Making the Tacit Explicit

Making the Tacit Explicit

STEPHEN TURNERjtsb_500 1..18

The term tacit knowledge is used in a variety of ways, but the most commonmotivation is this: Some activity, inference, or communicative act depends onboth the user and the recipient possessing some inferential element or mechanismwhich allows them to understand, anticipate, co-operate, or co-ordinate withanother. The typical sign of an element of tacit knowledge is that some people canperform the activity, including the activity of inferential reasoning, and otherscannot. On encountering an activity which others can perform one hypothesizesthat there is such an element, and imputes it, or asks those engaged in the activityto explain it. This explanation or imputation makes the knowledge explicit, orseems to, in the least problematic cases.

The idea that the tacit can be made explicit—that not only do we know morethan we can say, but that we can “say” explicitly at least some of what istacit—is the source of a number of deep problems. In this article I will maketwo general points: the first is that the process of making the tacit explicit ismisnamed and misunderstood, and that it can be better understood as a dif-ferent and commonplace kind of explanatory activity resembling translation; thesecond is that the standard views of the tacit stuff underlying tacit knowledge inthe brain are based on faulty analogies and are groundless, but there are alter-natives which deal successfully with the important problem of transmission oracquisition.

TACIT KNOWLEDGE: LOGICAL, PSYCHOLOGICAL, SOCIAL, OR COLLECTIVE?

The concept of tacit knowledge trades on an ambiguity between psychologicaland logical notions. The difference between the two notions of tacit knowledgecan be understood through an example that is marginal to the category of tacitknowledge, but has common features. In the 1980s the following puzzle wasposed:

A man is driving his son to soccer practice. The man loses control of the car and smashesheadlong into a large tree. The father is killed instantly, however the son is still alive but incritical condition. He’s immediately rushed in for surgery for which the hospital was prepared

Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour ••:••0021-8308

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thanks to a police call to the ER. The surgeon takes one look at the boy and says, “I can’t operateon him. He’s my son!”The puzzle: Who is the surgeon?

This was presented as a test of “sexism.” The correct solution was that the surgeonwas the mother of the injured son. To quote from one of the comments on the webversion, “This classic brainteaser works—and it worked on me—because of thehidden assumption that surgeons are male.”

What is a “hidden assumption”? And what sort of claim is a “because of thehidden assumption” claim? It has the surface form of an explanation citing a fact.But what sort of fact is “the hidden assumption”? Is the “assumption” a genuinefact, or simulacrum of a fact, about something in the mind or brain of the personmaking the comment? Or is it merely a kind of comment on the failure of thisparticular inference from the situation to the correct conclusion about the surgeon,with no corresponding psychological fact that resembles an “assumption”? Or is theassumption a transcendentally required condition for the possibility of answeringthe question in this way, and thus entailed by the answer. In short, was this aconclusion we could not have reached without this assumption, so it was “neces-sarily,” in a logical sense, in the mind and is therefore a psychological fact.

The answer seems to be this: it is a kind of comment about the failure of theinference. But if that is all it is, the “because” is insufficiently grounded. The firstgrounding problem is one of indeterminacy: there needs to be some reason tothink that someone has in fact failed to make the correct inference “because” ofthis specific assumption rather than another that would warrant the same wronginference. This is a problem for the idea that it is transcendentally required andthus entailed: it is not “required” in the sense that this is the only “assumption”that could back this inference. It is equally warranted by the assumption thatparents are not allowed to perform surgery on their children, or by many moreassumptions that one could make up for the purpose of justifying the inference.What if the assumption was the more complicated one with the same implicationsfor this case, that mother is an occupational role and that mothers were neversurgeons? This would have the same result—it would account for the failure tomake the inference. But which would be the real assumption? If we are doingEuclidean geometry, we know how the proof works because the assumptions areexplicitly stated. Without an act of assumption, why even think that there is a factof the matter that would decide between the two explanations?

There seems to be no alternative to thinking of the “assumption” as some sortof psychological fact. But what sort of psychological facts are they? This is a littlemore mysterious. “Sexism” is a psychological explanation, or an explanation withpsychological implications: unless there was something corresponding to it in themind of the puzzle-solver, the response to the puzzle would not reveal it. But thereare other possible psychological explanations. Perhaps the person responding tothe puzzle was “primed” by hearing the terms “surgeon” and “man.”1 Perhaps the

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person correctly associated the term surgeon with male on the basis of theempirical experience that “surgeons” usually are male, or associated the answerwith a type, such as an image of a surgeon that was male. Perhaps the prototypetheory of concepts is correct, and the person simply fell into the error of reasoningfrom a prototypical image of a surgeon as male, an error which is natural if theprototype does result from actual experiences of surgeons as predominantly male.In short, the problem of indeterminacy arises both for transcendental or logicalforms of thinking about this case, and causal ones.

If the inference is “natural” for someone, and they have not consciously“assumed” it, what happens when the failure is pointed out to them and they areasked to explain themselves? Do they invent the explanation on the spot, after theproblematic inference is pointed out to them? There are many known cases inwhich people do invent explanations in this fashion, so, on psychological groundsalone this is a plausible and perhaps likely explanation (Wegner, 2002, pp. 171–86).Do they need to use the language of assumptions, or is this just a bit of common folkpsychology? Suppose that this puzzle was posed in a universe in which there wereno women surgeons, in which, therefore, there would never be a reason for thisinference to fail. Would it make sense then to say that there was a hiddenassumption? If so, would it then mean that any feature of the world that allowed forcorrect inference would also need to be treated as a hidden assumption?

THE PSYCHOLOGIZATION OF TACIT KNOWLEDGE

The problem with any kind of ontologization of presuppositions or “assumptions”is that eventually it must return to the hard ground of the causal world. But thereare two families of “tacit knowledge,” each with its own issues in relation to theseproblems. Both appear extensively in the literature. The first is a “collective” formof tacit knowledge. We can, for example, speak of a shared language as a neces-sary presupposition of communication as a form of tacit knowledge, and this casereveals some typical problems with this family. In the case of language there is thecausal fact of language acquisition, and this constrains our theories of languageand our claims about presuppositions. If we treat languages as more or less fixedshared presuppositional structures, for example, there is the problem of languagechange, and how the change in the “language” understood as a shared collectivefact becomes a change in the “language” of the individual speaker. To make theshared presuppositions story work, in the situation in which there is ongoingchange in the presuppositions, one needs a causal story that works like this: thesame presuppositional contents are downloaded into individuals and become notonly transcendental but causal conditions for the things they explain, such ascommunication; this shared content is continually updated by some sort of down-loading mechanism that assures that the downloaded material is the same foreveryone (because sharing is the supposed condition for the thing to be explained,

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such as communication). Obviously there is nothing in the causal world thatconforms to this model, which would require something like a central computer togenerate the presuppositions to be shared and to assure that they were down-loaded to each brain. The question of how these collective tacit things areacquired and modified is thus a central mystery for this conception.

But tacit knowledge need not be conceived of as a collective object, and neitherdoes culture nor even language need to be understood in this way (cf. Davidson,[1986] 2005). Michael Polanyi’s major work was called Personal Knowledge (1958).The example he gave in his earlier work ([1946] 1964) is a starting point, thoughonly a starting point, for understanding the idea of tacit knowledge as “personal.”The example is the personal coefficient of the astronomer—the time it takes anindividual astronomer to record an observation of a star as it appears to moveacross an observation space, which is what allows the star to be located in the sky.The response time of different observers will differ. The difference between theobservations by that observer and the correct location is the observer’s personalcoefficient.

The result of the correction is the objective position. Objectivity, of course, isthe centerpiece of the Kantian picture of knowing, the possibility of which theexistence of categories of space and time is supposed to explain. Here we get adifferent picture, or partial picture, of the problem of objectivity. It is no longer amatter of the individual observer, armed with the categories, which are not publicbut in some fashion built into the cognizing subject, making a correct, objective,observation. It is a matter of acknowledging individual difference, and correctingit to a public standard.

This is a quite different picture of tacit knowledge than the “assumptions”picture. And there is a reason for this. From his first formulations of the conceptof tacit knowledge, Polanyi was determined to ground the idea in genuinepsychology—the concept for him was not a metaphorical or analogical one, likethe notion of presupposition and others from the neo-Kantian tradition, but onewhich was supposed to have actual empirical content. Precognition, focal anddistal awareness, the transmission of tacit knowledge from great scientists to greatscientists in apostolic succession, as well as the core idea that we know more thanwe can say, were things in the realm of psychological reality. Polanyi met regularlywith the psychologist Donald Campbell, and took this part of his thought seri-ously. It is thus worth re-asking whether there is in fact anything psychologicalthat corresponds to tacit knowledge or that would make sense of the possession oftacit knowledge, and then ask how this possession could be converted into some-thing relevant to science.

Polanyi gives some important clues to what tacit knowledge might mean thatconflict with the way the term later is employed and assimilated to the notion ofassumption. Much of his thinking on the subject had to do with the limitations ofour own access to psychological processes—itself an important theme of cognitivescience. His immediate concern was scientific discovery, and he recognized that

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this had something to do with precognition, with the sense that a pattern orexplanation was there; a sense which had to be actualized and focused on in orderto make a “discovery” that could then be articulated and presented in a publicallyverifiable form. A simple and commonplace example of this would be the expe-rience of sleeping on a problem and being able to solve it on awakening. Whateverthe cognitive processes prior to the solution are, they are not accessible to us. Weare not conscious of them, though we may be conscious of some sort of mentaleffort surrounding them. Similarly for attention. Polanyi recognized that some ofwhat we “know” and use to think is outside of the range of things that we areattending to. So he was fascinated by the difference between distal and focused orproximal attention.

This is material that is inaccessible or poorly accessible to consciousness, evenon the most generous construal of the powers of reflection on consciousness, andis indisputably “individual” or “personal.” But Polanyi was also concerned withwhat could be transmitted, as well as the phenomenon of tradition, which for himconsisted of tacit knowledge. In the case of science, he believed that personalcontact was important, and especially important for great science. His slogan,“science is an apostolic succession,” refers to the custom of Bishops laying handson the head of the confirmed in an unbroken chain of such acts of passing oncharisma reaching back to the apostles themselves.

PRECOGNITION AND FUNCTIONAL SUBSTITUTES

This poses the problem of tacit knowledge in a different way. Polanyi thinks of“. . . tacit thought as an indispensable element of all knowing and as the ultimatemental power by which all explicit knowledge is endowed with meaning . . .”(Polanyi, 1966, p. 60). But we have only very limited access to this element ofknowing through introspection, reflection, or even consciousness. Nor can muchof this be articulated. Moreover, there does seem to be something passed on bypersonal contact, or at least some sort of experience that personal contact isimportant for. What is passed on may include, but not be limited to, what comesunder the heading of tradition, which for Polanyi means something growing,changing, and adapting, rather than a sacralization of past habits or a set ofunchanging rituals.

The issue of the occlusion of our mental processes in general is not a thememade central by Polanyi,2 but it can be easily teased out from his remarks on tacitknowledge and precognition. Polanyi’s account of discovery is not limited in itsimplications to discovery itself. It fits an extraordinarily large set of normalexperiences in which we struggle with something—such as the problem of remem-bering a name or face, or figuring out how to make the next step in anargument—through a process that is not accessible to us, but which we know is a



“process” rather than merely a reaction because of the time it takes and ourintermittent awareness that we are bothered because we have not come up withthe name or solved the problem.

In the case of scientific discovery, it seems that we normally know and come toknow something in advance of our recognizing it and articulating it—somepattern is matched, locked onto, and fit with other patterns prior to our becomingconscious of it, or out of sight of our consciousness or will. There is every reasonto think that this is the case more generally: that the data we work with when wedo something conscious or semiconscious like “interpretation” is already largelyconstructed for us tacitly. Put differently, when we use the notion of interpretationbroadly, in the fashion, for example, of Hans-Georg Gadamer or Charles Taylor,to cover the whole meaning-conferring activity of the mind, we are making ananalogy between a more or less explicit process of providing functional substitutesfor passages of text that will make sense for another person with a tacit process ofdoing the same thing. This is a process similar to the repairing of inferences for aspecific audience that we encountered with the sexism example. And it allows fora different account of “making explicit” involving normal social interaction.

Social interaction between individuals requires, for the success of the activitiesin which people engage, some degree of mutual understanding. If mutual under-standing for the purpose of performing particular activities—functionalunderstanding—is not based on “shared assumptions,” if this is only a misleadingmetaphor, what is the source of, and nature of, mutual understanding? Functionalsubstitutability is an important issue for tacit knowledge because it provides a wayof thinking about such things as machine substitutes for tacit knowledge—whatHarry Collins calls prostheses (2010). But it also applies more generally. Differentpeople may perform the “same” acts, such as driving or riding a bicycle, indifferent ways that are functionally equivalent. The same holds for social activitiesand speech. If we are concerned with such a “social” activity as driving, forexample, we are faced with the fact that different drivers have different habits,different experiences, and different styles, and that they notice different things. Tosome extent these differences are smoothed out by training, an explicit process oflearning that provides feedback. But to a large extent the feedback is “wild” andconsists of actual experiences with other drivers and other situations that gobeyond the book or the driving school experience, and are individualized, becausethe individual has different experiences.

Some, indeed many, of these experiences involve other drivers, whose actionsmust be understood. But understanding, recognizing, representing, and so forthare terms that relate to conscious thought. They apply to the actual processes onlyby analogy. And this is a point that acquires a special importance in relation totacit knowledge, for reasons that are made clear if we reconsider the idea ofprecognition: there is a gap between “knowing” in the sense of working througha problem, for example of recognizing a pattern, and articulating this knowledge.The gap in the case of scientific discovery is very large. We struggle with a

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problem, which may be a problem that we have been trying without success toarticulate or which we can formulate but not solve, but our “struggle” may takeplace entirely or largely on the pre-cognitive, preconscious level and with precon-scious materials.

What do we do when we articulate driving advice, for example to a novicedriver? Do we pull something out of a stock of previously unspoken but alreadytacitly present sayings, which make the tacit explicit? Or do we repair inferencesin a way that provides a functional substitute for what we know tacitly for theparticular audience in question, a novice driver doing something that we recog-nize that we would not have done—waited too long to get into the turn lane, forexample—which we can then formulate as practical “knowledge” or a rule whichis a functional substitute for the driving and lane changing habits that we followunconsciously. What we do routinely in interaction, for example, when we restateor paraphrase something that we see was not understood or which the hearermade the wrong inference from. As with explanations of our intentions, we arewell-equipped to invent these on the spot. They tell us nothing about psychologi-cal processes: they are not reports of introspection, nor are they cases of draggingtacit things of the same kind up from the tacit to the explicit. They are functionalsubstitutes for specific needs, needs defined by and of the person we are speakingto, and we guess or hypothesize what saying will serve as the functional substitute,the aid, or the coaching pointer to repair the failure.

REPRESENTATIONS

This account rests very heavily on something that is of little significance in eitherthe bicycle model of tacit knowledge or the idea of collective tacit knowledge:social interaction. And this might seem to create its own regress, back to someform of shared tacit knowledge itself. There is a tradition in social theory ofthinking in this way: social phenomenology as represented by Alfred Schutz, forexample, or ethnomethodology, which would stress that our capacity to inventfunctional substitutes is a product of pre-existing more or less fixed local sharedrules. These accounts run into the same difficulties as those I have outlined above,and are discussed at length in The Social Theory of Practices (Turner, 1994), andelsewhere (Turner, 2002), and I will not discuss them further here. As I haveargued in these texts, there is no good way to convert these accounts into some-thing that can be made consistent with actual brain processes. What is still to beexplained is our capacity for the kind of recognition of the inferences and there-fore inferential “errors” or differences of others which we seem to be so good atspotting and responding to with functional substitutes. More narrowly, is there away of explaining these capacities that does not depend on common tacit knowl-edge or shared tacit objects? And what sort of cognitive or neuroscience realitywould this account connect to?



This also a problem at the heart of the discussion of mirror neurons. Mirrorneurons activate both in the performance of actions and in the perception ofactions. It has long been known that certain brain lesions cause individuals toimitate the bodily movements of others. This suggests—though this is still a matterof hypothesis—that the system underlying action works normally in such a waythat when the system is activated by the perception of an action, the systemprepares to imitate, but the imitative action is inhibited by another mechanismsuch that the same neurons for action are activated but without action occurring.This means of inhibition or taking the system off-line is hypothesized to be the onethat allows for imagination of actions and thus simulation, understood as a brainprocess in which the same neurons for action (which are also those activated byperception) are activated without action taking place. Simulation is thought to bethe means by which we “mind-read,” which thus becomes an off-line processinvolving the same neurons as those involved in perceiving an action of anotherperson as “minded” or intentional (Iacoboni, 2009, p. 106–83).

The processes involved here are not conscious, or, perhaps it would be better tosay, they are part of what is occluded from us about our own mental processes. Butthe language of the explicit intrudes in the usual descriptions of this work, as doesthe issue of the relation between the explicit or conscious and the tacit or implicit.Work on empathy and mirror neurons suggests that “we recognize someone else’saction because we manage to activate our own inner action representations usingmirror neurons” (Keysers, Kohler, Umiltà, Nanetti, Fogassi & Gallese, 2003, p.634). But the “we recognize” and “we manage” in this sentence are misleadinganalogical terms. This process is all tacit and unconscious, though our “recogni-tions” may become conscious. The process combines two mechanisms. We rec-ognize and also improve our capacity to recognize on the basis of our own abilitiesto perform similar actions, and especially “from the massive experience we haveaccumulated over the years in planning and executing self-produced activities”(Blake & Shiffar, 2007, p. 56). Dancers can see things about dance moves thatother people can’t see (Cross, Hamilton, & Grafton, 2006); male and female balletperformers see the typical gender-specific dance moves of their own gender better(Calvo-Merino, Grèzes, Glaser, Passingham, & Haggard, 2006, 1907). The twomechanisms are mirroring or empathy—understood in a very thin sense3—andlearning by doing or habituation.

THE PROBLEM OF REPRESENTATION

But, there is an issue with this way of putting the problem of what the dancers aredoing that is similar to the problems we run into with the idea of shared collectivetacit objects, and it has to do with the term “representation.” The issue is statedby Goldman in connection with the idea of mind-reading:

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Person A “directly” understands the mind of person B if A experiences a mental event thatmatches one experienced by B, and A’s mental event is caused by B’s mental event, via a brainmechanism that can reproduce such matches on similar occasions. (Goldman, 2010, n.p.)

Goldman asks the pertinent question:

Do babies who experience upsetness as a consequence of hearing another’s cry represent thelatter as upset? As undergoing a matching state? That is debatable. If not, then I don’t think it’sa case of either mindreading or interpersonal understanding. For these to occur, the receivermust represent the sender as a subject of a similar state, must impute such a state to the sender.No such requirement is included in [this description of mirroring]. (Goldman, 2010, n.p.;emphasis in the original)

At what point does “interpersonal understanding” occur? For Goldman, it is notat the point of making explicit statements about them, or even of mentallyrehearsing statements about them, each of which would be “social” or refer to aprospective audience, but before this point: at the point of possessing a “repre-sentation” of something that can then be matched to something else coming fromanother person, producing understanding.

It is a short step from this use of the notion of matching representations to theidea of collectively shared representations. This step is implicitly made whenthe term “concept” is substituted for representation. As a philosophical term, theorigins of the term concept are in the idea of an object of thought that is sharedin the sense that it is accessible or can be “possessed” by many people. But arethere such things as representations—or imputations of mental states, for thatmatter? And even if there are,—if the baby has a picture that corresponds to thething being recognized—does it play a role in this kind of interaction? This is atleast one site which allows us to think about the relation between social interactionand shared objects, and to make the relevant distinctions. The larger issue is this:what sorts of mental things are needed to account for interaction? Do we need atleast something substantial that could be shared or matched—a proto-collectiveconcept of some sort—or does this talk add nothing to what other mechanisms,for example mirror neurons plus our capacity to invent functional substitutes inspeech—already provide?

The “contagion” described by Goldman seems to involve some sort of responsein kind: the baby cries in response to the cry of the other baby, rather thanresponding in some other way. But this, Goldman thinks, is not matching becausethere is no “representation” made by the responding baby. The idea of a match-ing representation, however, involves a mysterious process applying to represen-tations. For Goldman, a similar intuition governs the use of the term empathy:contagion is not empathy because the baby is not taking the other baby as anobject to empathize with. The hint that empathy, or imitation, or imputation,must be a process modeled on or very similar to conscious, intentional, andexplicit versions of the same thing is never far from the surface of these discussions,



and this should not be surprising: these are analogies, and making the analogyconvincing requires that as many elements are in common between the analo-gized objects as possible. But we have just seen in connection with tacit knowledgethat this analogy can be completely misleading about the relevant mentalprocesses.

In the case of the baby one sees that there is a serious difficulty in making the“matched representations” picture plausible. Somehow, the baby needs todevelop in such a way that eventually the “in kind” responses transform intorepresentations and imputations. For Goldman these are strictly mental things—they imply nothing about explicit speech or language. The acts of imputing andrepresenting, however, are “explicit”: attributing them to mental objects is ana-logical, with all the problems that kind of analogizing produces. Nevertheless, theanalogizing allows us to build a picture. The picture is that babies respond in kindfirst, perhaps via mirror neurons, and later pass into a stage in which theyrepresent, impute, and thus can be said to understand. Later yet they can articu-late this understanding. But what would a representation be made of, and howwould the baby come to have the same kinds of representations as others? If weare talking about cultural differences, this representation-making activity of thebrain seems to require some sort of mechanism that not only constructs mentalrepresentations, but matches them to the representations in the minds of others.It is a short step from this way of thinking to the idea, as Durkheim famously putit, that society is made of representations, by which he meant precisely this kindof shared, or as he called them “collective,” representations (1982, pp. 108–42).

There is no reason, however, to take this path, that is, to require that the babydevelop in such a way that representations are constructed (somehow) out ofin-kind responses and then synchronized to the culture at large, and then articu-lated (or perhaps in some other order). The only thing compelling us to do so is theanalogy between actual explicit representation and a supposed mental act ofrepresentation that is supposed to serve as the mental backing for articulatedspeech. This is a way of construing the problem that, as Wittgenstein said, is likethinking that there is painted steam inside the painted pot ([1953] 1958, p. 107§297). A simpler account would be this: the baby responds, through the mirrorneuron system, in-kind as “contagion,” and subsequently responds, perhapsthrough the same mirroring mechanism, to articulated speech, which is “under-stood” as intended when the baby comes to connect speech with intention andresponds through the mirror neuron system to intentional actions as a kind. Theuse of speech serves to stabilize or crystallize the mirror neuron systems’ in-kindresponses, and to add to them, as experience adds to the dancers’ ability to discerndistinctions. This in turn produces more or less standardized usages in speech thatcan be constructed by an observer as a language.

What work could mirror neurons do in this? The current evidence is that themirror neuron system is not limited to motion related parts of the brain, but thatmirror neurons are widely distributed in the brain. There is also evidence that the

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kind of imitation that occurs through the mirror neuron system is not limited tomotions: that imitation of goal-seeking works in the same way. Moreover, there isa great deal of evidence about how early in the developmental process babiesbecome attuned to intentions. So it is plausible to think that a great deal of tacitknowledge is acquired before children speak, and that the system is activating“action” neurons as well as allowing for feedback. In short, they know something,and perhaps a lot, about action and understanding others, tacitly. This has aneffect on our way of thinking about action. Representation is traditionally under-stood to be a precondition of action—the act is an attempt to achieve therepresented goal. But if goal-oriented action is already imitated (unconsciously)through the mirror neuron system, it does so before representations, or sharedrepresentations, play a role. The explanatory need for “representations” and theproblem of explaining how the representations got there disappears.

The interesting problem then becomes explicitness. The developing child livesin a world of people whose conduct, including goal seeking, is mirrored in thechild’s mind, in a tacit way. What happens when the child begins to speak aboutmental life? The developmental evidence here is compelling: children apply thislanguage to themselves and to others at the same time, and begin to use the wordsthat relate to mental life in stages. At each stage the situation is the same: theybegin to explicitly impute states to others at the same time they explicitly imputethem to themselves. This is at least suggestive: imputation is something that islearned socially, and the words are applied in the context of mirroring, a situationof mutual in-feeling which provides a basis for understanding the mentalisticwords.

Polanyi’s notion of precognition in scientific discovery provides a model for thissituation of language learning. For Polanyi, in the course of discovery the scientistalready “knows” or has tacitly made the discovery in advance of being able toarticulate it or represent it. Making a discovery involves a struggle to articulate.But it is a struggle to articulate something that is already there, or has already beenarrived at in thought, in a precognitive form. The situation is similar to Goldman’scontagion: the babies know what crying is, and that others are doing the samething. They cannot yet articulate it or “represent” it. But when they are presentedwith the term “cry” in the context of joint attention to the act of crying, they canlearn to articulate their inchoate knowledge. So in language learning they do notneed to rely solely on trial and error to learn the correct words. They can rely onprecognition produced by the experience of mirroring others and “know” thatthey are talking about the same things.

Which of these accounts of the acquisition of common competence to commu-nicate is more plausible? The implausible account is this: that there is “contagion”and other mirror like responses first, then representation, then the matching ofrepresentations with objects, all of which is tacit, and then some sort of additionalmatching of representations to articulate speech, which allows the mental thingsthat are tacit to become explicit. The implausibility comes in at a familiar point:



the matching of representations in one head with those in another head, or in thecollective head in which these shared representations are stored, ready to bedownloaded. The more plausible account, though of course only a sketch, is thatthe kind of non-matching response Goldman calls contagion comes first, getsrefined through feedback, and then, in this more advanced state, gets engagedwith the intentional act of speaking, which in turn, through repeated interactionswith others who provide feedback, produces regularized habits of speech whichcopy the goal-seeking or intentional aspects of the speech that the child is exposedto, and the inferences that others are seen to make. These patterns becomeregularized between people by the same discipline: to understand and to beunderstood one must perform the kinds of speech acts that others understand, andin this way “mean what one says.” They get knit together into a “whole” withinthe individual by virtue of the inferential connections, and, because this whole isin rough but imperfect correspondence to others, there is a loose sense in whichthere is an external “shared” thing, a concept or representation, that correspondsto the individual’s habituated patterns. But only a loose sense, because the mecha-nism is not one which downloads exact copies, but rather downloads matches inbehavior that are good enough for the purposes of interaction, including suchthings as joint attention, and making oneself understood.

REPRESENTATIONS AND “CONCEPTS” RECONSIDERED

In this sketch, representations are superfluous. But of course there is a whole rangeof thinking in which representations do perform explanatory work, and they do so,as Eduard Machery notes, in connection with “the cognitive processes underlyingcategorization, induction, deduction, analogy-making, planning, or linguistic com-prehension” (2009, p. 110). Moreover, representations or concepts are the sorts ofthings we can “make explicit.” And these other cognitive functions raise questionsabout whether we can ignore representations as part of our explanatory account oftacit knowledge and its transmission. The literature in this area, nicely summarizedin Machery (2009) is complex and problematic: it does not yield a clear picture of“concepts” as a psychological phenomenon that integrates the various roles that theconcept of concept has played in past literatures. It specifically fails to provide anysupport for the idea of “matching” representations. The alternative is an even morespeculative and groundless idea: that there is a common pre-established languageof thought that assures that each of us possesses the same stock of representations,which would enable matching. But this idea, even if it was substantiated, would beuseless in explaining the highly specific and differentiated kind of mental contentsthat the term tacit knowledge is used to describe.

The work of a school known as neo-empiricism supports a certain view of thecognitive processes that employ representations, and need to be fitted with apsychology of tacit knowledge. As Machery explains it, the “central insight” of this

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school (Barsalou 1999, p. 586; Prinz 2002, p. 148; Stein 1995) is that “thesecognitive processes involve tokening and manipulating perceptual representa-tions,” and that “retrieving a concept from long-term memory during reasoning orcategorization consists of tokening some perceptual representations. For example,retrieving the concept of dog consists of tokening some visual, auditory, etc.,representations of dogs” (Machery, 2009, p. 110). This amounts to a form of“simulation” or “reenactment” which produces an experience like the originalperceptual experience (Machery, 2009; see also Barsalou, 1999, p. 578; Barsalouet al., 2003, p. 85; Prinz, 2002, p. 150).

The key to this account, however, is the process of retrieval, and what it consistsof. What does one retrieve? A concept? And is a concept a stable object inmemory, or something else. One of Barsalou’s and his students’ experiments(Barsalou, Solomon & Wu, 1999; Wu, 1995)

involves making a tacit concept explicit by listing the properties of the concept.Subjects are presented with a word, for instance, “dog,” and are asked to list the properties thatare typically true of the denoted objects. Psychologists of concepts assume that in this task,subjects retrieve their concepts from their long-term memory and use the knowledge stored inthe concept to solve the task. (Machery, 2009, p. 112)

The results of these experiments, however, show that subjects list different things whenthey list the properties of dogs, that what they list is dependent on the context, that is to sayon such things as the expectations of others. This is not a dramatic finding, but it issuggestive:presumably itmeansthatwhat is in thesubjects longtermmemoryaboutdogs,that is to say something tacit they are making explicit, is personal, a collection of theirperceptual experiences, rather than collective, and certainly not collective in the senseimplied by philosophical theories of concepts as shared objects of thought which oneeither possesses or not, and that the “concept” that comes to mind for them, exhibited inlists of properties, is constructed on the fly out of these materials, rather than sitting in thebrain in some fixed form.

“Matching” is not a part, or not yet a part, of this account. Indeed, there is aproblem with matching and the idea of shared concepts that appears with experi-ments. As Machery summarizes the findings,

on two occasions (two weeks apart), subjects were asked to describe bachelors, birds, chairs, and so on (afeature production task). Overlap in the properties mentioned by different subjects on a given occasionand by the same subject across the two occasions was calculated. Barsalou and colleagues found that only44 percent of the properties mentioned by a given subject were mentioned by another subject and thatonly66percentof thepropertiesmentionedbya subjectonagivenoccasionwerementionedby this verysubject on the other occasion. (Machery, 2009, 23)

Thus there is nothing like “matching” between subjects with respect to concepts,but rather more or less overlap in properties made explicit, and instabilitybetween occasions for the subjects themselves.



Nevertheless, as Machery notes, “Barsalou’s own findings show that the vari-ability of the knowledge we bring to bear in different contexts is small and is thusconsistent with the existence of bodies of knowledge being retrieved by defaultfrom long-term memory” (Machery, 2009, p. 23). These considerations ledBarsalou to argue that “instead of being default bodies of knowledge in long-termmemory, concepts are temporary bodies of knowledge in working memory.According to his proposal, concepts are constructed on the fly so that we canreason, categorize, and so on, in a context-sensitive manner” (Machery, 2009,p. 21). As Barsalou puts it:

a concept is a temporary construction in working memory, derived from a larger body ofknowledge in long-term memory to represent a category, where a category, roughly speaking,is a related set of entities from any ontolological type. . . . Across contexts, a given person’sconcept for the same category may change, utilizing different knowledge from long-termmemory, at least to some extent. (Barsalou 1993, p. 29; quoted in Machery 2009, p. 22)

This applies to much of what falls under the heading of tacit knowledge: notperhaps the evanescent precognitions that the scientist attempts to articulate inthe course of scientific discovery, but to the process of articulation itself, which isa matter of constructing an articulation, on the fly, that is sensitive to context.

The effect of this line of argument is to shift the problem of understandingothers from one of matching representations in order to enable understanding toone of responding to the other as a another thinking, acting, being and using onesempathic capacity to guess successfully how to articulate interventions, explana-tions, and the like (prostheses which are functional equivalents) in order to facili-tate interaction, repair inferences, and so forth. The former requires a set ofcommon representations which can be matched. And this hypothesis requires ananswer to the questions of how these representations are acquired and transmit-ted, how they are kept stable, and more generally how a process like downloadingfrom a common server can be mimicked by the kinds of processes of learning,habituating, remembering, and interacting that humans actually engage in. As Ihave argued elsewhere, there is no good answer to these questions. But there is noneed for an account of concepts, or tacit knowledge, that requires this kind of“collective object” hypotheses.

TACIT KNOWLEDGE RECONSIDERED

What does all this have to do with tacit knowledge as it is normally understood?If we think of the problem of mutual understanding in terms of mind-reading,there would be no need to convey tacit knowledge. The ideal mind-reader wouldalready have access to it. Prostheses, such as claims about assumptions, or aboutwhat someone knows or believes, have a place where empathy fails. When weexplain ourselves to an audience, we guess or hypothesize what it is that would

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make our actions or claims intelligible. We are guessing at what prostheses willenable them to understand us, or us to understand them. We may guess wrong:this is an act akin to discovery or invention. But we are good at doing this, andespecially good at it among people with whom we have learned about languageand the world, because we can rely on our mostly successful ability to think as theydo, and can identify what we would have had to think to draw the conclusionsthey draw.

To say this is to radically separate the explicit from the tacit: it is not a matterof saying what is in the mind. What happens when one makes an assumption“explicit” is simply to say, to a specific audience with specific knowledge andinferential habits for whom this is useful, that whatever the psychological facts ofthe matter are, the people in question are reasoning as if they assumed x. The “asif” assumption statement, the prosthesis, is audience specific and an invention. Wewill be unable to construct this kind of invention, except by lucky accident, unlesswe have some prior understanding of the thinking of the audience that needs theprosthesis.

This leaves the question of the psychological or neuroscience facts of the matterthemselves. But when we add mirror neurons to the story, these facts are already,implicitly, facts about social interaction. Who we are, our skills, competencies,capacities to discern and distinguish, which is to say the conditions of our con-scious thought, are a matter of whom we have interacted with and from whom weacquired, through the twin mechanisms of mirroring and feedback, skills, com-petencies, and capacities to discern and distinguish. The dancers mentionedearlier are who they are for this reason, but the point is more general. It is atraditional idea in the tacit knowledge literature, as noted earlier, that tacitknowledge passes from person to person in the course of close interaction. To theextent that this is true, we, as tacit knowers, are the product of our interactions.

But the boundaries of tacit knowledge are not so precise. We know more, ordifferent things, than the things we get simply through interaction. As with thedancers, there is mirror knowledge and there is feedback. Each works together toform the individual’s unique set of skills, competencies, capacities to distinguish,and so forth. Some of these may be novel and distinctive—a new dance moveinvented consciously and then learned and embodied as a skill, for example—andcan be conveyed to others by the same mechanisms of mirroring and feedback.But there are also skills that we develop without interaction, through feedbackalone, through invention and feedback, and so forth. Of course even these thingsmay have elements from the world of interaction with others. As tacit knowers weare not simply products of our interactions, or of mirroring: there is learning, too.

A few final thoughts of larger significance than the issue of tacit knowledge itselfmight be added. The “as if” character of assumptions talk extends to the problemsthat are generated by this language, such as the regress problem. In psychologicalreality, there is no regress problem, and nothing for transcendental reasoning toreach: there are, rather, inferences that a person makes without reference to any



conscious or introspectively accessible source. Jerome Bruner commented that“when things are as they should be, the narratives of Folk Psychology are unnec-essary” (1990, p. 40). The same point applies to the term “assumptions.” Theyrepair communication and facilitate understanding. They are a crutch that getsone to the point of empathic understanding. To describe one’s own “assumptions”or those of others is merely to engage in an “as if” exercise, in the language of aspecial kind of folk pseudo-psychology, for an audience for whom the addition ofthe “assumption” makes the actions, sayings, or attitudes of the person intelligibleto the other person. But they can only repair communication against the back-ground of other things that are tacitly understood in a way that is functionallyequivalent for both parties. This is as much “empathy” as we need. Bruner’s pointturns the problem of assumptions on its head: the baseline is not the individualknower with a problem of grounding experience, which he or she discovers canonly be done on the basis of assumptions, and communicated only when there areshared assumptions. For Bruner, the problem is communicating and understand-ing others. The baseline is not the individual groping for the intersubjective orcollective conditions of understanding, but the fact that we do understand eachother, that we know what the other person is doing when they act, and soforth—not always, but much of the time, and without a process of conscious orintrospectable reasoning of the sort analogized as the making of assumptions. This“knowledge” is a product of mirror neurons—a neurophysiological “natural” fact,and not a mysterious invented fact, such as a collective tacit object or transcen-dental conditions of reasoning.

As I have suggested, the problem with tacit knowledge is explaining how it istransmitted. Explicit knowledge is transmitted through explicit means: speech,texts, and so forth. To the extent that tacit knowledge is transmitted, it requires,by definition, other means. The problem arises from the analogy between the“knowledge” that is tacit and the knowledge that is articulated when what is tacitis made explicit. If we think that these are the same thing, or more or less the samething, the knowledge will come in the form of articulable assumptions and the like.And we will need an account of transmission that transmits these kinds of thingstacitly. This is where the argument runs into a wall, for there are no such means.The reason, however, is that the explicit statements that people make to enablethemselves to be understood, or construct to enable them to understand others, donot correspond to tacit knowledge. They are, rather, functional substitutes for bitsof tacit knowledge for particular audiences and particular purposes, invented onthe fly.

The idea of tacit knowledge contrasts to this. One cannot read a book to learnhow to read. What one learns in the course of learning to read, perhaps largelythrough some process of mirror neuron imitating and understanding togetherwith feedback, is tacit, and it is knowledge of a “knowing how” kind. One canprovide many partial functional substitutes for this knowledge in the course ofteaching a child to read, for example in the form of coaching pointers about how

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to see words or associate sounds and letters. But the tacit skill of reading as amatter of psychological fact cannot consist in the memorization and application ofthese pointers. A reader who “read” in this way would be unable to read at thespeed of genuinely skilled readers. As the bicycle riding example suggests, this is amatter of individual learning. The mystery aspect of tacit knowledge is entirely aproduct of the mistaken analogy between explicit functional substitutes with an“as if” character and the actual content of the brain.

Stephen TurnerUniversity of South [email protected]

NOTES

1 For a discussion of priming cases see Wegner, 2002, pp. 58, 128–9.2 Wegner gives a much more aggressive account, based on an extensive overview of

psychological research, of the limits and illusions of consciousness, which not only appliesto the case of will, but to such things as the sense of collective belonging. Needless to add,many of his most pointed observations, especially on the phenomenon of individuals’tendency to invent sense-making (and intentionalizing) reasons for behavior that is factdetermined by other things, apply mutatis mutandis to the phenomenon of making tacitknowledge explicit (2002, pp. 171–86).

3 I provide a discussion of the thin sense in “The Strength of Weak Empathy”(forthcoming).

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Barsalou, L. W., Simmons, W. K., Barbey, A., & Wilson, C. D. (2003). Groundingconceptual knowledge in modality-specific systems. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7, 84–91.

Barsalou, L. W., Solomon, K. O., & Wu, L. L. (1999). Perceptual simulation in conceptualtasks. In M. K. Hirage, C. Sinha, & S. Wilcox (Eds.), Cultural, typological, and psychologicalin cognitive linguistics. The proceedings of the 4th conference of the International Cognitive LinguisticsAssociation, pp. 209–228. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

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Anscombe. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.Wu, L. L. (1995). Perceptual representation in conceptual combination (Doctoral dissertation).

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Making the Tacit Explicit