Tacit and Explicit Knowledge

Much of what humans know we cannot say. And much of what we do we cannot describe. For example, how do we know how to ride a bike when we cant explain how we do it? Abilities like this were called tacit knowledge by physical chemist and philosopher Michael Polanyi, but here Harry Collins analyzes the term, and the behavior, in much greater detail, often departing from Polanyis treatment. In Tacit and Explicit Knowledge, Collins develops a common conceptual language to bridge the concepts disparate domains by explaining explicit knowledge and classifying tacit knowledge. Collins then teases apart the three very different meanings, which, until now, all fell under the umbrella of Polanyis term: relational tacit knowledge (things we could describe in principle if someone put effort into describing them), somatic tacit knowledge (things our bodies can do but we cannot describe how, like b