"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"
About this Quote
Polanyi is picking a fight with the fantasy that knowledge is basically a filing cabinet of statements. As a working scientist, he’d watched modern culture elevate “explicit” information - what can be written down, measured, replicated - into the gold standard, then quietly treat everything else as suspicious fog. His insistence lands like a corrective: communication doesn’t just pass packages of facts; it cues a listener’s unspoken competence. You don’t teach a lab technique, diagnose a patient, or read a friend’s mood by reciting propositions. You evoke a web of tacit know-how the other person already has, and you rely on it to make your words land.
The subtext is an argument about authority and what counts as legitimate understanding. By claiming that even our grasp of mental life (feelings, conscious thought) rests on what we “cannot tell,” Polanyi smuggles subjectivity back into the supposedly objective house of science - not as mystical exception, but as the ordinary condition of meaning. He’s also warning against a bureaucratic impulse: if only what can be articulated counts, then the real engines of expertise get erased, along with the people who carry them.
Context matters. Postwar science was ascendant, computing and formal logic were promising to mechanize intelligence, and behaviorism treated inner experience as a black box. Polanyi pushes back with a deceptively plain line that turns the tables: the most rigorous disciplines still depend on the inexpressible. His genius is to make “can’t tell” sound less like failure and more like the quiet infrastructure of every successful explanation.
The subtext is an argument about authority and what counts as legitimate understanding. By claiming that even our grasp of mental life (feelings, conscious thought) rests on what we “cannot tell,” Polanyi smuggles subjectivity back into the supposedly objective house of science - not as mystical exception, but as the ordinary condition of meaning. He’s also warning against a bureaucratic impulse: if only what can be articulated counts, then the real engines of expertise get erased, along with the people who carry them.
Context matters. Postwar science was ascendant, computing and formal logic were promising to mechanize intelligence, and behaviorism treated inner experience as a black box. Polanyi pushes back with a deceptively plain line that turns the tables: the most rigorous disciplines still depend on the inexpressible. His genius is to make “can’t tell” sound less like failure and more like the quiet infrastructure of every successful explanation.
Quote Details
| Topic | Knowledge |
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