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> activities based on tacit knowledge include recognizing a face, driving a car, riding a bike As far as I know, there are different classes of tacit knowledge

> activities based on tacit knowledge include recognizing a face, driving a car, riding a bike As far as I know, there are different classes of tacit knowledge here: Driving a car, riding a bike etc are learned behaviour, recent in evolutionary time, and might also in a few generations not commonly learned any more, as e.g. riding a horse is uncommon now. But recognising a face (or not being good at it) is innate in human brain structure, and not recent in evolutionary time.

mr_crankypants 7y ago
One that might bridge that gap is learning a language. It's almost certainly much more recent than recognizing a face, but still something humans have been doing for a long time, and is a near-universal human behavior. Like the others, though, it needs to be learned, has a strong cultural component, and tends to happen with the help of others. It's also interesting because there's an entire academic field devoted to its study, and, at least from my peripheral perspective, they seem to be constantly bumping up against Polanyi's Paradox. I've seen more than one academic argue that the set of grammatical rules that we can accurately describe is a subset of the grammatical rules that we use when communicating. Which, if true, is pretty interesting, since language is a social construct - the implication is that we can fabricate and reliably transmit information that we can't actually express.
- SideburnsOfDoom 7y ago
  > the set of grammatical rules that we can accurately describe is a subset of the grammatical rules that we use when communicating Although rules do move from one camp to the other. For instance, people (myself included) find this article fascinating because it makes conscious a rule that English-speakers use unconsciously https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/13/sentence-order-adjectives-rule-elements-of-eloquence-dictionary https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/13/senten...

mr_crankypants 7y ago

One that might bridge that gap is learning a language. It's almost certainly much more recent than recognizing a face, but still something humans have been doing for a long time, and is a near-universal human behavior. Like the others, though, it needs to be learned, has a strong cultural component, and tends to happen with the help of others. It's also interesting because there's an entire academic field devoted to its study, and, at least from my peripheral perspective, they seem to be constantly bumping up against Polanyi's Paradox. I've seen more than one academic argue that the set of grammatical rules that we can accurately describe is a subset of the grammatical rules that we use when communicating. Which, if true, is pretty interesting, since language is a social construct - the implication is that we can fabricate and reliably transmit information that we can't actually express.

SideburnsOfDoom 7y ago
> the set of grammatical rules that we can accurately describe is a subset of the grammatical rules that we use when communicating Although rules do move from one camp to the other. For instance, people (myself included) find this article fascinating because it makes conscious a rule that English-speakers use unconsciously https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/13/sentence-order-adjectives-rule-elements-of-eloquence-dictionary https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/13/senten...