Arbitrarily linked to LO25767 by your host --
Here is a blurb of a paper I wrote a few years ago that might add some
light to the Tacit Knowlege Thread.
In discussing language acquisition, Michael Polanyi clarifies tacit
knowledge by recognizing its existence in three areas.
The first area is referred to as the "ineffable domain" where "the tacit
predominates to the extent that articulation is virtually impossible"
(Personal Knowledge 87). Polanyi describes the ineffable as things we know
in only by doing them. It is the knowledge obtained through mimesis, or
immersion In the second area, "the tacit component is the information
conveyed easily by intelligible speech, so that the tacit component is
co-existive with the text of which it carries the meaning" (87). Polanyi
cites reading a letter as an example of this second area. The text is
subsidiary to the meaning, and as we read, the text, as it were, drops
away and the meaning remains. The third area is the "domain of
sophistication" in which "the tacit and formal fall apart" (87). Polanyi
explains that the domain of sophistication is formed by symbolic
operations which are not fully understood, but described as "a fumbling,"
to be corrected later by our tacit understanding or a "pioneering," to be
followed up later by our tacit understanding" (93). He goes on to say that
both cases incur a "state of mental uneasiness due to the feeling that our
tacit thoughts do not agree with our symbolic operation, so that we have
to decide which of the two we should rely and which we should correct. In
the light of the other" (93). The "uneasiness" that Polanyi describes is
cognitive dissonance, a sensing of anomalies.
" Fumbling" and "pioneering" thus become linked to tacit knowledge, and
dissonance provides the vital information. Gregory Bateson describes such
disturbances as news or signals of boundaries:
"[The mind] can only encounter news of boundaries, news of the contexts of
differences" (240).
According to Bateson,
"The bridge between map and territory is difference. It is only news of
difference that can get the territory to the map and...that bridge must
always be in the form of difference'"(240). Any true change in knowledge,
any deep learning takes place across this bridge.
--maggie griffin <mgriffin@unm.edu>
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