Science Quote by Michael Polanyi

Polanyi is warning that language doesn’t just report reality; it quietly rigs the game before the first question is even asked. If your vocabulary comes preloaded with certain metaphors, categories, and causal assumptions, then every “neutral” inquiry you frame inside it will smuggle those assumptions back in as if they were discoveries. The sentence has the unnerving logic of a trap: you can’t challenge the “theory of the universe” implied by your language without using the very tools that keep reaffirming it.

The intent is not mystical but methodological. As a scientist who lived through the 20th century’s battles over positivism, reductionism, and the authority of “objective” method, Polanyi is pushing back against the fantasy that we can step outside our conceptual equipment. His broader work argues that knowing is personal, situated, and tacitly guided; here he’s naming one of the most powerful tacit guides: grammar and vocabulary.

The subtext is a critique of intellectual self-confidence. Whole fields can mistake their linguistic habits for the structure of the world: economics turning humans into “agents,” psychology turning experience into “mechanisms,” data discourse turning life into “signals” and “noise.” Once those terms dominate, alternative questions start sounding illegitimate or incoherent, not because they’re wrong but because the language has no slots for them.

Polanyi’s punch is that paradigms aren’t only in textbooks and laboratories. They’re embedded in ordinary words, and that’s why changing what we can know often begins by inventing new ways to speak.