How do you learn to ride a bicycle? How do you teach someone to ride a bicycle? It is not easy to put this into words and that is an important point in itself. It may help to have some knowledge of the parts of the bicycle and their respective functions. It may help to know something about relevant physics such as inertia, the centre of gravity, and balance. It may help to have some practical advice about seat height, posture, the appropriate speed at which to pedal, and where to look when riding.
Nevertheless, all that information may not help much. Some young children learn to ride without knowing any of this. They just watch other children doing it, get on bike, try it, and learn by trial and error. The more passionate they are about learning the more likely they may be to succeed.
The mind and body of a bicyclist focus on just a few things: looking where they are going, pedalling, steering, and a sense of balance. This information is integrated together, and the rider adjusts their direction, pedalling, and posture. Furthermore, that process of integration and adjustment involves much that is not the rider’s focus, and they may not even be directly aware of. A person’s sense of body awareness and coordination is shaped by biology, physique, experience, and training.
This example of bike riding illustrates several important things. First, we can have the ability to do something without necessarily being able to articulate how we do it. Second, knowing requires personal commitment. It involves trust and risk. If a person is unwilling to trust or take risks, they may miss out on something good, such as the joy of riding a bicycle. Third, knowing requires integration of multifaceted information. Fourth, knowledge and understanding come from integrating our focus into an implicit background we may not even be aware of.
The example of riding a bike is valuable for understanding how we know (epistemology) because it is simpler and less fraught and emotionally charged than how we come to an understanding and make decisions about history, ethics, politics, religion, and the meaning of scientific knowledge.
These observations draw on Michael Polanyi, including his book, The Tacit Dimension, published in 1966, but based on lectures he gave at Yale in 1962. He referred to the first point as tacit knowing, and the fourth point as the subsidiary-focal interaction. The relationship of the subsidiary and the focus is like the whole and the parts. Polanyi considered the idea of tacit knowledge his most important discovery.
