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Bicycling on the Moon: Collective Tacit Knowledge and Somatic-limit Tacit

Knowledge
Harry Collins
Organization Studies 2007 28: 257
DOI: 10.1177/0170840606073759

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 Peripheral Vision
- - on the Moon:
Bicycling
- Tacit
Collective - Knowledge and
- - - Tacit
Somatic-limit - Knowledge
Harry Collins

Abstract

Harry Collins The idea of tacit knowledge plays an important role in many areas of academic debate,
Cardiff not least automation and its role in management. Here it is shown that tacit knowledge
University, UK comes in two distinct types, with different causes and consequences. The first kind,
‘somatic-limit tacit knowledge’, has to do with the limitations of the human body and
brain and has no consequences for encoding knowledge into machines. The second kind,
‘collective tacit knowledge’, is more ‘ontological’ than biological, having to do with its
location in the social collectivity. Here the human body and brain’s unique capacity gives
it special access to the tacit knowledge; known and foreseeable machines do not have
this capacity.

Keywords: tacit knowledge, embodiment, social collectivity

The concept of tacit knowledge lives rich, varied and, to some extent, independent
lives in different academic worlds. I come to it from the sociology of scientific
knowledge and from artificial intelligence. The significance of tacit knowledge
for science is that it shows that much of what passed, in traditional philosophy
of science, as formal, logical and calculative is really deeply invested with the
taken-for-granted, the unspoken and the unspeakable. These are things that can
be known only through living the collective life of science, in specific expert
communities, not as universal, immutable, articulated truths, knowable by any-
one, or anything, anywhere. This idea could not survive were it the case, as has
been claimed, that machines are able to make scientific discoveries: thus, the
sociology of scientific knowledge has implications for artificial intelligence, and
Organization artificial intelligence has implications for the sociology of scientific knowledge
Studies (Langley et al. 1987; Collins 1989, 1991; Simon 1991). Of course, understand-
28(02):257–262
ISSN 0170–8406 ing artificial intelligence is important for understanding automation.
Copyright © 2007 Another area that the idea of tacit knowledge bears upon is the debate about the
SAGE Publications role of the human body and brain in what it is to know. I believe that the con-
(London,
Thousand Oaks, tribution of the individual human body and brain has been confounded with the
CA & New Delhi) contribution of collectivities of human beings. In this note, I try to express the

www.egosnet.org/os DOI: 10.1177/0170840606073759

258 Organization Studies 28(02)

characteristics of tacit knowledge in a new way, to make it easier to see something

that is often overlooked — namely, that tacit knowledge comes in two distinct
kinds, involving different roles for the human brain and body. This has different
implications for encoding knowledge into machines, for automation, and hence
for theories of management such as that of Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995).1

Somatic-limit Tacit Knowledge

Why is such a large component of human knowledge known tacitly? Two dif-
ferent reasons are not distinguished in the literature. The first reason is to do
with the limited capacities and particular nature of the human brain and body;
this gives us what I’ll call ‘somatic-limit tacit knowledge’. The second reason is
to do with the relationship between individual humans and society; this gives us
‘collective tacit knowledge’. The two kinds of tacit knowledge are rarely distin-
guished, because they are experienced and acquired by humans in the same
way: through immersion in society and guided practice. Nevertheless, they have
not only entirely different causes, but entirely different consequences.
A sieve ‘knows’ the difference between things that will pass through it and
things that won’t, but the sieve cannot articulate this knowledge. The sieve, in a
manner of speaking, knows what it knows only tacitly. Nevertheless, the sieve’s
knowledge can be articulated. It is possible to measure the size of the mesh,
describe the aim of sieving, and use the results to carry out the sieving by dif-
ferent means — for example, measuring grains and separating them into piles
according to whether their largest dimension is above or below the mesh size.
In so far as there is a formula for anything, there is a formula for sieving. Still,
if that formula were given to the sieve, it would not be able to use it. A sieve can
only sieve by being a sieve, not by knowing what it is to sieve.
What has just been said about sieves and sieving is exactly what Polanyi (1958)
has to tell us about humans and bike-riding. The point is that the rules of bike-rid-
ing, as described by Polanyi, are not tacit because they cannot be formalized, but
because they cannot be made use of by humans when they ride bikes. Most
humans can demonstrate their knowledge of bike-riding only by bike-riding.
Nevertheless, just as in the case of sieving, the knowledge of riding can be articu-
lated and has been articulated by Polanyi himself. Polanyi’s point is that these rules
cannot be used by humans to help them ride. Still, Polanyi’s physics could, in prin-
ciple, be converted into the program of a robotic digital computer that could then
ride a bike. It should not surprise us that robotic bikes have been constructed
(though they use less clumsy methods). The moral is that the knowledge that is
tacit in bike-riding is tacit because of the way humans are made, hence the term
‘somatic-limit’. Somatic-limit tacit knowledge can often be converted into explicit
rules and/or executed by mechanisms such as sieves or robots; it is just that humans
cannot make use of the rules to carry out the behaviours that they represent.
Let us reinforce the point that the problem lies in the humans rather than in the
knowledge, by considering Polanyi’s bike riding problem from the reverse angle,
as it were. Imagine that our brains and nerve impulses were speeded up a mil-
lionfold! Perhaps we would then be able to follow the formally expressed rules.
Collins: Bicycling on the Moon 259

Or, consider the complement of this: suppose we slowed everything down enor-
mously. Suppose the loss of balance happened much less quickly (as in bicycle-
riding on the Moon or an asteroid with a still lower gravitational field). The bike
might fall over so slowly that there would be time to read a set of balancing
instructions along the lines provided by Polanyi, and follow them in the new,
much slower, real time. Bike-riding would then become more like assembling
flat-pack furniture: you hold the instructions in one hand and obey them without
any significant time constraints. The physics of bike-riding would not then seem
so forbidding. Under these circumstances, perhaps even the limited human organ-
ism (which, though limited, does have the ability to follow the rules that sieves
cannot follow) could use an articulated version of the normally tacit knowledge to
ride a bike. (The same idea can be applied to many situations: it would effectively
reduce moving ball games, such as cricket, to stationary ball games like golf,
which can be played by following instructions carefully enough.)
In using terms such as ‘formal’, ‘following instructions’ and ‘explicit’, certain
difficulties are being glossed. For example, it might be objected that even assem-
bling flat-pack furniture is a highly tacit knowledge-laden ability, since one must
already know the language of the instructions, how to apply rules that do not con-
tain the rules of their own application, and how to use a screwdriver. But every
member of every social collectivity requires a set of tacit knowledge-laden exper-
tises just to live in society. These expertises include natural language fluency,
moral and political judgment, a range of sensitivities about physical proximity to
others, appropriate behaviour in a variety of settings and, in our society, the abil-
ity to use a screwdriver. The matter is dealt with at length by Collins and Evans
(2007 forthcoming and www.cf.ac.uk/socsi/expertise) under the heading ‘ubiqui-
tous expertise’ — ubiquitous expertises being those expertises that one needs in
order to be said to be a fluent member of one’s native culture. Still, the phrase ‘fol-
lowing instructions’ has to mean something, and ‘following the instructions for
assembling flat-pack furniture’ is a good enough usage for the current exercise.

Collective Tacit Knowledge

I refer above to the rules of bike-riding ‘as described by Polanyi’. The way
Polanyi describes bike-riding, it is entirely a matter of somatic-limit tacit knowl-
edge and should really be called ‘bike balancing’. Bicycle-riding proper has
additional problems. These have to do with riding in traffic. Negotiating traffic is
a problem that is different in kind to balancing a bike, because it includes under-
standing social conventions of traffic management. For example, it involves
knowing how to make eye contact with drivers at busy junctions in just the way
necessary to assure a safe passage and not to invite an unwanted response. And
it involves understanding how differently these conventions will be executed in
different locations. For example, bike-riding in Amsterdam is a different matter
to bike-riding in London, or Rome, or New York, or Delhi, or Beijing.
Let us work this through with another example, this time drawn from fiction.
In one episode of Star Trek, Commander Crusher shows Mr Data — a clever
android — the steps of a dance. She shows them only once. Most of us would
260 Organization Studies 28(02)

need to practise and practise under Commander Crusher’s guidance before we

could repeat the steps with Commander Crusher’s skill. The scene is amusing
because this is what we are led to expect, yet Mr Data is immediately able to
repeat the steps at speed and without fault. Mr Data has the kind of quick brain
that could also master bike-balancing from Polanyi’s instructions. If Mr Data
has a somatic limit, it is less restrictive than that of any human.
Commander Crusher, impressed by the astonishing facility exhibited by Mr
Data, then tells him that he must simply repeat what he has done, with some
additional improvisation, if he wants to dance with verve on the ballroom floor.
This is where Star Trek goes wrong, because it shows Mr Data managing impro-
visation as flawlessly as he had managed the initial steps. But improvisation is
a skill requiring the kind of tacit knowledge that can only be acquired through
social embedding in society. Social sensibility is needed, to know that one inno-
vative dance step counts as an improvisation while another counts as foolish-
ness, and there is no reason to believe that Mr Data has social sensibility. Social
sensibility does not come through having a quickly calculating brain, but the
kind of brain that can absorb social rules. Mr Data can follow Commander
Crusher’s dance steps because his brain is so fast; tacit knowledge does not
enter into his learning process. He can master the steps after the fashion of a
computer, rather than in the clumsy way that humans would have to master
them. But this won’t work when it comes to the rules of improvisation.
The second kind of tacit knowledge is not a matter of the accident of the
human constitution, but a matter of the knowledge itself. This knowledge has to
be known tacitly, because it is located in human collectivities and, therefore, can
never be the property of the any one individual. The simplest way to see this is
to note that changes in the content of the knowledge belonging to communities
is beyond the control of the individuals within the communities. For example,
the content of the ever-changing argot that children speak, to the irritation of
their parents, is not under the control of any child or parent; it evolves at the col-
lective level and no one knows the rules of its evolution. Sociologists under-
stand this to be what Wittgenstein was talking about when he spoke of
forms-of-life containing rules that, in turn, do not contain the rules of their own
application. The reasons for the tacitness of this kind of tacit knowledge are, as
it were, ontological rather than biological.
To make sure this is right, we must check to see whether there is a bike-
riding-in-traffic equivalent, or dance-improvisation equivalent, of bike-balancing
on the Moon. Is it possible to write sets of instructions that could replace the tacit
social understandings of bike-riding and dance improvisation if only we slowed
time to a crawl? This is the stuff of the artificial intelligence debate: some AI
proponents claim that, say, natural languages could be replaced by sufficiently
ramified sets of rules encoded into large enough computers. Thought experiments,
such as Searle’s Chinese Room or Block’s machine containing all possible con-
versational strings, assume they have shown that the answer is ‘yes’ (Searle 1980;
Block 1981). These imaginary devices are supposed automated language speak-
ers based on look-up tables or computer memories. The Chinese Room is a mas-
sive look-up table of Chinese questions and answers that a non-Chinese speaker
can use to answer questions in Chinese without understanding the language; the
Block machine is a compilation of all conversations that can be constructed from
Collins: Bicycling on the Moon 261

the words in a language that can be accessed to provide an appropriate continua-

tion to any conversational turn. Even if these thought experiments were sound —
and I have argued that they could not work (Collins 1990) — they would fail to
capture the conventions of more than a frozen moment in history. This is because
social conventions are continually changing and the only way to keep up is to be
continually embedded in the society in question. The same applies to bike-riding
in traffic and dancing; the conventions are always changing, so that a single set of
rules, even if such a thing was imaginable, would not last. (It could be argued that
someone could be always at hand to update/maintain the rule-base of the Chinese
Room and Block machine, but in that case all the social intelligence would be in
the attendant, because it would be the attendant that had the responsibility of rec-
ognizing the continuously changing conventions of fluency in the native lan-
guage, and continually updating the machine. As far as the pretence to social life
was concerned, the machine would be, as it were, the attendant’s marionette. Such
an arrangement rather proves the point, that it requires a human in the chain if
social tacit knowledge is to be present.)
The right way to think of collective tacit knowledge is as something that
human individuals, and only human individuals, can acquire, because of their
special and continual access to the location of the knowledge — which is the
social collectivity (Collins 1998). Sieves and robot-bicycles have no access to
collective tacit knowledge, nor, incidentally, do dogs and cats, though they are
in contact with the collectivity on a daily basis: dogs and cats have contact with
the collectivity, but no access to the collectivity. The role of the human brain
and body in collective tacit knowledge is the inverse of its role in somatic-limit
tacit knowledge. In somatic-limit tacit knowledge, it is the brain and body’s lim-
itations that make it that the knowledge has to be acquired tacitly by humans,
whereas other entities can acquire it ‘formally’. With collective tacit knowledge,
it is the brain and body’s unique capacities that allow it to acquire tacit knowl-
edge from the collectivity in the way that no machine can imitate. In the case of
somatic-limit tacit knowledge, humans struggle to acquire knowledge that
belongs, as it were, to the physical domain naturally inhabited by machines. In
the case of collective tacit knowledge, humans are, as it were, unique parasites
specially fitted to take sustenance from a strange and alien species — social
collectivities — in whose domain the knowledge resides.
One of the reasons the two kinds of tacit knowledge are easily confounded is
that they are both absorbed by humans in the same way — through interacting
in society. You learn that a bicycle can be used as an unlikely means of trans-
port, and subsequently learn how to ride, through interaction with others. The
learning process for somatic-limit tacit knowledge is continuous with the learn-
ing process for collective tacit knowledge and that it why it is easy to confound
them. It is not surprising, but it is disappointing, that when Dreyfus and Dreyfus
(1986) analyse the stages involved in learning to drive a car, the discussion of
the two types of tacit knowledge is seamless. The danger of not separating the
two types is, as intimated, that they have entirely different consequences. There
is no deep reason why somatic-limit tacit knowledge cannot be reproduced by
computers and other kinds of machines — it belongs to their world. On the
other hand, there is a deep reason why collective tacit knowledge cannot be so
reproduced — it belongs to the alien species.
262 Organization Studies 28(02)

Note I am grateful to Rodrigo Ribeiro for exceptionally useful critical comments on earlier drafts of
this paper.
1 Confusion between the two kinds of tacit knowledge is apparent in the discussion of the bread-
making machine by Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995) and subsequent authors. An improved analy-
sis is offered in Ribeiro and Collins (forthcoming). Readers who are familiar with Collins and
Kusch (1998) will have noticed that actions that involve collective tacit knowledge are coex-
tensive with what are referred to there as ‘polimorphic actions’; actions that involve somatic
limit tacit knowledge are the ‘complex’ subset of mimeomorphic actions.

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Harry Collins Harry Collins is Distinguished Research Professor of Sociology and Director of the Centre
for the Study of Knowledge, Expertise and Science (KES) at Cardiff University. His thir-
teen books include three research monographs on the sociology of scientific knowledge,
including Gravity’s shadow: The search for gravitational waves (2004, University of
Chicago Press), and two analysing artificial intelligence. The introductory The Golem: What
you should know about science (1993, CUP) was followed by volumes on technology, The
Golem at Large: What you should know about technology (1998, CUP), and medicine, Dr
Golem: How to think about medicine (2005, University of Chicago Press). In 2007 Collins
and Evans’s: Rethinking Expertise (University of Chicago Press) will be published.
Address: Cardiff University School of Social Sciences, Glamorgan Bldg, King Edward
VIIth Ave, Cardiff CF10 3WT, UK.
Email: CollinsHM@cf.ac.uk