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Full-Text Articles in Library and Information Science
What Documents Cannot Do: Revisiting Michael Polanyi And The Tacit Knowledge Dilemma, C. Sean Burns
What Documents Cannot Do: Revisiting Michael Polanyi And The Tacit Knowledge Dilemma, C. Sean Burns
Information Science Faculty Publications
Our culture is dominated by digital documents in ways that are easy to overlook. These documents have changed our worldviews about science and have raised our expectations of them as tools for knowledge justification. This article explores the complexities surrounding the digital document by revisiting Michael Polanyi’s theory of tacit knowledge—the idea that “we can know more than we can tell.” The theory presents to us a dilemma: if we can know more than we can tell, then this means that the communication of science via the document as a primary form of telling will always be incomplete. This dilemma …
Disciplinarity And Trandisciplinarity In The Study Of Knowledge, Jay H. Bernstein
Disciplinarity And Trandisciplinarity In The Study Of Knowledge, Jay H. Bernstein
Publications and Research
Scholarly inquiry about the nature and significance of knowledge has been shaped by disciplinary traditions and priorities that define “knowledge” differently and result in disconnected literatures. In the mid to late twentieth century, library science educator Jesse Shera sought to bridge the conceptual gap between epistemological and sociological approaches to knowledge in proposing a new discipline he called social epistemology. Around the same time, long-term projects by the economist Fritz Machlup and the physical chemist turned philosopher of science Michael Polanyi did not merely combine existing disciplinary approaches but transcended conventional frameworks for conceptualizing knowledge. These scholars can be viewed …