Tacit Knowledge & the Knowing-Doing Gap

Primes about how awareness, tacit skill, and cultural knowledge are acquired and why possessing them doesn't guarantee acting on them, spanning cognitive apprenticeship, enculturation, curiosity-driven exploration, cognitive dissonance, and the knowledge-action gap.

9 primes in this family — primes that sit near one another in abstraction space (k-means over structural-signature embeddings). Each is shown with its short description.

• Absorbing State Under Restricted Modality — A state one can enter but not leave with one's available modality of action.
• Awareness — Awareness is the capacity of a cognitive or adaptive system to register a target state or occurrence and make that registration available for discrimination, report, coordination, or context-sensitive response.
• Cognitive Apprenticeship — Making the normally hidden reasoning of experts visible through modeling, coaching, and fading support so novices can internalize tacit cognitive skill.
• Cognitive Dissonance — Conflicting beliefs.
• Curiosity — Drive to explore.
• Enculturation — Learning cultural norms.
• Implicit Knowledge — Unconscious understanding.
• Knowledge-Action Gap — An agent holds accurate knowledge of the appropriate action, sincerely intends to take it, and systematically does not — because knowing and doing are separable load-bearing states and intervention on the knowing channel does not, by itself, change the doing channel.
• Memoing — Producing a parallel, contemporaneous, durable record of the in-flight reasoning that generates an artifact, so the trajectory survives alongside the artifact.