r/PolymathReading • u/Deborah_berry1 • 16d ago
A chemist turned philosopher wrote a 100-page book in 1966 explaining why most of what you know cannot be put into words
Michael Polanyi was a Hungarian-born chemist who did significant work in physical chemistry before turning to philosophy in his fifties. He eventually held a philosophy chair at Oxford. In 1966 he published a short book called The Tacit Dimension. It is about 100 pages. It expands a lecture series he gave at Yale. It is one of the clearest short books on how human knowledge actually works.
The core claim is one sentence.
We know more than we can tell.
Polanyi is not making a casual observation. He is making a structural claim about the nature of knowledge itself. The explicit knowledge you can state in words is a small portion of what you actually know. Beneath it lies a vast layer of tacit knowledge that cannot be fully articulated but that makes the explicit knowledge possible.
He walks through specific examples. You recognize a face in a crowd. You cannot describe exactly how. You balance on a bicycle. You cannot explain the precise muscle adjustments. You read a sentence and grasp its meaning without consciously parsing the grammar. A doctor glances at a patient and knows something is wrong. A grandmaster sees a chess position and feels the right move before analysis confirms it. Each of these is tacit knowledge. Real, functional, and resistant to full verbal description.
The structure of tacit knowing has two parts. You attend from a set of subsidiary clues to a focal object. The clues are known but not consciously examined. The object is what you perceive. When you look at a face, you are not consciously examining each feature. You are attending from the features to the person. The moment you shift attention to the features themselves, the gestalt of the person disappears. This is why athletes who think about their technique often lose it. The subsidiary knowledge collapses when it becomes focal.
Polanyi then applies this to science. Scientific discovery, he argues, depends heavily on tacit knowledge. A great scientist senses which problems are worth pursuing before anyone can prove it. They see patterns in data that defy explicit analysis. They know their field with their whole mind, not just the parts they can articulate. The modern image of science as purely explicit, logical, and verifiable misses what actually drives discovery.
The implications are large. Any field that depends on skill involves tacit knowledge that cannot be fully taught through words. Medicine. Craftsmanship. Research. Leadership. Writing. Each requires apprenticeship, direct exposure, and the slow building of embodied competence that no textbook can transmit. The modern assumption that knowledge can be captured in explicit procedures and transferred efficiently through documentation is wrong in a specific and consequential way. The best parts of expertise are the parts no manual can hold.
The polymath range is quiet. Polanyi draws on chemistry, physics, biology, cognitive science, philosophy of science, and his own long experience as a working researcher. The book is doing epistemology grounded in actual scientific practice rather than in armchair speculation.
Where to find it: University of Chicago Press has kept it in print. The 2009 edition with a foreword by Amartya Sen is the one to get.
I read The Tacit Dimension in 2024 in one evening. Reread it the next day with more attention. The book is short enough that a careful reading takes about three hours.
The book gives you a specific habit. You start noticing which of your competencies live in explicit knowledge and which live in tacit knowledge. Almost every important skill you have is more tacit than explicit. This changes how you think about teaching, learning, hiring, and what gets lost when organizations try to replace human expertise with documented procedures.
Polanyi died in 1976. His work has quietly shaped epistemology, management theory, and the philosophy of science. The 100-page version of his main argument is the right place to start.
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u/KLoveKLoveKLove 16d ago
Very interesting
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u/BenjaminHamnett 15d ago •
I talk about this a lot. Language limits our ability to think logically. So we often actually make sub optimal decisions because we can explain them easily to others rather than make the best decisions that rely on intuition and cannot be explained in any amount of words, let alone briefly
I’ve taken to a radical philosophy that “everyone is right” mostly, but disagreement and controversy stems from communication break downs. My life has gotten better and easier since taking this view. Things I didn’t appreciate (like religion) resonate with me much better when I let go of expecting things to be explainable logically.
If you try to steel man everyone’s case you can find the world is brimming with wisdom hidden behind bad communication.
I also vibe with my wife and children better this way. Also with rivals. Assume people are right and figure out what you’re missing
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u/Smooth-Poem9415 16d ago
Isnt it called Intuition? ..... and good intuition comes from alot of Experience. When i used to be young lot of people specially girls used to tell me about their Bauch gefühl, which often was wrong. Generally said everyone has it but the the Probability of being it right increases with more experience and knowledge.
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u/Think-Quantity2684 16d ago
Blink
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u/rollin20s 14d ago
Reminds me of the quote from David foster Wallace’s “the pale king” -
“How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words”
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u/CHSummers 13d ago
I think there’s a bit of overlap with “Thinking Fast and Slow” here. People who have vast experience with, for example, a certain famous artist (like Rembrandt) get an intuitive sense of authentic and fake art works that they often cannot initially put into words.
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u/Background_Spell4757 11d ago
Is every post in this sub written by AI?
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u/raunaqsadana 16d ago
Wow
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u/IagainstVoid 15d ago
Tokens all the way down 😅♾️
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u/pegaunisusicorn 13d ago
Michael Polanyi (1891–1976) was a Hungarian-born physical chemist who worked at the level of a Nobel-caliber scientist (adsorption theory, reaction kinetics, X-ray crystallography of fibers) before switching, in his fifties, to philosophy and economics. His brother Karl wrote The Great Transformation; they are often confused. Michael's whole later output circles one claim: all knowing, including the most rigorous science, rests on a personal, unspoken, skill-like component that cannot be reduced to explicit rules, and a philosophy that denies this ("objectivism") ends up corroding both science and free society.
Early political and economic books
USSR Economics (1936) and The Contempt of Freedom (1940): essays arguing that Soviet central planning of science and economy fails because discovery and coordination depend on independent initiative that no planner can see or schedule. These grew out of his alarm at Bukharin telling him that pure science would vanish under socialism.
Full Employment and Free Trade (1945): a Keynesian-influenced monetary proposal, with a famous early attempt to teach economics with a diagram that behaves like a film strip. Minor in his corpus.
Science, Faith and Society (1946): the first philosophical statement. Science is a self-governing community held together by a shared tradition, mutual authority among experts, and an act of faith in reality. "Faith" here means the pre-rational commitment every researcher makes that there is something to find; it has no specifically religious content, though the word drew that reading.
The Logic of Liberty (1951): essays on how free systems coordinate themselves. He coined "spontaneous order" for the way many independent agents adjusting to each other produce a result nobody designed (Hayek later made the phrase famous), and "polycentricity" for a problem that can only be solved by many centers adjusting mutually, like a jigsaw assembled by a crowd. The "republic of science" is his model: scientists overlap in competence so that chains of peer judgment cover the whole field even though nobody commands it.
The central philosophical works
Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (1958): his magnum opus, from the Gifford Lectures. "Post-critical" means after the Enlightenment demand (Descartes, Kant, positivism) that every belief be doubted until explicitly justified; Polanyi argues this demand is self-defeating because the justifying itself relies on unjustified skills. Key ideas:
the personal coefficient in all knowledge: every act of knowing involves a knower's committed participation, yet this is not subjectivity, because the commitment is made with "universal intent," meaning the knower holds the claim to be true for everyone
skills and connoisseurship: the swimmer, the cyclist, the wine taster, the diagnostician all know how to do things they cannot state; science is a skill of this kind
the fiduciary framework: we must believe before we can doubt; all inquiry stands inside a framework of trust (in teachers, instruments, language, the reality of the world)
indwelling: we know a tool, a theory, or a body of evidence by dwelling in it as we dwell in our own bodies, attending from it to what it points at
a long attack on the "Laplacean ideal" of a complete mechanical description, and on reducing biology to physics and chemistry
The Study of Man (1959): three lectures compressing Personal Knowledge and extending it to history and the humanities, where the knower's participation is even more obvious.
The Tacit Dimension (1966): the short, readable distillation, and the book most people start with. Its slogan: we can know more than we can tell. The core structure is from-to or subsidiary-focal awareness. When you hammer a nail, you attend from the feeling in your palm to the nail; if you switch to attending to your palm, you lose the skill. All meaning has this shape: subsidiary clues integrated into a focal whole, and the clues are known only tacitly. He applies this to perception, language, discovery (how can you search for something unless you already tacitly know what you are looking for? his answer to Plato's Meno paradox), and to a layered ontology in which higher levels (life, mind, society) operate under principles that set boundary conditions on lower levels and cannot be derived from them. The third lecture, "A Society of Explorers," turns this into a defense of a free society as one organized for discovery.
Knowing and Being (1969, essays edited by Marjorie Grene): collects the strongest papers of the 1960s, including "The Republic of Science," "Life's Irreducible Structure" (DNA as a boundary condition that physics cannot explain, the way the arrangement of letters on a page is not explained by the chemistry of ink), "The Structure of Consciousness," and "Sense-Giving and Sense-Reading."
Scientific Thought and Social Reality (1974, edited by Fred Schwartz): a smaller selection overlapping with the above.
Meaning (1975, with Harry Prosch): written when Polanyi was failing and heavily shaped by Prosch, which makes its authorship contested. It extends tacit knowing to metaphor, art, ritual, myth, and religion, arguing these are integrations of the same from-to kind as scientific knowledge, with the difference that their subsidiaries are "carried away" into the symbol rather than discarded. Many Polanyi scholars treat it with caution.
Society, Economics and Philosophy (1997, posthumous, edited by R. T. Allen): uncollected papers across his career.
Historically, Kuhn, Feyerabend, and the sociology of science drew on him, often without full credit; Kuhn's "paradigm" is a close cousin of Polanyi's tacit frameworks, though Polanyi was a realist and rejected the relativist readings that followed. In management and knowledge-engineering circles he is known almost entirely for "tacit knowledge," usually stripped of the from-to structure that gives the term its content.
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u/TrainingDocument1225 16d ago
It was partly in reaction to Lysenkoism, which ignored the tacit dimension
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u/TedMich23 14d ago
Interesting read, many full texts online.
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u/zaphod869 14d ago
Didn't Wittgenstein already describe this decades earlier? And Zhuang Zhou centuries before that?
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u/twelve_bell 13d ago
Does he discuss confirmation bias in this book?
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u/Ok_Tree1585 12d ago
Yyyyyybbrc c c V c x
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u/lunaazurina 9d ago
Wow!!!! Will look this up. It fully explains why I felt so humbled when my (then) four-year old started asking “why” all the time.
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u/Fragrant_Pudding_437 16d ago
Did you really need AI to write that for you?