Abstract
This paper elaborates on the link between different types and degrees of experience that can be gone through within a form of life or collectivity—the so-called levels of immersion—and the development of distinct types of tacit knowledge and expertise. The framework is then probed empirically and theoretically. In the first case, its ‘predictions’ are compared with the accounts of novices who have gone through different ‘learning opportunities’ during a pre-operational training programme for running a huge nickel industrial plant in Brazil. These are also analysed vis-à-vis the experience of an expert who has designed and experienced the outcomes of two pre-operational training sessions in the nickel industry before developing and managing the one discussed here. Theoretically, the framework is used to pinpoint exactly what interactional experts who have developed their expertise through linguistic socialisation alone are able to do as well as to analyse the case of technical connoisseurs. The results indicate that the proposed framework is useful. It supports the design and improvement of training programmes for the development of tacit knowledge while at the same time bringing about a refined analysis of claims concerning the abilities of types of experts and expertise.
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Notes
The empirical data on which this paper relies were collected in 2009 when the plant was still under construction.
This opens the way to argue for or against the proposed levels of immersion as well as the types of tacit knowledge and expertise without going against the link between them.
The answer to the first question can be found in the paper ‘Tacit Knowledge Management’ (Ribeiro 2012).
The data were collected on-site over 21 days in January and February 2009. It refers to the training the novices received from the time of their being taken on until January 2009.
As noticed during fieldwork, witnessing plant assembling together with the informal training prepared by their supervisors also constituted a significant part of their training, but this could not be measured. We can therefore infer that the amount of linguistic socialisation was much higher than that shown in Fig. 1.
It may be the case that the differences between the training patterns of the two teams is partly due to the differences between the functions comprised in each of them, but this cannot be the whole explanation. Maintaining a plant of this size requires the development of embodied abilities by its maintainers which can only be acquired through physical immersion. The operations team also had some functions (e.g. control room operator) that called for a theoretical understanding of the plant and its processes.
The fieldwork consisted of one week per month on average from October 2008 to September 2011. Thus, although most of the data used here was collected in the first semester of 2009, when the pre-operational training and the plant construction were still taking place, I followed the start-up of the plant and its ramp-up for nine months (December 2010 to September 2011).
This does not mean the novices from Operations did not make any mistakes during this period. They did and sometimes they even got hurt, but it was never expected that the pre-operational training would avoid all possible mistakes, only the major ones.
As a specialist stressed, the novices learned the basics of the daily procedures, but ‘if something unusual (happens, such as during) the metal or slag leaking (in the furnace), we cannot assess their expertise’. This explains why the presence of experienced people for an extended period of time is essential for a smooth and safe start-up and the ramp-up of operations—as well as providing novices with extensive on-the-job training on the actual plant (Ribeiro 2012).
As the focus here is the training of human beings, the case of non-immersion will not be discussed.
Collective tacit knowledge provides us with the social abilities of ‘following a rule’ in the Wittgensteinian sense, of participating in the establishment of new rules and of making ‘correct judgements’ (Wittgenstein 1976 [1953]). Judgements about three natures were then elaborated on, these being the judgements of similarity/difference, of relevance/irrelevance and of risk/opportunity. For a more detailed discussion of types of tacit knowledge and associated abilities see Ribeiro (2012).
In his study about the South African President Mbeki’s decision to stop using AZT to treat HIV/AIDS, Weinel (2010; pp.159–160) shows ‘that experts make technical judgements on the basis of social considerations that reflect their social proximity to the expert community’ and proposes the term ‘domain-specific discrimination (DSD)’ as ‘a form of “discrimination” that is based on domain-specific social knowledge’ [original emphasis]. This term is a good choice as it shows the need for an individual to interact with the members of a domain in order to be able to make this type of discrimination. The problem with adopting it here is that the ‘social’ that qualifies the type of knowledge upon which this type of discrimination is made has dropped (i.e. it is not said about ‘domain-specific social discrimination’ (DSSD)). The result is that DSD becomes too broad a concept which may include other types of discrimination; as we will see, some of these are not based on the social knowledge of field history or its members.
This point is supported by Winch’s (1990 [1958]) discussion on the possibility of resorting to definitions in order to ascertain how to use words in the future: ‘How, in general, is a definition connected with the subsequent use of the expression defined? … The definition lays down the meaning and to use a word in its correct meaning is to use it in the same way as that laid down in the definition. … [The] only defect [of this answer] is that it does not remove the philosophical puzzlement. For what is it to use the word in the same way as that laid down in the definition? … There is no absolute unchanging sense to the words “the same”. … It is only in terms of a given rule that we can attach a specific sense to the words “the same” ’ (Winch 1990 [1958], pp. 26–27). This indicates that the need for a judgement of similarity/relevance applies to all collective practices, including the use of words, expressions and concepts in speaking a (specialist) language.
The idea of ‘sensorial awareness’ can be exemplified by our (frustrated) attempts to capture in pictures or films the sensorial impressions of our body when considering characteristics such as the lightness of the Eiffel Tower or the verdure and extension of the Amazon Jungle. This point will be further illustrated below with quotes from the interviewees. In addition to the five senses (touch, sight, smell, taste and hearing) human beings possess many other sensory abilities, such as the ones to feel temperature (i.e. thermoception), balance (i.e. equilibrioception), awareness of their own body in space (i.e. proprioception) and pain (i.e. nociception). This indicates the sources of the ‘sensorial awareness’ provided by physical contiguity and the impact this may have on the understanding of a set of practices.
Somatic tacit knowledge enables human beings to interact with the physical world and to perform the physical counterpart of actions. As we will see, the actions’ outcomes may or may not be visible to an outside actor; we can see someone using a hammer but cannot see someone discriminating between different shades in an X-ray. Thus, the development of somatic tacit knowledge encompasses not only the development of muscles and ways of doing, but even the synapses that are created by working on a given set of practices; I thank Stuart Dreyfus for drawing my attention to this point, although our discussion was not about somatic tacit knowledge but on how ‘intuition’ was based on the continuous exposure to a given situation/task rather than reasoning. There is a third type of tacit knowledge—contingent tacit knowledge—the tacitness of which comes from its historical and contingent nature (Ribeiro 2012). Its development is mostly connected to learning the ‘taken-for-granted’ practices of an activity, which implies that this occurs primarily through physical immersion. However, as the presence of contingent tacit knowledge can be noticed mostly in retrospect—that is, when it is not tacit anymore—the focus of this paper is on the development of somatic and collective types of tacit knowledge.
Whether the understanding from physical contiguity together with linguistic socialisation is equal or superior to what comes from linguistic socialisation alone is a question that calls for further research.
This refers to when ‘the learner watches someone who is good at doing something, that could limit the learner’s random trials to the more promising ones’ (Dreyfus 2009, p. 37) when he or she undergoes physical immersion later on.
Hence, those hiding behind the anonymity of the Internet or living in virtual spaces (Dreyfus 2009) may be ‘acting’, but they are not being part of a ‘real’ practice or having a ‘hands on’ experience—at least not in the way these terms have been used here—because they are not ‘taking a chance’. Of course, this might necessitate putting the ‘physical immersion bar’ too high, but if we assume the connection between learning and the presence of risk, joy and involvement, this should not be a problem (see below).
The increasing ability to make judgments when one goes up the steps from novice to expert implies that the model of Dreyfus and Dreyfus is not only about the ‘internalization of physical skills’ (Collins and Evans 2007, p. 24; Collins 2010, p. 102). Consequently, it is misleading to claim that by focusing on ‘just one conception of tacit knowledge—Somatic Tacit [Knowledge]’ (Collins 2010, p. 2), ‘the problem with the five-stage model … is its individualistic nature’ (Collins and Evans, 2007, p. 26), perhaps as the result of ‘a serious source of misunderstanding of tacit knowledge, … [namely,] an obsession with the human body’ (Collins 2010, p. 104).
As Dreyfus and Dreyfus (1988, pp. 22–23) explain (emphasis added), ‘through practical experience in concrete situations with meaningful elements, which neither an instructor nor the learner can define in terms of objectively recognizable context-free features, the advanced beginner starts to recognize those elements [of the context] when they are present. … We call the new elements “situational” to distinguish them from context-free elements’.
As Dreyfus and Dreyfus (1988, p.24) put it (emphasis added), ‘with more experience, the number of recognizable context-free and situational elements present in a real-world circumstance eventually becomes overwhelming. A sense of what is important is missing [for the advanced beginner]… [T]o perform at the competent level requires choosing an organizing plan [as well as ‘examining only the small set of factors that are most important given the chosen plan’]’ (1998, pp. 23–24).
For Dreyfus and Dreyfus (1988, p. 29), intuition is neither the ‘unconscious and noninferential means by which human beings come to decisions’ nor ‘guessing’, but ‘the product of deep situational involvement and holistic discrimination’.
There are various ways of developing the distinct types of contingent tacit knowledge, but the most difficult ones—when practitioners are not fully aware of them—can only be developed through physical immersion (see footnote 15).
The highest level of linguistic socialisation is through face-to-face interactions, although, in principle, the use of teleconferences, telephone conversations, emails and so forth can also be considered as types of linguistic socialisation. See Dreyfus (2009) for an in-depth discussion on the differences between distance learning, telepresence, virtual bodies and an embodied presence in classrooms for learning and even for the creation of trust. Some of the claims developed by Dreyfus (2009) are corroborated by the fieldwork and actually support and anticipate particular points discussed here. Although it was not the intention of Dreyfus (2009), part of his analysis could be said to discuss the idea of levels of immersion within linguistic socialisation.
Simulation was not a representative part of the training and did not appear in the interviews. Nevertheless, simulation can be thought of as falling between physical contiguity and physical immersion because it shares the characteristics of the two types of immersion. On the one hand, novices have hands-on experience and are required to produce something or to solve a technical problem; this is so much more than just observing other people working. On the other hand, simulation, as the term itself indicates, never includes all the elements present in a real situation, such as the pressure of work, the workload, unforeseen events and so forth. (Clearly, it is possible to include particular types of unforeseen events in a simulation, but not all of them—otherwise the idea of being ‘unforeseen’ would not make sense).
The ‘perhaps’ answers were taken as a way of not going against a ‘lecturer’—given that most novices were shop-floors workers or young engineers—and as a result of their difficulty of talking about their sensorial experiences.
Reference to ‘imagination’ also appeared in previous research with Japanese–Portuguese interpreters as the best outcome from just talking to experts (Ribeiro 2007b, p. 719).
Some of the novices would go to the site anyway and would periodically ask the construction team people questions, thereby establishing the beginning of their immersion in the field. We should bear in mind that this is a huge industrial plant with an investment of US$3.2 billion to date.
This is not to say that the novice engineers were ‘ahead’ of the operators, merely that they had received a 5-year training in ‘metallurgical engineering’ which allowed them to understand the specialist’s explanation—hence the reason behind the ‘stars’.
We should bear in mind that in its strictest meaning, ‘linguistic socialisation’ denotes just ‘talking to experts’. Nevertheless, it is common that instructors use pictures, films, graphs and so on in order to facilitate the students’ understanding. Thus, we can infer that the novices would have had an even harder time than is shown by these quotations if they merely had to listen to the instructor.
In this sense, the use of the word ‘notion’ is relevant and cropped up in the interviews when the interviewees were talking about technical visits to operating plants—such as the one in quotation #13. Although physical contiguity is explicitly identified as being far preferable to linguistic socialisation on its own, it seems that it only provides a ‘notion’ of things but not the full-blown experience that comes from physical immersion.
On the other hand, the professionals knew that the novices were from a huge company and that in the future (if necessary) this could provide opportunities for switching companies.
Eventually social bonds were even implied when the experts took (controlled) risks in order to motivate and teach the novices. For instance, although it was not anticipated that the novices would operate the equipment, experienced operators would allow them to do so for a short while, usually during night shifts. (While this shows how social bonds help creating the necessary conditions for learning, this practice is no longer physical contiguity).
As an experienced supervisor explained: ‘When you start assembling, you detail the equipment, you see the equipment opened, see the material it is made of, the method the guy uses to tighten the screw, how he fits [one thing to another] … During operations you cannot notice [these things], you have no way [of seeing]’.
So-called ‘visualisation’ also speeds things up when necessary: ‘There was a problem and the maintenance team had not arrived, [the operator] could help by saying “look, there is a problem in valve such and such, it is on such a floor, in such a place”. Do you understand?’ (experienced supervisor).
Of course, if the calcine had overflowed, the novice would know that something had gone wrong, but he would not know—or it would take him some time to learn—what had caused it.
Thus, ‘the competent performer …, after wrestling with the question of the choice of a plan, feels responsible for, and thus emotionally involved in, the product of his choice. While he both understands and decides in a detached manner, he finds himself intensely involved in what occurs thereafter. An outcome that is clearly successful is deeply satisfying and leaves a vivid memory of the plan chosen and of the situation as seen from the perspective of the plan. Disasters, likewise, are not easily forgotten’ (Dreyfus and Dreyfus 1988, p. 26).
Some of the arguments about the abilities of special interactional experts and technical connoisseurs discussed here are derived from the paper ‘Theoretical Considerations on Tacit Knowledge Management’ which was presented at the Workshop ‘Acquiring and Using Interactional Expertise: Psychological, Sociological and Philosophical Perspectives’ in June 2010 at the University of California, Berkeley, USA.
Thus, sociologists of scientific knowledge would be able to recognise ‘jokes, irony, and leg pulls … to take a devil’s advocate position in respect of some scientific controversy and maintain it well enough to make the conversational partner think hard about the science… [and] convey [reliable] information’ (Collins 2004, p. 129).
The discussion on the ‘in principle’ abilities of special interactional experts is challenging as it raises the question of what the role of language is within one’s enculturation in a technical field. However, it is necessary to separate the philosophical discussion on whether language can be developed through ‘linguistic socialisation alone’ from the more empirical question of what language enables a person to do or what an individual has access to in the course of its acquisition or after it is acquired by any means. In other words, at least within levels of immersion, the focus has to do with discussing ‘linguistic socialisation’ (i.e. language affordances) rather than ‘linguistic socialisation alone’ (i.e. special interactional expertise), unless the latter throws some light on understanding the former.
This is what lecturers do when assessing students’ essays: they verify, through the written language, if a given student has successfully grasped the meaning of a concept or line of reasoning.
This is relevant, for instance, when separating ‘false’ controversies from ‘real’ ones (Weinel 2007).
Clearly, there is a huge difference here if linguistic socialisation occurs solely through writing, telephone conversations or face-to-face interactions as this impacts on other types of judgement and trust building. However, we will skip this point for the time being.
One of the reviewers suggested that I inadvertently took the above passages as meaning that Collins and Evans (2007) treated technical connoisseurs as being ‘interactional experts and nothing else’ and that ‘the quote actually says that connoisseurship is “based on” interactional expertise’ or, in other words, that ‘the claim made by Collins and Evans … is that doing connoisseurship (i.e. making judgements) is possible without contributory expertise in the thing being judged but relies instead on some interactional expertise in that practice’. It does not matter what was really meant by the above quotes, however. The point is that it is not clear if the role of interactional expertise within technical connoisseurship is about enabling the conversation flow between the parties or the making of ‘correct judgements’. Thus, for the sake of argument, I will maintain the original interpretation of the quotes.
The only possibility here would be to think of someone just observing the architect making tiling judgements for a short period of time, with no involvement and with no trial-and-error.
This shows that the idea of levels of immersion, as presented in Table 1, only applies to activities which require more than just talking. For instance, the four-level scale does not apply to the activity of speaking a language, where linguistic socialisation would already be considered as physical immersion (assuming that a person could learn a language without any contact with the practices the language refers to). Collins (2011, p.273) touches on this issue by stating that ‘language is practice. Therefore, the contrast is not really between language and practice but between “linguistic practice” and “physical practice” [within activities which require both of them]’.
For instance, the possibility of treating managers of scientific projects as interactional experts should be treated with caution until further empirical research on this topic has been carried out. A re-reading of the interview with the science manager Gary Sanders (Collins and Sanders 2007) in the light of levels of immersion makes it clear how much his expertise is based on the experience of making judgements within his previous job. In fact, Collins and Sanders (2007) do make an effort to separate what is contributory expertise in management, referred expertise and interactional expertise. Nevertheless, and at least as far as the interview is concerned, it is not possible to separate what Gary Sanders learned by ‘linguistic socialisation alone’ in either his previous or his new job. In addition, we can infer that physical contiguity took place as soon as Sanders began to work in the 30-m telescope project and the impact of this level of immersion on his understanding and the development of the specialist language is now an empirical question.
This shows that technical connoisseurship is not a ‘meta-expertise’ (Collins and Evans 2007) but simply a case in which one is able to judge the outcomes of other people’s performance in the same way that those performing are able to do.
In practice, things are more complex as a certain number may or may not be seen as problematic depending on other aspects of the situation. Thus, when an expert listens to a number and states how good it is, he or she takes into account the specifics of the situation, not merely the number.
It is then probable that changes in the characteristics of each level of immersion will change as the framework is applied to activities not connected to industrial settings, although the two main divisions will probably remain for a longer time.
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Acknowledgements
This paper would not have been possible without the full support of the Brazilian company where the fieldwork took place as well as the support of its employees; I am enormously grateful to them for allowing me to share their professional experiences and donating much more of their time than would normally be expected. I am also indebted to Fernando Campos Guimarães and to João Gilberto Queiroz, who have supported this research from the outset. I am further indebted to Stuart Dreyfus, Francisco de Paula Antunes Lima and Laura Cançado Ribeiro for commenting on previous versions of this paper, to the linguists Tommaso Raso and Heliana Mello for an enlightening discussion on particular aspects of Linguistics and Pragmatics and to Fernanda Moura Teatini for clarifying aspects of on-going research in Neuroscience. I am also enormously grateful to the two reviewers who sent me several pages of comments. Without these, the paper would not have addressed important key issues or stated particular points as clearly as they deserved. Finally, a special thanks goes to Kay Shipton for her outstanding proofreading work.
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The methodology described in this paper was protected by the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG) through a Patent Application.
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Ribeiro, R. Levels of immersion, tacit knowledge and expertise. Phenom Cogn Sci 12, 367–397 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-012-9257-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-012-9257-z