We live in an age of explicit rules and guidelines; of aims and objectives; of benchmarks and performance indicators, standardized tests and league-tables. Systematization abounds in the criteria specifying good practice and the delivery of public services; in the charters that outline rights and responsibilities in both civic society and in society’s microcosms. A university’s once unspecified expectation that its students will attend lectures and prepare work is often now formalised in contracts, and in return students are informed of the explicit ‘outcomes’ of their ‘learning activities’. Such reforms aim to replace a tacit or implicit understanding of practices with something explicit and codified. They are expressions of what Max Weber calls "intellectualisation": the sentiment that one can "in principle, master all things by calculation". In The Craftsman Richard Sennett identifies as longstanding this suspicion of merely implicitly understood standards, and emphasizes how a “Platonic” suspicion of ‘embedded’ knowledge expresses itself in the move to obviate dependence on the skilful judgements of individuals by formalising the knowledge and making explicit the rules that experts purportedly employ in making them. But the question this raises is the following: Can tacit or implicit forms of judgment or of understanding be ‘cleansed’ of subjective factors and rendered objective only insofar as they are codifiable in a principle or set of principles? Or is there a form of knowledge or judgement which is not codifiable (cannot be “put into words”) but which is still genuinely answerable to features of the world? What seems to be required here is the concept of a form of knowing that is not as Weber would say “calculable”, but which answers nevertheless to a genuine standard of correctness. Let’s call this “tacit knowledge”.