Book: Personal Knowledge

Overview

Michael Polanyi develops a sustained critique of objectivist epistemology and a constructive account of human knowing that places personal commitment at the center of scientific and everyday understanding. He rejects the ideal of detached, purely impersonal knowledge and insists that what counts as knowledge always involves the knower's active participation, judgment, and trust. The account reframes objectivity as something achieved through responsible personal involvement rather than through mechanical rule-following or exhaustive explicit proof.

Tacit Knowledge and Indwelling

A key insight is the distinction between explicit knowledge and tacit knowledge, summarized in the famous phrase "we know more than we can tell." Tacit knowledge includes skills, perceptual recognitions, and background understandings that cannot be fully articulated but are indispensable to performance and discovery. Polanyi uses the notion of "indwelling" to describe how a person internalizes instruments, rules, and traditions so that focal awareness can be directed toward problems and objects without consciousness of the supporting operations.

Subsidiary–Focal Relation

Polanyi introduces the subsidiary, focal relation to explain how subsidiary awareness supports focal tasks. Elements that are subsidiary are tacitly relied upon while attention is focused elsewhere; for example, when reading a sentence one attends to meaning while subsidiary attention holds knowledge of letters and language. This structure underlies skillful action and perceptual insight, and it shows why attempts to reduce knowing to explicit propositions miss the dynamic architecture of human cognition.

Personal Participation and Scientific Judgment

Science, on Polanyi's account, is a personal enterprise guided by the scientist's commitment, intuition, and ability to form and recognize patterns of significance. Judgment plays a central role where rules and algorithms cannot fix outcomes. Scientific discovery requires a fiduciary admission of trust in methods, instruments, and the reports of colleagues; such trust is not irrational but a necessary condition for communal inquiry. Objectivity emerges from the critical interplay of personal judgments within a tradition of shared standards and critical exchange.

Critique of Positivism and Dogmatic Relativism

Polanyi challenges both positivism, which privileges explicit verification and reduces meaning to observable data, and dogmatic relativism, which claims that all belief is arbitrary. He argues for a middle path in which personal commitments are held accountable by communal standards, historical continuity, and rationally articulated procedures. Knowledge is fallible and provisional, but this fallibility is managed through disciplined practice, peer criticism, and an evolving professional tradition.

Ethical and Social Dimensions

Knowing, for Polanyi, carries ethical responsibilities. The personal nature of knowledge entails an obligation to intellectual honesty, to the cultivation of skills, and to the maintenance of a scientific community that rewards truth-seeking. The pursuit of knowledge is embedded in broader moral and social commitments that shape what problems are pursued and how evidence is interpreted. Science thus functions as a moral as well as an epistemic activity.

Legacy and Continuing Relevance

Polanyi's emphasis on tacit dimensions of knowledge anticipated later debates in philosophy, cognitive science, and knowledge management, and it continues to inform discussions about expertise, creativity, and the limits of formalization. His insistence that personal judgment and trust are constitutive of objective inquiry remains a corrective to simplistic models of neutrality and a reminder of the human core of all intellectual endeavors.