Debidatta Dwibedi
Ericsson[1] concludes that the superiority of experts is domain-specific. They won’t perform better than average in other domains. Usually, expert performance is proportional to knowledge acquired through training and experience. The superior quality of the experts' mental representations of that domain specific knowledge helps him/her to plan and reason better.
However, it has been observed that more often than not the explanation of experts don't match their actions[2]. Experimentally, baseball players can't track the ball onto the bat because it is a 3 millisecond event. But when baseball hitters are asked for tips they inadvertently spoke of following the ball[3]. This is because while performing the task an expert has an intuitive grasp of the situation based on deep tacit knowledge but uses analytic approaches to justify actions and results[4].
So how can this tacit knowledge be transferred to a non-expert especially when the expert is wrongly interpreting his own actions? While explicit knowledge can be represented and thereafter be easily transferred without the expert's presence, tacit knowledge is unarticulated and cannot be understood without the expert. A human can learn by following an expert's instructions and observing the expert. With enough observation and training he/she becomes as good or better than the original expert. However, his mental representation may be different from that expert. Polanyi believed that while declarative knowledge may be needed for the acquisition of skills, it no longer becomes necessary for the practice of those skills once the novice becomes an expert in exercising them, and when we acquire a skill, we acquire a corresponding understanding that defies articulation[5].
Suppose, we have a system(say a chess playing supercomputer) that competes with an expert(say a Grandmaster) and is able to defeat the human expert. Can one conclude that tacit knowledge(in this case) is representable in form of explicit instructions? Or just that in this particular case, the explicit instructions to the system outdid the tacit knowldege of the expert?