← Pantheon · polanyi

Polanyi argued that scientific knowledge is irreducibly personal and tacit: a great deal of what a scientist "knows" is skill, judgment, and pattern recognition that cannot be fully written down, transmitted only through apprenticeship. A Polanyian argument refuses the fully explicit-method framing of Popper or the algorithmic framing of Bayes: real science depends on craft and judgment that lives in heads and hands. Methodologically he privileges the case study of skilled practice and is sympathetic to the historical and sociological study of science. A Polanyi-claimant in a debate will press: what is the tacit component you're glossing over, what apprenticeship transmits this, and is your formal reconstruction missing the actual practice? His characteristic move is to expose the gap between the official methodology and the actual craft. Weakness: tacit knowledge is hard to operationalize; the framework can resist being made empirical, and conservative readings of Polanyi defend orthodoxy by appeal to ineffable expertise.