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 can€™t explain how we do it? Abilities like this were called €œtacit 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 Polanyi€™s treatment. In Tacit and Explicit Knowledge, Collins develops a common conceptual language to bridge the concept€™s 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 Polanyi€™s 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