Did the Greeks talk about tacit knowledge?

June 28, 2005 9:40 AM

PhilosophyPhilter. This is kind of obscure, but I'm hoping that someone has some ideas. Did the Greeks have equivalent concepts for what we call 'tacit knowledge,' that is between knowledge that is familiar, habitual, everyday and usually unspoken? If so, did they juxtapose it with 'explicit knowledge'? Thanks!

I'm roughly familar with some 20C philosophical approaches to tacit knowledge (e.g. Heidegger and 'ready-to-hand'; Wittgenstein and 'language-games'; Polanyi and 'tacit knowing'; Bourdieu and 'habitus'; etc.) but could not really find anything pre-19/20C, or anything related to Plato, Aristotle, etc. Maybe the Greeks called it something else, which is why I can't google it. Any suggestions re. web sites and particularly books and journal articles would be most welcome.

posted by carter to religion & philosophy (13 comments total)

Rats. Scratch the surplus 'between' in the original question.
posted by carter at 9:43 AM on June 28, 2005

Well, Plato and platonic schools had the nous (banished by modern philosophers) which apprehends a particular kind of knowledge directly, without the intermediary of the senses.

It's because of the nous and it's relationship to the logos that mathematics and platonic forms are considered to be real, and not just the constructions of humans.

I'm not sure if that's what you were getting at.
posted by sonofsamiam at 10:31 AM on June 28, 2005

Do you mean ideas that are imprinted on the human mind?
If you do, I think Plato referred to this as "The World of Ideas". What follows is a short passage from the mediocre introduction to philosophy known as Sophie's World
"Plato believed that reality is divided into two regions. One region is the world of the sense, about which we can only have approximate or incomplete knowledge by using our five (approximate or incomplete) senses. In this sensory world, "everything flows" and nothing is permanent. Nothing in the sensory world is, there are only things that come to be and pass away.
The other region is the world of ideas, about which we can have true knowledge by using our reason. The world of ideas cannot be perceived by the senses, but the ideas (or forms) are eternal and immutable."

As I understand it Plato thought that every human had an innate understanding of the world of ideas.

Aristotle then went on to say that Plato was completely wrong on that point, and that the world of ideas was created out of the substances that they represented. For example, the substance cow was not created as an imperfect copy of the idea cow, but rather, the idea cow was created by viewings of multiple substance cows. When you think of a cow, or a chicken, or even a train your mind probably conjures an image that represents not a single, specific object but an average of all the objects of that type that you've seen.

In the end, I'm not really sure what I said made any sense or whether it even answers your question.
posted by cyphill at 11:18 AM on June 28, 2005

Metis, usually translated as "cunning"? Can't find a strictly philosophical citation for it now, but James Scott's Seeing Like a State uses "metis" to mean knowledge so tacit it's overlooked. Not sure if that 's a modern recasting, or what you're looking for, but it might be a start.
posted by ellanea at 11:23 AM on June 28, 2005

Thanks, sonofsamian, I *think* nous is kind of what I am getting at. I just went and searched on 'nous' and came up with ('scuse my Greek) an intellectual capacity for apprehending the underlying ideal forms of the universe, or something like that. And this person has some interesting points to make regarding the difficulty of translating between our conceptions of knowledge and what we assume Plato might have meant by nous. So nous is a theory of knowledge or gnosis, but not necessarily one we can claim to understand outside of Plato's context ... As might be the case with metis, too. I'll go check that link.
posted by carter at 11:32 AM on June 28, 2005

cyphill: One of the angles I'm coming at this from is theories of organizational knowledge, computer-supported cooperative work, groupware, etc. To an extent, I think that the Platonic/Aristotelian split is reflected in debate between some of these later theories.

First, there is a group of knowledge management theories that tend to see tacit knowledge as knowledge that has somehow been forgotten but which can be recovered, e.g. through the use of well-designed communication tools, knowledge databases, etc. This approximates roughly to the Platonic approach, maybe.

Second, there's another group of theories which sees the tacit not as 'facts' but as practices and knowledge of how to do something (this is the camp I tend to fall into). E.g. you can tell someone how to ride a bike by saying things like you hold the handlebars, and place your feet on the pedals and move them in a rotary fashion, and squeeze the brakes to stop, but this does not necessarily mean anything to a novice bike-rider, who has not ridden a bike. From a practice point of view, however, maybe you integrate your previous experiences of bike-riding into a model of how bike-riding happens, which is useful to you, but which is in the moment and which may be hard to explain to anyone else. This seems a bit like the Aristotelian model of substances, perhaps.

Cool!
posted by carter at 11:42 AM on June 28, 2005

OK, if that's what you were getting at, maybe check out the Protagoras and Meno, by Plato. In Meno, Socrates leads a slave boy through a mathematical proof, using only questions. He is attempting to show to his interlocuter that knowledge is pre-existent in the soul, and not necessarily learned.

IM totally underinformed O, I used to consider Aristotle in the right, but now I think that Plato was subtler than just postulating some "averaged-out" abstract world. The archetypal forms are, in his thought, prior to the instantiated things we see. The Form is a general tendency or phenomenon, and "real things" are the particular products of the process that is the Logos, in and through which the forms arise. Think fractals, or imagine living in a Mandelbrot set.
posted by sonofsamiam at 1:05 PM on June 28, 2005

the nous/logos split is most directly mirrored in modern philosophy by the understanding/reason split in Kant, I'd say. But Nous (and logos, for that matter) is a really complex and multi-layered concept, and for aristotle, the whole world is "nous nousing itself", essentially, which is very much an influence on Heidegger's notions of being in the world, ready to hand, all that. But it's not as cleanly translated into the more analytic distinctions of tacit and explicit, because the notion of the subject is much less central in greek thought.

Basically, if you're interested in the greek concepts, I'd recommend reading the original texts. There are a number of different forms of knowledge in, e.g., aristotle - including:
nous (traditionally translated "intellect" or "intuition")
logos (traditionally translated "reason", "language", "discourse", etc)
episteme (traditionally "science")
phronesis ("practical wisdom")
sophia ("wisdom")
doxa (opinion, belief)
aisthesis ("sensation" - this is sometimes considered a form of knowledge in the most immediate sense)

I'm sure I'm forgetting some good ones, too... but, the greek philosophers were definitely fascinated by what we know and how we know it, so they had lots of discussions about different ways of knowing. In the Ethics, Aristotle looks at thinking and deliberation as it relates to action and habituation... In the metaphysics, he begins by saying "all human beings desire to understand" and then spends 14 books trying to unpack what that means (the desire part and the understanding part). It's good stuff :)
posted by mdn at 1:24 PM on June 28, 2005

Metis is not a bad suggestion for something bordering on the strategy of the game (see here).

You don't seem interested in known-to-everyone but implicit norms of conduct (e.g. Antigone's "unwritten laws"), so I'll skip that.

Bourdieu first applied term habitus in the context of Erwin Panofsky's Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism, so it goes back via the scholastics to the Aristotelian hexis (of which habitus is simply the Latin translation), the state or disposition so important to Aristotle's ethical theory (see §5.1). I feel quite certain that this is what you want.

My brain is soaked with all manner of other random Greek stuff that comes to mind, though... a different meaning of "things at hand" in a poem of Bacchylides, "Ten thousand are the virtues of men, but one is preeminent of all — to steer the things at hand with a just mind." This is just free association, tho.
posted by Zurishaddai at 1:30 PM on June 28, 2005

You don't seem interested in known-to-everyone but implicit norms of conduct (e.g. Antigone's "unwritten laws"), so I'll skip that.

No no no I am - implicit is good! I should have remembered that 'implicit' is also often opposed to 'explicit' ...
posted by carter at 2:30 PM on June 28, 2005

OK, I knew you were interested in implicit, but I was dubious that you were interested in very articulable and normative and "clear" ordinances, which happen not to be codified in writing by the state (unwritten laws, agrapta nomima). In any case, the speech of Antigone's in question is this one. If it was Bourdieu et al. who inspired this question, I still recommend looking into Aristotelian hexis, and also the book on metis by Detienne and Vernant quoted in my first link
posted by Zurishaddai at 2:57 PM on June 28, 2005

Before this disappears of the front page, I just wanted to say thanks to Zurishaddai and everyone else - these are great answers and invaluable for a Greek philosophical dunce such as myself ... The habit/hexis articles look particularly interesting and I will take those home with me tonight.
posted by carter at 4:05 PM on June 28, 2005

Okay I've marked a couple of 'best' ones but kudos to everyone else, this was really useful!
posted by carter at 7:25 AM on June 29, 2005