Michael Polanyi

Works

• 1958Personal Knowledge

  Scientific knowledge rests on skills, judgement and commitment that cannot be fully made explicit; objectivity is reached through, not without, the knower.

• 1966The Tacit Dimension

  Three lectures on tacit knowing: we attend from bodily and subsidiary clues to what we focus on, and so know more than we can tell.

Position

Polanyi’s philosophy grew out of his defence of free science. Against Soviet planning and against positivist ideals of fully explicit knowledge, he argued in “Personal Knowledge” (1958) that all knowing involves skills, connoisseurship and commitments on which knowers rely without being able to state them completely. In “The Tacit Dimension” (1966) he gave this a structure: we attend from subsidiary clues – bodily sensations, the features of a face, the feel of a tool – to a focal whole, so that “we can know more than we can tell”. Discovery depends on such tacit integration and on a community of explorers, which he described in “The Republic of Science” (1962) as a self-coordinating order based on mutual authority. Thomas Kuhn cited “Personal Knowledge” in “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” (1962), and Kuhn’s account of paradigms learned through exemplars has often been compared with Polanyi’s ideas. Since the 1990s “tacit knowledge” has also become a key term in management and education research, often in simplified form. Critics objected that his appeal to personal commitment and the authority of the scientific community makes it hard to say why rival beliefs should be rejected, and that it blurs the line between scientific and religious conviction. His religious themes found a stronger response among theologians such as Thomas F. Torrance than among analytic philosophers.

Life & context

Michael Polanyi was born on 11 March 1891 in Budapest, the younger brother of Karl Polanyi. He studied medicine in Budapest, qualified in 1913, served as a medical officer in the Austro-Hungarian army during the First World War and in 1917 took a doctorate in physical chemistry with a thesis on adsorption. In 1920 he went to Berlin, first to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Fibre Chemistry and from 1923 to Fritz Haber’s Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry, where he worked on X-ray diffraction, adsorption and reaction rates. After the National Socialist dismissal laws of 1933 he resigned and took the chair of physical chemistry at the University of Manchester. Alarmed by Soviet science policy and by British calls for planned research, he co-founded the Society for Freedom in Science in 1940 and turned increasingly to economics and philosophy; in 1948 Manchester created a chair of social studies for him. His Gifford Lectures in Aberdeen (1951–52) became “Personal Knowledge” (1958); from 1959 he was a senior research fellow at Merton College, Oxford. He died on 22 February 1976 in Northampton. His son John C. Polanyi received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1986.

Further main works

• Science, Faith and Society (1946)
• The Logic of Liberty (1951)
• The Republic of Science (essay, 1962)
• Meaning (with H. Prosch, 1975)