Epistemology, biology and mysticism: comments on 'Polanyi's tacit knowledge and the relevance of epistemology to clinical medicine'.

摘要

Defenders of tacit knowledge may well accept that there is a something paradoxical about attempting to specify the nature of a thing one characterizes as 'unspeciflable', or to describe processes one claims to be 'inarticulable'. There are two ways one could respond to this observation. One could revel in the paradoxical nature of one's project, knowing that some audiences will be attracted to any view that appears deep and difficult. Alternatively, one could modify one's language, noting that features of our knowledge that function tacitly in many contexts can, without contradiction, be made the object of explicit attention in others. So certain features of the clinician's knowledge that enabled the diagnosis of Bell's palsy in Stephen Henry's illustration [1] may have been tacit, but in the context of critical reflection they can indeed be characterized, and rendered intelligible with reference to philosophically and scientifically sustainable accounts of human nature and human reasoning.