(6.2.5.1) Tacit knowledge: a sense approaching solution

Michael Polanyi believed that humans have a non-verbal ability to sense whether they are close to solving a problem or not. He also believed that this ability is being used to discover linguistic knowledge that has yet to be discovered. He called the feeling of being on the verge of solving a problem ”tacit knowing“.

In the background of this argument, there is a consideration on how creative discovery will occur. Creative discovery is to discover what other people did not think there was. Conversely, discovering what many people think are there is not creative discovery.

The philosopher Plato wrote in his book that if you know what you are looking for, there is no problem, and if you don’t know what you are looking for, you can’t expect to discover anything. The search for knowledge is not like searching through a house for a missing wallet. If you can clearly verbalize what it is you want to find, then you already have the answer.

I think that I can not expect to discover something if I do not know what I ‘m looking for is a bit of a word. You can also discover new things by repeating the cycle of changing and combining existing elements at random and verifying whether it works or not. Life was born about 4 billion years ago and it repeated a verification of random change and “whether it can function - whether it can make offspring” to create a variety of new forms of creatures. Even without intelligence it is possible to create new things. However, an enormous number of trial and error is necessary.

Human intelligence seems to be creating new things more efficiently. Why is this? Polanyi thought that it is because we hava a “feeling approaching solution of the problem.” As a result, we can find new ones more efficiently than random searches, because humans can feel whether they are approaching or solving problems.

(For Japanese readers) I could not find a good Japanese word expressing this “feeling approaching solution of the problem”. The common traanslation of tacit knowing ”ANMOKU-CHI”. However as of 2017 there are two meanings of “ANMOKU-CHI” in Japan. One is “feeling approaching solution of the problem” and another is “empirical knowledge that has not yet been verbalized”. Many people use in the latter meaning.

*32: (Japanese translation) Plato, translated by Fujisawa Reo, Menon, Iwanami Shoten, 1994. *33: This sentence is written as a statement by Meno in the dialogue between Socrates and Meno in the book Menon. It is called the ”Paradox of Menon” or the ”Paradox of Inquiry.”