Abstract
Over the years the concept of “tacit knowledge”, introduced in modern epistemological literature thanks to the seminal work of the scientist and philosopher of science Polanyi (1958, 1966), has been applied more extensively in an ever-expanding number of disparate disciplines, which range from psychology to mathematics, from econometrics to religious thought, and from aesthetics to evolutionary economics. For example, if we limit our considerations to strictly economic literature, we find “tacit knowledge” used as an explicatory concept in studies of organisational learning (Nelson and Winter 1982; Fransman 1994; Cohen et al. 1996; Grant 1996; Marengo et al.2000), knowledge management (Nonaka and Takeuchi 1995; Baumard 1999; von Krogh et al. 2000), the role of technology in economic development (Metcalfe 1988; Kogut and Zander 1992; Senker 1995; Nightingale 1998, 2000; Balconi 2002; Koskinen and Vanharanta 2002), and technology transfer and innovation models (Faulkner et al. 1995; Howells 1996; Gorman 2002).
The present chapter is a modified version of Viale, R. & Pozzali, A. (2007). Cognitive aspects of Tacit Knowledge and Cultural Diversity. In L. Magnani & P. Li (eds.), Model-Based Reasoning in Science and Medicine, Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag; and of Viale, R. & Pozzali, A. Cognition, types of “tacit knowledge” and technology transfer. In R. Topol & B. Walliser (eds.) Cognitive Economics: New Trends, Oxford: Elsevier. With kind permission from Emerald Group Publishing Limited. The plural of Knowledge is not grammatically correct but it is introduced in this chapter to represent the varieties of tacit knowledge.
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Notes
- 1.
The paper by Johnson et al. (2002) concentrates above all on a criticism of a theoretic use of the concept of “codification” by Cowan et al. (2000), who argue in favour of complementarity (and not of substitutability) between tacit knowledge and codified knowledge. Nightingale’s paper (2003) is more articulated; it considers a wider number of bibliographical references and accompanies his theoretical arguments with a considerable number of empirical supports, mostly taken from recent cognitive literature on procedural memory and implicit learning mechanisms. However, in his case too, the theoretic and the empirical aspects are woven together and not kept separate.
- 2.
Gorman’s classification admits the possibility that tacit knowledge may be present as a constitutive element of a series of different types of knowledge, such as, for example, heuristics, mental patterns, physical abilities, moral imagination and so on, but it does not concretely specify the modalities with which this can take place.
- 3.
By the way, this explains why in our times, with all the modern technology at our disposal, we are still not able to recreate or emulate Stradivari’s mastery in making violins!
- 4.
Even if it is possible in certain cases to admit that, in the case of language, we can reach the formulation of an explicit rule, the fact remains that the total formalisation and codification of linguistic knowledge has not yet been reached, in spite of the considerable research effort expended over the years.
- 5.
- 6.
In a study of the sociocognitive difference between academic and industrial research, we have hypothesised that the difficulties of collaboration and transferring knowledge are based on the presence of different values in TBK, such as a different evaluation of time, different importance given to money and increased importance attributed to scientific reputation, which generate different decision-making ICRs in terms of risk assessment, treatment of sunk costs, and the falsification or confirmation of hypotheses (Viale et al. 2003)
- 7.
Collins distinguishes five types of tacit knowledge: concealed knowledge, mismatched salience, ostensive knowledge, unrecognised knowledge and uncognised/uncognisable knowledge. Concealed knowledge encompasses all those tricks of the trade, rules of thumbs and practical stratagems that are part of scientists’ experience and that normally are not included in scientific publications and papers. Mismatched salience has to do with the fact that the development of new scientific knowledge usually involves an indefinite number of potentially important variables. Not all the possible variables have the same relevance and different scientists can attribute different importance to the same things. As this differential attribution is made quite often in a semi automatic manner, a scientist can have some difficulty in explaining this to other people. Ostensive knowledge is knowledge that can not be transmitted by words or formulas, but only by direct pointing, or demonstrating (as in the interpretation of radiography and other images). Unrecognised knowledge refers to the possibility that sometimes a scientist can perform aspects of an experiment in a certain way without realising their importance. Uncognised/uncognisable knowledge refers to all those activities that are carried out in an automatic and unconscious way. Of these, concealed knowledge is a type of knowledge that has a tacit character only on the basis of motivational factors related to the specific interests of the subject possessing the knowledge, while uncognised/uncognisable knowledge is difficult to detect empirically. Among the remaining three categories, the one that takes on the most important role is ostensive knowledge, which is substantially a further specification of the concept of skill-like knowledge.
- 8.
It may also be that the category of “tacit knowledge as background knowledge” might not be of great interest from a cognitive point of view, as long as it has more to do with the social mechanisms for knowledge accumulation and transmission than with the individual specific cognitive endowment. Even the actual empirical role of this type of tacit knowledge is something that may be quite difficult to detect and ascertain. For these reasons, from a more applied and empirical point of view, the analysis may be limited to identifying two broad dimensions for tacit knowledge itself: tacit knowledge as competence and tacit knowledge as implicit cognitive rule s (or in other words tacit competence and tacit cognition). In this paper we have decided to stick to a tripartition of tacit knowledge for the sake of completeness, as long as we think that, even if it may be quite blurred and cumbersome, the concept of tacit knowledge as background knowledge cannot be omitted from the analysis completely.
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Viale, R. (2013). Tacit “Knowledges”. In: Methodological Cognitivism. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-40216-6_12
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