ABSTRACT
The role of the concept of tacitness in the critical literature on computer modeling or human reasoning has been to identify a residual category of things allegedly 'essential' to 'real thinking' or 'real discovery' that are unmodeled and perhaps unmodelable by computer programs. In what follows the terms distinguish: 'tacitness' refer strictly to the reproducible expectations, assumptions, presuppositions, cognitive skills. The relevance of problems of tacitness to discussions of scientific discovery is evident from discussions of the more familiar 'search procedures' of statistics, such as the kinds of curve-fitting done using least squares. The Meno is a dialogue about whether virtue can be taught, and the point Socrates makes at the end of the dialogue is essentially that, if it could be, either the Sophists could teach it, or virtuous men could. The sheer diversity of the kinds of models that can emulate any given cognitive process of this sort raises a question about their status.
