Science & Tech Quote by Michael Polanyi

Polanyi is picking a fight with the comforting myth that science runs on rails. The line reads like a cold shower for anyone raised on the textbook story: observe, generalize, test, repeat. He insists that no "definite rule" turns raw experience into scientific propositions, and no equally tidy rule stamps them as verified or falsified. That repetition is the point. He is not merely doubting a method; he is undercutting the fantasy that method alone explains scientific authority.

The intent is both epistemological and cultural. Mid-20th-century philosophy of science was busy trying to formalize knowledge: logical positivists looking for verification criteria, Popper offering falsification as the clean demarcation line. Polanyi, a working scientist turned philosopher, had watched real discovery happen in messier ways: hunches, aesthetic judgments about elegance, apprenticeship, and the tacit know-how that labs transmit but papers can’t fully encode. His phrasing is almost legalistic, but the subtext is human: scientific knowing involves commitment, skill, and interpretation before it involves proof.

What makes the quote work is its refusal of easy villains. Polanyi isn’t saying experience is irrelevant; he’s saying experience doesn’t dictate meaning without a trained mind to frame it. Data do not speak; scientists teach themselves what counts as signal, what counts as noise, what questions are worth asking. In an era still tempted by technocratic certainty, he’s quietly reasserting something radical: science is powerful not because it is mechanical, but because it is a disciplined, communal art of judgment.