Work · Science & Human Sciences
The Tacit Dimension
Three lectures on tacit knowing: we attend from bodily and subsidiary clues to what we focus on, and so know more than we can tell.
Introduction
“The Tacit Dimension” (1966) goes back to the Terry Lectures Polanyi gave at Yale University in 1962. In three chapters – “Tacit Knowing”, “Emergence” and “A Society of Explorers” – he restates the argument of “Personal Knowledge” in compact form. The starting point is the observation that “we can know more than we can tell”: we recognise a face among thousands without being able to say how. Tacit knowing has a from-to structure: we attend from subsidiary clues, including our own body, to a focal object, so that understanding becomes a kind of indwelling. From this Polanyi argues for levels of reality that cannot be reduced to lower ones and for a community of science based on mutual authority and trust. The short book made “tacit knowledge” a widely used term, later also in management and education research.
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