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Yu Zhenhua - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Embodiment in Polanyi’s Theory of Tacit Knowing
Philosophy Today, 2008Co-Authors: Yu ZhenhuaAbstract:One of Michael Polanyi's most important contributions to philosophy is his clarification of the structure of tacit knowing based upon two terms of Awareness. For instance, in driving a nail, we are not only aware of the nail, but also aware of the hammer and the feelings in our palm and fingers that grasp the hammer. According to Polanyi, our Awareness of the nail is Focal Awareness, and the Awareness of the hammer and the feelings in our palm and fingers is subsidiary Awareness. Tacit knowing rests on the dynamic relationship between these two terms of Awareness. In order to grasp an object (a comprehensive entity), we need to integrate its various clues, particulars. Here we can identify the two terms of tacit knowing. Our subsidiary Awareness of various clues, particulars and parts constitutes the first term of tacit knowing, and our Focal Awareness of the comprehensive object is the second term. We rely on the former so as to know the latter. Tacit knowing manifests itself in the dynamic process of attending from the first term to the second term. "Tacit knowing is a from-to knowing.1 In the 1960s, Polanyi's theory of tacit knowing came to fruition. In revealing the conceptual potential of the theory of tacit knowing to solve a series of philosophical problems, Polanyi also brieflydiscussed the connection between his theory and other philosophical traditions. Phenomenology was one of them. Polanyi's theory of tacit knowing intersects phenomenology primarily at three points: intentionality, being-in-the-world, and embodiment. With regard to the relation between tacit knowing and intentionality, Polanyi says the following: Brentano (1942, orig. publ. 1847) has taught that consciousness necessarily attends to an object, and that only a conscious mental act can attend to an object. My analysis of tacit knowing has amplified this view of consciousness. It ells us not only that consciousness is intentional, but also that it always has roots from which it attends to its object. It includes a tacit Awareness of its subsidiaries.2 In Polanyi's view, the from-to structure of tacit knowing clarifies the nature of consciousness more adequately than does Brentano's theory of intentionality. It not only displays intentionality, that is, the vectorial quality of consciousness, but also reveals the fact that such directedness of consciousness is based upon a tacit Awareness of the subsidiaries. In addition to its "to" aspect, consciousness also has a "from" aspect. As will be shown below, an important corollary of the from-to structure of tacit knowing is the thesis of "knowing by indwelling." It is in indwelling that Polanyi sees the connection between the theory of tacit knowing and Heidegger's notion of being-in-the-world. In the preface to the Torchbook edition of Personal Knowledge (1964), Polanyi claims: "All understanding is based upon our dwelling in the particulars of that which we comprehend. Such indwelling is a participation of ours in the existence of that which we comprehend; it is Heidegger's being-in-the-world."3 He further claims, Indwelling is being-in-the-world. Every act of tacit knowing shifts our existence, re-directing, contracting our participation in the world. Existentialism and phenomenology have studied such processes under other names. We must re-interpret such observations now in terms of the more concrete structure of tacit knowing.4 I have tried to clarify the epistemological implications of Heidegger's notion of being-in-the-world in the perspective of the theory of tacit knowing elsewhere, in the direction pointed out by Polanyi.5 Although the claim that "Indwelling is being-in-the-world" is suggestive and inspiring, there is an important difference between Polanyi's "indwelling" and Heidegger's "being-in-the-world," of which Polanyi seems not quite conscious. As will be shown below, while Polanyi's thesis of knowing by indwelling is founded upon his insight into the unique position of our body in the universe, Heidegger does not take Dasein as being essentially embodied. …
Matthias Kliegel - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Prospective Memory Across Adolescence: The Effects of Age and Cue Focality
Developmental Psychology, 2020Co-Authors: Lijuan Wang, Mareike Altgassen, Weirui Xiong, Canan Akgün, Matthias KliegelAbstract:The present study examined the role of controlled attention in age differences in event-based prospective memory performance across adolescence. The researchers tested whether presenting the prospective memory cue in or out of Focal Awareness of the ongoing task (resulting in low versus high demands for controlled attention, respectively) might affect age-related prospective memory performance. In total, 119 Chinese participants ages 13 to 20 took part in this study (60 adolescents: age M = 13.26 years, SD = 0.50; 23 boys; 59 young adults: age M = 19.70 years, SD = 0.87; 19 men). Findings demonstrated a significant interaction, F(1, 114) = 6.41, p < .05. No effect of age on prospective memory performance was revealed when a Focal cue was used (F < 1), whereas there was a reliable age effect between adolescents and young adults when nonFocal prospective memory cues were presented, F(1, 59) = 16.13, p < .01. This pattern of results suggests that the interplay of both available resources of controlled attention and working memory, along with specific task demands, may contribute to possible age differences in prospective memory performance across adolescence. Results are discussed in the context of the multiprocess theory of prospective memory.
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Traumatic brain injury and prospective memory: influence of task complexity.
Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology, 2007Co-Authors: Julie D. Henry, Louise H. Phillips, John R. Crawford, Matthias Kliegel, Georgia Theodorou, Fiona SummersAbstract:A quantitative review indicated that prospective memory impairment is a consistent feature of traumatic brain injury (TBI). However, evidence also suggests that manipulations that increase demands on controlled attentional processes moderate the magnitude of observed deficits. A total of 16 TBI participants were compared with 15 matched controls on a task in which the number of prospective target events was manipulated. This manipulation was of interest because two competing models make different predictions as to its effect on controlled attentional processes. In the context of Smith and Bayen's (2004) preparatory attentional processes and memory processes (PAM) model increasing the number of target events should increase requirements for controlled attentional processing. In contrast, McDaniel and Einstein's (2000) multiprocess framework assumes that distinct target events presented in Focal Awareness of the processing activities required for the ongoing task are likely to depend on automatic processes....
Richard L. Gelwick - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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From Tacit Knowing to a Theory of Faith
Tradition and Discovery: The Polanyi Society Periodical, 2014Co-Authors: Richard L. GelwickAbstract:Both Polanyi and many of his interpreters saw the implications of tacit knowing for restoring the Augustinian principle that faith precedes understanding. Polanyi’s contribution to the rediscovery of the essential role of faith in the achievement of knowledge has, however, had a limited impact in science, philosophy, and in Christian theology. Polanyi’s epistemological contribution, nevertheless, is much more than a restoration and a reformulation of tradition. Tacit knowing provides a new vehicle for deeper interpersonal understanding. This essay is a beginning attempt to propose how tacit knowing provides a theory of faith and why a new theory is now needed. Just as process philosophy changes metaphysics, tacit knowing changes epistemology. Just as a change in metaphysics reorients concepts, language, perspective, and worldview, tacit knowing affects basic terms and worldview. One of these changes is to provide a new way of discussing the relation between faith as trust or fides qua creditur and faith as a set of beliefs or fides quae creditur so that faith is replaced by the tacit dimension. A second change then is to widen the range of faith from a religious framework to the total framework of knowing or epistemology. A third change is to coordinate and integrate the vast contributions of evolutionary biology and neuroscience into the general epistemology of our age. These changes are all nascent in Polanyi’s writing, but await an adequate theoretical development as a theory of faith. 1. Polanyi’ s epistemology developed from his experience over his lifetime and led to his theory of tacit knowing, the central principle of his philosophy. His four major books show a development toward tacit knowing and then an application to the achievement of meaning in society. a. His first book length treatment of the epistemological problem of our time was in Science, Faith and Society in 1946. The book is what I call his inaugural address for his epistemological career. Within this elegant discussion, many of the primary notions that will later flower into tacit knowing are present. Chief among his discussions are the fiduciary components in traditional authority, a community of inquirers, apprenticeship, intuition, and the process of scientific discovery. Guiding Polanyi’s argument for political and intellectual freedom is the role of faith in guiding us toward finding and serving the truth. He speaks passionately for a free society guided by commitment to transcendent ideals. (Polanyi once told me that T.S. Eliot said that he thought that Science, Faith and Society read with the excitement of a novel.) In this book, Polanyi has not yet found the heart of his epistemology: how a society confused and often dominated by a mistaken understanding of science can be reformed through a new, improved theory of knowledge. b. Freed from teaching duties, Polanyi produced over a number of years many articles, radio addresses, and lectures (including the Gifford Lectures of 1951-52) that culminated in the publication of Personal Knowledge in 1958. The problems raised in Science, Faith and Society are approached with the general thesis that all knowledge from the most exact sciences to religions and worldviews is personal and rooted in tacit components and coefficients. Personal Knowledge is a panoramic laboratory of analysis and demonstration of the evidence for the tacit dimension in Polanyi’s episTradition & Discovery: The Polanyi Society Periodical, 41:1 11 temology. Here Polanyi boldly aligns his fundamental findings from across the academic fields with the principle of the Christian traditions that faith precedes understanding and also that growth of knowledge and discovery are like the Pauline paradigm of grace and faith (PK, 266, 285). Personal Knowledge earned for Polanyi an important reputation in universities, professional societies, and international conferences; he received visiting professorships and appointments in advanced studies groups such as the Center For Advanced Studies at Stanford University. He chaired grant-funded programs such as the several conferences sponsored by the Study Group on the Foundations of Cultural Unity and the Study Group on the Unity of Knowledge. As Polanyi lectured across the world, he kept working and trying to condense into theoretical simplicity his driving insights into the fiduciary nature of knowing that is rooted in our personal and embodied being in the world. c. This desired goal of theoretical simplicity was achieved with the Terry Lectures at Yale in 1962 and published later in 1966 after many lectureships and revisions. In The Tacit Dimension, Polanyi presents the theory of his epistemology and briefly applies it to the grand crisis of culture. Compared with the over four hundred pages of Personal Knowledge, The Tacit Dimension’s ninety-two pages seem incredibly concise. The point, however, is that Polanyi sets forth here with clarity and evidence the far-reaching principle that makes possible human knowing. The principle is tacit knowing which consists of the way we rely subsidiarily upon clues in order to attend to a Focal Awareness. This principle can explain the universe of human knowing and judgment by emergence through biological and cultural evolution to the development of societies that now struggle for truth, freedom, and justice. Strikingly, Polanyi consistently maintained that faith precedes understanding and is thus best understood in terms of tacit knowing; this is especially important for a theory of faith, as I will later argue. d. After the publication of The Tacit Dimension, Polanyi began the task of bringing together his epistemological discovery with its relation to his driving concern for a free society and human responsibility. To the crisis of modem culture, rooted in a mistaken, powerful, and intellectually attractive cultural bifurcation of the knower and the known, the tacit dimension is applied more explicitly as a principle and remedy. Though hindered by his age, Polanyi managed to produce a series of six papers on the subject of meaning that would become the basis of his final book, Meaning. The term “meaning” itself tells what tacit knowing leads us to find. Meaning is achieved through the deliberate and surprising acts of ourselves in cumulative cultures arising out of a long history of evolution and human striving. At our current stage of history, we are faced with destructive influences from the pervasive disease of the objective ideal of knowledge that denies the tacit dimension essential to human knowing and flourishing. Professor Harry Prosch, one of the members of the conference on “The Crisis of Culture” in 1972 sponsored by the Consortium for Higher Education Religion Studies in Dayton, Ohio, was asked by Polanyi to coauthor the book. In 1973-74 during a sabbatical at Cambridge, I also worked with Polanyi on Prosch’s final draft of Meaning. Meaning expands further tacit knowing’s fundamental role in all cultural life. Prosch, following Polanyi’s guidance, emphasizes intellectual freedom and a free society as essential for the long term nurture of human knowing and responsible action. The application of tacit knowing to major domains of human knowing is demonstrated again, but a new step is made by focusing on the way tacit knowing illuminates the achievement of meaning from self-centered integrations of subsidiary clues to a Focal target as in a scientific discovery to the self-giving integrations of subsidiary clues to a Focal target as in metaphors, art, and religious frameworks. Here Polanyi adds a new feature to tacit knowing. In perception and the physical sciences, the clues or subsidiaries are of little interest except insofar as they contribute to what is focused upon. In poetry, drama, painting, myth, and religion the self-involving subsidiaries are of more intrinsic interest than the Focal target to which they contribute. This difference between the intrinsic interest of the subsidiaries
Karin Täht - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Validity and Reliability of Two Instruments to Measure Reflection: A Confirmatory Study
Trames-journal of The Humanities and Social Sciences, 2014Co-Authors: Karmen Kalk, Piret Luik, Merle Taimalu, Karin TähtAbstract:1. Introduction It is generally acknowledged that reflective teaching and reflective practices play an important role in teacher education. Reflection is also an important part in teachers' professional behaviour and relevant in their professional development. Various authors have pointed out the usefulness and necessity of reflection. For example, Killeavy and Moloney (2010) highlighted the ability to reflect on practice as the basis for learning. In addition, personal experiences are important in the teachers' development today, and reflection is one method that supports such development (Shoffner 2009); the ability to reflect evolves out of our experiences both as a professional and a person (Scanlan and Chernomas 1997). In many countries teacher education programmes operate with the notion that reflection is a critically important characteristic of an effective teacher. In Estonia, the ability to reflect on teaching practice is also one of the standards for teaching. Although reflection is key to the development of a professional teacher, several authors have indicated that it is not well defined and this can cause problems in understanding the meaning of reflection (e.g. Kreber 2005, Maaranen and Krokfors 2007). Reflection, however, can be used more deliberately if we realize its meaning and impact on our personal and professional development (Scanlan and Chernomas 1997). In this paper, we initially examine the definition of and theories about reflection because it is important to know how the process of reflection works in practice. Secondly, we conducted an overview of certain instruments used to measure reflection and examined their validity and reliability. The starting point for defining reflection is usually problematic (Akbari et al. 2010), but historically, Dewey is acknowledged as one of the originators of the concept of reflection in the twentieth century (Hatton and Smith 1995). In most articles dealing with reflective teaching, the roots of the term are traced back to John Dewey (1933). According to Dewey (1933:9), reflection is "active, persistent, and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that support it and the further conclusions to which it". Furthermore, reflection needs communication to formulate experience (Dewey 1930). Scanlan and Chernomas (1997) assert that reflection is a mental process that we all use in our everyday lives. However, reflection can be further developed for specific professional purposes. If we can become more aware of what reflection entails then we should be able to label more accurately the mental processes of reflection and further develop other reflective skills for professional purposes. Gibbs (1988) argued that without reflecting, received experience may be forgotten or the learning potential lost. His model of reflection contains six stages: description, feelings, evaluation, analysis, conclusion and action plan. Mezirow (1991: 104) claimed that "reflection is the process of critically assessing the content, process, or premise(s) of our efforts to interpret and give meaning to an experience". It includes thoughtful action with reflection or premise reflection. Premise reflection leads to critical reflection--this means more fully developed perspectives on meaning. Reflective learning can be divided into confirmative or transformative learning. Transformative learning produces new or transformed meaning while reflection focuses on premises. Therefore, reflection does not only involve a simple Awareness of our experiences. Non-reflective action may be habitual action that takes place outside of Focal Awareness or thoughtful action with higher cognitive processes (Mezirow 1991). Discussing the topic of reflection may be based on other well-known theories. For example, the five-factor personality theory describes five basic personality factors (extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, and intellect/autonomy) (Hendriks et al. …
Jonte Bernhard - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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to learn a complex concept is to keep more than one concept in Focal Awareness simultaneously an example from electrical engineering
SEFI 2013 16-20 September 2013 Leuven Belgium, 2013Co-Authors: Annakarin Carstensen, Jonte BernhardAbstract:To learn a complex concept is to keep more than one concept in Focal Awareness simultaneously : an example from electrical engineering
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Learning in the laboratory through technology and variation: A microanalysis of instructions and engineering students’ practical achievement
SEFI Annual conference Lisbon (Flash Week), 2011Co-Authors: Jonte BernhardAbstract:Mechanics, first experienced by engineering students in introductory physics courses, encompasses an important set of foundational concepts for success in engineering. However, although it has been well known for some time that acquiring a conceptual understanding of mechanics is one of the most difficult challenges faced by students, very few successful attempts to engender conceptual learning have been described in the literature. On the contrary, research has shown that most students participating in university level courses had not acquired a Newtonian understanding of mechanics at the end of their respective courses Recently I have described more than 10 years of experiences of designing and using conceptual labs in engineering education that have successfully fostered insightful learning. In the framework of the larger project I have developed labs applying variation theory in the design of task structure and using sensor- computer-technology (“probe-ware”) for collecting and displaying experimental data in real-time. In previous studies, I have shown that these labs using probe-ware can be effective in learning mechanics with normalised gains in the g≈50-60% range and with effect sizes d≈1.1, but that this technology also can be implemented in ways that lead to low achievements. One necessary condition for learning is that students are able to focus on the object of learning and discern its critical features. A way to establish this, according to the theory of variation developed by Marton and co-workers, is through the experience of difference (variation), rather than through the recognition of similarity. In a lab, an experiential human–instrument–world relationship is established. The technology used places some aspects of reality in the foreground, others in the background, and makes certain aspects visible that would otherwise be invisible. In labs, this can be used to bring critical features of the object of learning into the Focal Awareness of students and to afford variation. In this study, I will account for how the design of task structure according to variation theory, as well as the probe-ware technology, make the laws of force and motion visible and learnable and, especially, in the lab studied make Newton‟s third law visible and learnable. I will also, as a comparison, include data from a mechanics lab that use the same probe-ware technology and deal with the same topics in mechanics, but uses a differently designed task structure. I will argue that the lower achievements on the FMCE-test in this latter case can be attributed to these differences in task structure in the lab instructions. According to my analysis, the necessary pattern of variation is not included in the design. I will also present a microanalysis of 15 hours collected from engineering students‟ activities in a lab about impulse and collisions based on video recordings of student‟s activities in a lab about impulse and collisions. The important object of learning in this lab is the development of an understanding of Newton‟s third law. The approach analysing students interaction using video data is inspired by ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, i.e. I will focus on students practical, contingent and embodied inquiry in the setting of the lab. I argue that my result corroborates variation theory and show this theory can be used as a „tool‟ for designing labs as well as for analysing labs and lab instructions. Thus my results have implications outside the domain of this study and have implications for understanding critical features for student learning in labs.