Everyday conceptions of object fall: explicit and tacit understanding during middle childhood

Adults make erroneous predictions about object fall despite recognizing when observed displays are correct or incorrect. Prediction requires explicit engagement with conceptual knowledge, whereas recognition can be achieved through tacit processing. Therefore, it has been suggested that the greater challenge imposed by explicit engagement leads to elements of conceptual understanding being omitted from prediction that are included in recognition. Acknowledging that research with children provides a significant context for exploring this "omission hypothesis" further, this article reports two studies with 6- to 10-year-olds, each of which used prediction and recognition tasks. Study 1 (N=137) focused on understanding of direction of fall, and Study 2 (N=133) addressed speed. Although performance on the recognition tasks was generally superior to performance on the prediction tasks, qualitative differences also emerged. These differences argue against interpreting explicit level understanding purely in terms of omission of tacit constructs, and the article outlines alternative models that may account for the data.     

Tacit knowledge management

How can we identify and estimate workers’ tacit knowledge? How can we design a personnel mix aimed at improving and speeding up its transfer and development? How is it possible to implement tacit knowledge sustainable projects in remote areas? In order to answer these questions, it is necessary to distinguish between types of tacit knowledge, to establish what they allow for and to consider their sources. It is also essential to find a way of managing the tacit knowledge ‘stock’ and distribution within the workforce. In short, a conceptual framework is needed to manage tacit knowledge. Based on previous works and 2 years of action research, this paper introduces such a framework and describes its partial application to support the pre-operational training and hiring in a large industrial plant in Brazil. Two contributions emerge from the research. First, the concept of ‘levels of similarity’ is introduced as a means to qualify the experience of workers and estimate the associated tacit knowledge. Second, the capability of carrying out three types of judgement properly and speedily is put forward as being a core ability of those who possess what has been called ‘collective tacit knowledge’ (Collins in Organ Stud 28(2):257–262, 2007). In practical terms, the results indicate the opportunity for companies to capitalize on the experience and tacit knowledge of their workers in a systematic way and with due recognition. Ultimately, positive impacts are expected in their absorptive capacity as well as in their management and human resources systems, accident prevention, productivity and the development of sustainable projects in remote areas.     

Children's conceptions of physical events: Explicit and tacit understanding of horizontal motion

The conceptual understanding that children display when predicting physical events has been shown to be inferior to the understanding they display when recognizing whether events proceed naturally. This has often been attributed to differences between the explicit engagement with conceptual knowledge required for prediction and the tacit engagement that suffices for recognition, and contrasting theories have been formulated to characterize the differences. Focusing on a theory that emphasizes omission at the explicit level of conceptual elements that are tacitly understood, the paper reports two studies that attempt clarification. The studies are concerned with 6‐ to 10‐year‐old children's understanding of, respectively, the direction (141 children) and speed (132 children) of motion in a horizontal direction. Using computer‐presented billiards scenarios, the children predicted how balls would move (prediction task) and judged whether or not simulated motion was correct (recognition task). Results indicate that the conceptions underpinning prediction are sometimes interpretable as partial versions of the conceptions underpinning recognition, as the omission hypothesis would imply. However, there are also qualitative differences, which suggest partial dissociation between explicit and tacit understanding. It is suggested that a theoretical perspective that acknowledges this dissociation would provide the optimal framework for future research.     

Transmuted Expertise: How Technical Non-Experts Can Assess Experts and Expertise

To become an expert in a technical domain means acquiring the tacit knowledge pertaining to the relevant domain of expertise, at least, according to the programme known as “Studies of Expertise and Experience” (SEE). We know only one way to acquire tacit knowledge and that is through some form of sustained social contact with the group that has it. Those who do not have such contact cannot acquire the expertise needed to make technical judgments. They can, however, use social expertise to judge between experts or expert claims. Where social expertise is used to make technical judgments we refer to it as “transmuted expertise”. The various kinds of transmuted expertise are described and analysed.     

Prior experience and complex procedures

The role of prior knowledge in learning complex procedures was investigated in a transfer task in which subjects learned two related procedures in sequence. In Experiment 1, we manipulated the conceptual and structural similarity between the two procedures; in Experiment 2, we manipulated whether the order of the steps within subprocedures was the same or different during training and transfer, or whether the order of the subprocedures was the same or different. The results lead us to hypothesize that transfer in complex procedures is mediated primarily by a memory for specific steps rather than by conceptual understanding or problem solving. In particular, we were able to model the results precisely on the assumption that subjects use superficial similarity to retrieve the sequences of steps needed to perform segments of the procedure.     

The experience of the tacit in multi- and interdisciplinary collaboration

In exploring his concept of interactional expertise in the context of managers of big science projects, Collins identifies the development and deployment tacit knowledge as central, but acknowledges that sociologically, he cannot probe the concept further in developmental or pedagogical directions. In using the term tacit knowledge, Collins relies on the concept as articulated by Michael Polanyi. In coining the term, Polanyi acknowledges his reliance on Heidegger’s concept of being-in-the-world. This paper explores how Polanyi, and so Collins, fails to adequately ground the idea of the tacit in Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology. In so doing, it employs a rereading of Being and Time to phenomenologically resituate the tacit. This resituating of the tacit allows us to go further than Collins in providing developmental and pedagogical approaches to the tacit in the context of the kind of interactional expertise that may be employed to enhance the effectiveness of collaborative, multi-and interdisciplinary teams like those found in team science and in professional settings like healthcare management. As illustrative, the paper provides an example of this resituated understanding of the tacit in the author’s work teaching in a multidisciplinary healthcare management program.     

隐性知识的具身机制、转化与管理

隐性知识是知识经济时代的发展关键,在多个学科的知识体系中占有重要位置。由于隐性知识有内隐表征、主观经验和情境性等多种跨层属性,导致管理学、体育学等学科面临隐性知识转化与管理的难题。隐性知识本质上是具身性的,身体经验与情境的互动为个体在知识系统中归纳与形成隐性知识提供了基础。隐性知识的提取与应用机制为组织对隐性知识的转化与管理提供了桥梁,而隐性知识的具身机制是其提取与应用的依据。本文将基于具身认知理论,结合多个学科的研究证据,对不同情境下的隐性知识提取与应用机制进行分析,旨在梳理出隐性知识的具身机制,并针对隐性知识的未来研究、转化与管理提出建议。     

Tacit Integration and Referential Structure in the Language Comprehension of Aphasics and Normals

Aphasics, brain-damaged patients with no language deficit, neurologically intact elderly subjects, and university undergraduates matched pictures to sentences having compelling tacit implications (e.g., the sentence The fox grabs the hen strongly invites one to assume that the fox will eat the hen). All groups made, for the same sentences, qualitatively similar referential errors consisting in choosing a tacit implication picture. Two auxiliary experiments using the same target sentences in other interpretive situations permitted ruling out the possibility that these errors were due to the putative intrinsic semantic properties of the sentences, showing that the sentences which were most liable to elicit integrative error varied from task to task. These results are interpreted within the conceptual framework which posits that reliable directions for interpretation are couched by the speaker in the very structure of his utterances (the utterance's referential structure) providing the hearer with means to restructure the relevant personal knowledge integrated into the interpretive process in accordance with the speaker's communicative intent. The determination of the referential structure (RSD) of utterances thus seems critical to their correct or, more precisely, conventional interpretation, and, along with the tacit integration of relevant sources of personal knowledge, constitutes the principal cognitive device enabling us to understand each other. But this device appears to be easily corruptible. It is suggested that many errors made by aphasics in language interpretation are due to a failure to follow all referential instructions, but that qualitatively similar failures also occur in normal subjects, though to a lesser degree. Language interpretation is a fallible process and aphasic errors provide remarkable clues for the understanding of its subtle referential mechanisms.     

交互式认知：隐性知识的认知机制

在社会建构论和分布式认知等相关理论的基础上,结合隐性知识的特点提出了交互式认知理论,目的在于揭示隐性知识的认知机制。交互式认知是指不同知识主体认知的相互影响和相互作用的过程,其中师傅带徒弟和实践社区这是企业管理实践中最为常见的两种隐性知识传播形式,     

Tacit Knowledge and Spiritual Pedagogy

Michael Polanyi recognized the relevance of his theory of tacit knowledge to all areas of human understanding, including the religious, spiritual and moral domains. Nonetheless, few if any efforts have attempted to extend his theory's implications into the formulation of a spiritual epistemology. This article examines the possible implications of the concept of tacit knowledge advanced by Polanyi for the development of a spiritual epistemology. Furthermore, due to the relation Polanyi described between a skill and the tacit element of understanding, there are additional implications drawn out in this article for the formulation of a corresponding spiritual pedagogy     

An Externalist Account of Introspective Knowledge

The Content Skeptic argues that a subject could not have introspective knowledge of a thought whose content is individuated widely. This claim is incorrect, relying on the tacit assumption that introspective knowledge differs significantly from other species of knowledge. The paper proposes a reliabilist model for understanding introspective knowledge according to which introspective knowledge is simply another species of knowledge, and according to which claims to introspective knowledge are not, as suggested by the Content Skeptic, defeated by the mere possibility of error. This way of understanding introspective knowledge affords a robust theory of privileged access consistent with semantic externalism.     

Recognizing Racit Knowledge in Medical Epistemology

The evidence-based medicine movement advocates basing all medical decisions on certain types of quantitative research data and has stimulated protracted controversy and debate since its inception. Evidence-based medicine presupposes an inaccurate and deficient view of medical knowledge. Michael Polanyi’s theory of tacit knowledge both explains this deficiency and suggests remedies for it. Polanyi shows how all explicit human knowledge depends on a wealth of tacit knowledge which accrues from experience and is essential for problem solving. Edmund Pellegrino’s classic treatment of clinical judgment is examined, and a Polanyian critique of this position demonstrates that tacit knowledge is necessary for understanding how clinical judgment and medical decisions involve persons. An adequate medical epistemology requires much more qualitative research relevant to the clinical encounter and medical decision making than is currently being done. This research is necessary for preventing an uncritical application of evidence-based medicine by health care managers that erodes good clinical practice. Polanyi’s epistemology shows the need for this work and provides the structural core for building an adequate and robust medical epistemology that moves beyond evidence-based medicine.An erratum to this article can be found at     

The evocative power of words: activation of concepts by verbal and nonverbal means

A major part of learning a language is learning to map spoken words onto objects in the environment. An open question is what are the consequences of this learning for cognition and perception? Here, we present a series of experiments that examine effects of verbal labels on the activation of conceptual information as measured through picture verification tasks. We find that verbal cues, such as the word "cat," lead to faster and more accurate verification of congruent objects and rejection of incongruent objects than do either nonverbal cues, such as the sound of a cat meowing, or words that do not directly refer to the object, such as the word "meowing." This label advantage does not arise from verbal labels being more familiar or easier to process than other cues, and it does extends to newly learned labels and sounds. Despite having equivalent facility in learning associations between novel objects and labels or sounds, conceptual information is activated more effectively through verbal means than through nonverbal means. Thus, rather than simply accessing nonverbal concepts, language activates aspects of a conceptual representation in a particularly effective way. We offer preliminary support that representations activated via verbal means are more categorical and show greater consistency between subjects. These results inform the understanding of how human cognition is shaped by language and hint at effects that different patterns of naming can have on conceptual structure.     

The evolution of epistemology and concepts in an iterative-generative reflective practice: the importance of small differences

Using a contextualist epistemology, it would be expected that regional differences in community psychology would develop over time. It is argued that the epistemology and theory of Western Australian community psychology, while largely based on North American approaches, has developed its own idiosyncracies. These developed through the integration of practice and theory in an iterative-generative fashion. The process of development is conceptualized in terms of Schön's and Altman's distinctions between foundational knowledge, and professional and socially responsive knowledge (I. Altman, 1996; D. A. Schön, 1983). It has also been characterized as an incremental development based on the reflection on tacit and conceptual knowledge. From the small differences that have developed between regions, a dialogue can emerge that will better allow understanding of how social forces shape people's actions.     

Defining and measuring conceptual knowledge in mathematics

A long tradition of research on mathematical thinking has focused on procedural knowledge, or knowledge of how to solve problems and enact procedures. In recent years, however, there has been a shift toward focusing, not only on solving problems, but also on conceptual knowledge. In the current work, we reviewed (1) how conceptual knowledge is defined in the mathematical thinking literature, and (2) how conceptual knowledge is defined, operationalized, and measured in three mathematical domains: equivalence, cardinality, and inversion. We uncovered three general issues. First, few investigators provide explicit definitions of conceptual knowledge. Second, the definitions that are provided are often vague or poorly operationalized. Finally, the tasks used to measure conceptual knowledge do not always align with theoretical claims about mathematical understanding. Together, these three issues make it challenging to understand the development of conceptual knowledge, its relationship to procedural knowledge, and how it can best be taught to students. In light of these issues, we propose a general framework that divides conceptual knowledge into two facets: knowledge of general principles and knowledge of the principles underlying procedures.     

企业组织氛围与组织隐性知识共享之关系研究

本研究旨在考察组织氛围是否与企业中隐性知识的共享存在相关。是否可以以组织氛围的高低来预测企业中隐性知识的共享程度。本研究对辽宁省沈阳市和辽阳市的8家工业企业54个部门(班组)的463名员工组成的样本进行了问卷调查。结果表明,组织氛围的不同维度与隐性知识的不同因子的共享存在相关,组织氛围的不同维度能够在一定水平上预测隐性知识不同因子上的共享程度,但也显示隐性知识的不同因子共享机制并不一致。     

Transdisciplinarity and Conceptual Change

This article tenders an inaugural discussion of how conceptual change theory can contribute to deeper understandings of what is conceptually involved when people attempt (or succeed) to transition from multi- and interdisciplinarity to transdisciplinarity. After explaining the nuances of Newtonian thinking (framed as formal rather than postformal thinking), the article shares a comparison of multi-, inter-, and transdisciplinarity along four dimensions. Special attention is given to Nicolescuian transdisciplinarity, an approach predicated on the new sciences of quantum physics, chaos theory, and living systems theory (rather than Newtonian and Cartesian thinking). Nicolescuian transdisciplinarity is a new methodology for creating knowledge and it comprises three axioms: multiple Levels of Reality and the Hidden Third; the Logic of the Inclusive Middle; and, knowledge as complex, emergent, and embodied. The discussion then turns to an overview of three basic approaches to conceptual change theory: knowledge as theory, knowledge as elements, and knowledge as context. The author then applies conceptual change theory to understand what is involved in moving toward transdisciplinary thinking, including four elements necessary for conceptual change to occur (intelligibility, plausibility, fruitfulness, and dissatisfaction with existing conceptualizations and mental models). The article concludes with the idea that transdisciplinary thinking is a form of postformal thinking (especially paradigmatic order thinking) and suggests that future conceptual shifts toward transdisciplinarity involve achieving a transdisciplinary conceptual tipping point.     

Developing spirituality through the use of literature in history education

This paper demonstrates the significant potential for history teachers to contribute to the development of children’s spirituality through the use of literature within the history curriculum. Using four case studies of history teaching in English comprehensive schools, the paper outlines a holistic approach to the subject – drawing upon art and music as well as literature – to foster children’s capacity for meaning‐making from historical interpretations. The paper argues that history education prepares children for the spiritual by virtue of three elements unique to the subject: First, the subject matter and conceptual content of history provide the context for students to engage with the complexity of questions at the essence of the human condition, establishing a cognitive conflict through which spiritual development is fostered. Second, the subjectivity of historical knowledge allows for the development of a community of ethical enquiry within the classroom through which individuals can explore their own ideas and beliefs as well as those of others. Such enquiry fosters the development of reflexive empathy – the capacity to reflect on one’s own life in the light of understanding the lives of others. Third, the subject provides children with a language through which they can articulate their thoughts, beliefs and feelings. The paper argues that these unique elements are significantly strengthened through the complementary use of literature within history lessons, providing a powerful methodology which fosters children’s spirituality.     

LOGICAL KNOWLEDGE AND GETTIER CASES

Knowledge of the basic rules of logic is often thought to be distinctive, for it seems to be a case of non-inferential a priori knowledge. Many philosophers take its source to be different from those of other types of knowledge, such as knowledge of empirical facts. The most prominent account of knowledge of the basic rules of logic takes this source to be the understanding of logical expressions or concepts. On this account, what explains why such knowledge is distinctive is that it is grounded in semantic or conceptual understanding. However, I show that this cannot be the correct account of knowledge of the basic rules of logic, because it is open to Gettier-style counter-examples.