Science Quote by Michael Polanyi

Polanyi is quietly tightening the screws on a comforting modern assumption: that language is a neutral tool we can wield without buying into its worldview. His line insists that words don’t merely describe reality; they smuggle in criteria for what counts as relevant, reasonable, or even real. Belief shows up in language only when we treat a word as apt, not just available. “Implied acceptance of their appositeness” is the key phrase: the moment you reach for a term and mean it, you’re conceding that it fits the situation well enough to organize thought around it.

The subtext is a critique of the fantasy of pure objectivity, especially in scientific and bureaucratic speech. Polanyi, a scientist who argued for tacit knowledge, is pushing back against the idea that we can purge commitment from inquiry by policing vocabulary. Even “operational definitions” and “value-free” labels require a background sense of what matters, what’s similar, what’s worth naming. Calling something “noise,” “error,” “efficiency,” or “risk” isn’t innocent; it’s an endorsement of a frame.

Contextually, this sits in Polanyi’s broader project: defending the role of personal judgment, tradition, and practiced intuition in science against mid-century positivism and technocratic rationalism. The sentence works because it’s both modest and destabilizing. He doesn’t claim language always reveals belief. He claims belief is there precisely when we pretend it isn’t: when we act as if our words are simply the right ones. That’s where ideology hides best, wearing the costume of good fit.