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100-546: A CoP can form around members' shared interests or goals. Through being part of a CoP, the members learn from each other and develop their identities. CoPs can engage in community practices in physical settings (for example, in a lunchroom at work, an office, a factory floor), but CoP members are not necessarily co-located. They can form a "virtual community of practice" (VCoP) when the CoP is primarily located in online spaces such as discussion boards, newsgroups, or social media. Similar to

200-413: A phenomenalist and fallibilist empiricism as an alternative to rationalistic speculation." Peirce developed the idea that inquiry depends on real doubt, not mere verbal or hyperbolic doubt , and said that, in order to understand a conception in a fruitful way, "Consider the practical effects of the objects of your conception. Then, your conception of those effects is the whole of your conception of

300-465: A "community of practice" as a group that shares a common interest and desire to learn from and contribute to the community. In his later work, Wenger shifted his focus from legitimate peripheral participation toward tensions that emerge from dualities . He identifies four dualities that exist in communities of practice: participation-reification, designed-emergent, identification-negotiability and local-global. The participation-reification duality has been

400-652: A "neo-classical" pragmatism (such as Susan Haack ) that adheres to the work of Peirce, James, and Dewey. A few of the various but often interrelated positions characteristic of philosophers working from a pragmatist approach include: Dewey in The Quest for Certainty criticized what he called "the philosophical fallacy": Philosophers often take categories (such as the mental and the physical) for granted because they don't realize that these are nominal concepts that were invented to help solve specific problems. This causes metaphysical and conceptual confusion. Various examples are

500-501: A 1908 publication, his differences with James as well as literary author Giovanni Papini . Peirce regarded his own views that truth is immutable and infinity is real, as being opposed by the other pragmatists, but he remained allied with them about the falsity of necessitarianism and about the reality of generals and habits understood in terms of potential concrete effects even if unactualized. Pragmatism enjoyed renewed attention after Willard Van Orman Quine and Wilfrid Sellars used

600-439: A CoP can be codified and archived, they provide rich content and contexts that can be accessed for future use. Members of CoPs are thought to be more efficient and effective conduits of information and experiences. While organizations tend to provide manuals to meet employee training needs, CoPs help foster the process of storytelling among colleagues, which helps them strengthen their skills. Studies have shown that workers spend

700-453: A CoP is central to identity because learning is conceptualized as social participation – the individual actively participates in the practices of social communities, thus developing their role and identity within the community. In this context, a community of practice is a group of individuals with shared interests or goals who develop both their individual and shared identities through community participation. The structural characteristics of

800-527: A VCoP, a "mobile community of practice" (MCoP) forms when members primarily engage in community practices via mobile phones. Communities of practice have existed for as long as people have been learning and sharing their experiences through storytelling. The idea is rooted in American pragmatism , especially C. S. Peirce 's concept of the " community of inquiry ", as well as John Dewey 's principle of learning through occupation. For Etienne Wenger , learning in

900-449: A belief valid when it represents reality? "Copying is one (and only one) genuine mode of knowing". Are beliefs dispositions which qualify as true or false depending on how helpful they prove in inquiry and in action? Is it only in the struggle of intelligent organisms with the surrounding environment that beliefs acquire meaning? Does a belief only become true when it succeeds in this struggle? In James's pragmatism nothing practical or useful

1000-555: A bike, playing the piano, driving a car, hitting a nail with a hammer, putting together pieces of a complex jigsaw puzzle, and interpreting a complex statistical equation. In the field of knowledge management , the concept of tacit knowledge refers to knowledge that cannot be fully codified . An individual can acquire tacit knowledge without language. Apprentices , for example, work with their mentors and learn craftsmanship not only through language but also by observation , imitation, and practice. The key to acquiring tacit knowledge

1100-450: A century later, Richard Rorty in his Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) argued that much of the debate about the relation of the mind to the body results from conceptual confusions. They argue instead that there is no need to posit the mind or mindstuff as an ontological category. Pragmatists disagree over whether philosophers ought to adopt a quietist or a naturalist stance toward

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1200-408: A certain degree of trust or faith and that we cannot always wait for adequate proof when making moral decisions. Moral questions immediately present themselves as questions whose solution cannot wait for sensible proof. A moral question is a question not of what sensibly exists, but of what is good, or would be good if it did exist. ... A social organism of any sort whatever, large or small, is what it

1300-831: A community member becomes part of a community occurs through legitimate peripheral participation . Legitimation and participation define ways of belonging to a community, whereas peripherality and participation are concerned with location and identity in the social world. Lave and Wenger's research examined how a community and its members learn within apprenticeships. When newcomers join an established community, they initially observe and perform simple tasks in basic roles while they learn community norms and practices. For example, an apprentice electrician might watch and learn through observation before doing any electrical work, but would eventually take on more complicated electrical tasks. Lave and Wenger described this socialization process as legitimate peripheral participation. Lave and Wenger referred to

1400-418: A community of practice among Yucatán midwives , Liberian tailors, navy quartermasters and meat cutters, and insurance claims processors. Other fields have used the concept of CoPs in education, sociolinguistics, material anthropology, medical education , second language acquisition , Parliamentary Budget Offices, health care and business sectors, and child mental health practice ( AMBIT ). A famous example of

1500-412: A community of practice are redefined to a domain of knowledge, a notion of community and a practice: In many organizations, communities of practice are integral to the organization structure. These communities take on knowledge stewarding tasks that were previously covered by more formal organizational structures. Both formal and informal communities of practice may be established in an organization. There

1600-512: A community of practice within an organization is the Xerox customer service representatives who repaired machines. The Xerox reps began exchanging repair tips and tricks in informal meetings over breakfast or lunch. Eventually, Xerox saw the value of these interactions and created the Eureka project, which allowed these interactions to be shared across its global network of representatives. The Eureka database

1700-436: A conception's meaning in terms of conceivable tests, Peirce emphasized that, since a conception is general, its meaning, its intellectual purport, equates to its acceptance's implications for general practice, rather than to any definite set of real effects (or test results); a conception's clarified meaning points toward its conceivable verifications, but the outcomes are not meanings, but individual upshots. Peirce in 1905 coined

1800-657: A difference in an individual's life and refer to claims that cannot be verified or falsified either on intellectual or common sensorial grounds. Joseph Margolis in Historied Thought, Constructed World (California, 1995) makes a distinction between "existence" and "reality". He suggests using the term "exists" only for those things which adequately exhibit Peirce's Secondness : things which offer brute physical resistance to our movements. In this way, such things which affect us, like numbers, may be said to be "real", although they do not "exist". Margolis suggests that God, in such

1900-657: A full-fledged epistemology with wide-ranging implications for the entire philosophical field. Pragmatists who work in these fields share a common inspiration, but their work is diverse and there are no received views. In the philosophy of science, instrumentalism is the view that concepts and theories are merely useful instruments and progress in science cannot be couched in terms of concepts and theories somehow mirroring reality. Instrumentalist philosophers often define scientific progress as nothing more than an improvement in explaining and predicting phenomena. Instrumentalism does not state that truth does not matter, but rather provides

2000-460: A human body's nervous and endocrine systems . Although it is possible to distinguish conceptually between explicit and tacit knowledge, they are not separate and discrete in practice. The interaction between these two modes of knowing is vital for the creation of new knowledge. Tacit knowledge can be distinguished from explicit knowledge in three major areas: The process of transforming tacit knowledge into explicit or specifiable knowledge

2100-463: A job requires the application of theory into practice. CoPs help individuals bridge the gap between knowing what and knowing how . As members of CoPs, individuals report increased communication with people (professionals, interested parties, hobbyists), less dependence on geographic proximity, and the generation of new knowledge. This assumes that interactions occur naturally when individuals come together. However, social and interpersonal factors play

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2200-419: A linguistic usage, might very well be "real", causing believers to act in such and such a way, but might not "exist". Pragmatic pedagogy is an educational philosophy that emphasizes teaching students knowledge that is practical for life and encourages them to grow into better people. American philosopher John Dewey is considered one of the main thinkers of the pragmatist educational approach. Neopragmatism

2300-439: A middle ground between materialism and absolute metaphysics. These opposites are comparable to what William James called tough-minded empiricism and tender-minded rationalism. Schiller contends on the one hand that mechanistic naturalism cannot make sense of the "higher" aspects of our world. These include free will, consciousness, purpose, universals and some would add God. On the other hand, abstract metaphysics cannot make sense of

2400-571: A model of knowledge creation that explains how tacit knowledge can be converted to explicit knowledge, both of which can be converted into organisational knowledge. While introduced by Nonaka in 1990, the model was further developed by Hirotaka Takeuchi and is thus known as the Nonaka–Takeuchi model. In this model, tacit knowledge is presented variously as uncodifiable ("tacit aspects of knowledge are those that cannot be codified") and codifiable ("transforming tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge

2500-426: A particular focus in the field of knowledge management . Wenger describes three dimensions of practice that support community cohesion: mutual engagement , negotiation of a joint enterprise and shared repertoire. The communities Lave and Wenger studied were naturally forming as practitioners of craft and skill-based activities met to share experiences and insights. Lave and Wenger observed situated learning within

2600-440: A priori truths but synthetic statements. Later in his life Schiller became famous for his attacks on logic in his textbook, Formal Logic . By then, Schiller's pragmatism had become the nearest of any of the classical pragmatists to an ordinary language philosophy . Schiller sought to undermine the very possibility of formal logic, by showing that words only had meaning when used in context. The least famous of Schiller's main works

2700-403: A revised pragmatism to criticize logical positivism in the 1960s. Inspired by the work of Quine and Sellars, a brand of pragmatism known sometimes as neopragmatism gained influence through Richard Rorty , the most influential of the late 20th century pragmatists along with Hilary Putnam and Robert Brandom . Contemporary pragmatism may be broadly divided into a strict analytic tradition and

2800-410: A role in the interaction, and research shows that some individuals share or withhold knowledge and expertise from others because their knowledge relates to their professional identities, position, and interpersonal relationships. Communicating with others in a CoP involves creating social presence . Chih-Hsiung defines social presence as "the degree of salience of another person in an interaction and

2900-433: A situation based on their experiences, which may enable another person to avoid mistakes, thus shortening the learning curve. In a CoP, members can openly discuss and brainstorm about a project, which can lead to new capabilities. The type of information that is shared and learned in a CoP is boundless. Paul Duguid distinguishes tacit knowledge (knowing how ) from explicit knowledge (knowing what ). Performing optimally in

3000-552: A specific answer to the question of what truth and falsity mean and how they function in science. One of C. I. Lewis ' main arguments in Mind and the World Order: Outline of a Theory of Knowledge (1929) was that science does not merely provide a copy of reality but must work with conceptual systems and that those are chosen for pragmatic reasons, that is, because they aid inquiry. Lewis' own development of multiple modal logics

3100-583: A theory of pragmatic bioethics and its rejection of the principalism theory then in vogue in medical ethics . An anthology published by the MIT Press titled Pragmatic Bioethics included the responses of philosophers to that debate, including Micah Hester, Griffin Trotter and others many of whom developed their own theories based on the work of Dewey, Peirce, Royce and others. Lachs developed several applications of pragmatism to bioethics independent of but extending from

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3200-410: A third of their time looking for information and are five times more likely to turn to a co-worker than an explicit source of information (book, manual, or database). Conferring with CoP members saves time because community members have tacit knowledge , which can be difficult to store and retrieve for people unfamiliar with the CoP. For example, someone might share one of their best ways of responding to

3300-429: A universe entirely distinct from the one you left behind you in the street. The two were supposed, he said, to have so little to do with each other, that you could not possibly occupy your mind with them at the same time. The world of concrete personal experiences to which the street belongs is multitudinous beyond imagination, tangled, muddy, painful and perplexed. The world to which your philosophy-professor introduces you

3400-418: A way that can be written down. On this account, knowing-how or “embodied knowledge” is characteristic of the expert, who acts, makes judgments, and so forth without explicitly reflecting on the principles or rules involved. The expert works without having a theory of his or her work; he or she just performs skillfully without deliberation or focused attention. Embodied knowledge represents a learned capability of

3500-450: Is experience . Without some form of shared experience, it is extremely difficult for people to share each other's thinking processes . Tacit knowledge can be divided according to the terrain. Terrains affect the process of changing tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge. Terrains are of three kinds: Tacit knowledge has been described as “ know-how ” as opposed to “know-what” ( facts ). This distinction between “know-how” and “know-what”

3600-587: Is a broad contemporary category used for various thinkers that incorporate important insights of, and yet significantly diverge from, the classical pragmatists. This divergence may occur either in their philosophical methodology (many of them are loyal to the analytic tradition) or in conceptual formation: for example, conceptual pragmatist C. I. Lewis was very critical of Dewey; neopragmatist Richard Rorty disliked Peirce. Tacit knowledge Tacit knowledge or implicit knowledge —as opposed to formalized, codified or explicit knowledge —is knowledge that

3700-414: Is a case in point. Lewis is sometimes called a proponent of conceptual pragmatism because of this. Another development is the cooperation of logical positivism and pragmatism in the works of Charles W. Morris and Rudolf Carnap . The influence of pragmatism on these writers is mostly limited to the incorporation of the pragmatic maxim into their epistemology. Pragmatists with a broader conception of

3800-550: Is a concept that is derived from our interaction with the external world and not the other way around. At the same time he held persistently that pragmatism and epistemology in general could not be derived from principles of psychology understood as a special science: what we do think is too different from what we should think; in his " Illustrations of the Logic of Science " series, Peirce formulated both pragmatism and principles of statistics as aspects of scientific method in general. This

3900-442: Is a function of the meanings of the words in the statement ('all bachelors are unmarried'), and synthetic statements, whose truth (or falsehood) is a function of (contingent) states of affairs. The other is reductionism, the theory that each meaningful statement gets its meaning from some logical construction of terms which refers exclusively to immediate experience. Quine's argument brings to mind Peirce's insistence that axioms are not

4000-402: Is a great deal of interest within organizations to encourage, support, and sponsor communities of practice to benefit from shared knowledge that may lead to higher productivity. Communities of practice are viewed by many within business settings as a means to explicate tacit knowledge , or the "know-how" that is difficult to articulate. An important aspect and function of communities of practice

4100-494: Is a noun derived from the verb prassein , to do. The first use in print of the name pragmatism was in 1898 by James, who credited Peirce with coining the term during the early 1870s. James regarded Peirce's "Illustrations of the Logic of Science" series—including " The Fixation of Belief " (1877), and especially " How to Make Our Ideas Clear " (1878)—as the foundation of pragmatism. Peirce in turn wrote in 1906 that Nicholas St. John Green had been instrumental by emphasizing

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4200-486: Is an important point of disagreement with most other pragmatists, who advocate a more thorough naturalism and psychologism. Richard Rorty expanded on these and other arguments in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature in which he criticized attempts by many philosophers of science to carve out a space for epistemology that is entirely unrelated to—and sometimes thought of as superior to—the empirical sciences. W.V. Quine , who

4300-451: Is because each member proceeds to his own duty with a trust that the other members will simultaneously do theirs. Wherever a desired result is achieved by the co-operation of many independent persons, its existence as a fact is a pure consequence of the precursive faith in one another of those immediately concerned. A government, an army, a commercial system, a ship, a college, an athletic team, all exist on this condition, without which not only

4400-404: Is by hypothetical inference from external facts. Introspection and intuition were staple philosophical tools at least since Descartes. He argued that there is no absolutely first cognition in a cognitive process; such a process has its beginning but can always be analyzed into finer cognitive stages. That which we call introspection does not give privileged access to knowledge about the mind—the self

4500-520: Is considered to be valuable context-based experiences that cannot easily be captured, codified and stored. Because knowledge management is seen "primarily as a problem of capturing, organizing, and retrieving information, evoking notions of databases, documents, query languages, and data mining", the community of practice is viewed as a potential rich source for helpful information in the form of actual experiences; in other words, best practices . Thus, for knowledge management, if community practices within

4600-658: Is considered to date back to a 1945 paper by Gilbert Ryle given to the Aristotelian Society in London. In his paper, Ryle argues against the ( intellectualist ) position that all knowledge is knowledge of Propositions (“know-what”), and therefore the view that some knowledge can only be defined as “know-how”. Ryle's argument has, in some contexts, come to be called " anti-intellectualist ". There are further distinctions such as "know-why" (science) or "know-who" (networking). Tacit knowledge involves learning and skill but not in

4700-465: Is critical to success in communities of practice. Studies show that members are motivated to become active participants in a CoP when they view knowledge as a public good, a moral obligation and/or a community interest. CoP members can also be motivated to participate through tangible returns (promotion, raises or bonuses), intangible returns (reputation, self-esteem) and community interest (exchange of practice related knowledge, interaction). Collaboration

4800-464: Is difficult to express or extract; therefore it is more difficult to transfer to others by means of writing it down or verbalizing it. This can include motor skills , personal wisdom , experience , insight , and intuition . For example, knowing that London is in the United Kingdom is a piece of explicit knowledge; it can be written down, transmitted, and understood by a recipient. In contrast,

4900-400: Is essential to ensure that communities of practice thrive. In a study on knowledge exchange in a business network, Sveiby and Simons found that more seasoned colleagues tend to foster a more collaborative culture. Additionally they noted that a higher educational level predicted a tendency to favor collaboration. What makes a community of practice succeed depends on the purpose and objective of

5000-556: Is estimated to have saved the corporation $ 100 million. Examples of large virtual CoPs include: American pragmatism Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition that views language and thought as tools for prediction , problem solving , and action , rather than describing, representing, or mirroring reality . Pragmatists contend that most philosophical topics—such as the nature of knowledge, language, concepts, meaning, belief, and science—are best viewed in terms of their practical uses and successes. Pragmatism began in

5100-407: Is held to be necessarily true nor is anything which helps to survive merely in the short term. For example, to believe my cheating spouse is faithful may help me feel better now, but it is certainly not useful from a more long-term perspective because it doesn't accord with the facts (and is therefore not true). While pragmatism started simply as a criterion of meaning, it quickly expanded to become

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5200-438: Is how organisms can get a grip on their environment. Real and true are functional labels in inquiry and cannot be understood outside of this context. It is not realist in a traditionally robust sense of realism (what Hilary Putnam later called metaphysical realism ), but it is realist in how it acknowledges an external world which must be dealt with. Many of James' best-turned phrases—"truth's cash value" and "the true

5300-443: Is increasing organization performance. Lesser and Storck identify four areas of organizational performance that can be affected by communities of practice: Collaboration constellations differ in various ways. Some are under organizational control (e.g., teams), whereas others, like CoPs, are self-organized or under the control of individuals. Researchers have studied how collaboration types vary in their temporal or boundary focus, and

5400-451: Is known as codification"). This ambiguity is common in the knowledge management literature. Assuming that knowledge is created through the interaction between tacit and explicit knowledge, the Nonaka–Takeuchi model postulates four different modes of knowledge conversion: Nonaka's view may be contrasted with Polanyi's original view of "tacit knowing". Polanyi believed that while declarative knowledge may be needed for acquiring skills, it

5500-412: Is known as codification, articulation, or specification. The tacit aspects of knowledge are those that cannot be codified, but can only be transmitted via training or gained through personal experience. There is a view against the distinction, where it is believed that all propositional knowledge (knowledge that) is ultimately reducible to practical knowledge (knowledge how). Ikujiro Nonaka proposed

5600-424: Is no point in asking what "ultimate reality" consists of. More recently, a similar idea has been suggested by the postanalytic philosopher Daniel Dennett , who argues that anyone who wants to understand the world has to acknowledge both the "syntactical" aspects of reality (i.e., whizzing atoms) and its emergent or "semantic" properties (i.e., meaning and value). Radical empiricism gives answers to questions about

5700-502: Is not antithetical to religion but it is not an apologetic for faith either. James' metaphysical position however, leaves open the possibility that the ontological claims of religions may be true. As he observed in the end of the Varieties, his position does not amount to a denial of the existence of transcendent realities . Quite the contrary, he argued for the legitimate epistemic right to believe in such realities, since such beliefs do make

5800-457: Is nothing achieved, but nothing is even attempted. Of the classical pragmatists, John Dewey wrote most extensively about morality and democracy. In his classic article "Three Independent Factors in Morals", he tried to integrate three basic philosophical perspectives on morality: the right, the virtuous and the good. He held that while all three provide meaningful ways to think about moral questions,

5900-499: Is only the expedient in our way of thinking" —were taken out of context and caricatured in contemporary literature as representing the view where any idea with practical utility is true. William James wrote: It is high time to urge the use of a little imagination in philosophy. The unwillingness of some of our critics to read any but the silliest of possible meanings into our statements is as discreditable to their imaginations as anything I know in recent philosophic history. Schiller says

6000-525: Is simple, clean and noble. The contradictions of real life are absent from it. ... In point of fact it is far less an account of this actual world than a clear addition built upon it ... It is no explanation of our concrete universe F. C. S. Schiller 's first book Riddles of the Sphinx was published before he became aware of the growing pragmatist movement taking place in America. In it, Schiller argues for

6100-508: Is that ethics is a fallible undertaking because human beings are frequently unable to know what would satisfy them. During the late 1900s and first decade of 2000, pragmatism was embraced by many in the field of bioethics led by the philosophers John Lachs and his student Glenn McGee , whose 1997 book The Perfect Baby: A Pragmatic Approach to Genetic Engineering (see designer baby ) garnered praise from within classical American philosophy and criticism from bioethics for its development of

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6200-404: Is the central goal of American pragmatism. Although all human knowledge is partial, with no ability to take a "God's-eye-view", this does not necessitate a globalized skeptical attitude, a radical philosophical skepticism (as distinguished from that which is called scientific skepticism ). Peirce insisted that (1) in reasoning, there is the presupposition, and at least the hope, that truth and

6300-467: Is the ultimate test and experience is what needs to be explained. They were dissatisfied with ordinary empiricism because, in the tradition dating from Hume, empiricists had a tendency to think of experience as nothing more than individual sensations. To the pragmatists, this went against the spirit of empiricism: we should try to explain all that is given in experience including connections and meaning, instead of explaining them away and positing sense data as

6400-421: The good reasons approach . The pragmatist formulation pre-dates those of other philosophers who have stressed important similarities between values and facts such as Jerome Schneewind and John Searle . William James' contribution to ethics, as laid out in his essay The Will to Believe has often been misunderstood as a plea for relativism or irrationality. On its own terms it argues that ethics always involves

6500-411: The " ultimate Being " of Hegelian philosophers, the belief in a " realm of value ", the idea that logic, because it is an abstraction from concrete thought, has nothing to do with the action of concrete thinking. David L. Hildebrand summarized the problem: "Perceptual inattention to the specific functions comprising inquiry led realists and idealists alike to formulate accounts of knowledge that project

6600-487: The "lower" aspects of our world (e.g. the imperfect, change, physicality). While Schiller is vague about the exact sort of middle ground he is trying to establish, he suggests that metaphysics is a tool that can aid inquiry, but that it is valuable only insofar as it does help in explanation. In the second half of the 20th century, Stephen Toulmin argued that the need to distinguish between reality and appearance only arises within an explanatory scheme and therefore that there

6700-603: The United States around 1870. Charles Sanders Peirce (and his pragmatic maxim) is given credit for its development, along with later 20th-century contributors, William James and John Dewey. Its direction was determined by The Metaphysical Club members Peirce, Dewey, James, Chauncey Wright and George Herbert Mead . The word pragmatic has existed in English since the 1500s, borrowed from French and derived from Greek via Latin. The Greek word pragma , meaning business, deed or act,

6800-401: The United States in the 1870s. Its origins are often attributed to philosophers Charles Sanders Peirce , William James , and John Dewey . In 1878, Peirce described it in his pragmatic maxim : "Consider the practical effects of the objects of your conception. Then, your conception of those effects is the whole of your conception of the object." Pragmatism as a philosophical movement began in

6900-461: The ability to speak a language, ride a bicycle, knead dough, play a musical instrument, or design and use complex equipment requires all sorts of knowledge which is not always known explicitly , even by expert practitioners, and which is difficult or impossible to explicitly transfer to other people. The term tacit knowing is attributed to Michael Polanyi 's Personal Knowledge (1958). In his later work, The Tacit Dimension (1966), Polanyi made

7000-619: The assertion that "we can know more than we can tell." He states not only that there is knowledge that cannot be adequately articulated by verbal means, but also that all knowledge is rooted in tacit knowledge. While this concept made most of its impact on philosophy of science , education and knowledge management —all fields involving humans—it was also, for Polanyi, a means to show humankind's evolutionary continuity with animals. Polanyi describes that many animals are creative, some even have mental representations , but can only possess tacit knowledge. This excludes humans, however, who developed

7100-539: The basis of their members' relationships. A project team differs from a community of practice in several ways. By contrast, In some cases, it may be useful to differentiate CoP from a community of interest (CoI). Social capital is a multi-dimensional concept with public and private facets. That is, social capital may provide value to both the individual and the group as a whole. As participants build informal connections in their community of practice, they also share their expertise, learn from others, participate in

7200-426: The capability of articulation and therefore can transmit partially explicit knowledge. This relatively modest difference then turns into a big practical advantage, but there is no unexplained evolutionary gap. Tacit knowledge can be defined as skills, ideas and experiences that are possessed by people but are not codified and may not necessarily be easily expressed. With tacit knowledge, people are not often aware of

7300-415: The community as well as the interests and resources of community members. Wenger identified seven actions to cultivate communities of practice: Since the publication of "Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation", communities of practice have been the focus of attention, first as a theory of learning and later as part of the field of knowledge management. Andrew Cox offers a more critical view of

7400-451: The consequent salience of an interpersonal relationship". Social presence may affect the likelihood for an individual to participate in a CoP (especially in online environments and virtual communities of practice ). CoP management often encounter barriers that inhibit knowledge exchange between members. Reasons for these barriers may include egos and personal attacks, large overwhelming CoPs, and time constraints. Motivation to share knowledge

7500-436: The different ways in which the term communities of practice can be interpreted. To understand how learning occurs outside the classroom, Lave and Wenger studied how newcomers or novices become established community members within an apprenticeship. Lave and Wenger first used the term communities of practice to describe learning through practice and participation, which they described as situated learning . The process by which

7600-399: The former for its a priorism , and the latter because it takes correspondence as an unanalyzable fact. Pragmatism instead tries to explain the relation between knower and known. In 1868, C.S. Peirce argued that there is no power of intuition in the sense of a cognition unconditioned by inference, and no power of introspection, intuitive or otherwise, and that awareness of an internal world

7700-462: The generation of explanatory hypotheses, and conducive to the employment and improvement of verification. Typical of Peirce is his concern with inference to explanatory hypotheses as outside the usual foundational alternative between deductivist rationalism and inductivist empiricism, although he was a mathematical logician and a founder of statistics . Peirce lectured and further wrote on pragmatism to make clear his own interpretation. While framing

7800-427: The group, and demonstrate their expertise - all of which can be viewed as acquiring social capital . Wasko and Faraj describe three kinds of knowledge: knowledge as object, knowledge embedded within individuals, and knowledge embedded in a community. CoPs are associated with finding, sharing, transferring, and archiving knowledge, as well as making explicit "expertise", or articulating tacit knowledge . Tacit knowledge

7900-416: The importance of applying Alexander Bain 's definition of belief, which was "that upon which a man is prepared to act". Peirce wrote that "from this definition, pragmatism is scarce more than a corollary; so that I am disposed to think of him as the grandfather of pragmatism". John Shook has said, "Chauncey Wright also deserves considerable credit, for as both Peirce and James recall, it was Wright who demanded

8000-485: The knowledge they possess or how it can be valuable to others. Effective transfer of tacit knowledge generally requires extensive personal contact, regular interaction, and trust. This kind of knowledge can only be revealed through practice in a particular context and transmitted through social networks . To some extent it is " captured " when the knowledge holder joins a network or a community of practice . Some examples of daily activities and tacit knowledge are: riding

8100-465: The limits of science, the nature of meaning and value and the workability of reductionism . These questions feature prominently in current debates about the relationship between religion and science , where it is often assumed—most pragmatists would disagree—that science degrades everything that is meaningful into "merely" physical phenomena . Both John Dewey in Experience and Nature (1929) and, half

8200-526: The mind-body problem. The former, including Rorty, want to do away with the problem because they believe it's a pseudo-problem, whereas the latter believe that it is a meaningful empirical question. Pragmatism sees no fundamental difference between practical and theoretical reason, nor any ontological difference between facts and values. Pragmatist ethics is broadly humanist because it sees no ultimate test of morality beyond what matters for us as humans. Good values are those for which we have good reasons, viz.

8300-405: The movement do not often refer to them. W. V. Quine 's paper " Two Dogmas of Empiricism ", published in 1951, is one of the most celebrated papers of 20th-century philosophy in the analytic tradition. The paper is an attack on two central tenets of the logical positivists' philosophy. One is the distinction between analytic statements (tautologies and contradictions) whose truth (or falsehood)

8400-405: The multitude of formal logics, one set of tools among others. This is the view of C. I. Lewis. C. S. Peirce developed multiple methods for doing formal logic. Stephen Toulmin 's The Uses of Argument inspired scholars in informal logic and rhetoric studies (although it is an epistemological work). James and Dewey were empirical thinkers in the most straightforward fashion: experience

8500-437: The new name pragmaticism "for the precise purpose of expressing the original definition", saying that "all went happily" with James's and F. C. S. Schiller 's variant uses of the old name "pragmatism" and that he nonetheless coined the new name because of the old name's growing use in "literary journals, where it gets abused". Yet in a 1906 manuscript, he cited as causes his differences with James and Schiller and, in

8600-404: The object", which he later called the pragmatic maxim . It equates any conception of an object to the general extent of the conceivable implications for informed practice of that object's effects. This is the heart of his pragmatism as a method of experimentational mental reflection arriving at conceptions in terms of conceivable confirmatory and disconfirmatory circumstances—a method hospitable to

8700-431: The possibility of conflict among the three elements cannot always be easily solved. Dewey also criticized the dichotomy between means and ends which he saw as responsible for the degradation of our everyday working lives and education, both conceived as merely a means to an end. He stressed the need for meaningful labor and a conception of education that viewed it not as a preparation for life but as life itself. Dewey

8800-505: The products of extensive abstraction back onto experience." From the outset, pragmatists wanted to reform philosophy and bring it more in line with the scientific method as they understood it. They argued that idealist and realist philosophy had a tendency to present human knowledge as something beyond what science could grasp. They held that these philosophies then resorted either to a phenomenology inspired by Kant or to correspondence theories of knowledge and truth . Pragmatists criticized

8900-508: The real are discoverable and would be discovered, sooner or later but still inevitably, by investigation taken far enough, and (2) contrary to Descartes's famous and influential methodology in the Meditations on First Philosophy , doubt cannot be feigned or created by verbal fiat to motivate fruitful inquiry, and much less can philosophy begin in universal doubt. Doubt, like belief, requires justification. Genuine doubt irritates and inhibits, in

9000-571: The role that religion can still play in contemporary society, the former in A Common Faith and the latter in The Varieties of Religious Experience . From a general point of view, for William James, something is true only insofar as it works. Thus, the statement, for example, that prayer is heard may work on a psychological level but (a) may not help to bring about the things you pray for (b) may be better explained by referring to its soothing effect than by claiming prayers are heard. As such, pragmatism

9100-433: The sense that belief is that upon which one is prepared to act. It arises from confrontation with some specific recalcitrant matter of fact (which Dewey called a "situation"), which unsettles our belief in some specific proposition. Inquiry is then the rationally self-controlled process of attempting to return to a settled state of belief about the matter. Note that anti-skepticism is a reaction to modern academic skepticism in

9200-423: The truth is that which "works." Thereupon he is treated as one who limits verification to the lowest material utilities. Dewey says truth is what gives "satisfaction"! He is treated as one who believes in calling everything true which, if it were true, would be pleasant. In reality, James asserts, the theory is a great deal more subtle. The role of belief in representing reality is widely debated in pragmatism. Is

9300-493: The ultimate reality. Radical empiricism , or Immediate Empiricism in Dewey's words, wants to give a place to meaning and value instead of explaining them away as subjective additions to a world of whizzing atoms. William James gives an interesting example of this philosophical shortcoming: [A young graduate] began by saying that he had always taken for granted that when you entered a philosophic classroom you had to open relations with

9400-505: The unique character of art and the disinterested nature of aesthetic appreciation. A notable contemporary pragmatist aesthetician is Joseph Margolis . He defines a work of art as "a physically embodied, culturally emergent entity", a human "utterance" that isn't an ontological quirk but in line with other human activity and culture in general. He emphasizes that works of art are complex and difficult to fathom, and that no determinate interpretation can be given. Both Dewey and James investigated

9500-611: The wake of Descartes. The pragmatist insistence that all knowledge is tentative is quite congenial to the older skeptical tradition. Pragmatism was not the first to apply evolution to theories of knowledge: Schopenhauer advocated a biological idealism as what's useful to an organism to believe might differ wildly from what is true. Here knowledge and action are portrayed as two separate spheres with an absolute or transcendental truth above and beyond any sort of inquiry organisms used to cope with life. Pragmatism challenges this idealism by providing an "ecological" account of knowledge: inquiry

9600-512: The work of Dewey and James. A recent pragmatist contribution to meta-ethics is Todd Lekan's Making Morality . Lekan argues that morality is a fallible but rational practice and that it has traditionally been misconceived as based on theory or principles. Instead, he argues, theory and rules arise as tools to make practice more intelligent. John Dewey's Art as Experience , based on the William James lectures he delivered at Harvard University,

9700-419: Was an attempt to show the integrity of art, culture and everyday experience ( IEP ). Art, for Dewey, is or should be a part of everyone's creative lives and not just the privilege of a select group of artists. He also emphasizes that the audience is more than a passive recipient. Dewey's treatment of art was a move away from the transcendental approach to aesthetics in the wake of Immanuel Kant who emphasized

9800-440: Was instrumental in bringing naturalized epistemology back into favor with his essay "Epistemology Naturalized", also criticized "traditional" epistemology and its "Cartesian dream" of absolute certainty. The dream, he argued, was impossible in practice as well as misguided in theory, because it separates epistemology from scientific inquiry. Hilary Putnam has suggested that the reconciliation of anti-skepticism and fallibilism

9900-404: Was opposed to other ethical philosophies of his time, notably the emotivism of Alfred Ayer . Dewey envisioned the possibility of ethics as an experimental discipline, and thought values could best be characterized not as feelings or imperatives, but as hypotheses about what actions will lead to satisfactory results or what he termed consummatory experience . An additional implication of this view

10000-623: Was the constructive sequel to his destructive book Formal Logic . In this sequel, Logic for Use , Schiller attempted to construct a new logic to replace the formal logic that he had criticized in Formal Logic . What he offers is something philosophers would recognize today as a logic covering the context of discovery and the hypothetico-deductive method. Whereas Schiller dismissed the possibility of formal logic, most pragmatists are critical rather of its pretension to ultimate validity and see logic as one logical tool among others—or perhaps, considering

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