Much human knowledge resists explicit prescription and can only be transmitted by example
Evidence
During the 1950s Polanyi turned his attention to another failure of rationalism, developing a social philosophy that accounted for modes of knowing that could not be relayed to others through language alone. Many forms of knowledge, Polanyi argued, cannot be distilled into any simple prescription. Consider, for example, the existence of skills that can be transmitted only by example from master from apprentice. He observed that many such crafts were altogether lost after remaining dormant for a single generation, citing the repeated failures of even the most sophisticated techniques of modern production “to reproduce a single violin of the kind the halfliterate Stradivarius turned out as a matter of routine more than 200 years ago.” Knowledge of the kind that Stradivarius manifested in his work was unspecifi able. Polanyi called this “tacit knowing” and indicated that it could not be subjected to the systematic forms of criticism that were applied to articulate forms. He believed that much of human life could be described in these terms, a fact that accounted “for the possession by humanity of an im mense mental domain, not only of knowledge but of manners, of laws and of the many different arts which man knows how to use, comply with, enjoy or live by, without specifi ably knowing their contents.” — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, 281
Categorization
- DEFINE: Polanyi’s tacit knowing is a defining concept for the antirationalist critique that underpins market skepticism toward centralized planning.
- XREF: Connects to Hayek’s ‘use of knowledge in society’ and the epistemic-arguments lineage of the MPS project. — connects to: Some knowledge forms are intrinsically resistant to being wielded as power; Mass-level genius cannot substitute for specific local knowledge — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 2064; Experiential and analytical knowledge fused cannot be gained through books alone. — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 179
- CANDY: The Stradivarius violin point is a memorable, shareable tidbit about crafts lost when knowledge goes unarticulated.