Despite going through literature, I would like to start with a rudimentary understanding of the topic through personal observations that would help us dive into the topic without going into a myriad of jargon.
What is tacit knowledge?
Simply put, it is the knowledge that one possesses and yet finds language and communication inadequate to share the same. When you learnt to ride the bicycle, were you told how to ride a bicycle? And would learning the mechanics of riding a bicycle helped you ride one? The truth is its mechanics is fairly complex and yet we are able to learn through direct exposure and by acquiring embodied knowledge.
Expertise?
Well, it is hard to define expertise and yet we are fairly certain we recognise an expert when we see one. Let us continue which this loose idea of an expert who is able to exhibit excellence for a particular skill set.
It does not necessarily imply greatness. And expert artist may not be considered great since greatness is also associated with creativity.
So let us consider a domain where mastery over skill set is sufficient. Say an expert in tennis.
To become an expert one would have to fist undergo a training experience. Initially expertise increases with knowledge set and training. But expertise besides acquiring knowledge set also involves a different knowledge representation. Furthermore, it is also shown that the expertise is domain specific [Ericsson, 1999]. This can be understood through the fact that the practise is also domain specific. While the different knowledge representation is something that tells an expert apart from others.
The role of tacit knowledge in Expertise: Pattern recognition, Hierarchial learning, Prediction and Time scales.
I would like to give my personal opinion here. It is fairly certain that tacit knowledge has a role to play, but how can we understand the nature of its importance? One method, could be by teaching two people with similar skill sets a new task. One will only be given explicit knowledge without any practise, and the other will not be told the rules but watch the game being played by others. It is interesting to imagine what a match between such two individuals will be like.
The tacit knowledge is developed not only from experience (grounding of sensory input) but also from pattern recognition. Perhaps experts are able to better organise the emplicit knowlegde they have in an implicit understanding. What is also seen in varying expertise is that it is always not linear with practice. This may be attributed to a hierarchial learning that relies on forming a pattern over the earlier level patterns while increasing relying less on memory set from practise. What this means is an Expert chess player may only see three feasible moves where another player may see sixty. It is possible that it is because of the extra layer of pattern recognition which rejects moves.
This can also be seen in Physics, while each result may be derived from some first principles, an expert may not always explictily calculate to have a feel for the solution. This is essentially pattern recognition too.
One may note this concept is not directly appilcation to all physical sports where overcoming physical limitations is also vital. Also strategic
sports involve prediction which is something that is similar to extrapolation of patterns. And though there is not enough time to calculate the outcome, one is able to predict by sheer memory of the event, which again shows the importance of practice.
On another note, in the book Blink by Gladwell, experts were able to tell a piece of model to be fake that a lot of scientific tests were unable to find out. This surely shows how tacit learning involves our judgements on a short time scale without having any rational arguments. After all an expert is a person who is able to do things that other algorithmic approaches fail to mimic!