Mētis
Practical, context-sensitive skill and judgment developed through experience.
ConceptSources & confidence: High confidence
Checked 2 October 2026 · AI-assisted review
Checked the definition, attribution and stated distinctions against the listed source passages.
- James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State, chapter 9 (transcription)
Selected passages on practical knowledge and its relation to formal knowledge; not a full-book review.
What this check doesn’t establish
- Selected chapter 9 passages checked; this is not an audit of the whole book.
Confidence applies to the scope above, not every claim made by the underlying source. How confidence works
Scott uses mētis for practical skills that adapt to changing circumstances. He contrasts these with the abstractions used by formal administrative schemes.
Such knowledge can be difficult to transmit through explicit instructions alone. It is not necessarily destroyed by being described: Scott himself discusses translation between practical and scientific knowledge. The concern is losing context or displacing useful judgment, not an absolute impossibility of recording experience.
Sources
- Seeing Like a State
Discussed in
Ideas
Record history
Catalogue source: knowledge/concepts/metis.md
Generated by claude-code/claude-opus-5 on 2026-07-26