Personal knowledge
Asserts that scientific knowledge is a synthesis of personal experience, moral judgement, and empirical findings.
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3recommend
11mentions
7people
2012–2023years
36% recommend64% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- No mention of Michael Polanyi. Personal Knowledge is perhaps the defining criticism of positivism.
- Beginning of Infinity - David Deutsch Personal Knowledge - Michael Polanyi
- I consider Michael Polanyi's works to be very important in a certain way.
MP's The Tacit Dimension (1966, ~120pp) is a good introduction to his ideas about "Tacit knowledge", i.e. 'we can know more than we can tell', e.g. facial recognition. , A quick and enjoyable read that might appeal to many in this crowd.
Akin to Hadamard's Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field.
If you've got time, MP's earlier Personal Knowledge (1958, ~400pp) might be a worthwhile deeper-dive. I recall that his style reminded me of Lewis Thomas.
- See also: Polanyi, Personal Knowledge and The Tacit Dimension.
- Because even if you have experimental results in your favor, you still need epistemology to tell you why you can believe the results of the experiments. And you can't derive epistemology from experiments.
Logical positivism tried to do this, and failed. Michael Polanyi's Personal Knowledge pretty much killed logical positivism, because he showed that no scientist is in the fully objective position that was required to set up and evaluate the experiments.
- See also:
Personal Knowledge - Michael Polanyi, 1958.
"not only that there is knowledge that cannot be adequately articulated by verbal means, but also that all knowledge is rooted in tacit knowledge...."
Against Method. Paul Feyerabend, 1975.
"there no such thing as the scientific method and we should not impose a single methodological rule upon scientific practices."
