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Imagining the Ineffable:  

Elucidating Tacit Knowing Through Deliberate Imagining 

 
 

Natalie M. Fletcher  
 

 
Introduction 

 
 
ichael Polanyi famously stated that “we can know more than we can tell,”1  but is it 
possible to know more than we imagine? Or, on the contrary, does imagining play a role 

in elucidating what we feel we know but cannot fully express? In this article, I will argue that 
imagining can elucidate knowledge by helping us to name and color in the contours of the fuzzy but 
existentially significant aspects of our phenomenological experience. Specifically, I will claim that if we 
initiate deliberate imagining, as a conscious, flexible process of meaning-making, we may be in a better 
position to express the ineffable qualities of our tacit knowing, notably through interpretive acts of 
meaning-generation that are affectively charged. To start on a metaphorical note, this article deals with 
concepts that cannot stand still. Concepts like imagination, tacit knowledge, affect and embodiment 
imbue richness and texture into our mental landscape—that vast expanse of intertwined knowledge, 
memories, beliefs and feelings that make up the scenery of our mind—but they do not stick around 
long enough for our direct contemplation; if chased, they move in so many different directions that it 
seems only definitional dizziness can ensue. In some sense, these concepts all share an ineffable 
quality, one that has alienated many theorists and rendered the prospects of the obscured illuminating 
the obscure hard to fathom. After all, how can that which is tacit itself elucidate tacitness elsewhere? 
Accordingly, putting these restless concepts in relation is no easy task, and the connections and 
demarcations this article proposes will likely not satisfy all readers, but will hopefully lessen the 
conceptual fidgeting. To begin, in the first section, I will present some of imagination’s lovers and 
haters from intellectual history and a handful of key criteria garnered from the interdisciplinary 
contributions of contemporary imagination theory. The subsequent sections will examine tacit 
knowledge from major theoretical frameworks in an effort to reveal a relative subspecies of tacit 
knowing that deliberate imagining can help elucidate through immersive philosophical exploration. 
Finally, in the concluding section, I will briefly outline why formal education should be concerned 
with the process of elucidating relative tacit knowing through deliberate imagining, notably through 
the Community of Philosophical Inquiry (CPI) pedagogical model.          
 
I. Under Heated Observation: Construals of Imagination  
 

The concept of imagination is like a wild animal in captivity: if observed from too close when 
confined, it appears not to behave like it might in a natural setting. Studies done in a vacuum, or 
detached from the everyday context of living, have painted pictures of imagination that seem removed 
                                                 
1 Plane, 1967, 4. 

M 



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from how many of us would describe our everyday imaginative activities. For instance, we can undergo 
experiments of imagining specific objects under increasingly complex circumstances to learn about our 
capacity to produce diverse mental images on command. One example from imagination theory 
involves starting with a simple visualization of a cat, followed by a more complicated visualization of 
the same feline with the added supposition that his parents have left him behind to tour France.2  Yet 
such an orchestrated process, while illuminating in some senses, will not necessarily enhance our 
understanding of the ways our imagination quietly colors our perspectives and worldviews in the 
background of our thought by invoking our memory and orienting our reasoning. 

 
On the other hand, if imagination is studied unrestrained in its natural habitat—that is, in our 

phenomenological experience—it seems almost too vast to behold, assigned traits and behaviours so 
disparate that it appears contradictory and implausibly heterogeneous, responsible for sparking 
everything from our greatest scientific innovations to our finest poetry. As phenomenologist Edward 
Casey remarks, imagination has been “cast into exceedingly diverse roles, ranging from that of mere 
understudy to that of the leading character in the drama of the mind” and as a result has “come to 
promise more than it can possibly deliver.”3 With such a diversity of characterizations, imagination 
becomes difficult for us to spell out, making our knowledge of its functionings in some sense tacit 
despite the abundant attempts—not all of them charitable—to provide a unified picture. Educational 
philosopher Kieran Egan has attributed this vagueness of imagination to the “compound of residues 
of various meanings people have had of it in the past...due in part to its complexity but also in part to 
its containing a number of elements that do not sit comfortably together.”4  Given such difficulties, in 
this section, I will consider some of these conflicting elements by briefly surveying historical 
impressions of imagination, then narrowing in on features that can contribute to defining the kind of 
deliberate imagining I will be associating with the elucidation of tacit knowledge.  

 
Historically, imagination has not enjoyed the noblest reputation, being routinely equated with 

fantasy and frivolity. Plato infamously dismisses imagination as an inferior faculty prone to deceiving 
us through shadows of reality that can lead our reason astray and result in corrupting artistic pursuits 
like poetry, which excites our passions and distorts our values.5  In Greek mythology, the rebellious 
Prometheus, Titan god of forethought, is described as stealing fire from Mount Olympus to fuel the 
imagination of humans, enabling creative pursuits once strictly reserved for the divine, then suffering 
eternal punishment chained to a rock where he is visited daily by a liver-eating eagle.6 Similar 
conceptions of imagination as a symbol of resistance to holy command and spiritual upheaval 
permeate Judeo-Christian traditions, resulting in its being branded as profane and relegated to realms 
of the occult.7   

                                                 
2 This example is offered by Dominic Gregory to suggest that our mental imagery is not largely imagistic—some additional 
supposition-like information can be imagined without contributing anything more to the imagined image. Gregory, 2016, 
99. 
3 Casey, 1976, 19, 1. 
4 Egan, 1992, 9.  
5 Book VI of The Republic in Jowett, 1999: 258-264.  
6 Adapted from Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound in Blackie, 1850: “The secret fount of fire / I sought, and found, and in a 
reed concealed it; / Whence arts have sprung to man, and life hath drawn / Rich store of comforts. For such deed I suffer 
/ These bonds, in the broad eye of gracious day, / Here crucified.” 
7 Egan, 1992, 13, 16-17. 



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In the hands of 17th century philosophers of science, imagination has not fared better, with 
Bacon describing it as a mere pleasure of art with no scientific potential,8  and Descartes viewing it as 
“nothing more than to contemplate the figure or image of a corporeal thing,”9 engendering 
“blundering constructions” and “misleading judgments” that negatively affect our knowledge 
acquisition.10  In the field of psychology, Freud has conflated imagining with acts like fantasizing, 
daydreaming and hallucinating, attributing it no special role besides “constructing composite 
images”11  that express our inner desires and drives, whereas Piaget confines it to a phase of “symbolic 
play” and make-believe in child development that evolves into fuller cognitive capacities with age.12  
On these accounts, it is as if imagination is being analyzed in a captive state from too close a range, 
with theorists focusing on the ways its image-creation can distract us through flights of fancy that 
distance us from what matters, revealing our hubris and immaturity. However, this perspective 
neglects the broader potential of imagination to assist with meaning-making by offering new modes of 
envisioning.  

 
In contrast, theorists that offer a wider lens of analysis have tried to pinpoint some of 

imagination’s essential qualities without straying too far from the significations we tend to attribute to 
it in our lived experience. Kant’s account of imagination distinguishes between reproductive and 
productive types, arguing that the former works to mentally represent items that are not currently 
accessible to our senses and help to name them, whereas the latter involves the spontaneous “free 
play” of ideas toward our greater understanding of experience, notably through artistic expression and 
aesthetic appreciation. For his part, Hume maintains that the imagination facilitates our generation of 
ideas—which he understands as images—to connect with our impressions of the world, thereby helping 
us understand our experience and build knowledge accordingly.13 These mental representations have 
an emotional counterpart since, as he writes, “the imagination and affections have a close union 
together...nothing which affects the former can be entirely indifferent to the latter.”14 Romantic 
thinkers push this emotional connection further, extolling imagination’s capacity to draw on our 
feelings to freely express and shape our thoughts, with Coleridge viewing it as a “mediator between 
reason and understanding,”15  and Wordsworth referring to it as “reason in her most exalted mood”16 
—a vital source of personal meaning.  

 
From an existentialist standpoint, imagination is associated with the very formation of selfhood: 

Sartre claims it is through imagination that “consciousness discovers its freedom”17 and shapes 
identity. In the words of Sartrean scholar Jonathan Webber, “We can imagine the world or any part of 
it being different from the way it in fact is. This ability is necessary to motivate changing the world.”18  

                                                 
8 Francis Bacon in Spedding et al., eds., 1864-74, 406. 
9 René Descartes in Tweyman, ed., 1993, 53. 
10 René Descartes in Haldane and Ross, eds., 1931, 7. 
11 Freud, Standard Edition, IV, 324. 
12 Piaget, 1962, 212. 
13 Warnock, 1976, 15, 26. 
14 Hume, 1896, 424. 
15 Warnock, 1976, 94.  
16 William Wordsworth in De Selincourt and Darbishire, eds., 1940-1949, 192. 
17 Kearney, 1988, 227.  
18 Webber, 2004, xxvi. 



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Last but not least, Dewey’s wide angle perspective on imagination points to its far-reaching effects: for 
him, “all conscious experience has of necessity some degree of imaginative quality.”19 Because it 
couples meanings from our previous experiences with our current lived circumstances, imagination 
can be seen as “the conscious adjustment of the old and the new”20—a faculty required for any human 
production, from engineering and technological invention to the artistic realm where it thrives best. 
On these accounts, it is as if imagination is being studied in the wild where it has free rein. Its energy 
appears boundless and positive, though it needs harnessing to enable productive endeavors like idea 
generation, emotional expression, identity formation and aesthetic innovation.  

 
And so, from the pages of intellectual history we are left with the “compound of residues” 

described by Egan, which have paved the way for a handful of assorted, contestable criteria in 
interdisciplinary contemporary imagination theory—as the following paragraphs will strive to itemize. 
In recent accounts, imagination is described as the “action of forming ideas or mental images”21  
which are multi-sensory and “can cover visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, etc., imagery.”22 This process 
can be active or passive, conscious or unconscious, but any visualization it enables will lack the 
“phenomenal oomph”23 of perceiving objects in real-time through the senses. We can envision 
abstractedly or in an “egocentric visualized space”24 from a particular perspective: either we are the 
subjects of the imagined scene or we envisage the scene from a set vantage point—like from the side or 
up above—as if viewing it as spectators.25 When we visualize objects and circumstances coming 
together to form a state of affairs, we are imagining-that, whereas when we envision ourselves 
experiencing something we have not undergone—the actions, thoughts, feelings that might be 
involved—we are imagining-how.26   

 
The contents of our imaginings can also be non-imagistic, that is, not involve any visualized 

images: we can “talk quite properly of imagining reasons, differences, dilemmas and lies, of imaginary 
wants and happiness, of imaginable caution and torment, of imagining what, why and how...yet none 
of this is imageable.”27 Moreover, imagination is seen as distinct from belief, although it shares some 
of its motivational force. We can imagine X without having to believe it since “we intend our beliefs 
to be true, while we have no such intention regarding our imaginings.”28  Yet while our imaginings are 
not true, they are nonetheless experienced as real: “The contents of imaginings are fictional 
propositions in the trivial sense that they are to be imagined, not in the ordinary sense that they are a 
species of falsehood.”29   

 
 

                                                 
19 Dewey, 2015, 283. 
20 Ibid, 283. 
21 Dominic Gregory, “Imagination and Mental Imagery” in Kind, 2016, 97. 
22 Bruce Nanay, “Imagination and Perception” in Kind, 2016, 125. 
23 Ibid, 128. 
24 Ibid, 125. 
25 Gregory, in Kind, 2016, 125. 
26 Casey, 1976, 42-45. 
27 White, 1990, 
28 Neil Sinhababu, “Imagination and Belief” in Kind, 2016, 120. 
29 Kieran and Lopes, 2003, 4. 



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Compared to other faculties of the mind, imagination is characterized as uniquely accessible: “it 
is nearly always available to us as an alternative to whatever else we may be doing at a given time, 
whether it be perceiving, remembering, reflecting, or whatever,” and with enough concentration, we 
can freely choose what and how we want to imagine.30 In terms of focus, then, imagination is 
concerned with possibility—it explores the possible without assuming its realization, making it “a 
fallible guide.”31 Still, some argue that “the patently impossible cannot be imagined”32 since our 
imaginings are composed of pre-existing knowledge. Within that repertoire, however, the capacity to 
be imaginative entails “being inclined and able to conceive of the unusual and effective”33 to enrich 
human endeavor. On current ontogenetic accounts, imagination through pretend play is no longer 
seen merely as a phase, as Piaget has suggested, but rather as “the first indication of a lifelong mental 
capacity to consider alternatives to reality,”34 one that can enhance our decision-making skills by 
enabling us to think through the implications of possible courses of action.  

 
Imagining possibility also lays the foundation for our empathic dispositions: when faced with an 

uncertain future, we need to “envisage possible but perhaps non-actual states of affairs...imagine how 
[our] tastes, aims and opinions might change and work out what would be sensible to do or believe in 
the circumstances” and we can use our “ability to imagine in order to yield an insight into other 
people without any further elaborate theorising about them.”35  By extension, imagination has socio-
political dimensions since it can empower us to envision the world differently for ourselves and 
others—it makes possible “a view of society as an ongoing process of self-constitution through the 
continuous opening up of new perspectives in light of the encounter with the Other.”36 Engaging with 
the imaginary further helps us to resist problematic social codifications—it is “both a medium of 
experience and an interpretation of that experience in a way that opens up new perspectives on the 
world.”37  

  
For present purposes, it is worth keeping in mind these historical impressions and varied criteria 

of imagination theory, but focus our attention on a few key features of what I call deliberate 
imagining. As Casey asserts, in terms of our phenomenological experience, “imagination as a fixed 
faculty is indeed dead...but imagining is very much alive.”38  So rather than define imagination as a 
faculty, this article will focus instead on imagining as “a particular flexibility which can invigorate all 
mental functions,”39 to borrow from Egan.  More specifically, I will define deliberate imagining as a 
conscious, flexible process of meaning-making that occurs in our mental landscape but in response to 

                                                 
30 Casey, 1976, 6. 
31 Ninan, in Kind, 2016, 276. 
32 Vendler, 1984, 105. 
33 Barrow, 1990, 108. 
34 Further, Paul L. Harris argues “that the capacity to imagine alternative possibilities and to work out their implications 
emerges early in the course of children’s development and lasts a lifetime.” Harris, 2000, 28, xi. 
35 Heal, 2003, 13. 
36 Delanty, 2009, 13. 
37 Ibid, 15. 
38 Casey, 1976, 3. 
39 Further, Egan argues that “imagination is an intentional act of consciousness rather than a thing in consciousness; it is 
one way in which our consciousness works, rather than a distinct part of it that might be studied separately.” Egan, 1992, 
36. 



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an actual phenomenological experience, and that is purposefully initiated to assist with achieving a 
particular goal, notably bringing to light what is tacitly known. This imagining process is pre-critical—it 
is concerned with exploring possibility in the here and now but not yet making judgments about the 
meanings it seeks to elucidate, whether they be ethical, political or societal.40  In the words of Maxine 
Greene, its role “is not to resolve, not to point the way, not to improve. It is to awaken, to disclose the 
ordinarily unseen, unheard, and unexpected.”41   

 
Further, deliberate imagining can be considered an aesthetic practice in a wide sense, without 

requiring artistic pursuits—our case study will be immersive philosophical exploration—since, to draw 
on affect theorist Ben Highmore’s conception of aesthetics, it is “primarily concerned with material 
experiences, with the way the sensual world greets the sensate body, and with the affective forces that 
are generated in such meetings.”42 And this practice, as we shall see, is not only embodied and 
affectively charged but may also be supportive of agency. In keeping with this section’s metaphor, 
throughout the rest of the article, I will strive to observe deliberate imagining “in the wild” in that I 
will be concerned with real phenomenological encounters of tacit knowing, and I will try not hold the 
imagining process captive by imposing, as Dewey put it, “a ghostly metaphysics irrelevant to actual 
aesthetic experience.”43 Yet I will also attempt some gentle taming of deliberate imagining by 
considering ways to make planned use of its elucidation powers for educative purposes.  

 
II. Accessing the Ineffable: Relative Tacit Knowing  

 

In an environment where formal, propositional knowledge is privileged, tacit knowing can be 
unfairly perceived as an invasive alien species threatening the stability of our epistemological 
ecosystem. It can seem unnecessarily messy and unappealing—even dangerous—to consider the notion 
of an embodied, incommunicable type of knowing that operates below the surface of intelligibility and 
defies the language and codification systems we establish to facilitate knowledge exchange. Why spend 
time trying to illuminate that which will never allow itself to be fully verbalized or transmitted, and 
risks irreversibly muddying the epistemic waters? Moreover, if we have oblique access to this tacit 
knowing, the urge to discover what we already know seems like a paradox, and a rather useless one at 
that. Yet, in my view, this kind of perspective reflects an outdated understanding of what ought to 
count as knowledge—as pedagogues Timothy Leonard and Peter Willis note, “We never know ‘just the 
facts,’ for they are mediated by myriad versions and visions.”44   

 
Varied examples suggest that we have access to unspoken knowings that significantly impact our 

phenomenological experiences yet do not lend themselves well to the kind of direct, accurate 

                                                 
40 Elsewhere, notably in a chapter of The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Imagination, I have written about the moral 
and political dimensions of imagination but this essay will focus on pre-critical imaginative activity. 
41 Greene, 1995, 28. 
42 Highmore seeks to recover a lost sense of aesthetics as concerned with “creaturely, experiential life” rather than only art 
theory: He asks: “Anyone interested in the history of aesthetics must be faced with this odd predicament: how does a form 
of inquiry that was once aimed at the entire creaturely world end up as a specialized discourse about fine art? How did an 
ambitious curiosity about the affects, the body, and the senses end up fixated on only one tiny area of sensual life-beauty 
and the sublime?” In Gregg and Seigworth, 2010, 121-122. 
43 Dewey, 2005, 306. 
44 Leonard and Willis, 2008, 1. 



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descriptions we have come to expect from our knowledge bases. Such examples vary from humor and 
artistic taste to business savvy and the application of moral concepts, as well as especially embodied 
activities like dance, surgery or woodworking. In this section, I will examine tacit knowing from the 
perspective of the concept’s originator, scientist and philosopher Michael Polanyi, as well as through 
the categories of tacit knowledge proposed by sociologist Harry Collins. This examination will seek to 
to show how this species of knowing may destabilize our epistemological ecosystem for the better, 
recognizing the fuzzy but existentially significant ways we draw on our conceptual and sensory 
information to interpret our circumstances. 

 
For Polanyi, tacit knowledge is part of what he calls the “ineffable domain” of knowing which 

designates those things “that [we] know and can describe even less precisely than usual, or even only 
very vaguely.”45  Weaving issues of language and embodiment with the human drive for discovery, his 
theory offers the now famous example of bicycle riding as an illustration of a tacit type of knowing 
that enables us to operate successfully in a certain task without having to operationalize it—we can 
know how to proceed but not how to clearly express the particulars involved. According to Polanyi’s 
theory, tacit knowledge remains intact and largely unproblematic to us until we attempt to explain it 
and find ourselves hitting a wall of linguistic limitations, realizing it eludes articulation despite our 
embodied grasp and genuine valorizing of it. In his words, “To assert that [we] have knowledge which 
is ineffable is not to deny that [we] can speak of it, but only that [we] can speak of it adequately”—it 
therefore lurks low in the “domain of sophistication” presided by propositional types of knowledge 
that are more readily codifiable.46   

 
On Polanyi’s account, language includes not only words spoken and written but also all other 

symbolic representations from mathematic equations and geographical maps to diagrams and 
graphs.47 We make sense of linguistic communication largely because many of our words connect to 
our experiences of embodiment: as he argues, “To a disembodied intellect, entirely incapable of lust, 
pain or comfort, most of our vocabulary would be incomprehensible,” since so much of it refers “to 
living beings, whose behavior can be appreciated only from an experience of the drives which actuate 
them.”48 While formal knowledge cooperates better with language than its tacit counterpart, Polanyi 
insists that all our knowing retains an element of vagueness since “we remain ever unable to say all 
that we know…[and] we can never quite know what is implied in what we say.”49   

 
And so, our tacit knowledge should not be discounted despite its reluctance to be made explicit 

since it comprises the personalized repository of conceptual and sensory information that compels us 
to problem-solve and innovate, notably in the sciences, where Polanyi focuses much of his theorizing. 
In his estimation, “originality must be passionate.”50 Human inquiry is fuelled by the inexact, 
unspecifiable but fervent knowings that help us intuit problems worth solving far before we have 
established what precisely we hope to discover.  For Polanyi, it is our imagination that strives to fill the 

                                                 
45 Polanyi, 1962, 91. 
46 Ibid, 95. 
47 Ibid, 81. 
48 Ibid, 104. 
49 Ibid, 99. 
50 Ibid, 151. 



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gap between what we tacitly know in intuition and what we seek: “it will be persistent, deliberate, and 
transitive; yet its whole purpose is directed on ourselves; it attempts to make us produce ideas…and 
the action induced in us by this ransacking [of our brain] is felt as something that is happening to 
us…we are actually surprised and exclaim: Aha! when we suddenly do produce an idea.”51 Whether 
the knowing is stored in our muscle memory or in our sensory responsiveness, we apprehend tacit 
knowing through and within our bodies, via imagination, and according to Polanyi it has “existential 
meaning”52 for us; what we understand about it is personally significant even if not easily explicable. 

 
While sociologist Harry Collins agrees that tacit knowledge is important, in response to 

Polanyi’s theory, he underscores what he deems a key distinction between tacit knowledge being 
inexplicable and inexplicit—the former suggests it cannot be explained whereas the latter hints only 
that it is not plainly expressed.53 In his view, the tacit is “made mysterious by its tension with the 
explicit”54 : it is because as humans we insist on talking things through that our tacit knowing seems 
problematic to us; animals do not share our concern. To help with demystifying this explicable-explicit 
tension, Collins proposes three categories of tacit knowledge. First, relational tacit knowledge refers to 
knowing that is explicable but not made explicit for various reasons: for instance, it may intentionally 
be kept secret (an elite society wanting their agenda to remain classified); it may unintentionally be 
kept hidden (an employee leaving out procedural steps, assuming his colleagues are more informed 
than they are); or it may simply be unrecognized (a specialist not being aware of the important know-
how she routinely applies in her work). In theory, relational tacit knowledge can be explained but due 
to constraints of time, tradition and incentive, its complete elucidation is logistically unlikely: “any 
one piece of relational tacit knowledge can be made explicit, because the reason it is not explicit is 
contingent on things that can be changed.”55   

 
Second, somatic tacit knowledge refers to knowing that is explicable in principle by scientific 

means but in practice is hard to grasp because of our bodily limitations. For Collins, Polanyi’s bicycle 
example fits best in this category because the process is in fact explicable; it is just that we have 
difficulty translating the explanation (involving angles, equilibrium, laws of gravity, etc.) into action 
through our bodies due to the nature of our brain and its information acquisition—in such cases, we 
are dealing with “knowledge that is tacit because of our bodily limits.”56  In contrast, a computer could 
be trained through artificial intelligence to implement such complex principles and act in accordance 
with them. Third, collective tacit knowledge refers to social knowing that we have not determined 
how to make explicit because it involves the intricacies of socialization across particular contexts, 
including assimilation and application of rules, practices, mores, values and conventions—or the 
“cultural fluency” resulting from social immersion. In these instances, according to Collins, “to 
                                                 
51 Polanyi, “Creative Imagination” in Krausz et al, eds., 2009, 159. Polanyi’s offers a rather broad description of 
imagination as constituting “all thoughts of things that are not present, or not yet present—or perhaps never to be present” 
and argues that “the imagination must attach itself to clues of feasibility supplied to it by the very intuition that it is 
stimulating; sallies of the imagination that have no such guidance are idle fancies.” Ibid, 155, 160. 
52 Polanyi, 1962, 94. 
53 Collins, 2010, 4. For Collins, “the tacit is that which has not or cannot be made explicit”—his definition thus includes 
the inexplicable along with what is difficult or unlikely to be expressed. Ibid, 85. 
54 Ibid, 85. 
55 Ibid, 98. 
56 Ibid, 101. 



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understand how these things are to be done we have to engage with social life.”57 Here, the prime 
example would be riding a bicycle but in traffic, which adds myriad factors whose interpretations will 
vary from one context to another thus requiring a social embeddedness to properly “know” how to 
proceed—something a machine could not do with our current technology.58  

 
Though imagination could arguably play a role in illuminating the explicable-explicit tension in 

all three categories of tacit knowledge that Collins identifies, I want to focus on the collective form. 
Specifically, I will focus on how, as individuals, we “borrow”59 from this socially owned knowledge to 
make sense of our phenomenological experience—a process that stands to be greatly elucidated by 
deliberate imagining as the next section will strive to show. Examples of collective tacit knowledge 
seem to center on socially embedded knowing regarding performed acts: beyond the bicycling 
example, Collins describes the skills required for improvised dancing in public, noting that “social 
sensibility is needed to know that one innovative dance step counts as an improvisation while another 
counts as foolish, dangerous or ugly, and the difference may be a matter of changing fashions, your 
dancing partner and location.”60 Yet, as I seek to argue in this article, the challenges of cultural fluency 
seem to also apply to interpretive acts conducted in our mental landscape in response to the 
performed acts we witness—we draw on collective tacit knowledge to make sense of how socialization is 
enacted in befuddling ways that give us an itch for elucidation. It may not be clear whether the itch is 
felt by others too but at the phenomenological level that does not matter since we experience it as 
problematic. As Polanyi notes, “nothing is a problem in itself; it can be a problem only if it puzzles 
and worries somebody.”61   

 
So the question becomes: For whom is this kind of knowing ineffable?62  For instance, some 

might find the intersubjective intricacies of justice obvious to explain because these do not present 
interpretive hurdles for them—political philosophers who have thought extensively about the topic’s 
myriad manifestations and associated levels of cultural fluency will be able to verbalize what they know 
in the face of, say, crimes against humanity, which may not be true of a young child whose 
comparatively limited but no less profound encounters with justice and attempts to interpret them 
remain genuine problems of articulation.63  In this sense, from my perspective, though fed by “the rich 

                                                 
57 Ibid, 120. 
58 Ibid, 123. 
59 As Collins notes, when it comes to collective tacit knowledge, “we can only ‘borrow it’: it is not our property but is social 
and collective.” Collins, 2010, 30-31. 
60 Ibid, 123. 
61 Polanyi, 1962, 129. 
62 Carroll asks a similar question when he dismisses the banality argument against the morally educative potential of 
literature: “Conclusions that might appear utterly banal or obvious for experts in ethics may not be banal or obvious to 
nonprofessional audiences…What the philosopher discounts as trivial may in fact be revelatory for the plain reader and, 
for that very reason, can have a fair claim to being informative and educative for the intended audience.” Carroll, 2002, 
10. 
63 Fuzzy but existentially powerful concepts like justice present particular challenges for articulation. As Polanyi writes, “we 
must use the word ‘justice’, and use it as correctly and thoughtfully as we can, while watching ourselves doing it, if we want 
to analyze the conditions under which the word properly applies. We must look, intently and discriminatingly, through 
the term ‘justice’ at justice itself, this being the proper use of the term ‘justice’, the use which we want to define.” Polanyi, 
1967, 122. 



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layers of meaning from our collective history,”64  the degree to which this tacit knowing in interpretive 
acts is ineffable is relative to the person experiencing it based on her present mental landscape, yet it is 
felt as existentially worth elucidating because it points to something significant but fuzzy in her 
phenomenological experience. As moral philosopher Mary Warnock argues, this “sense that there is 
always more to experience, and more in what we experience than we can predict” is felt as very real to 
us, and the yearning for elucidation, notably through imagination, imbues our lived encounters with 
purpose.65 

 
III. Elucidating Imaginatively: Tacit Knowing Unfolded through Interpretive Acts  

 

At last we arrive at a fine-tuned version of our original question: How can deliberate imagining 
elucidate our relative tacit knowing? If we think of the elucidation as taking place in our mental 
landscape—which combines not only our personalized repository of fluid conceptual and sensory 
information, but also socially owned knowledge on extended loan, so to speak—we can begin to see 
how deliberate imagining can elucidate our relative tacit knowing by helping us to name and color in 
the contours of those fuzzy but existentially significant aspects of our phenomenological experience. I 
want to argue that deliberate imagining, as a conscious, flexible and pre-critical process of meaning-
making, can facilitate carefully constructed interpretive acts—notably figurative language constructions 
and thought experiments, as we will soon see—with the aim of unfolding tacit meanings existing 
within our mental landscape. When effective, these interpretive acts can become what I call arresting 
aesthetic encounters: they seize elements of our embodied knowing with affective force and bring 
them to the surface of intelligibility, illuminating both details and context—in Dewey’s words, they 
“concentrate and enlarge an immediate experience.”66 In this section, I will strive to illustrate this 
process of elucidation and its affective force with an example of immersive philosophical exploration, 
then elaborate on two interpretive acts that are typical of this exploration: figurative language 
constructions and thought experiments. 

 
By way of illustration, let us consider an example from personal experience that I think reflects 

the elucidation features considered so far. Elsewhere, in an article inspired by Merleau-Ponty and by 
my own experiences with collaborative philosophical dialogue, I introduce the notion of body 
taunting to describe what takes place when disagreement is communicated nonverbally in antagonistic 
ways that contradict voiced arguments, through the combined “vocabulary” of flesh—gestural, postural, 
physiognomic, kinetic expression—used to provoke, dismiss, intimidate or alienate.67  This process of 
naming and coloring in my extremely fuzzy but very existentially significant phenomenological 
experience can appropriately be described as a case of deliberate imagining purposely initiated to 
elucidate my relative tacit knowing. After undergoing repeated instances of what I only later dubbed 
as “hostile interventions of body language” during philosophical dialogues, I tried to express for myself 

                                                 
64 Collins, 2010, 30-31. 
65 Warnock calls this sense “the feeling of infinity.” She argues that “our experience is significant to us, and worth the 
attempt to understand it...without some such sense, even at the quite human level of there being something which deeply 
absorbs our interest, human life becomes perhaps not actually futile or pointless, but experienced as if it were.” Warnock, 
1976, 202-203. 
66 Dewey, 2005, 285. 
67 Fletcher, 2014, 11. 



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and a few friends the affective intensity of what felt like a disingenuous incongruity between verbal 
and corporeal language on behalf of some of my co-inquirers—their dialoguing bodies seemed to be 
communicating something different than what they had voiced, resulting in mixed signals that were 
estranging to me and (I sensed) to others as well. In terms of the relative degree to which my tacit 
knowing was ineffable, since I am decidedly not an expert in body language or group dynamics, I had 
comparatively little to draw on in terms of cultural fluency in this area, although I knew something 
was amiss.  

 
On some level, I was drawing on collective tacit knowledge regarding what counts as socially 

acceptable in the context of intellectual conversations among adults, including appropriate gestures, 
delicate dealings with disagreement, cultural sensitivity, and subtle but palpable effects of gender 
disparities, to name but a few. Yet my attempts to articulate this profound but messy 
phenomenological experience betrayed the coherence it enjoyed in my mental landscape; that is, until 
an arduous brain ransacking reached a Polanyi-esque “Aha!” moment of elucidation through 
imagining. Indeed, it was only when I started to engage in figurative and counterfactual thinking 
through interpretive acts enkindled by my deliberate imagining that I had the impression this 
particular knowing of mine was being elucidated. Taken together, my imagining of possibly useful 
labels and analogies—zeroing into potential significations and zooming out again—represented an 
arresting aesthetic encounter: it seized those elements of embodied knowing I was trying in vain to 
articulate and morphed them into the concept cluster of “body taunting” that approximated the 
experiences I had, then was further validated by some “Aha!” moments in others who shared in my 
newly found elucidation. The small but personally meaningful social critique resulting from this pre-
critical, flexible imagining process reflected what Greene describes as “the creation of new interpretive 
orders as human beings come together not only to ‘name’ but to change or to transform their 
intersubjective worlds.”68   

 
It is worth noting that in all likelihood, this process of elucidating our tacit knowing through 

deliberate imagining is, more often than not, highly affectively charged. Why? Affect is what motivates 
our itch for elucidation by shrouding a given situation in confusion, wonder, curiosity, and the like, 
so that we experience it as problematic and put our imagining to work. To be clear, affect in this sense 
is not merely a synonym for ‘atmosphere’ or ‘emotion,’ as colloquial descriptions might suggest—it 
denotes “impersonal intensities that do not belong to a subject or an object,”69 “forces of 
encounter…[that] need not be especially forceful,”70  “vivacity of context,”71 and “vital forces insisting 
beyond emotion” that “arise in the midst of inbetween-ness: in the capacities to act and be acted 
upon.”72  Affect is indeterminate, pre-individualized and volatile,73  yet it is also “sticky”—“it preserves 
the connection between ideas, values and objects” and explains “how we are touched by what we are 
near.”74 So when our phenomenological experience confronts us with enactments of social knowing 

                                                 
68 Greene, 1995, 61. 
69 Anderson, in Gregg and Seigworth, eds., 2010, 161. 
70 Gregg and Seigworth, eds., 2010, 2. 
71 Massumi, 2002, 220. 
72 Gregg and Seigworth, eds., 2010, 1. 
73 Wissinger, in Clough and Halley, eds., 2007, 238. 
74 Ahmed, in Gregg and Seigworth, eds., 2010, 30-32. 



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that we find hard to interpret, the affects of that situation travel into the process of deliberate 
imagining that we initiate to elucidate what we have witnessed, then intermingle with the affects 
already connected with our collective tacit knowledge, and continue to resonate throughout the 
interpretive process. In this sense, no matter what emotions are subsequently evoked in our bodies, 
“the atmosphere is already angled; it is always felt from a specific point.”75  Returning to the example 
of body taunting, the affects of hostility and antagonism that sparked the imaginative process 
entwined themselves with the fervor of wanting to label the felt incongruity which itself carried affects 
of chaos and bewilderment—all tinged with affects of estrangement and even righteous indignation 
culled from socially owned knowledge.76  In short, in the process of imaginative elucidation, affect can 
be described as what spurs our recognition of our relative tacit knowing so that we may get to a point 
where it is no longer ineffable to us. 

 
Once spurred into immersive philosophical exploration, certain imaginative interpretive acts 

become especially useful to our elucidation process. First, figurative language constructions draw on 
our imaginative resources to manage the fuzziness of phenomenological experience by at once 
clarifying and clouding it—as Warnock puts it, while “our imagination is at work tidying up the chaos 
of sense experience, at a different level it may, as it were, untidy it again.”77  One the one hand, when 
we attempt to explain our tacit knowing and find ourselves hitting a wall of linguistic limitations, 
figurative devices like metaphors and analogies help to provide a circuitous but often more 
existentially satisfying route to express what once felt ineffable. Their aim is not precision but meaning 
generation that is intersubjectively compelling—as Polanyi notes, “In order to describe experience 
more fully, language must be less precise.”78 As interpretive acts, they encourage us to imaginatively 
align two things that are distinct but comparable in some intuitive way, testing the comparison’s 
worth by extending it along various avenues across different contexts. In so doing, we change that 
which we are trying to name and color, and our tacit knowing is transformed—metaphors and 
analogies become “actual carriers of knowledge” and “the basis for the transfer of tacit knowledge,”79  
because they “create novel interpretations of experience by asking the listener to see one thing in 
terms of something else...and create new ways of experiencing reality.”80  A time-tested case is myth: as 
an allegorical device, it is a prime example of collective tacit knowledge elucidated by imagining so 
that it can be borrowed by individuals and put to use in their own phenomenological experience—it 
endures because of what Egan calls an “affective tug;”81  the vivacity of its affects survives through time 
and interweaves with our imagining’s drive to interpret meaning. The aforementioned myth of 
Prometheus powerfully demonstrates this contribution to our cultural fluency.  

 
Yet at the same time, figurative language constructions can be destabilizing: since we cannot co-

imagine—our imaginings never coincide exactly—the best thing we can do through metaphors and 

                                                 
75 Ibid, 37. 
76 Borrowing from Brian Massumi, if affect is intensity, then “emotion is qualified intensity...It is intensity owned and 
recognized.” Massumi, 2002, 88. 
77 Warnock, 1976, 207. 
78 Polanyi, 1962, 89. 
79 Fock, in Göranzon et al., eds., 2006, 103. 
80 Donnellon, Anne et al., 1986, 48. 
81 Egan, 1992, 32. 



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analogies is “put together what [we] know in new ways and begin to express what [we] know but 
cannot yet say.”82  In these circumstances, ambiguity is not a failing since the imprecise explanations 
that figurative language offers may be more honest than some forms of explicit knowledge, recognizing 
the messiness of phenomenological experience and accepting the by-product of tacit residue. It is no 
coincidence that metaphors and analogies are used liberally throughout this article to grab hold of 
concepts that pose a flight risk. As products of deliberate imagining about the mystifying character of 
tacit knowledge, what they might end up elucidating is the extent to which tacit knowing is indeed 
obscure but profoundly integrated into our everyday context of living, and thus worth our conceptual 
attention. Importantly, they try to convince us of imagining’s potential for knowledge elucidation, 
making us see that “the more energetic and lively the imagination, the more are facts constantly 
finding themselves in new combinations and taking on new emotional colouring as we use them to 
think of possibilities, of possible worlds.”83 Under imagining’s tutelage, figurative language 
constructions elucidate our tacit knowing by awakening us to new but unfinished meanings. 

 
Second and similarly, the imaginative interpretive act of thought experiments can help to unfold 

and reconfigure tacit meanings existing in our mental landscape. Understood as imaginative 
hypotheticals deliberately devised to probe a concept and its implications, thought experiments 
elucidate the fuzziness of phenomenological experience by “reconfigure[ing] our conceptual 
commitments, thereby rendering our concepts newly meaningful,” to borrow from aesthetics 
philosopher Noel Carroll, and as such we can “regard them as productive of knowledge, since they 
make what in some sense is already known accessible and salient.”84 When well-constructed and 
sensorially detailed, thought experiments become arresting aesthetic encounters because of the 
affectively charged, creative world-making they encourage in us by invoking our tacit knowings, 
enabling us to move from actualities to possibilities and back again—to “see as” in the words of Paul 
Ricoeur.85 Thanks to imaginative fuel, the specificity of details they provide helps to concretize 
concepts for us, involving our bodies affectively in the visualizing of what could happen if the 
hypothetical obtained—“we feel in ourselves some of the affective aspects of the scene”86 —so “although 
the world-frames of imaginative presentations lack the depth, breadth and persistence of the perceived 
world, they do present themselves as evanescent constellations of specific imagined contents, as 
momentary mini-worlds of imaginative experience.”87   

 
If we imagine, for instance, a world without imagination, the myriad elements of our pre-factual 

and counterfactual thinking can evoke strong emotional reactions because of what we already know to 
be the case in our social interactions (by appeals to our collective tacit knowledge), and due to the 
affects sticking to the atmosphere of our endeavor—at times consternation at the possibility of the 
hypothetical coming true, other times playfulness with the freedom of imagining different scenarios. 
In thought experiments, imagining flexes its muscles. As Egan writes, 

                                                 
82 Richards, 1936, 89. 
83 Egan, 1992, 50. 
84 Carroll says that thought experiments “rely upon what competent users of a concept already, in some sense, know in 
order to clarify our understanding.” Carroll, 2002, 7-8. 
85 Egan, 1992, 18. 
86 Warnock, 1976, 169. 
87 Casey, 1976, 51. 



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The flexibility that is central to imaginativeness seems to enable the imaginative person to 
conceive of a wider than normal range of states or actions that do not exist or that do not 
follow by literal extrapolation from current states or actions or from conventional 
representations of states or actions. In conceiving an indeterminate range of such states or 
actions the imaginative person can hold them in the mind, consider potential implications, 
assess their appropriateness, scan their features, selecting whichever might be most unusual 
and effective.88 
 

This complex imaginative thinking is crucial because it sheds new light on our existing tacit knowing, 
and may even contribute to our shaping and moulding the collective tacit knowledge that governs so 
much of our intersubjective exchanges. Indeed, by painting alternative possibilities that engage us 
affectively, thought experiments, as imaginative explorations, “suggest the contingency of the reality 
we are envisaging,”89 and can move us to challenge the contents of our cultural fluency. Moreover, in 
both cases of immersive philosophical exploration—figurative language constructions and thought 
experiments—we can often benefit from a “reflective afterlife”90 that continues to color in the contours 
of the concepts and phenomena we have sought to name, bringing a creative philosophical literacy to 
our everyday context. We gain new understanding through imaginative “readings” of our tacit 
knowings. 

 
Through examples of immersive philosophical exploration, we can already start to see the 

educative powers of deliberate imagining with respect to our tacit knowing. In closing, it is worth 
briefly reflecting on a few specific reasons why formal education should be concerned with this 
imaginative process of elucidation, namely: to prevent “affect aliens” and to increase agency by 
personalizing knowledge. We have seen how deliberate imagining—as a conscious, flexible and pre-
critical process of meaning-making—can facilitate carefully constructed interpretive acts “in the wild” 
of our actual, day-to-day phenomenological experience, to help unfold the tacit meanings of our 
mental landscape, but this process may also be adapted to thrive “in captivity” within a school setting. 
With some gentle taming of deliberate imagining into a pedagogically useful aesthetic practice, we can 
envision some planned uses of its elucidation powers for educative purposes.  

 
First, formal education should be concerned with elucidating tacit knowledge by imaginative 

means so as to prevent students from becoming “affect aliens,”91 a term coined by Sara Ahmed to 
designate individuals who are estranged by the prevailing affects of their context. For our purposes, 
affect aliens are in a sense forced to exist on the margins of collective tacit knowledge because it does 
not represent what they find meaningful. Ahmed’s examples of “feminist kill-joys, unhappy queers, 
and melancholic migrants”92 can be translated to the realities faced by students whose difference may 
preclude their sense of belonging at school and surface in the form of resistance, warranted as it may 
be. Relative to their current mental landscape, such students may find that what they know to be 
morally wrong or problematic in a classroom that, say, privileges whiteness or heteronormativity, is 
                                                 
88 Egan, 1992, 14. 
89 Greene, 2013, 30. 
90 Carroll, 2002, 12. 
91 Ahmed, in Gregg and Seigworth, eds., 2010, 29-30. 
92 Ibid, 30. 



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extremely ineffable to them, notably compared to the politicized adults that Ahmed references, but 
their phenomenological experience is no less existentially profound. Here, the kind of immersive 
philosophical exploration we have been considering could help engage students imaginatively with 
their tacit knowing so as to awaken them to new but unfinished meanings and move them to 
challenge the cultural fluency of their school so they do not get affectively alienated from their 
educational experiences. In this case, pre-critical deliberative imagining can pave the way to the more 
critical envisioning that we associated earlier with empathy and socio-political engagement.  

 
On a related note, formal education should also be concerned with the imaginative process of 

elucidation so conceived to increase the agency of students by helping to personalize their knowledge. 
By focusing on the tacit knowing relative to students in their present circumstances, we can give them 
a chance to voice what they find fuzzy but significant in their phenomenological experiences—
regardless of whether we as educators share in their itch for elucidation or have already figured out 
our own articulations. As a result, they may become better acquainted with themselves as knowers and 
become more active participants in their knowledge construction. As epistemologist Ingela Josefson 
writes, “There is a tacit knowledge in every word we say. A person’s language is a fingerprint of her 
meeting with the world; it is loaded with the individual fabric of life that has given concepts 
meaning.”93 For instance, what students are able to communicate through thought experiments can 
help them figure out what matters to them in light of tacit knowings they already have, all the while 
giving these a new coloring. As development psychologist Paul Harris writes, “the landscape of reality 
may look different after they return from an excursion into the counterfactual world.”94  

 
IV. Educative Elucidation: Deliberate Imagining of the Tacit at School 

 

But how might this process of elucidation happen in schools? Educational theorists Douglas 
Thomas and John Seely Brown have proposed that we cultivate students’ imaginative engagement by 
creating “a bounded learning environment that strikes a balance between constraint and freedom, and 
exercises based, for example, on ‘what if’ questions that allow the imagination to flourish.”95  Many 
pedagogical methods are likely to contribute to such a learning environment, and to these ends, 
pedagogical pluralism is probably worthwhile.96 But let us briefly consider the Community of 
Philosophical Inquiry (CPI) as one viable approach. As conceived by co-founders Matthew Lipman 
and Ann Margaret Sharp, the CPI aims to develop responsible, relational agency through 
multidimensional thought (or combined critical, creative and caring thinking), by challenging youth 
to confront the contestable questions they deem central to their lives and seek reasonable judgments 
through structured group dialogue.97 If used specifically with deliberative imagining in mind, this 
model can purposefully integrate thought experiments and narratives rich in figurative language to 
encourage youth to pinpoint fuzzy but significant elements of their tacit knowing that they would like 

                                                 
93 Göranzo, 2006, 44. 
94 Harris, 2000, 118. 
95 Thomas and Brown, 2012, 54. 
96 Although beyond the scope of this particular article, it would be important to examine the possible downsides and 
dangers of this kind of approach, notably with respect to issues of neurodiversity and different learning styles. 
97 For more on the nature of the CPI as method, please see Matthew Lipman’s Thinking in Education (Cambridge, MA: 
Cambridge University Press, 2003). 



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to elucidate. Given its philosophical commitments, the CPI can also easily offer youth the challenge of 
crafting effective metaphors and analogies that extend the breadth of their mental landscape through 
imaginative world-making, while problematizing their repository of conceptual and sensory 
information toward new meanings and knowings.  

 
This potential has not only educative but also epistemological potential for childhood. It stands 

to reason that youth’s mental landscape likely contains more tacit elements given they are generally 
less experienced and language-savvy than adults—they might “know” a lot more than they can explain 
yet the fuzziness of this knowing still stands in the way of its transformation into concerns and 
commitments despite its felt importance. Powerful philosophical concepts like justice (as we have 
seen) as well as freedom, power and identity may present particular challenges for articulation, which 
is why the CPI is such an interesting candidate for a collaborative practice of deliberate imagining that 
enables youth to illuminate their tacit knowings with others in a purposeful way. Such envisioning can 
act as a useful stand-in for the experiences that youth have yet to encounter—they can deliberately 
imagine in their mental landscape through a kind of Deweyan “dramatic rehearsal” in which 
possibilities can be tested without the “irrevocable” consequences of “an act overtly tried out,” until 
they live out the real thing, so to speak.  

 
In contexts where formal, propositional knowledge tends to be privileged, children’s tacit 

knowing risks being unfairly neglected in part because they draw on sensory, affective information to 
interpret their circumstances—that is, the often-confusing adult world they will eventually inherit but 
currently experience as newcomers. Yet this very freshness in the face of philosophical concepts carries 
with it possible tacit knowings that could greatly contribute to knowledge production if only these 
could be elucidated. In this light, deliberate imagining could contribute not only to youth’s education 
but also to their emerging agency—thereby fighting against their epistemic exclusion—by helping them 
to spell out concerns and commitments that may otherwise seem ineffable to them despite their 
personal significance. If successful, the CPI and its collaborative interpretive acts could become 
arresting aesthetic encounters for youth that are intersubjectively meaningful, preventing the 
accidental creation of affect aliens while heightening possibilities for agency at school and beyond. 
 
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Address Correspondences to: 
Natalie Fletcher, Affiliate Professor, Department of Philosophy, Université de Montréal,  
Email: natalie.malo-fletcher@umontreal.ca  
 

mailto:natalie.malo-fletcher@umontreal.ca

