The Tacit Dimension
From kwharrison13.com · Anti-library
The Tacit Dimension
| Author | Michael Polanyi |
|---|---|
| Published | 1966 |
| Pages | 108 |
| Recommended | Once |
| Buy | Amazon |
| Why it’s on the list | Polanyi’s short statement of the premise that “we can know more than we can tell” — that all knowing rests on a tacit foundation that cannot be fully made explicit, so knowledge is transmitted by apprenticeship and trust rather than by specification alone. |
Where I heard about it
- University of Austin — assigned in Philosophy of Social Science on its Fall 2025 reading list, November 2025. Polanyi is the direct challenge to the idea that social inquiry can be put on a fully explicit, rule-following footing: if the knowledge that guides an expert cannot be written down, then what a social science can hope to be, and how it can be taught, both change. Full curriculum: UATX Fall Reading List.
About this edition
Three lectures given at Yale in 1962 and published in 1966, condensing the argument of Polanyi’s much longer Personal Knowledge. His examples: we recognise a face without being able to specify how, a swimmer cannot state the rule that keeps him afloat, and a scientist’s judgement about which problem is worth attacking is not derivable from any method. He concludes that a research community governed by central direction rather than mutual authority will fail, because the thing being directed is not statable.
Connections
- UATX Fall Reading List — the curriculum this is assigned in.
- Michael Polanyi — the author.
- Personal Knowledge — Polanyi’s longer book, which these lectures compress.
- The Republic of Science — Polanyi’s 1962 essay on self-governing research, the political half of the same argument.
- Scientific Progress — what the tacit account implies about how discovery actually happens.
What links here
Curated by Kyle Harrison. Organized by Claude. Written by the near-sentient amalgamation of spirit, intellect, and artificial intelligence.