The Role of Tacit Knowledge in Expertise

Expert behaviour has been attributed to factors like knowledge, training, experience and special talents. This essay intends to explore the role of tacit knowledge in expert behaviour while disregarding for the moment the role played by talent, which is generally more prominently highlighted.

Tacit knowledge is something that is accumulated independent of consciousness. It can be acquired and implied but is difficult to articulate. Certain “experts” can make correct judgements/predictions like predicting divorces and pre-empt tennis double faults effortlessly. However, their explanation is mostly retrospective and is not always logical or coherent. A lot of baseball players say that they can see the complete trajectory of the ball towards their bat whereas this has been shown to be physically impossible.
Using evolutionary arguments, Reber contends that implicit learning:

1. Predates explicit.

2. Is more resilient to disruption of mental functions.

3. Displays lesser variation among individuals.

4. By virtues of its primitiveness is refractory to conscious control.

The points 2 and 3 above are the ones that are most relevant to our discussion. The robustness of tacit knowledge means that it requires practice and experience to cause significant enough of its acquisition to become an expert. Anders’s conclusion that expertise is domain-specific also suggests the difficulty of modifying it. Expert musicians can often play very well even when they are on a drug induced high (an altered state of consciousness). This hints at the refractory nature of expertise (at least in music).

The ability to make snap decisions is, according to Anders, due to optimal mental representations formed around key domain related concepts that facilitate information retrieval. The efficiency of this task and its apparent post facto inexplicability points to the significance of tacit knowledge in expertise.

References:

1. Anders Ericsson: Expertise (MITECS)

2. Implicit Learning and Tacit Knowledge (Arthur Reber, 1995)

3. Blink (Malcolm Gladwell)

4. Dictionary of Philosophy of Mind, University of Waterloo