Michael Polanyi Quotes

Hungary, Polymath
March 11, 1891 – February, 22, 1976.

Michael Polanyi FRS was a Hungarian-British polymath, who made important theoretical contributions to physical chemistry, economics, and philosophy. He argued that positivism supplies a false account of knowing, which if taken seriously undermines humanity's highest achievements.

Personal participation is the universal principle of knowing.

Michael Polanyi
Our reliance on the validity of a scientific conclusion depends ultimately on a judgment of coherence; and as there can exist no strict criterion for coherence, our judgment of it must always remain a qualitative, nonformal, tacit, personal judgment.

Michael Polanyi

We cannot ultimately specify the grounds (either metaphysical or logical or empirical) upon which we hold that our knowledge is true. Being committed to such grounds, dwelling in them, we are projecting ourselves to what we believe to be true from or through these grounds. We cannot therefore see what they are. We cannot look at them because we are looking with them.

Michael Polanyi
While tacit knowledge can be possessed by itself, explicit knowledge must rely on being tacitly understood and applied. Hence all knowledge is either tacit or rooted in tacit knowledge. A wholly explicit knowledge is unthinkable.

Michael Polanyi
The information in DNA could no more be reduced to the chemical than could the ideas in a book be reduced to the ink and paper: something beyond physics and chemistry encoded DNA.

Michael Polanyi
The process of philosophic and scientific enlightenment has shaken the stability of beliefs held explicitly as articles of faith.

Michael Polanyi
A free society is regarded as one that does not engage, on principle, in attempting to control what people find meaningful, and a totalitarian society is regarded as one that does, on principle, attempt such control.

Michael Polanyi
We could not, for example, arrive at a principle like that of entropy without introducing some additional principle, such as randomness, to this topography.

Michael Polanyi

Discoveries are made by pursuing possibilities suggested by existing knowledge.

Michael Polanyi
I shall reconsider human knowledge by starting from the fact that we can know more than we can tell.

Michael Polanyi
We know more than we can tell.

Michael Polanyi
- Knows
- Tacit