We cannot ultimately specify the grounds (either metaphysical or logical or empirical) upon which we hold that our knowledge is true. Being committed to such grounds, dwelling in them, we are projecting ourselves to what we believe to be true from or through these grounds. We cannot therefore see what they are. We cannot look at them because we are looking with them.

Michael Polanyi

Categorized in : Looks Believe Dwelling

We know more than we can tell.

Michael Polanyi

tacit knows

The process of philosophic and scientific enlightenment has shaken the stability of beliefs held explicitly as articles of faith.

Michael Polanyi

enlightenment belief process

While tacit knowledge can be possessed by itself, explicit knowledge must rely on being tacitly understood and applied. Hence all knowledge is either tacit or rooted in tacit knowledge. A wholly explicit knowledge is unthinkable.

Michael Polanyi

learning management knowledge

The information in DNA could no more be reduced to the chemical than could the ideas in a book be reduced to the ink and paper: something beyond physics and chemistry encoded DNA.

Michael Polanyi

ink-and-paper book ideas

I shall reconsider human knowledge by starting from the fact that we can know more than we can tell.

Michael Polanyi

starting humans facts

Discoveries are made by pursuing possibilities suggested by existing knowledge.

Michael Polanyi

possibility made discovery

We do not accept a religion because it offers us certain rewards. The only thing that a religion can offer us is to be just what it, in itself, is: a greater meaning in ourselves, in our lives, and in our grasp of the nature of things...a religion exists for us only if, like a piece of poetry, it carries us away. It is not in any sense a 'hypothesis.

Michael Polanyi

rewards pieces accepting

We could not, for example, arrive at a principle like that of entropy without introducing some additional principle, such as randomness, to this topography.

Michael Polanyi

topography principles example

Our reliance on the validity of a scientific conclusion depends ultimately on a judgment of coherence; and as there can exist no strict criterion for coherence, our judgment of it must always remain a qualitative, nonformal, tacit, personal judgment.

Michael Polanyi

criteria coherence judgment

A free society is regarded as one that does not engage, on principle, in attempting to control what people find meaningful, and a totalitarian society is regarded as one that does, on principle, attempt such control.

Michael Polanyi

principles meaningful people

Human beings exercise responsibilities within a social setting and a framework of obligations which transcend the principle of intelligence.

Michael Polanyi

principles responsibility exercise

The amount of knowledge which we can justify from evidence directly available to us can never be large. The overwhelming proportion of our factual beliefs continue therefore to be held at second hand through trusting others, and in the great majority of cases our trust is placed in the authority of comparatively few people of widely acknowledged standing.

Michael Polanyi

trust science knowledge

But even physics cannot be defined from an atomic topography.

Michael Polanyi

topography defined physics

Personal participation is the universal principle of knowing.

Michael Polanyi

gathering-data knowing principles

So long as we use a certain language, all questions that we can ask will have to be formulated in it and will thereby confirm the theory of the universe which is implied in the vocabulary and structure of the language.

Michael Polanyi

vocabulary use long

These maxims and the art of interpreting them may be said to constitute the premisses of science but I prefer to call them our scientific beliefs. These premisses or beliefs are embodied in a tradition, the tradition of science.

Michael Polanyi

belief may art

Theories of evolution must provide for the creative acts which brought such theories into existence.

Michael Polanyi

theory-of-evolution existence creative

I shall suggest, on the contrary, that all communication relies, to a noticeable extent on evoking knowledge that we cannot tell, and that all our knowledge of mental processes, like feelings or conscious intellectual activities, is based on a knowledge which we cannot tell.

Michael Polanyi

communication intellectual feelings

But the system of prices ruling the market not only transmits information in the light of which economic agents can mutually adjust their actions, it also provides them with an incentive to exercise economy in terms of money.

Michael Polanyi

agents light exercise

My title is intended to suggest that the community of scientists is organized in a way which resembles certain features of a body politic and works according to economic principles similar to those by which the production of material goods is regulated.

Michael Polanyi

community body way