Michael Polanyi

Michael Polanyi (1891–1976) was a Hungarian-British physical chemist and philosopher. He argued that knowing depends partly on tacit skills and commitments that cannot be fully stated as rules.

Tacit knowledge: Knowledge expressed through skilled performance or judgment but not fully captured in explicit rules. Polanyi made this kind of knowing central to his account of knowledge.
Subsidiary awareness: Awareness of clues or tools that supports attention to a larger object or task. Polanyi described tacit knowing as relying on subsidiary clues while attending focally elsewhere.
Budapest: The capital of Hungary and the city where Michael Polanyi was born and began his scientific education. Polanyi’s early life and training began in this city.
Scientific discovery: The process by which new findings, methods, or explanations become established through research. Polanyi described discovery as guided by tacit judgment and commitment.
Knowledge management: Organizational practices for creating, sharing, retaining, and applying knowledge. Polanyi’s distinction between tacit and explicit knowledge became influential in this field.
Personal knowledge: Knowledge shaped by a knower’s judgment, commitment, and participation rather than detached observation alone. Polanyi’s major philosophical work develops this view of knowing.
Focal awareness: Conscious attention directed toward an object, meaning, or task as a whole. It is the focal pole of Polanyi’s account of how tacit and explicit knowing work together.
University of Berlin: A German university where Polanyi conducted research and built his early scientific career. His work in physical chemistry developed during his Berlin years.
Republic of Science: Polanyi’s model of science as a self-coordinating community of researchers pursuing problems independently. He used this model to defend scientific autonomy and decentralized coordination.
Social epistemology: The study of how social relations and institutions affect the production and justification of knowledge. Polanyi’s account of scientific communities helped foreground knowledge as a social achievement.

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