Tacit Knowledge Is Language You Can Touch

Two knowings

Explicit knowledge is the codable kind: propositions, symbols, anything you can say. Polanyi named the rest. Tacit knowledge — "we know more than we can tell": riding a bike, the craftsman's hands, the doctor's read of a face. You have it, you use it, and you cannot fully put it into words.

It turns on touch

The standard claim about tacit knowledge is that it can't be put into language at all — that is what makes it tacit. The definition doesn't fight that. It moves the medium. The competence is still articulate, still structured, still a kind of grammar — it has simply left the mouth for the hand. Not language you speak. Language you touch.

Touch is the present's sense

And touch is the one sense that requires the present. Sight and hearing reach across distance — you can see a far hill, hear a far voice. Touch needs contact: here, now, this. So "language you can touch" is language in the tense of the present — proximal, grounded, un-tellable because it has to be done. You cannot speak someone onto a bicycle. They have to touch the knowing into being, in the only place touch happens, which is the now.

The grounded floor

Up top, language is arbitrary: symbols, hierarchies, an alphabet that could have been otherwise. It grounds only where it touches the world — the symbol grounding problem (Harnad): a sign means nothing until it makes contact with what it is about. Tacit knowledge is that ground. It is the grammar that never rose into words — kept in the fingers, the posture, the hands. The memory of a skill is an engram you can only re-touch, never recite.

The hand holds a grammar the mouth can't.

So the pair is clean. Explicit is language you speak; tacit is language you touch. One lives at distance, in symbols, and can be told. The other lives in contact, in the present, and can only be done. Most of what you actually know is the second kind — held where the words run out, exactly where the body meets the world.

A companion to The Logic of the Circle and Kinds of Un-shortcuttability — the place where language stops mapping and starts touching is the same floor those notes keep landing on.