Practical local knowledge acquired by doing is not reducible to codified technique, and schemes that ignore it fail in ways their designers cannot see.
Scott's 1998 distinction. Metis is what the local farmer knows about this field in this season; techne is the agronomy manual. Schemes that recognise only the second fail in ways their designers cannot see.
In practice
- A national curriculum cannot encode what the teacher knows about the four pupils in this class who are stuck.
- An agricultural scheme that specifies planting dates for a region fails on the farm where the soil drains differently, and the farmer cannot say why in the scheme's vocabulary.
- Standing
- Converges independently on Hayek's knowledge problem and Polanyi's paradox.
- Subject
- Science & Epistemology
- Essay
- How knowledge grows, and how inquiry fools itself