Tacit Knowledge
Michael Polanyi introduced tacit knowledge in Personal Knowledge (1958) and developed it in The Tacit Dimension (1966). The core insight: “We can know more than we can tell.”
You recognize a face among thousands but can’t describe how. You ride a bicycle but can’t explain the physics of balance. You catch a ball by computing trajectories your conscious mind can’t articulate. The knowledge is real — it produces results — but it resists explicit formulation.
Polanyi distinguished focal from subsidiary awareness. When hammering a nail, your focal awareness is on the nail. Your subsidiary awareness is in your hand, feeling the hammer’s weight, sensing impact, adjusting force. If you shift focal attention to your hand, you lose the nail. The subsidiary knowledge works precisely because it’s not explicit.
Skills transfer this way. The master potter doesn’t lecture on finger pressure. The apprentice watches, imitates, adjusts. Something passes that language can’t carry. The tradition persists in bodies — books can’t hold it.
Science struggles with this. The explicit, reproducible method is the ideal. But labs transmit technique through apprenticeship — watching how the senior researcher handles equipment, sensing what “looks right” in an experiment. The paper describes the method. The method isn’t quite in the paper.
Tacit knowledge creates bottlenecks and moats. If expertise can’t be written down, it can’t be scaled. The master must be present. The tacit component limits transfer to those who can watch and practice alongside.
This explains why some skills resist automation while seemingly harder tasks succumb. Chess fell to computers. Folding laundry didn’t. The explicit (chess rules) yields to computation. The tacit (knowing how cloth drapes) remains stubbornly human.
Polanyi’s deeper claim: all knowledge rests on tacit foundations. Even explicit rules require tacit understanding of how to apply them. The explicit floats on a sea of the tacit.
Go Deeper
Books
- The Tacit Dimension by Michael Polanyi — The 1966 original. Short, dense, foundational. Start here.
- Personal Knowledge by Michael Polanyi — The fuller treatment (1958). Argues all knowledge rests on tacit foundations.
- Knowing and Being edited by Marjorie Grene — Collected essays spanning Polanyi’s thinking.
- Making by Tim Ingold — Anthropologist explores how knowledge lives in materials and practice.
Essays
- “The Republic of Science” by Michael Polanyi — How scientific communities transmit what can’t be written down.
Films
- Jiro Dreams of Sushi (2011) — Watch tacit knowledge in action. Ten years to learn to cook rice. The documentary.
Related: [[chunking]], [[apprenticeship]], [[implicit-learning]], [[craft]], [[deliberate-practice]]