Is Tacit Knowing an Uncertainty or an Answer to Science Education? –Michael
Polanyi Revisited.
HSIAO-YU CHEN
Faculty Development & Instructional Resources Center, Fu-Jen Catholic University,
Taipei County 24205, Taiwan.
SUFEN CHEN
Graduate School of Technological and Vocational Education, National Taiwan
University of Science and Technology, Taipei 10607, Taiwan.
Abstract:
This paper aims at demonstrating the complicated role of tacit knowledge in
science education. By Thomas Alva Edison’s story, we would like to show that not
only is it impossible to separate tacit knowing process from the articulate analytical
methods, but those methods will not be (mis)led towards the irrational, postmodern
approach because of the inarticulateness in knowing process. Michael Polanyi
argues that science knowledge is tacit knowledge, and it sounds reasonable.
Scientists’ tacit knowing involves deeply in every single move of all the complicated
process in a scientific approach, although it seems that none of the steps to work on
the analysis of method is inarticulate. That is the reason why so many outstanding
scientists need to guide graduates personally to do the experiments step by step in
laboratories. What mentees would learn from the mentors would usher us into
developing an initiative designed to enhance our understanding of how
professionalism might be embedded in science education. The point is that, not how
much explicit knowledge and technology we know, but we learn only if the
knowledge and technology is attached to tacit knowledge that is ambiguous and often
misunderstood. Polanyi argues that the act of knowing based on tacit knowing,
connecting with a hidden real world, is the foundation of the nature and justification
of scientific knowledge. However, it could be a problem that scientists completely
break with the tradition, and adopt an irrational, post-modernism approach instead, as
anything-goes attitude shown in Paul Karl Feyerabend’s writings. Polanyi might
frame the words anything-goes in details. We attempt to use Edison’s story to
exemplify one of the details.
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