Tacit and Explicit Knowledge

Polimorphic actions are actions that can only be executed successfully by a person who understands the social context.

But nearly the entire history of the universe, and that includes the parts played by animals and the first humans, consists of things going along quite nicely without anyone telling anything to anything or anyone.' There is, then, nothing strange about things being done but not being told-it is normal life. What is strange is that anything can be t

Copying the visible behavior that is the counterpart of an observed action is unlikely to reproduce the action unless it is a mimeomorphic action, because in the case of polimorphic actions, the right behavioral instantiation will change with context. Here it will be concluded that, for now and the foreseeable future, polimorphic actions-and only p

Tacit knowledge is knowledge that is not explicated.

This book is, first, an attempt to resolve these confusions and, second, with the resolution in hand, an attempt to produce the coherent account of tacit knowledge.

In spite of the possibility of scientific explanation in principle, it remains true that for most individuals, if not all, that the body is central to the acquisition of knowledge. This, however, says less about the nature of knowledge than has been assumed; what it does indicate is something about the nature of human beings and how they acquire kn

The three-way classification of tacit knowledge-relational, somatic, and collective-is the basis of the new map,

Thus, this book amounts to the completion of a three-book project to analyze knowledge from "top to bottom"-from the nature of expertise to the nature of actions, with the nature of tacit knowledge in the conceptual middle.

We can know more than we can tell.-Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension