Personal Knowledge

Summary

Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy was published in 1958 by Routledge and Kegan Paul in London and by the University of Chicago Press. Its author, Michael Polanyi, had been a physician and a distinguished physical chemist before turning to philosophy, and the book grew from his Gifford Lectures at the University of Aberdeen in 1951–52. It argues against the ideal of a wholly detached, impersonal knowledge, which Polanyi thought both impossible and destructive of intellectual freedom, and proposes instead that all knowing, including the most exact science, depends on the skilled, committed participation of the knower. The book remains under copyright, so the library provides a guide without a stored text. Part One, The Art of Knowing, begins with objectivity. Polanyi argues that Copernicus preferred the heliocentric system for its intellectual beauty and rationality, not because it fitted the data better, and that scientists accept theories for the order they reveal. Chapters on probability and order follow. The chapter on skills shows that a swimmer, a cyclist or a craftsman follows rules that he does not know as rules, and that connoisseurship, such as a physician's skill in diagnosis or a wine-taster's palate, can be passed on only by example within a tradition of apprenticeship. Part Two, The Tacit Component, develops the distinction between focal awareness, directed at what we attend to, and subsidiary awareness of the clues and tools we attend from, as when we feel the head of a nail through the hammer in our hand. Language, too, rests on tacit skill: a medical student learning to read chest X-rays at first sees only shadows and gradually comes to see what the radiologist describes. The chapter on intellectual passions treats the scientist's sense of beauty and value, the heuristic passion that drives discovery, and the persuasive passion that defends it in controversy between rival frameworks. The chapter on conviviality examines tradition, authority, the community of scientists and the conditions of a free society. Part Three, The Justification of Personal Knowledge, argues that belief is the source of all knowledge, recalling Augustine's teaching that we must believe in order to understand. Polanyi criticizes the attempt to found knowledge on universal doubt, and describes commitment: the knower submits to standards he takes to be universally valid while knowing he may be wrong. Part Four, Knowing and Being, argues that living things and machines must be understood through their operational principles, which physics and chemistry cannot supply, and closes with a picture of the rise of man through levels of emergence toward responsible persons in a society of explorers.

Top Lessons

• We know more than we can say

  Polanyi shows that much knowledge is tacit: the swimmer keeps afloat, the cyclist balances and the physician recognizes a symptom by skills they cannot fully state. Such knowledge is transmitted by example and practice rather than by written rules.

• Attending from and attending to

  In using a hammer or a probe we are subsidiarily aware of the tool and focally aware of the nail or the object probed. Polanyi extends this to language and theory, through which we attend to the world. If we shift attention to the clues themselves, the performance can collapse.

• Belief before understanding

  Polanyi argues that the modern ideal of accepting nothing that cannot be proved leaves no foundation at all, since every inquiry depends on beliefs held in trust. He revives Augustine's principle that one must believe in order to understand, and treats commitment as responsible rather than arbitrary.

• The community of science

  Science depends on a community of trust in which learners submit to masters, specialists rely on one another's judgment, and members share standards of value. Polanyi defended the freedom of this community against central planning and political control.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Polanyi trained and served as a physician, and medicine supplies several of his central examples. In the chapter on skills he treats medical diagnosis as connoisseurship, an art of knowing learned only through long experience under a master, where recognizing a single sign on auscultation matters more than reading descriptions of syndromes. In the chapter on articulation a medical student learning X-ray diagnosis of the lungs at first sees only shadows, then gradually learns to see what the radiologist sees as he masters the language. Elsewhere Polanyi cites Freud's psychoanalysis as an example of a self-contained conceptual framework, discusses the responsibility a physician feels in a difficult diagnosis, and considers the knowledge of persons and of mental illness. His account of tacit knowledge has since been widely applied in discussions of clinical judgment and medical education.

• Part One, ch. 4 (Skills), section on connoisseurship

  Medical diagnosis as connoisseurship learned by apprenticeship; the example of recognizing an accentuated pulmonary second heart sound.

• Part Two, ch. 5 (Articulation)

  A medical student in a course on X-ray diagnosis of pulmonary disease gradually learns to see what the radiologist describes.