tacit knowledge dances at the edge of words, laughing at our attempts to pin it down.
we sense it without explaining how. feel its boundaries without mapping them. catch its importance without calculating it. the very act of spotting tacit knowledge requires tacit knowledge - meta-knowledge inception at its finest.
this isn't just philosophical foreplay. it's the bedrock of how we understand anything at all. explicit knowledge stands on tacit foundations like skyscrapers on bedrock. we articulate what we can while balancing on what we can't. our fanciest theories rest on unspoken hunches. our cleanest logic begins with messy, unjustified premises.
i ride bikes but can't explain the exact physics of balance. recognize mom's voice instantly in a packed pub but couldn't code that algorithm. feel when a sentence slaps but struggle to articulate why. tacit knowledge lives in our fingertips and muscle memory. it exists beyond our dictionaries and documentation.
polanyi dropped the mic first: "we know more than we can tell." that knowing-how that refuses to become knowing-that. the cookbook versus the chef's intuition. the map versus actually being there. the word versus the vibe.
we write dense papers about it. build frameworks to categorize it. create methodologies to transfer it. all while missing the punchline - our attempts to define the undefinable prove exactly why it's undefinable. each explanation falls short, each model leaves gaps. we're using language to describe language's limitations. drawing maps to explain why maps are inadequate. linguistic ouroboros.
the rabbit hole deepens with qualia. those stubborn subjective experiences that dodge description. the specific redness of red. the exact texture of pain. the precise feeling of falling for someone. i can't upload my experience of blue.exe into your brain. can't airdrop the exact sensation of heartbreak. can't share the precise taste of that childhood memory that lives rent-free in my head.
language shapes what we can even communicate. sapir and whorf were on this this vibe decades ago. our words do more than describe reality - they filter and restructure it. languages without separate terms for blue and green don't just label colors differently - their speakers literally perceive color boundaries through different lenses. the inuit navigate dozens of snow types while the rest of us just see "snow." the limits of my vocabulary become the limits of my expressible universe.
tootsie tomanetz, legendary texas pitmaster, cuts through the academic smoke: "if i used a thermometer, i'd learn to read it and not my hand." her hands contain knowledge that thermometers can't capture. what spreadsheets can't graph. what explicit knowledge can't contain. bbq wisdom lives in fingertips. formulas never compare.
this pattern slips into every domain. the musician who feels the perfect moment to break tempo before they could explain why. the fighter who slips a punch they never consciously saw coming. the writer who cuts a beautiful sentence because it feels wrong without knowing exactly why. the farmer who smells rain coming while meteorologists check their radar.
our modern world worships the explicit and measurable. we digitize, quantify, standardize, proceduralize everything. we believe what can't be measured doesn't exist. what can't be explained isn't real. what can't be transferred isn't valuable. we've built entire economies on the assumption that everything important can be written in a manual or stored in the cloud.
but reality breaks our categories like waves against sand castles. the most vital knowledge refuses our attempts to pin it down like butterflies in display cases. it lives in motion, in context, in relationship. dissolves the moment we try to isolate it.
apprentices learn from masters through proximity, not PowerPoints. watching. absorbing. failing. trying again. the knowledge transfers through osmosis, not instruction manuals. through doing, not describing. the master can't fully explain what they know, and the apprentice can't fully explain what they learn. yet the knowledge jumps between them, wordlessly, like static electricity.
we acquire language itself this way. no toddler masters grammar through flashcards and rules. they absorb patterns, internalize rhythms, feel sentence structures before understanding syntax. we learn to speak by speaking. learn to listen by listening. the grammar textbooks arrive years after fluency.
the communication gap runs even deeper. even if i somehow perfectly articulated my tacit knowledge, you couldn't fully receive it through words alone. your understanding filters through your lived experiences, contexts, embodied knowledge. identical instructions produce wildly different results in different hands. same recipe, different cake.
this isn't mystical woo-woo. it's the fundamental architecture of human cognition. our brains evolved to know without knowing how we know. to recognize patterns without naming them. to feel truth before proving it. consciousness itself might just be the PR department - a storyteller making sense of decisions our bodies have already executed.
cultures preserve tacit knowledge through stories, rituals, practices. through showing rather than telling. through participation rather than lectures. the knowledge of how to live together, how to belong, how to continue. knowledge too intricate for words alone. knowledge that must be lived, not just learned.
we pass tacit knowledge through generations like a flame - delicate, vital, easily extinguished. each generation adds their own understanding without fully grasping the whole picture. the knowledge evolves without ever being fully captured in text or video.
perhaps our mistake isn't trying to define tacit knowledge but expecting any definition to be complete. perhaps we can point to it even if we can't fully capture it. can sketch its shadows and reflections. can track its fingerprints across different domains. can feel its presence in our skills and intuitions.
tacit knowledge stays tacit. the sentence contains its own truth. we understand it through recognition. through experience. through knowing.
we know it when we feel it. that's exactly the point. where words end, knowing continues.