Knowledge (Explicit and Implicit): Philosophical Aspects

Abstract

Explicit knowledge is knowledge that the knower can make explicit by means of a verbal statement; implicit knowledge is knowledge that is not explicit. In cognitive psychology, a distinction is drawn between explicit and implicit tests of memory, and in some cases perception itself is implicit. Patients suffering from brain damage often show preserved implicit knowledge in the absence of explicit knowledge, and these neuropsychological phenomena present challenges for both philosophical and empirical theories about consciousness. Any battery of performance that conforms to a rule inevitably conforms to more than one rule, so there is a question of principle whether any sense can be given to the notion of tacit knowledge of one rule rather than another. This question can be answered by providing an account of tacit knowledge of rules in terms of the structure of the causal explanations of a subject's performance. The terms ‘explicit’ and ‘implicit’ are also used to mark a number of distinctions that are specifically related to the storage and processing of information. Explicitly stored information is encoded in a language-like format; information is represented implicitly if it is logically implied by something that is stored explicitly.