Recipes and Tacit Knowledge

This is my sixth month on paternity leave (counting my one-month vacation) and one thing I’ve been doing is learning to cook. Previously, I found it difficult even to follow recipes, and wouldn’t think of trying to cook up something by ad-libbing in the kitchen.

So I began with some really simple pasta sauce recipes which I got from Svante, which I tried variations on, and proceeded with more and more “advanced” recipes. I focusedon recipes which all included tomatoes. Not by intention, but in hindsight it seems like a good idea to try recipes in the same flavor-space. So I could add ingredients from one recipe to another and see whether it worked.

After a while I felt ready to try other flavor-spaces, so I did, and repeated the same procedure of first following the recipe in its entirety, then cooking the same dish a few days later, but adjusting it according to the result from the first time—a little more of this, a little less of something else. Then trying other related dishes, cross-breeding, and so forth.

Cooking is a great example of where really learning what you’re doing would take years. It would be like studying the chemistry of flavors, trying to memorize which flavors blend well. But it isn’t all about flavor, it’s also about at what temperature and for how long different foodstuffs should cook. In addition, cooking is to a great extent about timing: when you’re frying something, for instance, you must have the next ingredient ready in time, or you’ll burn the fried stuff. So add to this a course in planning, of learning to draw sequence diagrams, etc.

Or you can just learn by doing. By following recipes.

The first time you do a recipe, the result isn’t quite in line with your taste preferences, and most notably, although you followed the recipe, you didn’t have the tomatoes chopped by the time the onions were done sizzling in the pan. And it only takes another shot at the same dish to get the timing right, provided that you try again within a few days.

Six months ago, I had a poor sense for which flavors went well together, and I didn’t know quite how to learn to cook. But I can recommend this method.

Anyway, this brings me to something I read in the postscript of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn:

Philosophers of science have not ordinarily discussed the problems encountered by a student in laboratories or in science texts, for these are thought to supply only practice in the application of what the student already knows. He cannot, it is said, solve problems at all unless he has first learned the theory and some rules for applying it. Scientific knowledge is embedded in theory and rules; problems are supplied to gain facility in their application. I have tried to argue, however, that this localization of the cognitive content of science is wrong. After the student has done many problems, he may gain only added facility by solving more. But at the start and for some time after, doing problems is learning consequential things about nature. In the absence of such exemplars, the laws and theories he has previously learned would have little empirical content.

Later he adds:

That sort of learning is not acquired by exclusively verbal means. Rather it comes as one is given words together with concrete examples of how they function in use; nature and words are learned together. To borrow once more Michael Polanyi’s useful phrase, what results from this process is “tacit knowledge” which is learned by doing science rather than by acquiring rules for doing it.