Michael Polanyi’s Personal Knowledge of Science
Introduction
Personal Knowledge sounds like a contradiction in terms. How can true knowledge about something that exists independently of those who agree upon it (such as Jupiter’s moons, dinosaurs 65 million years ago, the Higg’s boson) rest upon a personal commitment? And yet this was what Michael Polanyi made the basis of his 1958 philosophy of science. It is a philosophy that is worth returning to after so much confusion between then and now for it endorses; ‘The intuitive view that there is a way things are that is independent of human opinion, and that we are capable of arriving at belief about how things are that is objectively reasonable, binding on anyone capable of appreciating the relevant evidence regardless of their social or cultural perspective.’ (as Paul Boghossian writes (2006, 130).
Michael Polanyi’s theory of tacit knowledge
The most concise introduction to Polanyi’s ideas are the 1962 lectures recently republished as The Tacit Dimension. They start from ‘the fact that we know more than we can tell’ (4), drawing upon Gestalt psychology to place explicit and tacit knowledge (‘knowing what’ and ‘knowing how’ in Ryle’s 1949 distinction) into a complementary relation. ‘These two aspects of knowing have a similar structure and neither is ever present without the other,’ says Polanyi (7). So there is no knowledge without skill and no skill without knowledge.
In an act of tacit knowing, Polanyi explains, we attend from something in order to attend to something else. For example, from the features of a face to recognise someone we know, without – as a computer would – cross-checking nose, eyes, ears etc. against a database. In the same way, Polanyi argues, skilful performance ‘combines elementary muscular acts which are not identifiable, according to relations that we cannot define’ (8).
Polanyi gives examples of tool use, hammering a nail for example, when we focus on the nail for which our handling of the hammer becomes subsidiary. ‘We are attending from these elementary movements to the achievement of their joint purpose’ (10). ‘This is their meaning to us’ (11) so that ‘an interpretative effort transposes meaningless feelings into meaningful ones’ (12–13) ‘by a process of learning, which can be laborious’ (15) and which can be reversed; for example, if you start focussing on the hammer, you are likely to hit your thumb! Or, in Polanyi’s example of riding a bicycle, fall off if you try to work out how you are doing it.
For Polanyi, all knowledge derives from the solution to a problem. As he says, ‘It is a commonplace that all research must start from a problem’ (21) since ‘to see a problem is to see something that is hidden. It is to have an intimation of the coherence of hitherto not comprehended particulars.’ (21). This intimation is a scientist’s starting point. S/he is convinced that something is the case and proves the strength of that conviction through investigation and experiment, not through falsification but through justification.
‘Personal knowledge is an intellectual commitment, and as such inherently hazardous… into every act of knowing there enters a passionate contribution of the person knowing what is being known, and this coefficient is no mere imperfection but a vital component of the knowledge.’
This rejects ‘the ideal of scientific detachment… [that] true knowledge is universally established and objective.’ But it does not thereby open the door to anything-goes relativism. As Polanyi’s preface to Personal Knowledge also says, ‘the seeming contradiction is resolved by modifying the concept of knowing’ (p.2).
Polanyi’s main target in advocating Personal Knowledge was what he called objectivism, the idea that objects in the real world had merely to be discovered and described to correspond with knowledge constructed by scientific experiment. That knowledge was also personal, based on intuition and ultimately faith, what he called ‘the fiduciary principle’, not only rejected objectivism but went beyond the pragmatic idea that what works must also be true and, while accepting that hunches or more logical commitments had to be proven, also allowed back in social and psychological conflicts to the apparently detached realms of ‘pure science’.
With detailed historical examples, Polanyi showed that in experimental and other situations clear cut distinctions could not necessarily be made between discovery and verification / falsification and that ‘evidence’ was often ignored for quite extraneous reasons. Polanyi thus opened the way to a real history and sociology of science and also to a similar history of artistic and technological creativity and their preservation and development in craft, apprenticeship and pedagogy. These were all included in his grand evolutionary scheme which grounded human focal awareness (shaped by the use of tools, including language) in the tacit knowledge shared with other animals.
Conclusion
That knowledge corresponds to phenomena objectively out there in the physical world, as well as that it is constructed to be differentially distributed amongst social actors whose intentions towards ‘truth’ are universalised by scientific method, affords a way out not only of cultural determinism but from pragmatism and the postmodern morass by indicating ‘a meaning of universal doubt which is free from self-contradiction’ (PK 295). For, as Polanyi says (ibid),
‘We may imagine an indefinite extension of the process of abandoning hitherto accepted systems of articulation, together with the theories formulated in these terms or implied in our use of them. This kind of doubt might eventually lead to the relinquishing, without compensation, of all… concepts which those idioms conveyed. Our articulate intellectual life, which operates by the handling of denotable concepts, would thus be reduced to abeyance…’
Arguably, this is what happened to the human sciences after their linguistic turn! Polanyi’s Personal Knowledge returns science to the roots of its knowing.
References
Boghossian, P. (2006) fear of knowledge, against relativism and constructivism,Oxford UP.
Polanyi, M. (2009) The Tacit Dimension, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Polanyi, M. (1958) Personal Knowledge, towards a Post-Critical Philosophy, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Ryle, G. (1949) The Concept of Mind, London: Hutchinson.
By Patrick Ainley
