Abstract
In exploring his concept of interactional expertise in the context of managers of big science projects, Collins identifies the development and deployment tacit knowledge as central, but acknowledges that sociologically, he cannot probe the concept further in developmental or pedagogical directions. In using the term tacit knowledge, Collins relies on the concept as articulated by Michael Polanyi. In coining the term, Polanyi acknowledges his reliance on Heidegger’s concept of being-in-the-world. This paper explores how Polanyi, and so Collins, fails to adequately ground the idea of the tacit in Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology. In so doing, it employs a rereading of Being and Time to phenomenologically resituate the tacit. This resituating of the tacit allows us to go further than Collins in providing developmental and pedagogical approaches to the tacit in the context of the kind of interactional expertise that may be employed to enhance the effectiveness of collaborative, multi-and interdisciplinary teams like those found in team science and in professional settings like healthcare management. As illustrative, the paper provides an example of this resituated understanding of the tacit in the author’s work teaching in a multidisciplinary healthcare management program.
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Notes
The NSF ISPST-SEE Workshop: Acquiring and Using Interactional Expertise: Psychological, Sociological, and Philosophical Perspectives, which took place in Berkeley in August 2010.
I italicize the key conceptual terms in this paper, the implicit, the tacit, the latent, and the unsaid to highlight the fact that I will be providing them with a somewhat different sense than that through which they are understood by Polanyi and Collins and by the traditional uses they are following.
This is Collins’ term for those who have expertise in the area in which they were academically and professionally trained, as opposed to interactional experts, whom Collins demonstrates develop the ability to interact dialogically with contributory experts without formal training and, instead, largely through a process of linguistic immersion in the field, which imparts both content knowledge and tacit knowledge about the field and how experts talk about it, and through reading the literature. Collins also notes in this regard that contributory experts too possess interactional expertise in the sense that they too can converse with other contributory experts, and they too gain understanding in their course of their conversations with other contributory experts. For this reason, Collins has suggested the term “special interactional expertise” for those who develop their expertise without formal training. We will not adopt this terminology in the present paper.
In this work, Collins distinguishes three types of tacit knowledge: Relational, which comprises things like keeping secrets or leaving things out when we do not know what kind of prior knowledge a person has of what we were trying to explain; Somatic, which is the kind of tacit knowledge that resides in our embodiment, examples of which include bicycle riding and car driving; and Collective, which includes the kinds of knowledge that reside collectively in our culture and our society. Examples of this include the kind of knowledge it takes to ride a bicycle smoothly and safely in traffic (as opposed to the somatic knowledge required to balance on a bicycle). The “problem of socialization” is presumably the problem of identifying the specific mechanisms by which those collective understandings are passed on to us as individuals.
Over the last year, I have been involved with a team from the University of Idaho and Boise State University who have had National Science Foundation funding to develop a “Philosophical Toolbox” designed to improve communication in cross-disciplinary communication. Their approach looks specifically at epistemological and metaphysical differences among collaborators that may hinder communication.
Because the multidisciplinary, the interdisciplinary, and the interprofessional are at times difficult to tease apart and because various disciplines and approaches define them differently, this paper will use any reference to one or more to mean any of the three.
SEESHOP workshops are meetings of the Cardiff University group on Studies in Expertise and Experience and their collaborators throughout the world who meet together annually in Cardiff.
The Northern Illinois University Multidisciplinary Health Care Management, Effectiveness and Policy program.
In other words, Polanyi is saying that if we try to focus our attention on what our subsidiary awareness knows, the meaning which that subsidiary awareness carried with it before we turned around to focus on it will change and we will not be able to act on that potential source of information. This position, therefore, does not say that we cannot act on the basis of subsidiary awareness; obviously, we do that all the time. But when we do so, as Polanyi has it, that awareness remains subsidiary and is not focused upon.
Translations of Heidegger’s use of Vorhandenheit by MacQuarrie & Robinson and Stambaugh, respectively.
This is Heidegger’s term for human relatedness to the world. It literally translates there-being.
In his work on Focusing, Gendlin shows us that we can access the implicit by means of a “felt sense” of it cultivated through our bodily awareness (Wạllulis and Gendlin 1994).
Note that a fore-conception is not a preconception in the usual sense of the term. That is, it is not that we hold in mind a concept of something before we encounter it; rather, we hold a definite sense of it, grasp it in advance in a certain way, before we attach a concept to it.
For Heidegger, assertion remains a mode of interpretation insofar as it retains the essential structure of interpretation. That is, the forestructure of understanding recurs in it. Assertion, as the mode of articulation that goes along with knowing, which is a form of being-in-the-world, requires a fore-having of whatever it is that it intends to point out; this pointing out must in some way be grounded in our engaged involvement with the thing to be pointed out. Predication requires the kind of “take” on something provided by foresight that allows it to be given a definite character. And communication, as the articulation of something, will necessarily employ a definite way of conceiving it—a fore-conception.
It is worth noting here how this description of the tacit and its relationship to the implicit aligns with both the phenomenological description of expertise provided by Dreyfus and the description of phronesis provided by Aristotle. Both expertise and phronesis are described as the capacity to get (1) better and better at discriminating between similar situations, and (2) getting better at discriminating what action is called for in those situations. We can now see that these are more properly understood as developing a more discriminating fore-having, foresight, and fore-conception than as the more commonly used metaphor of “pattern recognition” arrived at by the third-person approach offered us by psychology.
I borrow this term from Thomas Sheehan.
In one sense, Heidegger speaks of the meaning of being that holds sway throughout the period of dominant Western metaphysics as time. But in the sense we pursue here, Heidegger also delineates a series of shifts in the way different epochs in the history of the Western tradition have been guided by a dominant sense of the meaning of being. As we outline it in the multidisciplinary healthcare course, the ancient Greeks drew their ontology from the wonder of nature, the sense of things arising into presence, which they captured in terms like ουσια (substance, essence) and φυσις (physical, arising out of itself, as in nature). And so it fell to the thinkers of the age to work out the nature of things physical, the role of things metaphysical, and the place of things produced by human hands, which served as the latent basis for everyday Greek doing, saying, and thinking. By the Middle Ages, the meaning of being had shifted to better “fit” a Christian worldview. The ground of all being was now presupposed as ens creatum; all that is is as created, that is, produced by God. Modernity arises with yet another shift in the meaning of being. Descartes takes up the ens of medieval ontology, but changes its locus, giving us res cogitans (the thinking subject) and res extensa (extended objects). The subject–object ontology persists in structuring the modern relation to being and beings, but as modernity gives way to post-modernity our global sense of that which is is changing. In what Heidegger termed the age of technology, the meaning of being becomes the sense that all there is is there for us as “Enframed” (Heidegger 1977). That which is is everywhere characterized as “standing reserve,” as “resource,” existing as on-hand and being challenged-forth and unlocked, to fulfill its possibility as a resource, a source of energy, production, or yield. That which is enframed is set up, ordered in a complex of orderability, challenged to produce maximum yield with maximum efficiency. Within this meaning of being, the subject and the object lose their primacy, but the subject–object relation becomes dominant. As Heidegger has it, “[T]he subject and the object are both sucked up as standing reserves. That does not mean that the subject–object relation vanishes, but rather the opposite: it now attains its most extreme dominance, which is predetermined from out of Enframing. It becomes a standing reserve to be commanded and set in order” (Heidegger 1977, 173).
The term formal indication comes from the early Heidegger, it was his first attempt to work out a philosophical language that was not “representative,” and that attempted to articulate lived phenomena in such a way as to draw our attention back to the lived-through instead of remaining satisfied with what has just been said about it—the way representation expects us to do. The later Heidegger abandoned the use of the term, though he continued to try various means of addressing things non-representationally.
In this sense, it should be clear that the terms we are using in this paper are to be treated formal-indicatively. The terms tacit, implicit, latent, and unsaid all refer to shared, recognizable experiences that we can draw from in making distinction between them and in relating those to the way in which interpretation operates.
As Plato also noted in the Cave analogy, the one who has turned his soul around and comes back to the cave will find it difficult to convince those who have not experienced the light of the sun of what they are saying. The same is the case for explicating Heidegger’s version of turning the soul around. It will likely take more than this one article to properly get this idea across to readers who have not shared the experience.
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Acknowledgement
I would like to thank Professor Robert C. Scharff for his early comments on this paper and for suggesting the technical terms turning the soul around, really real, and stuff, and Christina Papadimitriou for her close readings of text.
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Stone, D.A. The experience of the tacit in multi- and interdisciplinary collaboration. Phenom Cogn Sci 12, 289–308 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-011-9248-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-011-9248-5