Cognitive Scaffold

Preparing your thinking workspace

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MENTAL MODEL · M12970

Tacit Knowing

Tacit Knowing
CultureHigh supportAnthropology
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Updated 2026-08-22

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INTRODUCTION

English translation pending.

CORE DEFINITION

The term comes from Greek and was reconstructed as a concept by James C. Scott, naming a cunning practical wisdom or feel based on concrete experience and situation, such as a farmer's intuition for weather, and distinguished from techne, technical knowledge, and episteme, theoretical knowledge. The scaffold is respect for the field: when the theoretical model, the map, conflicts with field intuition, the terrain, do not lightly dismiss the intuition. Much of the inarticulate metis contains complex variables that theory has not yet captured.

SCAFFOLDING EFFECT

psychology

Reduce cognitive load

- Consult the field first: when the model and the practitioner disagree, listen to the practitioner. - Name the metis: identify which judgments are situationally skilled rather than rule-based. - Hold the map loosely: treat the model as a partial map and not as the terrain.

anchor

Anchor fast decisions

Tacit knowledge is the base structure of cognition: the knower's subsidiary awareness of the proximal term supports focal attention to the distal term, and every explicit knowledge is rooted in tacit knowing. Field skill encodes variables that the formal model has not yet enumerated, so the model is necessarily a lossy compression of what the practitioner perceives, not a fuller account of it.

MINIMUM ACTION

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Source support: Explicit

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    zh.wikipedia.orghttps://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E4%B8%AA%E4%BA%BA%E7%9F%A5%E8%AF%86ZH · Explicit
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