The Tacimometer

"Hot" knowledge is the most explicit.

"Cold" knowledge is the most tacit.

Explicit as it gets

• Fully explicit (direct statements to others, oneself, written policies taken at face value, scientific laws, etc.)
  Entirely conscious but unspoken, for reasons of good grace, privacy (intentional unspoken understandings).
• Situated consciousness: we are aware of “the rules” or our moves in the very particular context as things come up, but hardly at all if asked out of the blue (often self-management principles, many social moves, some encoding chunks)
• Peripheral unfocused awareness—we know it’s there without examining or analyzing, just doing it (social rituals of greeting and departure).
• Mood and such that operate in the background, “coloring” our lives, although we may detect them if we pay attention (tension, etc., a la Damasio)
• Not conscious of what stimuli trigger what responses on an occasion (often emotional reactions, many other conditioned responses)
• Completely unconscious of practices, behaviors, rules—no direct conscious access, although we may surface them by examining our own conduct (grammar, how close you stand in different cultures, some encoding chunks)
• Embodied knowledge (the knowledge of physics, chemistry, mechanics embodied in biological structures: perhaps too tacit even to be called tacit knowledge).

Tacit as it gets

Extraído de The Tacimometer: Degrees of the Tacit

D. Perkins, May, 2002