The Tacit Dimension¶
Polanyi, M. (1966). The Tacit Dimension. Doubleday.
Cited by¶
8 citations across 8 artifacts.
Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.
Primes¶
- Boundary State Loss
- In craft and cultural transmission, tacit practice — smithing, jazz, surgery, ritual — requires apprenticeship-like overlap, and a book or video is constitutively impoverished, so the practice is lost when the master dies without an apprentice even though every explicit artifact survives.
This sourceStates the principle that "we can know more than we can tell" — the constitutive impossibility of fully encoding tacit, practice-bound knowledge, which underlies apprenticeship-based craft transmission.
- In craft and cultural transmission, tacit practice — smithing, jazz, surgery, ritual — requires apprenticeship-like overlap, and a book or video is constitutively impoverished, so the practice is lost when the master dies without an apprentice even though every explicit artifact survives.
- Formalization
- The defining commitment is a move up the explicitness gradient: replacing "we just know how" with an articulated system whose elements and inference rules are laid out and can be operated on mechanically or audited against.
This sourceSource of 'we can know more than we can tell': a substantial residue of any skilled practice is tacit, so codifying it into explicit form transforms rather than transcribes it, and the formal artifact is a lossy model of the practice.
- The defining commitment is a move up the explicitness gradient: replacing "we just know how" with an articulated system whose elements and inference rules are laid out and can be operated on mechanically or audited against.
- Implicit Knowledge
- Implicit knowledge is grounded in four constitutive components: (1) the unarticulated know-how
This sourceFoundational statement that "we can know more than we can tell": a substantial residue of any skilled practice is tacit, which is why codifying it into explicit form transforms rather than transcribes it, and why the formal artifact is a lossy model of the practice it abstracts.
- Implicit knowledge is grounded in four constitutive components: (1) the unarticulated know-how
- Legacy Integration
- Archiving is the passive preservation of records; legacy integration is the active transfer of knowledge and practice into live institutional operation—a distinction grounded in Polanyi's (1966) recognition that the most consequential knowledge is tacit and lives in practice, not in records.
This sourceFoundational statement that "we can know more than we can tell": a substantial residue of any skilled practice is tacit, which is why codifying it into explicit form transforms rather than transcribes it, and why the formal artifact is a lossy model of the practice it abstracts.
- Archiving is the passive preservation of records; legacy integration is the active transfer of knowledge and practice into live institutional operation—a distinction grounded in Polanyi's (1966) recognition that the most consequential knowledge is tacit and lives in practice, not in records.
- Mediator Availability Constraint
- A budget constraint can be relaxed by capital; an equipment constraint can be relaxed by purchasing; a mediator-availability constraint resists relaxation because expertise is a bounded human capacity that cannot be purchased, borrowed indefinitely, or automated without reducing quality—a structural fact rooted in what Polanyi (1966) called the tacit dimension of knowledge: "we can know more than we can tell," so the expert capacity cannot be fully extracted into manuals, tools, or training corpora.
This sourceFoundational statement that "we can know more than we can tell": a substantial residue of any skilled practice is tacit, which is why codifying it into explicit form transforms rather than transcribes it, and why the formal artifact is a lossy model of the practice it abstracts.
- A budget constraint can be relaxed by capital; an equipment constraint can be relaxed by purchasing; a mediator-availability constraint resists relaxation because expertise is a bounded human capacity that cannot be purchased, borrowed indefinitely, or automated without reducing quality—a structural fact rooted in what Polanyi (1966) called the tacit dimension of knowledge: "we can know more than we can tell," so the expert capacity cannot be fully extracted into manuals, tools, or training corpora.
- Procedure-Work Mismatch
Mechanisms¶
- Entity Definition Workshop
- Its failure mode is that workshops surface only the assumptions people can articulate, and the most dangerous ones are tacit — genuinely known-but-unspoken, the kind Michael Polanyi meant by "we know more than we can tell."
This sourceDefines tacit knowing as knowledge that exceeds what a person can explicitly tell.
- Its failure mode is that workshops surface only the assumptions people can articulate, and the most dangerous ones are tacit — genuinely known-but-unspoken, the kind Michael Polanyi meant by "we know more than we can tell."
- Heritage-to-Principles Translation Workshop
- The workshop shines when the legacy is genuinely valuable but locked in tacit form
This sourceExplains tacit knowledge as knowledge people possess but cannot fully articulate in words.
- The workshop shines when the legacy is genuinely valuable but locked in tacit form
Verification¶
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Links previously used in the corpus¶
Before the registry existed this work was also linked 2 other ways.
- https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/T/bo6035368.html ×2
- https://search.worldcat.org/title/The-tacit-dimension/oclc/374908 ×1
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