"We could not, for example, arrive at a principle like that of entropy without introducing some additional principle, such as randomness, to this topography"
About this Quote
Entropy doesn’t just “fall out” of the landscape; Polanyi is insisting that we smuggle in a way of seeing before we can claim we’ve discovered a law. His example is doing double duty: it’s a technical point about physics and a philosophical ambush aimed at the myth of fully objective science. You can map every contour of a “topography” of microstates and still not get entropy until you add an extra rule about how to treat those states: that they’re effectively random, that we should count them in a particular way, that we should ignore fine-grained correlations. Entropy is a principle of interpretation as much as a measured property.
The subtext is Polanyi’s lifelong argument against the idea that scientific knowledge is purely explicit and mechanical. Scientists rely on tacit commitments - about what counts as noise, what counts as a relevant variable, what kinds of regularities are “real” - and those commitments aren’t derivable from the data alone. Randomness here is less a fact than a stance: a decision to treat complexity as statistically featureless so that a higher-level order can be stated.
Context matters: writing in the shadow of mid-century positivism and the prestige of formal systems, Polanyi pushes back on the dream that method can replace judgment. The rhetorical move is surgical. By choosing entropy - a cornerstone concept often presented as inevitable - he exposes how even our most “hard” principles are scaffolded by auxiliary assumptions. Science advances not by escaping interpretation, but by making the right interpretive wager at the right time.
The subtext is Polanyi’s lifelong argument against the idea that scientific knowledge is purely explicit and mechanical. Scientists rely on tacit commitments - about what counts as noise, what counts as a relevant variable, what kinds of regularities are “real” - and those commitments aren’t derivable from the data alone. Randomness here is less a fact than a stance: a decision to treat complexity as statistically featureless so that a higher-level order can be stated.
Context matters: writing in the shadow of mid-century positivism and the prestige of formal systems, Polanyi pushes back on the dream that method can replace judgment. The rhetorical move is surgical. By choosing entropy - a cornerstone concept often presented as inevitable - he exposes how even our most “hard” principles are scaffolded by auxiliary assumptions. Science advances not by escaping interpretation, but by making the right interpretive wager at the right time.
Quote Details
| Topic | Science |
|---|
More Quotes by Michael
Add to List
