Ken

So many things for a bear with very little brain to consider, but in 
between the honey dips I will try…

 >Curious to see clarification between "tacit knowing" and "tacit knowledge."
I try to use knowing to refer to what is in the actions of people, and 
knowledge to refer to what is an external/explicit representation of that 
knowing. I have not used the term tacit knowledge, but it would make sense 
in my lexicon that it refers to external representations of knowing that 
are not made formally explicit. A story or a designed artifact will contain 
tacit knowledge. A logical argument would be an example of what I mean by 
making something formally explicit.

 >Also curious about distinctions between classes of activities you place 
in single
 >category of tacit knowing. I see at least three kinds of activities:
My position is that we know how to do everything we do. We can also 
represent (make explicit) everything we know how to do, but the quality of 
that representation will vary. Some things we know how to do we may have 
entirely unsatisfactory, or plain wrong, representations for. Knowing of 
all forms can be improved by coaching, but coaching is a thing that people 
do, and is not simply a factor of some explicit representation (theoretical 
or otherwise) of what people know. Explicit knowledge only makes sense 
because we have shared experiences on which to base shared meaning.
Thinking is a practice in this sense the same as any other. We know how to 
think when we think. Thinking can be coached as any practice can be 
coached. I do not agree with your interpretation of Schon (and am drafting 
a paper to that effect at the moment). Schon did not propose 
reflection-in-action as a means of rendering tacit knowing explicit in a 
formal sense. Indeed his basic assumption was “that competent practitioners 
usually know more than they can say” (Schon, 1983: viii), and the goal of 
reflection-in-action was specifically to offer an alternative to the 
epistemology of technical rationality that “fosters selective inattention 
to practical competence and professional artistry” (Schon, 1983: vii). As a 
scholar he recognized the need to communicate knowledge, but he looked to 
step out of formal argument as the basis of conveying professional 
artistry, using instead vignettes and descriptions of what competent 
practitioners actually do when the reflect in practice.
Your ‘hard-wired’ knowing is more problematic to this view of knowing. I am 
not satisfied with my response, but I would say that breathing is not 
something people do. Breathing is a label we give to something people do, 
the bounds of which are not clear or hard-wired at all. Is someone on a 
ventilator breathing?
The issue of PhD research does involve communicating knowledge, and the 
tradition states that this must be formally explicit. As I suggest, and I 
think Schon argues as well, if that is the only form of communication a PhD 
can represent, then the artistry of professional practice will remain a 
mystery. Coyne and Snodgrass (1991) provide a useful perspective on the 
dual knowledge thesis, and my use of the term mystery is taken from them.

 >Before arguing that we can't state anything explicit and useful about tacit
 >knowledge, it's worth probing the boundaries of what we can know and
 >state about tacit knowledge.
I do not suggest that we can never make statements that are explicit and 
useful about tacit knowing (any statement can be useful to some degree), 
but I do suggest that such statements will only ever be a representation 
and that formally explicit knowledge is limited in what it can convey 
specifically because it demands logical argument. As I indicate, I see 
formal reason as one representation, and other forms of explicit knowledge 
are also possible (story-telling, descriptions of what practitioners do, 
etc.). Formal reason is very powerful, but it is only a hammer.

 >You should already be aware of this work, or some of it. You've sent me some
 >very good references by researchers considering these issues. I 
discovered on
 >fine book by Etienne Wenger and Jean Lave through you.
A fine book indeed. To quote from the cover, “By placing emphasis on the 
whole person, and by viewing agent, activity, and world as mutually 
constitutive, they give us the opportunity to escape from the tyranny of 
the assumption that learning is the reception of factual knowledge or 
information.” (Lave and Wenger, 1991). That is to say that knowing is 
something formed by a person active in the world, and that any element of 
that taken in isolation or abstraction provides nothing more than a 
representation of knowing. I think Lave and Wenger support my case, how do 
you interpret the ‘facts’.

 >There is a specific issue you also raise. You state that "we are directed 
that to
 >have credible knowing of something requires first an explicit and credible
 >(formalized) knowledge of it."
 >Who has ever made this claim on this list?
This is how I characterize technical rationality.

 >p.s. One last question. How do we "do" quantum physics or non-Euclidean
 >geometries through action?
We don’t ‘do’ such things, we ‘do’ science and geometry. These are 
practices in their own right. Our knowing of geometry is constituted by 
having agent, activity and world, not some explicit representation of them.

Coyne, R. and Snodgrass, A. (1991) Is designing mysterious?, Design 
Studies, Vol.12, No.3, pp.124-131.
Schon, D. 1983 The reflective practitioner
Lave, J. and Wenger, E. (1991) Situated Learning, Cambridge Uni Press.


--Sid.