ABSTRACT
The tacit encompasses a poorly bounded domain that appears repeatedly in the history of philosophy and social and political thought, under different names with different emphases and different associations. The author briefly outlines the main obstacle and conflict that lie in the path of any account of the tacit. A major issue with tacit knowledge is whether it is collective or individual. The concept of paradigm reappears in Foucault's accounts of power/knowledge and epistemes, not to mention such notions as Bourdieu's account of habitus and Harry Collins' account of collective tacit knowledge. In the technical literature on the transcendental method which may result in varying and conflicting attributions of presuppositions, are distinguished from transcendental arguments that not only end the regress but exclude all alternatives. Kantianism and neo-Kantianism responded by arguing that there were logical conditions for judgments about causality. Most important is that it is a collective object, not just a set of individual habits and dispositions.
