(Column) Two kinds of tacit knowledge

• The Intellectual Production of Engineers p. 202, col.
• 2023-09-16 In “tacit knowledge (knowledge management terminology)” I wrote something in 2018 to the effect of “I wrote this in a column and will put it in Scrapbox when it is published” and forgot about it until now. The names of the philosophers are now written in katakana (I originally thought it would be easier to read that way, but the publisher wanted it differently in the paper).

Two kinds of tacit knowledge

. I think the discussion about the meaning of the term “tacit knowledge” is too abstract and will not lead to much improvement in your intellectual productivity. However, many people seem to be interested in it, so I will explain it in the form of a column.

When Polanyi proposed the concept of what we now call “tacit knowledge (knowledge management terminology)” in his 1958 book “personal knowledge,” he used both tacit knowing and [tacit In Japanese, knowing is also called knowledge. In Japanese, both knowing and knowledge are translated as “knowledge,” so it is difficult to distinguish between the two. A softer translation would be the difference between “knowing implicitly” and “knowing implicitly.

The subtitle of “Personal Knowledge” was “Toward a De-Critical Philosophy. Let us delve into what “critical philosophy” means. [Since Descartes proposed methodic doubt in his Principles of Philosophy in 1644, Western philosophy has emphasized the linguistic process of thinking, “questioning what we take for granted. Kant] considered this doubt (criticism) to be the most important task of philosophy, and he published books that included the word “criticism,” such as Critique of Pure Reason (Kritik der reinen Vernunft) (Kant), Critique of Practical Reason, and Critique of Practical Reason, Critique of Practical Reason, and Critique of Practical Reason, Critique of Practical Reason. judgment criticism]” were published between 1781 and 1790. The term “critical philosophy” in the title of Polanyi’s book refers to this.

Polanyi believed that explicit, linguistic “criticism” was not the only way to create something new, and his 1966 book “Dimensions of tacit knowledge” (originally titled “The Tacit Dimension”) spoke of an implicit, nonverbal dimension that was distinct from the explicit, linguistic dimension. The Tacit Dimension” (originally titled “The Tacit Dimension”) is about the tacit, non-verbal dimension, which is different from the explicit, verbal dimension. In this book, “tacit knowledge is about implicitly perceiving something that will one day be discovered, but for now is hidden.” (p. 48), “a sense of itself that senses that it is closing in on a solution” (p. 50).

Polanyi envisioned primarily the process of scientific discovery. So his ideas are not at odds with those of Descartes and Kant, but probably due to the difference in the nature of the fields: science, where knowledge is gained through hypothesis making and experimentation, and philosophy, where experimentation is not possible. (2023 added: supplemented below)

In his 1996 book “knowledge creation company,” management scholar Ikujiro Nonaka divided knowledge into tacit and formal knowledge based on Polanyi’s ideas, added the dimension of whether knowledge resides in individuals or organizations, and discussed knowledge creation within organizations. Polanyi’s interest is in the knowledge of the individual scientist. While Polanyi’s interest was knowledge creation by individual scientists, Ikujiro Nonaka’s interest was knowledge creation within organizations.

Ikujiro Nonaka believed that individuals, not organizations, create knowledge, and that individual knowledge creation is facilitated by social interaction within organizations. He proposed the following four modes of knowledge transformation. The acronym SECI model is used to represent the four modes of knowledge transformation.

• Collaboration” (Socialization) that turns individual tacit knowledge into organizational tacit knowledge.
• Externalization” to convert tacit knowledge into formal knowledge
• Combination” (turning individual formal knowledge into systematic formal knowledge)
• Internalization” to convert formal knowledge into tacit knowledge

In this context, the term “tacit knowledge” refers to that which is transformed into formal knowledge through representation. It is, so to speak, “empirical knowledge that has not yet been verbalized.” This seems to me to be different from Polanyi’s “a sense of whether or not one is approaching a solution to a problem. On the other hand, there are those who argue that this sense may have been acquired empirically, and therefore Polanyi’s tacit knowledge may be part of Ikujiro Nonaka’s tacit knowledge.

My personal feeling is that we would be closer to solving the problem if we did not try to equate or encompass the two usages.

2023-09-16 Postscript.

Polany envisioned primarily the process of scientific discovery. So his ideas are not at odds with those of Descartes and Kant, but probably due to the difference in the nature of the fields: science, where knowledge is gained through hypothesis making and experimentation, and philosophy, where experimentation is not possible. With this contrast between “science” and “philosophy,” I thought the reader would not know “which side he or she is on. When the reader is solving everyday problems, it falls on the side of “science. As an example of everyday problem solving, consider, for example, a mailbox that does not open and close smoothly, and you try repeatedly tapping, pulling, opening and closing the mailbox. This is a hypothetical example of seeing the problem of “not opening and closing smoothly,” and thinking, “Maybe if I pull it, it will fix it?” and then conducts an experiment to test the hypothesis by pulling it, and verifies the hypothesis by looking at the result that “it did not fix it. This is the hypothesis testing cycle of empirical science. How did you choose to try at this time? Why, for example, did they not choose “pray to God” or “sleep overnight”? Because I implicitly feel that “that doesn’t seem to fix it”. Conversely, you implicitly feel “good” about the “pull” option. On the other hand, since you “tried it and it didn’t work,” you did not know the “right” answer. Therefore, this case is an example of “not knowing what the right answer is, and in a situation where you are searching for it, you are choosing an action according to a feeling that is not explicitly stated.

Descartes says “I think, therefore I am” and so on. This is a story about how he went through the process of thinking about what could be said to be right if he did not believe what he saw to be right, and he thought that “I think, therefore I am” seemed to be right. This is a discussion based on the assumption that it cannot be verified by experiment, so the results of this discussion cannot, of course, be verified experimentally either. Since most readers will not be in a position to believe anything they see or sense with their own eyes, it is a good idea to go through the hypothesis testing cycle of experimental science.

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