Budapest, 1891–1976
Michael Polanyi
A distinguished chemist who turned to philosophy in middle age because he thought the standard account of science described nothing he had ever done in a laboratory. What scientists know, he said, is mostly in their hands and eyes.
The view
Polanyi trained as a physician in Budapest, made his name in physical chemistry in Berlin, and left Germany for Manchester in 1933. In 1948 the university moved him from a chair in chemistry to one in social studies. His major book, Personal Knowledge, appeared ten years later.
His target was the ideal of knowledge as wholly explicit, impersonal and rule-governed: the positivist picture in which a scientist is a kind of recording instrument. Against it he set a single observation, stated near the start of The Tacit Dimension (1966): "we can know more than we can tell."
You can pick out a friend's face from a thousand and cannot say how. A cyclist keeps upright by steering into each fall, in a way that can be written as an equation relating the curve of the path to the speed, and no cyclist has ever used it. A doctor reading an X-ray, a taster grading tea and a physicist judging whether a result is "interesting" all rely on skills that were never put into words and are passed on only by apprenticeship, master to pupil.
The argument
Polanyi analyses skill as having two terms. We attend from a set of clues to the thing they mean. A blind man with a stick does not feel the handle against his palm. He feels the kerb at the far end. The pressures in his hand are known subsidiarily, the kerb focally. Turn your attention to the subsidiary clues and the performance falls apart, as a pianist stumbles who thinks about her fingers.
All knowing has this structure, he argues, including the most theoretical. A scientist dwells in a theory as the blind man dwells in his stick and sees the world through it. So knowledge cannot be detached from the person who holds it. To assert something is to commit oneself, with what Polanyi calls universal intent: staking a personal judgement on a claim about a reality that is independent of oneself. No set of rules can remove that responsibility.
The same view shaped his politics of science. In "The Republic of Science" (1962) he argued that research cannot be centrally planned, because nobody can know in advance where discoveries lie. Science advances by the mutual adjustment of independent scientists, each judging the work of near neighbours.
Where he meets Deutsch
Deutsch agrees that most knowledge is inexplicit. A person's ideas about how to speak grammatically, read a face or tell whether an argument smells wrong were never written down, and many could not be. He extends the point further than Polanyi did: the knowledge in genes is inexplicit too, and nobody holds it at all.
They agree as well that science has no mechanical method, that it is a tradition sustained by people, and that it flourishes only where it is free. Polanyi's case against planning research is close to Popper's argument that the growth of knowledge cannot be predicted.
Where they part
Polanyi draws the conclusion that knowledge is personal, and that at bottom it rests on commitment and on trust in the authority of a community of masters. He describes his own position as fiduciary: we must believe in order to know. Popper thought this gave too much away, and Deutsch follows Popper.
For Deutsch, that an idea is inexplicit does not put it beyond criticism. A tacit expectation is still a conjecture. It can be wrong; it can clash with other ideas; it can be made explicit, at least in part, and improved; and it is corrected in practice all the time, which is what learning a skill consists of. Nor is knowledge personal. Once created it is objective, and can sit in a book, a tool or a genome, working for people who do not understand it.
The appeal to authority is the deepest difference. A tradition of criticism has experts, but nobody whose judgement is the last word.
| Polanyi | Deutsch | |
|---|---|---|
| Where does knowledge come from? | Skilled, largely tacit acts of knowing, learned inside a tradition. | Conjecture: guesses, improved by criticism and experiment. |
| What does justification do? | Personal commitment and the judgement of a community stand where proof was meant to be. | Nothing. No theory is ever justified, and none needs to be. |
| Can knowledge grow without limit? | Yes, wherever science is left free to govern itself. | Yes. Problems are inevitable, and problems are soluble. |
| What is knowledge, physically? | Embodied skill. It lives in trained people more than in texts. | Information that, once embodied, tends to keep itself in existence. |
Further reading
- Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (1966): short, and the best place to start.
- Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (1958).
- Michael Polanyi, "The Republic of Science: Its Political and Economic Theory", Minerva 1 (1962).
- Mary Jo Nye, Michael Polanyi and His Generation (Chicago, 2011).