Michael Polanyi
Physical Chemist & Philosopher of Tacit Knowledge
About
Michael Polanyi (1891–1976) was a Hungarian-British polymath who made major contributions to physical chemistry before turning, in his fifties, to philosophy. Holding a chair in social science at the University of Manchester from 1948, he developed the concept of tacit knowledge, crystallized in his phrase 'we can know more than we can tell.' Against the positivist ideal of fully explicit, impersonal knowledge, he argued that all knowing rests on personal judgment, skill, and 'indwelling' — a background of commitments that can never be completely stated as rules. His books Personal Knowledge (1958) and The Tacit Dimension (1966) remain central to any discussion of knowledge that resists formalization, and pose a sharp question for machines trained only on what has been written down.
Key Contributions
- Introduced the concept of tacit knowledge — 'we can know more than we can tell'
- Wrote Personal Knowledge (1958), a sustained case against the ideal of wholly impersonal, explicit knowledge
- Wrote The Tacit Dimension (1966), the compact statement of his epistemology
- Argued that skilled expertise depends on 'indwelling' — a background that cannot be reduced to rules
- Made foundational contributions to physical chemistry (reaction rates, adsorption, X-ray analysis) before his philosophical work
Questions they sharpened View the streams
Books
Connections
Karl Popper
DebatedPhilosopher of Science
Two Central European emigres who arrived at English universities opposing the same things — positivism, totalitarianism — and then spent decades unable to agree on what holds an inquiry together. Polanyi's position was that no falsification is ever quite decisive, since the experiment may be the thing at fault, and that scientists therefore work from frameworks they dwell in rather than doubt; he subtitled 'Personal Knowledge' as 'Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy', with Popper's critical rationalism as the thing being moved past. Popper took the point as an invitation to irrationalism and answered sharply in the 1959 English edition of his own book. The argument is still live wherever people ask whether the tacit judgment of a practitioner is knowledge or merely habit.
polanyisociety.org · Struan Jacobs and Phil Mullins, "Michael Polanyi and Karl Popper: The Fraying of a Long-Standing Acquaintance", Tradition & Discovery 38:2
John Vervaeke
KindredCognitive Scientist & Philosopher
An interpretive pairing anchored in one admission. Explaining to Adam Walker why a great poem is inexhaustible, Vervaeke reached for Polanyi: 'this is Polanyi's idea, and Esther Meek — the idea that our sense of contact with reality is the sense of being in the presence' of something that will keep yielding more. 'I agree with Polanyi and Meek.' Polanyi's tacit knowing and Vervaeke's relevance realization are the same claim from two centuries: we know more than we can say, and what tells us we have touched something real is that it does not run out.
youtube.com
