The Tacit Dimension (book by Polanyi)

The Tacit Dimension

Michael Polanyi

The Tacit Dimension

 This book is the transcript of a series of lectures in philosophy given in the 1960s. The author’s background was in chemistry and he came to this topic when thinking about the process of discovery. A key distinction is made between explicit knowledge and tacit knowledge. Explicit knowledge can be spoken about, but tacit knowledge cannot.

 

Two experiments illustrate different aspects of tacit learning and behavior that depends on that learning. In one experiment, a subject was presented with a series of nonsense syllables, and after certain syllables they were given an electric shock. Over time, the subject showed signs of anticipating the shock on hearing those syllables. However, they did not report having determined any pattern to the shocks in post-experiment interviews. This is one example of tacit or subceptive (below perception) learning. In a second experiment, a subject was shocked when they reacted with certain associations to words. These subjects rapidly learned to avoid the “shock” associations, but also were unable to explain how they knew how to avoid the shocks. These seem like good examples of tacit knowledge, where one can know more than one can tell.* Tacit knowledge seems to have a two-part structure; that which is known and that which the knowledge is applied to. The knowledge remains tacit because the subject is paying attention to the result (the shock) rather than the cause (the word).

 Sometimes, tacit knowledge remains tacit because nothing has triggered a need to examine the knowledge. Sometimes, we simply lack the capability to adequately describe what we know. Two simple examples are description of a person’s face and telling someone how to ride a bike. But tacit learning can occur in ways that create physical action. In an experiment, people were exposed to an unpleasant noise. An electrode was placed to track tiny muscle contractions, and these signals were amplified to silence the noise. The subjects were completely unaware of the muscle twitches because the signals were so small. Despite this, they rapidly “learned” to increase the frequency of muscle twitches to silence the noise. This indicates that the mind is able to pay attention to things that the consciousness does not (and maybe cannot) observe, learn from events, and act on that learning. This sort of knowledge-action combination is known as indwelling.  The description of this whole process is very extensive but the key observation is that it is not by looking at things, but by dwelling in them, that we understand their…meaning. Tacit knowledge is more of an “experience” and to gain tacit knowledge we must have experiences. This matches to the concept of practicing in one’s field as the route to mastery. A corollary to this thought is that there is a huge store of information that one generation gains that can’t be “taught” to the succeeding generation; they must learn it for themselves.

 The author goes on to say that this is exactly what happens in the discovery process. The discoverer “knows” what they are going to discover before they become aware of it. Another expression of this concept is that new knowledge emerges from the old primarily tacit knowledge. In fact, the nature of a “good” problem is tacit and is first explored in this tacit (subconscious) way. The creation or discovery of this new knowledge is driven by the imagination of individuals. People trying to discover new knowledge run the risk of being wrong and wasting their time, money and reputation. The “calling” of the new potential is what balances the risk of failure enabling the scientist to begin the effort and requires that the scientist trust their tacit knowledge, intuition and imagination to create a solution to the problem.

 I get the impression that there was an ongoing debate underway that is addressed in this part of the book, but the nature of the debate is not clear. However, this discussion does address some concepts in systems thinking that are worth consideration. The world clearly has a hierarchy of organization with the inanimate world at the base. This is the world of chemistry and physics. At a higher level of hierarchy is biology, with human biology at a yet higher level. This hierarchy is based on complexity, with the human mind being more complex than most other biological forms. What is important about this hierarchy is that a level does not contain the information to create the next higher level of hierarchy. There is nothing in the laws of physics that predicts biology. Nothing in biology that predicts humans, much less the human mind. This is not to suggest that higher levels of hierarchy don’t follow the laws of lower levels, but that they create additional rules. Looking “back”, the origin of higher level rules can be deduced, but higher levels cannot be induced from lower levels. In other words, you can’t logically predict what comes “next”. At the same time, the structure of higher levels may be tacitly present in the world and people may know this before they can speak about it. This is part of the explanation for “flashes of insight” and for the frequency of simultaneous discovery.

 Scientific progress seen after the event may be taken to represent the possibilities that were previously hidden and dimly anticipated in a problem. This does explain how different scientists may independently feel intimations of a particular potentiality, often sighting it by different clues and possibly discovering it in different terms. In 1925, three different scientists independently “discovered” quantum mechanics, and at the time their explanations were thought mutually incompatible. Subsequent work showed that each had illuminated a different aspect of the problem and all were correct, if incomplete descriptions.

 One feature of science common to some other disciplines relates to the concept of a field. Science is divided up into “fields”, and it may be useful to consider this world in two senses. One sense is the geographic; the field is a space where similar things are found. Another sense is the field as a force aligning and powering movement; a magnetic field aligns and moves magnetic particles. Scientific fields exert a force on scientists that scientists may not even be aware of consciously. Nevertheless, under the influence of a principle of mutual control, scientists “agree upon what good science practices are, what constitutes new and valid information, and what the proper approach to sharing that knowledge is. In this sense of the word, a field is a culture (in human interaction terms) that acts on scientific tacit thinking. Scientists all around the world are sensitive to these forces without any discussion of the forces. This can also be observed in fields like law, medicine, and business.

 One of the barriers to progress is perfectionism, particularly when perfectionism acquires a moral dimension. This book was written by a Hungarian who escaped from communist Hungary as an adult. Soviet science was trapped in the Stalinist utilitarian morality and thus often rejected objective reality. The book describes how this perfectionism. While the actual text reflects this historical perspective, it is worth considering how perfectionism plays out in modern society. Business engages in continuous improvement seeking perfect efficiency. Business also seeks to predict the future through market research, econometric modeling and all manner of data collection and analysis. But the description above suggests that it is impossible for business to predict the behavior of a higher order system (society). Perfectionism, which would transform the whole of thought and the entire society, is a program of destruction, ending up at best in a world of pretense….Look  now at the way innovations are achieved by the effort of human thought. This process too can be described as the actualization of certain potentialities. To see a problem and undertake its pursuit is to see a range of potentialities, believed to be accessible. Such heuristic tension appears to be generated in the alert mind….But this tension seems deliberate….It makes choices that are hazardous but always controlled by the pursuit of their intention. Perfection and innovation exist in tension and it may not be possible to achieve both. One of the underlying reasons is that perfectionism may require that everything known be made explicit, and there is no way for humans to do this. With a substantial part of the world certain to be tacit, a certain part of the world will always be uncertain and beyond the reach of perfection. To be innovative is to accept failure.

 Reactions and interpretations

• One of the consequences of computerization and mechanization of society is a growing sense that things should be perfect. When you place an order online, you expect to receive the right item. You do not expect to buy defective goods or to get defective services. Yet each of these processes, whether computer mediated or not, has humans behind it. Humans program the computers, build and maintain (or not) the machines. When did we begin to expect organizations to behave perfectly? How much are we sacrificing in society in striving for perfection? What is the effect of mechanization on the people, whose skills were previously valued but no longer needed? The author makes it very clear that perfectionism can take on a moral absolutism that is ultimately destructive.
• One of the suggestions of this book is that the most important knowledge that we have is tacit. We depend on tacit knowledge for all of our interactions with each other, for our language skills, for doing many of the mechanical actions in our lives (writing, riding a bike, walking, recognizing our family), yet we tend to rate people based on their explicit knowledge (college degrees, etc.). It may be understood that the explicit knowledge is backed by tacit knowledge, but occasionally we see examples that suggest this correlation is false. Whatever the truth of the assertion, it is widely believed that Asian education is superior at teaching explicit knowledge (math, science) but inferior at teaching tacit skills (creativity, intuition). Applied to modern business, it the increase in online education incompatible with the need to transmit tacit knowledge. In-person courses brought people together and provided chances for stories to be exchanged. These stories carried tacit knowledge that could never be conveyed in an online setting, because they were essentially human interaction.
• The “shock” experiments demonstrate how effective humans are at learning without being aware of the fact. Applied in a business culture context, it is easy to see that people are learning from their whole experience of being at work. They are deriving “rules” for proper behavior without any explicit understanding of what the rules are, but with an ability to apply the rules automatically and unconsciously. Thus, leaders hoping to reinforce select cultural attributes must be very aware that what is being said or written is only one part of the information that people are absorbing. The totality of their experience matters and as the example of simultaneous development of quantum mechanics shows, groups of people can develop similar concepts of “reality” without even connecting with each other.

 *text in italics is directly quoted from the book

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pretty wonderful Explanation