physical skills or know how. This is the first stepin order to develop more detailed categorisation of the different forms thattacit knowledge can assume.

Keywords Implicit learning Æ Knowledge theory Æ Skills Æ Tacit knowledge

1 Tacit knowledge and its role in scientific reasoning

The belief in the fact that any attempt to model scientific reasoning shouldtake into consideration the role of tacit knowledge is spreading throughoutthe community of research. As a matter of fact, tacit knowledge research iscurrently witnessing a tremendous interest by many scholars belonging todifferent disciplines such as philosophy, cognitive sciences, neurosciences,social sciences, economics and so on. The number of books and scientificpapers that deal with tacit knowledge shows a kind of exponential growth,

A. Pozzali (&)Department of Sociology and Social Research, University of Milan, Bicocca, Milan, Italye-mail: andrea.pozzali@unimib.it

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Mind Soc (2008) 7:227–237DOI 10.1007/s11299-007-0034-6

ORI GI N A L A R T I CLE

Tacit knowledge, implicit learning and scientificreasoning

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 field.1

Yet, despite all this current excitement and the significant advances the fieldhas made in the last few years, we still are very far from developing a cleardefinition and categorization of tacit knowledge itself.

One of the reasons for this can be due to the fact that the literature hasbeen concerned more with tacit knowledge as a product than with tacitknowing as a process. Tacit knowledge research was thus constrained tooperate within the framework provided by the standard theory of knowledgeand its classical categorization of knowledge in ‘‘competence’’, ‘‘acquain-tance’’ and ‘‘justified true beliefs’’ (Lehrer 1990). In this categorization, tacitknowledge was considered almost exclusively as ‘‘competence’’ and was thusidentified with skills, know-how and physical abilities. The possibility that tacitknowledge could also assume other forms was somehow ruled out and this didnot help both empirical and theoretical research. Focusing on tacit knowing asa process not only seems to be more in line with Polanyi’s original work, but itcould help to develop a better understanding of tacit knowledge itself, as I willtry to argue. As we are concerned here mainly with modeling scientific rea-soning, I will try to illustrate my thesis by focusing only on a very specific fieldof analysis that is the role of tacit knowledge in science. Anyway, the generalconclusions I draw from this analysis can be applied to tacit knowledge re-search as whole.

As already mentioned, the concept of ‘‘tacit knowledge’’ was first intro-duced in the epistemological debate by Michael Polanyi (1958), who used it torefer to all those kinds of scientific knowledge that cannot be expressed inexplicit form (spoken words, formulae, maps, graphs, mathematical theoryand so on). Even if a great part of overall scientific knowledge is stored inlaws, theories, formulae and so on, another part of it consists of practices,abilities, personal insight and expertise that cannot be codified 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 thatcannot itself be understood in fully explicit terms. ‘We know more that we cansay’ as Polanyi’s slogan puts it (...). In the case of an activity, such as producinga particular kind of scientific observation, the notion of practice (...) describeswhat 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 cookbookdescription 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 givesthe following results: the papers dealing with tacit knowledge are 590 (163 of which carrying theexact phrase ‘‘tacit knowledge’’ in the title). If we limit ourselves to consider only the last sevenyears (from 1999 to 2006), we find 356 papers dealing with tacit knowledge and 91 carrying ‘‘tacitknowledge’’ in the title. In other words, more than half of all the papers dealing in one way oranother with this topic have been written in the last seven years.

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Research on tacit knowledge in science has not been limited to philo-sophical analysis. It has also tried to perform an empirical analysis of theactual role of tacit knowledge in the processes of scientific and technologicaldevelopment. Many field studies have been conduced on this topic, rangingfrom laser building (Collins 1992) to nuclear weapons invention (MacKenzieand Spinardi 1995), from biological procedures (Cambrosio and Keating 1988)to veterinary surgery (Pinch et al. 1996). Other interesting contributions comefrom history of technology, in particular for what concerns engineeringdevelopments (Vincenti 1990; Ferguson 1992). In all these cases, tacitknowledge has been shown to be highly influential in the processes that led toscientific invention and to technological development. Unfortunately, thisliterature seems to be affected by a sort of ‘‘bias’’, as it has mainly identified‘‘tacit knowledge’’ with implicit skills and kinaesthetic abilities (often definedalso as know-how); other possible forms of tacit knowledge have been ne-glected. A few examples will suffice to show how this reduction of tacitknowledge to skills actually goes on.

Collins (1992, p. 56), talks of tacit knowledge as of ‘‘... the name given byMichael Polanyi (1958) to our ability to perform skills without being able toarticulate how we do them. The standard example is the skill involved in ridinga bicycle. (...) Tacit knowledge usually finds its application in practical settingssuch as bike riding or other ‘skilled’ occupations’’. Even if he recognizes thattacit knowledge can also be applied to mental activity, Collins equates theselast activities with a sort of ‘‘social skill’’ (the whole of social knowledge thatenables 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 nothave this knowledge, and from newborns, that still have to acquire it). AlsoMacKenzie and Spinardi (1995, p. 45) refers to tacit knowledge mainly as asort of physical skill, and once again bike riding is used to provide a standardexample: ‘‘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 abicycle yet would find it impossible to put into words how we do so. There are(to our knowledge) no textbooks of bicycle riding, and when children are taughtto ride, they are not given long lists of written or verbal instructions. Instead,someone demonstrates what to do and encourages them in the inevitably slowand 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 specifically ‘‘... intended not to deepen ourunderstanding at a philosophical level but to explicate the idea clearly and drawout its implications for scientific practice’’ (Collins 2001, p. 71). This categor-isation identified five different kinds of tacit knowledge (concealed knowl-edge, mismatched salience, ostensive knowledge, unrecognised knowledgeand uncognized/uncognizable knowledge) and this in turn seemed to providethe possibility to consider tacit knowledge as something more than purelyphysical skills. Unfortunately, the results of the empirical fieldwork performedby Collins were not strong enough to provide a clear support for this cate-gorisation. Much of the tacit knowledge Collins identified fall in fact in the

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category of ‘‘ostensive knowledge’’, that seems to represent just an alternativedefinition for skill-like knowledge. Moreover, at the end of his paper Collinsonce again reverts to the identification of tacit knowledge as a whole with skill,by using also the well-known analogy with bike-riding: ‘‘Knowing how difficulta skill is, is another important part of learning to master it. If one believed thatbike-riding could be mastered in one minute, a few minutes of falling off wouldlead one to distrust claims that bikes could be ridden at all, and one would neverlearn to ride—still more so with, say, playing a musical instrument’’ (Collins2001, p. 82).

2 Tacit knowledge versus tacit knowing

As I have already mentioned, tacit knowledge research has always been morefocused on the product (tacit knowledge) than on the process (tacit knowing).This sounds quite paradoxical, as long as all this literature makes reference tothe seminal work by Polanyi, who was by himself much more concerned withtacit knowing than with tacit knowledge. The evidence for this is quiteoverwhelming: not only he used the expression ‘‘tacit knowing’’ much moreoften than ‘‘tacit knowledge’’ in all his major works, but he also consideredknowledge as ‘‘... an activity which would better be described as a process ofknowing’’ (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 clarifi-cations will be needed. Polanyi’s epistemology was quite complex and wasbased on a model of perception derived from gestalt psychology. In a fewwords, in his model all forms of perception require the integration of ‘‘focal’’and ‘‘subsidiary’’ elements into a whole. While the ‘‘focal’’ elements areexplicitly known, the ‘‘subsidiary elements of perception’’ are tacitly known.We can here make reference directly to the original example Polanyi used inorder 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 andhammer, but in a different way. We watch the effect of our strokes on the nailand try to wield the hammer so as to hit the nail most effectively. When we bringdown the hammer we do not feel that its handle has struck our palm but that itshead has struck the nail. Yet in a sense we are certainly alert to the feelings inour palm and the fingers that hold the hammer. They guide us in handling iteffectively, and the degree of attention that we give to the nail is given to thesame extent but in a different way to these feelings. The difference may be statedby saying that the later are not, like the nail, objects of our attention, butinstruments of it. They are not watched in themselves; we watch something elsewhile keeping intensely aware of them. I have a subsidiary awareness of thefeeling in the palm of my hand which is merged into my focal awareness of mydriving in the nail’’ (Polanyi 1958, p. 55).

The two forms of awareness are mutually exclusive. Shifting our focalawareness from the general nature of a determined action to the single details

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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 ondoing the action we have undertaken. This is what happens, for example, to apianist when he shifts his focal awareness from the piece he is playing to thedetails of the movements of his hands: it is likely that at this point he willbecome confused to the point that he has to interrupt his performance. Whatis destroyed, in these cases, is the sense of context.

The process of tacit knowing can be then described as the process ofintegrating all the different focal and subsidiary elements into a coherentwhole. 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 appliedthis model of knowing, based on the two-fold structure of focal and subsidiaryawareness, not only to physical skills and to the pattern detection skillscharacteristic of experts, but to a wide range of activities, that included im-plicit learning, visual perception, scientific research and discovery, speech andlanguage and the formation of class concepts: ‘‘... a scientific discovery reducesour focal awareness of observations into a subsidiary awareness of them, byshifting our attention from them to their theoretical coherence. This act ofintegration, which we can identify both in the visual perception of objects and inthe discovery of scientific theories is the tacit power we have been looking for. Ishall call it tacit knowing’’ (Polanyi 1969b, p. 140). Tacit knowledge in itselfseems to be quite residual in Polanyi’s interest and as such it is fully identifiedwith tacit knowing.

This difference on emphasis between tacit knowledge and knowing mayseem trivial at first sight, but in reality it may carry on significant consequencesfor research. As long as we focus almost exclusively on tacit knowledge, weare in fact bound to operate within the framework provided by standardtheory of knowledge. As it is well known this theory identifies three mainkinds of knowledge:

• Knowledge as ‘‘justified true beliefs’’: This is also known as propositionalknowledge as it involves the ability to recognize the truth-value of prop-ositions. To have this kind of knowledge is to recognize that a giveninformation is correct and to have justified reasons to hold it as correct. Iknow that 2 + 2 = 4 because I possess the information that 2 + 2 = 4, theinformation is correct, I consider it to be correct, and I have a good ideawhy I think it is correct.

• Knowledge as competence: An individual may possess this kind ofknowledge when he knows how to perform a given activity. Competencecan be the result of unconscious instinct (for example in breathing) or itcan be acquired with a lengthy apprenticeship. This kind of knowledge isalso called as know-how (as opposed to know-that, Ryle 1949/1984) orprocedural knowledge (as opposed to declarative knowledge, Anderson1983).

• Knowledge as acquaintance: An individual may be said to know that withwhich it is acquainted. To say that one knows something in this sense is to

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say that it has had some experience with what it knows. Acquaintance hasa 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 classification for granted, how can we categorize tacitknowledge? It seems evident that it cannot be considered as a kind of justifiedtrue beliefs, or of propositional knowledge. The processes of justification andtruth-testing are in fact not possible for tacit knowledge: we cannot hold ajustified true belief that is both unspoken and unspeakable. An alternativecould be to consider tacit knowledge as a kind of acquaintance, especially inthe sense that it can represent a sort of ‘‘background knowledge’’ that isshared among a given community of research. This is maybe what Collinsrefers to when he speaks of tacit knowledge as the ‘‘social skill’’ that ‘‘formsthe 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 anindividual attribute. It is something that is spread in a given social context andit 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 likelyto involve a great deal of time, and they first require that a given type of newtacit knowledge is developed at the individual level. For this reason, tacitknowledge as ‘‘social skill’’ usually does not hold much explanatory power ifwe are to explain the processes of development of new scientific discoveriesand of technological innovations. The accumulation and diffusion of tacitknowledge in the form of acquaintance is in fact something that normallyfollows and not precede scientific discovery and technological progress. Evenif we consider that ‘‘social capital’’ or ‘‘path dependency’’ phenomena arerelevant explicatory variables to explain scientific and technological paths ofdevelopment, I don’t think that they can be useful in modeling processes ofscientific cognition that take place mostly at the individual level. They canhelp us in understanding why a scientific discovery has taken place in SiliconValley and not in Paris, for example, but they cannot help us to reconstructand 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 importanttype of tacit knowledge falls into the category of knowledge as competence.This is precisely the tacit knowledge as skills, know how, kinesthetic andphysical abilities that we find at plenty in sociology of science case studies asthe ones we have seen and that represents the object of analysis of moderntheory of practice.

Two questions arise at this point: the first one concerns the possibility thattacit knowledge can be considered as something more than purely skill-like

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abilities or residual, social acquaintances (are there forms of tacit knowledgethat cannot be considered as ‘‘skills’’ and that can play a relevant role inprocesses of scientific discovery?). The second one is whether the analysis ofthese last types of tacit knowledge can be helped by shifting our focus fromthe study of tacit knowledge as a product to the study of tacit knowing as aprocess.

3 Implicit learning in language and problem solving

The first, well-known example of a kind of tacit knowledge that cannot beconsidered as a pre-theoretical, skilled expertise can be found in languagecompetence (Chomsky 1986, pp. 263–273). Knowledge of language is notusually understood to constitute a skill, but rather is meant to be a properlycognitive system, defined in terms of mental states and structures that cannotbe articulated with words or described in a complete formal system. Thehypothesis that knowledge of language cannot be equated with skilledexpertise can be supported if one thinks at the example of transient aphasicsubjects. As these subjects can recover their capacity of speaking, this meansthat what has been lost is the linguistic competence, not the linguisticknowledge. The system of mental states and of cognitive structures that rep-resent the ‘‘knowledge of language’’ has been maintained, even if subjectshave temporarily lost their linguistic skills. Knowledge of language can thus beconsidered as the paradigmatic example of a kind of tacit knowledge that hasnothing to do with physical and kinesthetic abilities or with skilled-likeknowledge in a broad sense.

The tacitness of this kind of knowledge is moreover confirmed by the factthat a language, as Chomsky has pointed out, cannot be properly ‘‘taught’’,but must in a proper sense be ‘‘learned’’: ‘‘Language is not really taught, forthe most part. Rather, it is learned, by mere exposure to the data. No one hasbeen taught the principle of structure-dependence of rules (...), or language-specific properties of such rules (...). Nor is there any reason to suppose thatpeople are taught the meaning of words. (...) The study of how a system islearned cannot be identified with the study of how it is taught; nor can weassume that what is learned has been taught. To consider an analogy that isperhaps not too remote, consider what happens when I turn on the ignition inmy automobile. A change of state takes place. (...) A careful study of theinteraction between me and the car that led to the attainment of this new statewould not be very illuminating. Similarly, certain interactions between me andmy child result in his learning (hence knowing) English’’ (Chomsky 1976, p.161).

If knowledge of a language is more than partially tacit, we find here a kindof tacit knowledge that realistically should play a great role in processes ofscientific discovery and of technological processes. The development of newconceptual categorizations and of new linguistic terms, that are both moreprecise and flexible than the ones used in ordinary language, can in fact be

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considered as one of the most important characteristics of scientific progress(Gopnik and Meltzoff 1996). Unfortunately, even if research on categoriza-tion processes and on linguistic developments is a quite developed field ofresearch, these studies have not as a whole paid enough attention to theimportance 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 implicitlearning. Implicit learning research is a field that has witnessed a greatdevelopment in the last years (Cleeremans 1997; Cleeremans et al. 1998;French and Cleeremans 2002). The first works trace back to the second half ofthe 1960s, and were developed mainly by the research group of Anthon Reber(cfr. Reber 1993), using experiments of artificial grammar and of probabilisticsequence learning. A typical experiment of artificial grammar learning is toexpose subjects to strings of letters governed by hidden rules and others,which are not governed by any rule and are thus completely random. Thesubjects 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 distinguishbetween grammatical and non-grammatical strings, even if they do not knowhow they do it. In a certain sense, they are able to use the hidden structuralfeatures of the artificial grammar without being in any case able to describethem explicitly. The same seems to happen when strings of letters are replacedby stochastic sequences of signals, as in probabilistic sequence learningexperiments. Even more interesting experiments in the field of implicitlearning require the subjects to learn to control artificial complex systems byexploiting 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 firm by deciding the level of input and output.Even if the profit function is kept hidden, subjects usually succeed in reachingthe 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 orto solve complex problems without having to rely on forms of explicitknowledge. The processes of pattern recognition and of problem solving aredealt with on a fully implicit way. This field of research seems to give inter-esting suggestions for the study of tacit knowledge in science. Surely, a greatpart of scientific work can be considered as a matter of recognizing hiddenregularities and structures in nature. Moreover, the overall process of scien-tific discovery can be described as an activity of problem solving, as manyworks in cognitive philosophy of science have clearly shown (Langley et al.1987; Klahr 2000). If implicit learning plays a significant role in general pro-cesses of problem solving and pattern recognition, it could be possible toassume that this can hold also when we consider the application of theseprocesses to the specific field of scientific research. Unfortunately, it seemsthat this possibility has not been since now examined with enough attention bythe community of research. In the last part of this paper, I will try to explain

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how this fact can be linked to the already mentioned dichotomy between tacitknowledge and tacit knowing.

4 Conclusion: is it possible to reconcile the analysis of implicit learningwith classical knowledge theory?

How can we try to categorize the types of tacit knowledge that lie at the basisof our language, or that are the results of processes of implicit learning as theones we have seen? Surely this knowledge cannot be considered as compe-tence or acquaintance, but can we consider it as a ‘‘justified true belief’’? Theanswer to this question is obviously ‘‘no’’, but this can represent a relevantproblem, if we are to develop a comprehensive theory of knowledge. As amatter of fact, the examples given above are instances of a type of knowledgethat cannot fit into the traditional partition in justified true belief, competenceand acquaintance that lies at the basis of every theory of knowledge. So whatcan we do?

The answer sounds quite provocative, but I think that in order to analysetacit 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 itis well known. In their Knowing and the known, Dewey and Bentley seem toprovide a good example to follow in this direction: ‘‘The word ‘knowledge’, as aname, is a loose name. We do not employ it in the titles of our chapters and shallnot use it in any significant way as we proceed. (...) We shall rate it as no. 1 on alist of ‘vague words’ to which we shall call attention and add from time to time infootnotes. Only through prolonged factual inquiry, of which little has beenundertaken as yet, can the word ‘knowledge’ be given determinable status withrespect to such questions as: (1) the range of its application to human or animalbehaviours; (2) the types of its distribution between knowers, knowns, andpresumptive intermediaries; (3) the possible localizations implied for knowl-edges as present in space and time. In place of examining such a vague generalityas the word ‘knowledge’ offers, we shall speak of and concern ourselves directlywith knowings and knowns—and, moreover, in each instance, with those par-ticular forms of knowings and knowns in respect to which we may hope forreasonably definite identifications’’ (Dewey and Bentley 1949, p. 48).

Dewey and Bentley define ‘‘knowing’’ as a behavior that entails eithersigning or sign-process (that is the reaction to given signs, coming from theenvironment). There are three types of signs: ‘‘signal’’ (perception, manipu-lations, etc.), ‘‘designation’’ (in this case ‘‘organized language is employed as asign’’), and ‘‘symbol’’ (as in mathematical language). In this framework, wecan consider tacit knowing/knowledge as corresponding to signaling, whileexplicit 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 alsothe ability to recognize given patterns of observations and to perform

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accordingly in order to achieve the desired results (for example in the processof developing a medical diagnosis, or in the implicit learning examples weconsidered).

In scientific activities, this can also imply for example the ability to classifygiven sets of non-verbal and non-numerical data (for example: visual andother purely sensory data) into a sign that can be assigned a precise meaning, ameans to an end (for example in biotechnology, recognizing the similarities ofDNA structures and assigning functions to them). All these activities require atype of knowledge that cannot be made explicit but is not a purely physicalskill or know-how. It is a cognitive, non-physical, kind of tacit knowledge thatcannot be considered a belief, a competence or an acquaintance but can play arelevant role in scientific work. If we look only at knowledge as a product wewould maybe never be able to characterize it according to traditionalknowledge theory. If, on the other hand, we start to pay more attention to theprocesses that lead to this type of knowledge, and we shift our focus ofanalysis to the knowings and knowns Dewey and Bentley referred to, we maybe able to develop our empirical inquiries in a more promising and productiveway.

Acknowledgments This article is a revised version of the paper presented at the InternationalConference Model-Based Reasoning in Science and Engineering (MBR04), held at the Universityof Pavia, Italy (16–18 December 2004) and chaired by Lorenzo Magnani.

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