Did the Greeks talk about tacit knowledge?
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.
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-ri
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.
