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Intuition and Ineffability: Tacit Knowledge and Engineering Design

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The Future of Engineering

Part of the book series: Philosophy of Engineering and Technology ((POET,volume 31))

Abstract

My goal in this paper is to show how the study of intuition in engineering design allows a fresh perspective from which to approach the issue of tacit knowledge, and one which may even help us gain some traction on stubborn philosophical problems. The first section of this paper seeks to outline the nature and role of intuition by examining the limitations of attempts to formalize the practice of engineering design. As an element of engineering practice that is commonly understood to resist codification, and be acquired exclusively through practice and experience, intuition not only shares a number of characteristics with philosophical accounts of tacit knowledge, but it also reveals promising new directions for its analysis in both historical and philosophical contexts. The second section of this article aims to draw out correlations between characteristics of intuition in engineering design and phenomenological aspects of the accounts of tacit knowledge provided by Michael Polanyi and Harry Collins. It will be shown how both thinkers emphasize the use of judgment stemming from a cultivated receptivity to relevant features of a task, as central to their accounts of tacit knowledge. Finally, I aim to show how a phenomenological understanding of tacit knowledge provides us with a solution to what I call the “ineffability problem”; the idea that because tacit knowledge resists codification it is ineffable and therefore possesses little explanatory value.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See Ferguson, Eugene, S. Engineering and the Mind’s Eye. (U.S.A: M.I.T Press, 1993), 58 & Trevelyan, James. “Towards a Theoretical Framework for Engineering Practice” in Williams, Bill & Figueiredo, José & Trevelyan, James. (eds) Engineering Practice in a Global Context: Understanding the Technical and the Social (U.K: CRC Press, 2014) pp., 33–61.

  2. 2.

    See, for example Brooks, Harvey. “Dilemmas of Engineering Education” IEEE Spectrum 4, (1967) No. 2 Feb & Ferguson, Eugene, S. Engineering and the Mind’s Eye. (U.S.A: M.I.T Press, 1993), & Trevelyan, James. “Towards a Theoretical Framework for Engineering Practice” in Williams, Bill & Figueiredo, José & Trevelyan, James. (eds) Engineering Practice in a Global Context: Understanding the Technical and the Social (U.K: CRC Press, 2014) pp., 33–61.

  3. 3.

    Ferguson, Eugene, S. Engineering and the Mind’s Eye. (U.S.A: M.I.T Press, 1993), 39.

  4. 4.

    See Collins, Harry M. “Language as a Repository of Tacit Knowledge” in Schilhab, T. & Sternfelt, F. & Deacon, T. (eds) The Symbolic Species Evolved (Dordrecht: Springer, 2012) also Collins, Harry M. & Evans, Robert. Rethinking Expertise (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007) & Collins, Harry M. Tacit and Explicit Knowledge (U.S.A: University of Chicago Press, 2010).

  5. 5.

    See, for example, Badke-Schaub, Petra & Eris, Ozgur “A Theoretical Approach to Intuition in Design: Does Design Methodology Need to Account for Unconscious Processes?” in Chakrabarti, Amaresh & Blessing, Lucienne T. M. (eds) An Anthology of Theories and Models of Design: Philosophy, Approaches and Empirical Explorations (London: Springer-Verlag, 2014) & Pahl, G. & Beitz, W. & Feldhusen, J. & Grote, K.-H. Engineering Design: A Systematic Approach (3rd ed) Ken Wallace & Luciënne Blessing trans. (London: Springer-Verlag, 2007), 9.

  6. 6.

    See for example, Gibson, James J. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (New York: Psychology Press, 1986) & Ingold, Tim. Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture (New York: Routledge, 2013).

  7. 7.

    See Collins, Harry M. & Reber, Arthur. “Ships that Pass in the Night: Tacit Knowledge in Psychology and Sociology” Philosophia Scientiæ Vol 17, No. 3, 2013 pp., 135–154 & Collins, Harry M. Tacit and Explicit Knowledge (U.S.A: University of Chicago Press, 2010).

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Harald Johanessen and Sorin Bangu for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway

    Mark Thomas Young

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Correspondence to Mark Thomas Young .

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  1. Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Nürnberg, Germany

    Albrecht Fritzsche

  2. Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Nürnberg, Germany

    Sascha Julian Oks

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Young, M.T. (2018). Intuition and Ineffability: Tacit Knowledge and Engineering Design. In: Fritzsche, A., Oks, S. (eds) The Future of Engineering. Philosophy of Engineering and Technology, vol 31. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91029-1_4

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