Sharing Tacit Knowledge via Chance-Seeking

According to Polanyi any act of cognition has a tacit component that we cannot fully access or explicitly specify. The author will characterize tacit knowledge by referring to the notion of unknown known. That is, tacit knowledge is that kind of knowledge that people do not know they know, but that nonetheless has an impact on the way people solve problems and make decisions. The problem the author will specifically address in this paper is how tacit knowns as instances of tacit knowledge can be shared. The idea that the author will try to develop is that tacit knowns cannot be communicated, but they can be shared. In illustrating the author’s proposal, the author will refer, first of all, to the idea of docility. The author will describe docility as that disposition enabling people to discover what cannot be told. Secondly, the author will argue that this activity of discovering what one cannot be told is a chance-seeking one. The author will describe chance-seeking as an adaptive process characterized by incremental, hypothetical, and open-ended modifications of the environment, which leads one to his/her goal by means of successive approximations.