CONCEPT
Situated Knowledge
The embodied, context-bound, developmentally accumulated understanding that practitioners build through sustained engagement with specific domains — constitutively resistant to extraction, transfer, or replacement by generated outputs.
Situated knowledge is the form of understanding that develops only through a practitioner's sustained, first-person engagement with the resistance of specific material reality. Unlike propositional knowledge (facts that can be stated) or generic skills (capacities that transfer across domains), situated knowledge is bound to the history of practice that produced it. It is the senior engineer's ability to feel that a codebase is wrong before she can say why; the surgeon's hand that knows, before the mind does, that this tissue is not healthy; the intelligence analyst's judgment that this signal is anomalous in a way the training data cannot specify. Suchman's framework identifies situated knowledge as the irreducibly human contribution to any system that must operate in open worlds — and as the specific capacity that AI threatens to erode by performing the activities through which it develops.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Situated knowledge differs in kind, not in degree, from propositional knowledge. Propositional knowledge — the database schema, the statute, the diagnostic criteria —