Science & Tech Quote by Michael Polanyi

Polanyi is doing something sly: he takes the supposedly granite foundation of science - “premisses,” “maxims,” the kind of language that sounds like Euclid - and swaps in a word that makes positivists bristle: beliefs. It is less a demotion of science than a demystification of how it actually runs. The “art of interpreting” is the tell. Rules don’t execute themselves; they need trained judgment, and judgment is cultivated socially, not derived mechanically from data.

The subtext is an argument against the fantasy of a fully explicit, value-free method. Polanyi, a working scientist turned philosopher, is pushing back on the mid-century impulse to treat scientific knowledge as if it were a clean algorithm: inputs (observations) go in, outputs (truths) come out, with no human residue. He insists that science depends on commitments you cannot prove before you start: that nature is intelligible, that anomalies matter, that some problems are worth pursuing, that certain standards of elegance or explanatory power count. These are “premisses,” but also loyalties.

Calling them “embodied in a tradition” is also a warning about where authority really lives. Not primarily in textbooks or protocols, but in apprenticeship: labs, peer review, conferences, the invisible curriculum of what good work looks like. Tradition can sound conservative, even anti-radical, yet Polanyi’s point is liberating: science is powerful because it is communal and interpretive, not despite that fact. If you want to defend science in public life, you can’t pretend it’s a priesthood of pure facts; you have to explain the culture that makes those facts trustworthy.