Michael Polanyi Quotes on Knowledge
Michael Polanyi (1891–1976) developed in Personal Knowledge (1958) and The Tacit Dimension (1966) the most influential mid-century critique of the positivist ideal of impersonal, fully explicit scientific knowledge. The fundamental thesis — "we can know more than we can tell" — locates the integrative work of skilled understanding in a tacit dimension that supplies the framework against which explicit propositions can be formulated, tested, and revised. The framework is at once a philosophy of science, a theory of skilled practice, and a vindication of the scientific community as the institutional bearer of the tacit traditions that propositional knowledge presupposes.
Quotes
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Attributed to Michael Polanyi:
“We can know more than we can tell.”
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“All knowledge is personal.”
p. 17 -
Attributed to Michael Polanyi:
“Tacit knowing is the foundation of explicit knowing.”
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Attributed to Michael Polanyi:
“Discovery is the act of guessing reality.”
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Attributed to Michael Polanyi:
“Pure objectivity is a myth that, if accepted, destroys what it sought to perfect.”
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“When order is achieved among human beings by allowing them to interact with each other on their own initiative — subject only to the laws which uniformly apply to all of them — we have a system of spontaneous order in society.”
Wikiquote -
“The term ' simplicity ' functions then merely as a disguise for another meaning than its own. It is used for smuggling an essential quality into our appreciation of a scientific theory, which a mistaken conception of objectivity forbids us to openly acknowledge.”
p. 16 -
“No sincere assertion of fact is essentially unaccompanied by feelings of intellectual satisfaction or of a persuasive desire and a sense of personal responsibility.”
p. 27 -
“Whitehead and Russell ... translate ⊢ {\displaystyle \vdash } p imples q into the words 'it is asserted that p implies q '. But the phrase 'it is asserted' suggests an impersonal happening of assertions: 'it is asserted' as 'it is raining' or 'it happens'. The value of the assertion sign is lost if we allow ourselves to revert in our verbal translation of it to the muddle of a declaratory sentence which asserts itself or is impersonally asserted by nobody in particular.”
p. 28 -
“A declaratory sentence can be asserted, because it is an incomplete symbol, of indeterminate modality; while a question, a command, an invective, or any other sentence of fixed intention can no more be asserted than could my act of hewing wood or of drinking tea.”
p. 28