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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.