Three Modes of Knowing

When we speak about research we mean gathering of knowledge, either from theoretical, written or printed sources or directly from the real world or empiria, as researchers call it. This holds true in applied research (on the right) as well as in other factual sciences.

Knowledge is thus essentially a report or a description that tells us how things are in empiria. A depiction of a limited phenomenon is often called a model and a set of models that together portray a large system of phenomena is called its theory.

Ordinary people seldom speak of "theory" but in their daily lives in homes and in work they are continually using knowledge and models, too. Already a small child can translate whatever he sees around him into models like "mother" and will then append to it a growing number of other concepts. Eventually these models grow to contain the rules of family and social life and important values and beliefs which are useful in conventional living. As invariance and as knowledge they are often not much inferior to scientific findings. However, their mode of presentation is different.

The method of a child which gathers knowledge is quite different from the scientific one. Marjo Räsänen (1993) thinks that when investigating a new object or problem a child typically alternates the sensory, the action related, and the conceptual viewing angles. After several iterations, the child arrives to a total and final experience of the phenomenon he is experiencing. Räsänen's diagram (on the right) illustrates primarily a study of an artistic image, but the same principle can be applied to many other processes of human learning as well.

The baby has to construct his first models of the world already before he learns to speak, and naturally such models cannot be very explicit. The same holds true for much of the tacit knowledge that the grown-up uses as the basis of his behaviour in home and in work - it is seldom expressed in exact wording.

For example, everybody knows in his nearest environment a number of products - such as food, clothes and tools, - knows how they are called, for what they are, and (approximately) how you can use them. This kind of knowledge can be called knowing by experience.

Another sort of practical tacit knowledge is the professional skill, know how.

Some characteristics of the above two types of tacit knowledge can be presented as a table. For comparison, we add a third column which characterizes the favorite mode of information in sciences, i.e. so called theoretical or conceptual knowing which is presented as precise words and so exact concepts and models as possible.

Mode of knowing:	Knowing by experience	Knowing how to do, "know-how"	Conceptual (theoretical) knowing
Example:	"The benches in this church are not comfortable."	"I know how to design a good TV couch."	"A suitable seat height for British grown-ups is 44 cm."
Area of validity:	Pieces of knowledge are detached and valid only in one case	Knowledge can be applied in several instances	Knowledge can be applied to all instances of the same type. It contains mainly general rules
Mode of presentation:	The essential sense of "tacit" knowledge cannot be explained verbally	Tradition. Exemplar. Skill of trade. Many important points of these cannot be presented verbally.	The knowledge can be expressed in words and exact models, and it can be printed as a report or as a handbook
Method of teaching the knowledge:	Cannot be taught. Can be learned only by own experience	The master shows how the thing is done; the student imitates the master	Lectures and reading of text-books

Earlier, many scientists especially in the so called positivistic school used to think that tacit knowledge were useless in science. "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent" (Wittgenstein, B, § 78). One reason to this condemnation was the belief that only explicit theoretical knowledge could be effectively tested by the researcher himself and by other researchers. Testing was thought to be essential to the advancement of science because it makes possible to reject untrue information, as is explained in Diachronic View on Arteology.

According to the positivistic doctrine it is the researcher's duty to explicate everything that he studies into plain language and disregard those things that he cannot explicate.

Explicating means translating or paraphrasing tacit knowledge into unequivocal expressions, thus transforming it into conceptual knowledge so that it would be moved, in the table above, into the column on the right.

The difficulty in explicating is that it is arduous and the results remain uncertain because the researcher often misunderstands the content of tacit knowledge, despite of his best intentions.

Lately many researchers have started to search for approaches which would allow exploiting the know-how of the makers of products and the experience of their users, in other words tacit knowledge in its original state, for solving practical problems in the design and fabrication of industrial products. Some possible approaches to this end are the following.

• The complaints and acknowledgments pertaining to a company's products that arrive as letters to the user feedback system could often yield more information than can be read in the text. To gather it, it would be necessary to interview writers of these letters, perhaps by telephone.
• The master-and-apprentice method. As a temporary pupil to a recognized master designer or artisan the researcher can try to imitate the methods of the master and perhaps try to make incremental refinements to them. The apprentice can also ask the master to "think aloud" and he can ask questions such as: Why you are doing it that way? What do you think if I did it this way? The method is similar to Consulting-type Observation, and video recording of the session is usually advisable to allow later inspection.
• Collective research and development is possible for any activity that takes place as team work. Such is the case often in the design, manufacture as well as the use of a product. Special collective research methods for each of these activities are Collective Design, Action Research and Developing the Use of a Product.
  A nucleus in each of these methods is a collective discussion concerning the initial state of things, existing problems and possible remedies to them. Because most participants have previous experience of the activity that is being developed, they thus know what tacit know-how there is about the activity, they can refer to it during the discussion and can use it in order to create proposals for changing things to the better. Often no proposal that would satisfy all the participants cannot be found at once, and the discussion has to be repeated several times. A researcher can participate in the meetings as secretary and methodological advisor.
• Documenting traditional fabrication or use of artefacts as folklore can be worthwhile even when there is no immediate need to decipher the tacit knowledge that these activities contain. It is possible that future generations of researchers will find a use for the recordings which are easy to make with modern camcorders. For methods, see Case Study, Non-systematic Observation or Documenting Objects.
• In the case that the researcher believes to have a grasp of the tacit dimensions in an activity but cannot precisely explicate them, one possibility could be to present them as a work of art, for example as a short story or as an artistic illustration like painting, in order to document at least something of the tacit knowledge that is present in the activity. This approach would certainly be condemned by the positivistic school of scientists, but it has received some support from some philosophers, notably Plato and Husserl, who think that it can be useless to try explicating things that you do not know well. Juha Varto agrees and proposes using a work of art for the first attempts to explicate findings in a field which has not been studied and reported earlier. "If you try to fetch intelligence from nowhere it tends to remain so disjointed and fragmentary, and it expands so uncontrollably, that it is better to use fiction in describing it to others" (2001, 56). This alternative is discussed in Art and Science: Differences and Similarities.

The above are just a few options for exploiting tacit knowledge or converting it to other formats of intelligence. You need not regard them as mutually exclusive alternatives to the standard method of explicating, on the contrary it is usually possible to use several approaches in parallel.

Another question then is, how to handle these different formats of knowledge, record and process them. It is discussed in Tools for Analysis.

March 8, 2005. Original location: http://www2.uiah.fi/projects/metodi
Comments to the author: