Philosophical Research On Tacit Knowledge

Knowledge is an important thing that people have searched for from ancient times. Different philosophers proposed different views on knowledge. From ancient Greece philosophy, philosophers have focused their minds on explicit knowledge. While the explicit knowledge is just like one angle that giant iceberg shows from water, and the massive knowledge system exists tacitly, that is tacit knowledge .some of the tacit knowledge is attached to the skills that people make experience, and the other is conceded in the belief and culture that people are satisfied with the knowledge system will be incomplete if people neglect the existence of tacit knowledge. The excavation and use of tacit knowledge plays an important role in individual growth, organization development and improvement of society.An English physical chemist and philosopher, Michael Polanyi, who is considered as father of tacit knowledge ,is the earliest person that searches tacit knowledge profoundly .He published Personal knowledge in 1958 and Tacit Dimension in 1966, which are the first work concerns with tacit knowledge, tacit reorganization and science research .This paper analyzes and researches tacit knowledge in three aspects. The first part is sorting the researches to tacit knowledge in history of philosophy, and analyzing the concept of tacit knowledge. The second part is interpreting division between tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge, their relation and visualization of tacit knowledge .The third part is analyzing tacit knowledge from the aspect of contemporary philosophy.