Science Quote by John Charles Polanyi

Polanyi’s line has the clipped elegance of a lab note that suddenly turns moral. He starts from a premise scientists and skeptics alike often share: your experience counts. Pain, wonder, grief, conviction, the felt texture of being alive - it’s the one dataset you can’t outsource. Then he tightens the screw: if you insist your own inner evidence is “real,” you lose the right to dismiss everyone else’s as noise. Empiricism, in his hands, becomes an argument for empathy.

The intent is quietly corrective. It’s aimed at a reflex that shows up in politics, in academia, in family arguments: treating your own perceptions as self-evident while demanding that others “prove” theirs. Polanyi doesn’t ask you to agree with other people’s conclusions; he asks you to grant their lived data the same baseline dignity you grant your own. That’s a higher standard than tolerance. It’s epistemic fairness.

The subtext is also a warning to science itself. Scientific culture prizes objectivity, but the human impulse behind discovery - curiosity, intuition, the sense that something matters - is subjective fuel. Polanyi (a Nobel-winning chemist who lived through the 20th century’s ideological and scientific upheavals) is pushing against the fantasy that only measurable facts are real. If we erase experience, we don’t get purer truth; we get a narrower one, and a society more willing to steamroll what it can’t quantify.

It works because it turns self-regard into obligation: your “I know what I felt” becomes a bridge, not a moat.