What Mary Didn't Know About Tacit Knowledge

This paper explores the notion that tacit knowledge can be converted to explicit knowledge, by examining the philosophical concept of qualia. Qualia is suggested to be a type of tacit knowledge that cannot be made explicit, whether or not one subscribes to the belief that qualia also represents a non-physical mental property. Given that qualia shows that there exists at least one type of knowledge that resists codification, the existence of qualia disproves the assumption that all tacit knowledge is potentially capable of being converted into explicit knowledge an assumption which it is suggested is common in the Information Systems literature. As a result, it is recommended that IS researchers resist blindly accepting this assumption as one of the foundations of their argument, and that they continue to examine their understanding of what is meant by the term “knowledge”.