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Michael Polanyi placed a strong emphasis on dialogue within an open community

pre-logical phase of knowing as 'tacit knowledge

Perhaps the strongest echo of his work that we encounter as educators comes through the work of Donald Schön and Chris Argyris on knowing in action, and in Eisner's consistent arguments for connoisseurship and criticism in evaluation.

By paying attention to Polanyi's conception of the  tacit dimension we can begin to make sense of the place of intuition and hunches in informal education practice - and how we can come a better understanding of what might be going on in different situations

praxis (informed, committed actions) that stand at the heart of informal education.

Our intellectual skills are driven by passionate commitments which motivate discovery and validation.

Commitments lead innovators to risk their reputation by committing to a hypothesis. He gives the example of Copernicus, who declared, contrary to our experience, that the Earth revolves around the Sun. He claims that Copernicus first arrived at the truth of the Earth's true relation to the Sun not by following a method, but via "the greater intellectual satisfaction he derived from the celestial panorama as seen from the Sun instead of the Earth."[3] What saves this approach from the charge of relativism is his conviction that tacit knowing connects us with objective realities.

Knowing more than we can say helps to explain how knowledge can be passed on within a tradition by non-explicit means, via apprenticeship i.e. a pupil improves their skills by observing a master.