"It is this, at its most basic, that makes science a humane pursuit; it acknowledges the commonality of people's experience"
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Polanyi’s line sneaks past the usual lab-coat mythology and insists on something quietly radical: science earns its moral standing not by being “objective,” but by being shareable. The phrase “at its most basic” is doing rhetorical work. It strips away prestige and technicality, implying that if science can’t connect to ordinary human experience, it’s missing its own point. “Humane” here isn’t sentimental; it’s a claim about ethics and democracy. A humane pursuit is one that treats other people’s perceptions as legible and worth testing against your own.
The hinge is “acknowledges.” Science doesn’t create commonality; it admits it, institutionalizes it, and builds procedures around it. Replication, peer review, and measurement become social technologies: ways of translating private sensation into public knowledge. That’s the subtextual rebuttal to two caricatures at once - the technocrat’s belief that expertise floats above society, and the relativist’s suspicion that all claims are just tribal narratives. Polanyi positions science as a disciplined form of empathy: a method for saying, “If you were here, under these conditions, you would see it too.”
Context matters. Coming from a Nobel-winning chemist who lived through the 20th century’s extremes of ideology and industrialized power, the sentence reads like a defense of science against its own abuses. He’s carving out a distinction between science as a humanizing practice and technology as an amoral amplifier. The intent is not to romanticize science, but to anchor its legitimacy in a shared world we can argue about together.
The hinge is “acknowledges.” Science doesn’t create commonality; it admits it, institutionalizes it, and builds procedures around it. Replication, peer review, and measurement become social technologies: ways of translating private sensation into public knowledge. That’s the subtextual rebuttal to two caricatures at once - the technocrat’s belief that expertise floats above society, and the relativist’s suspicion that all claims are just tribal narratives. Polanyi positions science as a disciplined form of empathy: a method for saying, “If you were here, under these conditions, you would see it too.”
Context matters. Coming from a Nobel-winning chemist who lived through the 20th century’s extremes of ideology and industrialized power, the sentence reads like a defense of science against its own abuses. He’s carving out a distinction between science as a humanizing practice and technology as an amoral amplifier. The intent is not to romanticize science, but to anchor its legitimacy in a shared world we can argue about together.
Quote Details
| Topic | Science |
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