The language of research and the importance of the tacit dimension

I consider the nature of research, both as a mode of learning about the world, with the focus on the object of research, and as a role for staff and students in the higher education sector, with the focus on the practice to be learned, on the pedagogy of research. The domain of research and researchers has, like other domains of higher education and like education more widely, has received a good deal of policy attention. In the UK, there has been the growing “impact agenda”, an attempt to measure the worth of research projects by the social, and especially economic, benefits they would bring about. Critics of this agenda need, in order to maintain their stance, to appreciate the metaphysical importance of Kant’s noumenon, supplemented by Priest’s “torn boundary” thesis, for the object of research. The new Researcher Development Framework, being launched in 2011, will supplant the 2001 “Joint Skills Statement”. Criticisms that this “skills agenda” is too generic to be useful and not sufficiently academic in character to be appropriate for the pedagogy of research are wide of the mark. Examination of the various senses of the “tacit dimension” in Polanyi variously inform discussion of these criticisms.