The Tacit Dimension by Michael Polanyi (PDF)

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“I shall reconsider human knowledge by starting from the fact that we can know more than we can tell,” writes Michael Polanyi, whose work paved the way for the likes of Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper. The Tacit Dimension argues that tacit knowledge—tradition, inherited practices, implied values, and prejudgments—is a crucial part of scientific knowledge. Back in print for a new generation of students and scholars, this volume challenges the assumption that skepticism, rather than established belief, lies at the heart of scientific discovery.“Polanyi’s work deserves serious attention. . . . [This is a] compact presentation of some of the essentials of his thought.”—Review of Metaphysics“Polanyi’s work is still relevant today and a closer examination of this theory that all knowledge has personal and tacit elements . . . can be used to support and refute a variety of widely held approaches to knowledge management.”—Electronic Journal of Knowledge”The reissuing of this remarkable book give us a new opportunity to see how far-reaching—and foundational—Michael Polanyi’s ideas are, on some of the age-old questions in philosophy.”—Amartya Sen, from the new Foreword

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review “Polanyi’s work deserves serious attention, and this compact presentation of some of the essentials of his thought will serve to send more readers on to, or back to, Personal Knowledge.” ― Review of Metaphysics About the Author Michael Polanyi (1891–1976) was a Hungarian-British chemist and philosopher, a Fellow of the Royal Society, and a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford. He is the author of many books, including Science, Faith and Society and Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy, both published by the University of Chicago Press. Amartya Sen, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1998, is the Lamont University Professor at Harvard University.

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐In this rather compact book, Polanyi addresses three main topics in separate sections: knowing, emergence, and human endeavors. The continuity over the sections is quite smooth, largely due to their various perspectives on tacit knowing. The third section, however, is rather more free-ranging in content as well as somewhat tentative in tone. All three sections are quite readable and plausible, though this review mainly considers just the first two topics in combination. Here the intent is to provide an indication the scope, applicability, and coherence of Polanyi’s seminal thinking.TACIT KNOWLEDGE, which is an integral part of all knowledge, is that which one is unable to access readily or to express precisely. It results from the structure of tacit knowing wherein knowledge items of which one is only subsidiarily aware are tacitly integrated, and then provided to focal awareness as explicit knowledge. Integration via spontaneous equilibration keys on fostering mutual coherence among the subsidiary items. Although it admits some degree of reconstitution within focal awareness, tacit knowledge refers generally to knowing that one is unable to articulate (i.e., the case of knowing more than one can tell). Ultimately though, all knowledge is either tacit or rooted in tacit knowledge.STRUCTURE OF TACIT KNOWING is a triad composed of the knower (subject), the subsidiaries (clues), and the focal content (entity). Through tacit integration, the knower causes the subsidiaries to bear on the focal entity, thereby imparting meaning to it. This is an act of sense-giving.ALTERNATIVE VIEW OF STRUCTURE involves an emphasis on the integration of particulars as a means of interiorizing them. This interiorization enables indwelling in them, and in turn, the discernment of the joint meaning of the comprehensive entity.TACIT KNOWING in the context of scientific investigations accounts for indeterminate or contingent commitments encompassing the following:1. discernment of valid and important problems and their attendant clues,2. guidance, imagination, and motivation in pursuing a promising course of solution,3. closure on a pending discovery and anticipation of its implications.COMPREHENSIVE ENTITIES exhibit a (two-level) structure for instances of tacit knowing. A comprehensive entity appears on a level above that of its subsidiaries, where the two levels correspond to distinct levels of reality. The higher level controls the marginal conditions left undetermined by the principles governing the lower level. Furthermore, the controlling principle for the higher level relies on the operations available on the lower level, but the lower level control principles do not affect the principles of the higher level. Accordingly, each level is subject to asymmetric dual controls.EMERGENCE in a generalized evolutionary hierarchy pertains to the creation of entirely new comprehensive entities, not merely novel behavior inexplicable in terms of subsidiary elements. Such creation occurs bottom-up as novel boundary conditions capture and instantiate/integrate an ensemble of subsidiaries in a nascent comprehensive entity. Such an evolutionary step can happen in knowledge development in general, not just in the advances of scientific knowledge. Progress in terms of enhanced sophistication or capabilities results from the bottom-up sequencing of layers. Moreover, the consolidation of each comprehensive entity spawns additional yet largely unforeseen potentialities, and in turn the prospects and motivation for new knowledge discovery quests.SENTIENCE as an attribute in humans, which seen as evolved comprehensive entities, cannot therefore result from lower-level controlling principles, namely from the laws of chemistry or physics. Rather, sentience must obtain from the higher-level controlling principles around which the comprehensive entity is formed. In general, principles additional to ones manifested by inanimate matter must be involved.MACHINES similarly are comprehensive entities whose respective purposes and operating principles cannot be derived from physics or chemistry. Rather, a machine’s operational principles are imposed through boundary conditions on its constituent subsidiary elements, including various physical or chemical ones. In the case of an engineered machine, its organizing principles are designed by humans to fulfill particular purposes, and in turn are actualized through the selection, adaptation, and integration of appropriate subsidiary constituents. Hence the deliberate actualization of a new and more complex higher-level entity.HUMAN VERSUS MACHINE FAILURE causes basically differ in nature. Humans are subject to failure in the conduct of their activities due to breakdown susceptibilities inherent in their operational principles. This susceptibility is attributable to accrued cognitive complexity. Machine failures in general, however, can never be ascribed to their operational principles. A machine’s failure to function as designed can result only from elemental physical/chemical faults in its structure or constituents, as attributable to its composition solely of inanimate matter.ANIMATE VERSUS INANIMATE PROCESSES in general are distinguished according to three major contrasts. These distinctions are essential considerations in dealing with the intersection of the two domains, like the existent gaps between life sciences and physics/chemistry. Basically, an animate process pursues discovery that is latent in potentialities, and an inanimate process tends toward more stable potentialities.1. Guidance/motivation per problem attributes versus drive toward more stable states,2. Effort toward actualization of potentialities versus catalysts or accidental events,3. Imaginative thrusts toward discovery versus probabilistic uncaused events.SUMMARY: Although this book is comparatively short, it is heavily laden with very substantive and consequential concepts. In my view, they seem compatible with if not complementary to certain ones of several other seminal thinkers in epistemology, cognitive psychology, or the philosophy of science. Here, moreover, it seems to me that Polanyi’s ideas are the most profound and incisive, albeit perhaps not the most encompassing ones. In all, “The Tacit Dimension” is a most invaluable resource, especially for multidisciplinary thinkers and researchers.

⭐Polanyi, a scientist turned philosopher, developed this set of three lectures partly in response to a 1935 conversation with Bukharin, a prominent Soviet scientist. Bukharin asserted that pure science was a morbid symptom of a class society; under socialism, science pursued for its own sake would disappear, and scientists would use their knowledge only for a higher social good, such as solving the problems of the current Five Year Plan. Polanyi’s defense of free scientific inquiry took the form of describing how we actually acquire knowledge of the world as we move through it. In the process, he made lasting contributions to epistemology, the branch of philosophy that explores how we know what we know.He starts by examining how scientists actually practice their craft. Scientific problem solving starts with finding a good problem to work on, and Polanyi’s interest is in how that problem gets posed. He introduces the idea of tacit knowledge, which consists of things we know without being able to say how we know them. For instance, I know my wife’s face, without being able to tell you how I can pick her face out of the billions of faces in the world. Scientists use tacit knowledge all the time to formulate problems. They make indeterminate commitments based on internal feelings that this commitment will be eventually be fruitful.Having reclaimed individual agency and subjective knowing as part of the scientific process, Polanyi then asserts the value of empirical knowledge against top down ideologies such as Marxism and philosophies such as Existentialism that argue that humans choose their own reality by willing it into existence at the moment of choice. He worries that without the ballast of consensual social tradition, the tendency of the modern state to tie “objective” truth to moral fervor would lead it to veer inevitably toward the suppression of individual freedom.Returning to the actual practice of science, he demonstrates that scientists don’t find problems or create experiments in a vacuum. They draw from a vast arsenal of assumptions about how the world works and accept on faith the discoveries made by other scientists. New realities emerge from pre-existing conditions. He observes that a higher level of structure is never actually manifest in the lower level from which it emerges. Lower levels are stepping stones which can set the conditions of what will emerge, but not determine the outcome of what actually emerges. A swarm of bees is a good example of this: the study of an individual bee will not enable you to predict the behavior of the hive.The opposite approach to emergence is to propose and propagate top down truths. Top down truths tend to fall short in actual practice. The Enlightenment threw off the constraints of traditional morality in the name of new objective truths, which led directly to the guillotine as truth’s enforcing agent. Stalin’s forced collectivization of agriculture led to horrible human suffering because it refused to take into account how peasants actually grew their crops and got them to market.Polanyi describes a realistic free society as one where new truths emerge from the consensus of what actually exists rather than what ought to exist or what exists in the mind only. His “society of explorers” works within the constraints of accepted tradition. Scientists and other explorers are controlled and guided by peer feedback. They have faith that a higher order of reality exists, even though it’s hidden from them in the present. In Polanyi’s brave new world, seekers of truth are neither constrained by foregone conclusions nor set adrift in meaninglessness.Even though the dragons loosed by Stalin and Sartre have been driven back toward their caves, the murky postmodern landscape we wander in today seems particularly susceptible to truths that owe more to political expediency than to any moral or social tradition. Polanyi’s warning that we can’t allow the scientific process to be highjacked for totalitarian purposes feels timely in an age where scientists are forced to fend off the claims of religious fundamentalists. His insight that forging internal knowing with external tradition creates the most durable intellectual freedom might help us battle the poisonous vapors of truthiness.

⭐Thsis is a great read – Michael Polanyi, with simple concepts, takes us thru ideas about how we understand and come to new things. The revelation of emergence of the new from old paradigms, things that are nothing of the old – more than the sum of the parts and more than the parts could have conceived or imagined on their own.

⭐Polanyi writes from outside of the traditional knowledge-as-information approach that has been assumed at least since Plato’s Meno in the West. His epistemology refreshingly distances itself from both objectivist modernism and skeptical postmodernism; it really is a new approach, and a superior one in my view. This volume is also *significantly* more readable than Personal Knowledge (although I would recommend that book also).

⭐The book “The Tacit Dimension” by Michael Polanyi has some interesting insights to offer. But then to get those insights, one has to plod through the content that is presented in a pedantic, long-winded style. At the end of it, one gets the feeling that one has tacitly understood it all but just could not put it in exact words. After all, as Polanyi puts it, “We can know more than we can tell.”

⭐A must read primarily to understand the unstated.talks about the implicit knowledge that we all carry with us. It sheds light on something which we need to know, go grab one copy!

⭐Unique perspective

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