Polanyi

Works

One large book and one short one that most readers actually meet.

• Personal Knowledge (1958) is the major statement: tacit knowing, personal participation, the fiduciary framework, and the attack on the ideal of impersonal knowledge.
• The Tacit Dimension (1966) is the compact version and the source of the sentence everyone quotes.
• Science, Faith and Society (1946) sets out the account of the scientific community as an apprenticeship in judgement rather than a rule-following enterprise.

Central ideas

Three, and the first is a mechanism rather than an observation.

• The from-to structure: attention runs from subsidiary particulars to a focal whole. The particulars are genuinely known and not focally attended, and making them focal collapses the performance they were supporting. Indwelling is his word for the relation — one dwells in the particulars rather than inspecting them.
• Personal knowledge: all knowing involves the knower's skill, judgement and commitment. That is neither subjective in the sense of arbitrary nor objective in the sense of impersonal, and his claim is that the impersonal ideal is both false and corrosive.
• The fiduciary framework: knowing rests on commitments that cannot themselves be justified without circularity, so the critical demand for explicit justification of everything cannot be met by anything, including itself.

Distinctive vocabulary

Three terms whose common uses invert the argument.

• Tacit knowledge: what is known subsidiarily and cannot be made focal without loss. NOT knowledge that has not yet been written down.
• Personal knowledge: knowing that involves the knower's skill and commitment. Not subjective and not private.
• Subsidiary awareness: genuine awareness of particulars while attending to something else. Not inattention and not the background.

Debates and disagreements

One argument is philosophical and one is a large literature built on a misreading.

• Whether personal knowledge collapses into relativism. His guard is that commitment is made with universal intent — the knower claims to be right, not merely to be sincere — and critics find that thin.
• Management theory built an entire programme on converting tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge, which is close to the opposite of the claim. That the misreading was so productive suggests the original distinction was underspecified as much as it suggests careless reading.
• Whether tacit knowing is one phenomenon. Later work distinguishes somatic, relational and collective varieties with different degrees of unspecifiability.

Intellectual relationships

A chemist's account of skill that reached the philosophy of science.

• Gestalt psychology supplies the figure-and-ground structure he reworks into from and to.
• Kuhn drew on tacit knowledge for the account of how normal science is transmitted and practised.
• Ryle's distinction between knowing how and knowing that is adjacent and not the same: Ryle sorts kinds of knowledge, and Polanyi describes a structure present in all knowing including the propositional kind.
• Merleau-Ponty reached a comparable account of skilled embodiment independently.
• Scott's metis, a reference elsewhere in this work, is the near-relative arrived at from agrarian studies rather than from philosophy of science.

How it changes this reading

Polanyi is named in the lineage of the Epistemological lens.

• The load-bearing borrowing is the from-to structure, because it explains WHY an account of a practice cannot be complete. What makes a practice work is partly what cannot be made focal without breaking it, so the incompleteness is structural rather than a failure of effort or of documentation.
• For a project that renders a life into explicit form, that is the strongest available version of a caution this work makes throughout: tacit knowledge is by definition not recoverable from a record, and no amount of care recovers it.
• It also cuts against a reading that treats articulacy as evidence. Being able to say something and knowing it are different, in both directions.
• It is not evidence about what anyone knew or could do.

Useful comparisons

The lens names four references who agree the knower matters and mean different things by it.

• Michael Polanyi: tacit knowing, personal participation, and a fiduciary framework.
• W. V. O. Quine: holism about confirmation, and the rejection of the analytic and synthetic distinction.
• Hilary Putnam: reference, realism, and a position that changed substantially across his career.
• Lorraine Code: the situated knower, epistemic responsibility, and the question of whose knowledge counts.

Where the ideas meet

None of the four treats knowledge as propositions floating free of a knower.

• None treats knowing as a set of justified propositions independent of anyone.
• All four hold that knowing has conditions which are not themselves justified propositionally.
• Each treats the knower's participation or position as epistemically relevant rather than as contamination.

Where they part

They mean four different things by the knower mattering.

• Polanyi's personal participation is about skill and commitment; Code's situated knower is about social position and power. Both say the knower matters and the claims are not interchangeable — one concerns competence, the other standing.
• Quine's holism is a logical thesis about how confirmation distributes across a web of belief; Polanyi's is a phenomenological thesis about how a performance is structured. Both undercut foundationalism and they do it from different directions.
• Putnam's position moved substantially over decades, so citing him at all requires specifying which Putnam.
• Outside the lineage, Ryle's knowing-how is regularly substituted for tacit knowing, and it is a different claim about a different thing.

Limits

What this reference can carry here is narrow, and the limit is unusually clean.

• Tacit knowledge is by definition not recoverable from a record. That is not a documentation problem to be solved with better records.
• A claim about the structure of knowing establishes nothing about what any particular person knew.

Criticisms

The objections are about the guard against relativism and about the framework's cast.

• Universal intent is a thin guard against the relativism the account invites, and critics have not been satisfied by it.
• The fiduciary framework has a theological cast, and whether it rehabilitates faith inside the sciences or merely describes their actual conditions is disputed.
• The tacit and explicit distinction proved easy to misread as a convertible pair, and a large applied literature was built on the conversion he denied is possible.
• Later work suggests tacit knowing covers several distinguishable phenomena with different degrees of unspecifiability, which the original account runs together.

Common misreadings

Four uses this placement does not license.

• Treating tacit knowledge as knowledge that has not yet been articulated, which is the conversion misreading and inverts the claim.
• Reading personal knowledge as subjective or private knowledge.
• Reading the from-to structure as a contrast between attention and inattention, which loses the point that the subsidiary is genuinely known.
• Citing him as a defender of faith against evidence rather than as describing commitments that any inquiry rests on.

What remains outside this idea

• It cannot establish anything about what any person knew or could do.
• It cannot recover from a record what it says a record cannot contain.