Conocimiento tácito

Abstract

The concept of tacit knowledge is widely used in social sciences

to refer to all those knowledge that cannot be codified and have to be

transferred by personal contacts. All this literature has been affected by two

kind of ‘‘biases’’: (1) the interest has been focused more on the result (tacit

knowledge) than on the process (implicit learning); (2) ‘‘tacit knowledge’’

has been somehow reduced to physical skills or know-how; other possible

forms of tacit knowledge have been neglected. These two ‘‘biases’’ seem

interconnected one with each other. A greater consideration of the role and

relevance of implicit learning allows us to consider tacit knowledge as

something more than pure physical skills or know how. This is the first step

in order to develop more detailed categorisation of the different forms that

tacit knowledge can assume.

Keywords

Implicit learning

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Knowledge theory

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Skills

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Tacit knowledge

1 Tacit knowledge and its role in scientific reasoning

The belief in the fact that any attempt to model scientific reasoning should

take into consideration the role of tacit knowledge is spreading throughout

the community of research. As a matter of fact, tacit knowledge research is

currently witnessing a tremendous interest by many scholars belonging to

different disciplines such as philosophy, cognitive sciences, neurosciences,

social sciences, economics and so on. The number of books and scientific

papers that deal with tacit knowledge shows a kind of exponential growth,

A. Pozzali (

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Department of Sociology and Social Research, University of Milan, Bicocca, Milan, Italy

e-mail: andrea.pozzali@unimib.it

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Mind Soc (2008) 7:227–237

DOI 10.1007/s11299-007-0034-6

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Tacit knowledge, implicit learning and scientific

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