On this matter of “recall” and “loss” of knowledge I think David Snowden has mixed his metaphors and his sources, and I’d be happy to have his comments on the matter.

When he starts with “We always know more than we can say,” he is, willy-nilly, quoting Polanyi, and perhaps misusing him. Polanyi’s point was that in addition to the explict knowledge we have, knowledge that we can say and write, we have “tacit” knowledge, knowledge like knowing how to recognize a friend’s face that we just have and can’t explain. David Snowden has taken the idea and used to suggest that we have more explicit knowledge than we can say: that we can’t say all that we know explicitly, that there is loss, that we can’t :recall” it all. And he pushes this idea of knowledge in the mind as a quantity further: we can “say” more than we can “write.”

But:

If I begin to think about Snowden’s comments, and try to write about them, the process of engaging with him, and with you, is not a process of “recall” from my present stock of knowledge only, although that is involved, but a process of seeing new possibilities as well: a process of generating ideas that are new to me, that I am creating, not taking from the storehouse in my head.

Perhaps the writing of a poem illustrates the proposition that writing is generative as well as recalling. I don’t take the poem from a stock of knowledge: it is an addition, not a subtraction.

We generate knowledge as well as manage what we already have, and dialog–with ourselves or with Nancy–is one way to create knowledge that is new to us.

I expect Dave will eventually find this post and offer his critique, but your comments raise the issue of context. My understanding is that Dave is writing about knowledge in the workplace that is the accumulation of days/weeks/years of practice in a domain. So we can’t say or write it all. It is just too much. Is that different than the academic context? Does a professor have everything she knows written down?

The point that I take from your comment circles back to the practice of reflection. For example, by reflecting and writing in my blog, I help clarify my own thinking. Especially as a person who “practices via intuition” and only later really understands what I did. The writing IS a critical path for me to understand my own knowledge which often operates under my own radar screen. (How’s that for weird?)

So maybe the question is, how do we discern where to put our reflective and writing energies? For me, putting them out in public DOES allow new connections, but connections that I could not see if I were working along. Your comment is a perfect example. You expanded on my understanding of Dave’s work, and how it might be useful in mine – even if I interpret it in in new ways that Dave might not have intended.

The most important, says Dr. Snowden, is his notion of “loss”: we know more than we can say and can say more than we can write down.

So: students would learn more if academic practice allowed for more orality,more recitation, less writing.

Really?

What some of us think we have learned–from theory and research as well as practice–is quite the reverse of the practice implied by this conclusion.

When the student–or any practititioner–writes things down, and looks at what she has written, she sees connections and possibilities that were not previously available to her, and these new combinations become a form of knowledge generation, of discovery and uncovering.

If this is so, writing things down is a route to knowledge gain, not loss.

It might be a useful exercise to submit each of Dr. Snowden’s formulations to similar challenge.