Explicit refers to what is known within conscious awareness, the organisation of experience into forms that can be recalled, reflected upon, named, and shared. It is the known of experience, accompanied by a felt sense of remembering, the recognition that what is called to mind belongs to then-and-there and is being reflected upon from here-and-now.
What is explicitly known takes two broad forms. What is semantically known gives shape to facts, concepts, and understandings of Self, Other(s), and the World around us. What is episodically known locates the remembered moments of our lives in time, space, and place, and over time these moments link together into autobiographical narrative, the story of who we have been and who we are becoming.
Across development, the explicitly known emerges after implicit knowing, becoming increasingly available from around the second year of life as the capacities that support focal attention and contextual memory mature. Within co-regulated connection, an attuned Other helps the youngling make sense of what is happening, naming feeling, linking cause and consequence, and co-constructing narrative. Where our core needs for connection, protection, autonomy, and belonging with communicative meaning-making are met with sufficient relational-regulatory response, implicit knowing finds its way into language and story, becoming known. Where these needs are met with alarm, absence, or silence, experience may remain unlinked with narrative, while what becomes explicitly known organises around protection, explaining, justifying, or disowning what our systems still know implicitly.
What becomes explicitly known is also shaped by attention. Under overwhelm, the capacities that support it may be compromised, so that fragments of experience remain within implicit knowing while what is explicitly known is partial, disordered, or absent. This is why the reasoning mind and the older embodied knowing so often speak different languages, and why understanding alone rarely resolves what has awakened.
Explicit may therefore be understood as the known form of experience, interpretation as it becomes reflectively available. Where the explicitly known is linked with implicit knowing, the here-and-now, the then-and-there, and the yet-to-come may move together with continuity, supporting contextual coherence within and between Self, Other(s), and the World around us.
