Philosophy of science
Michael Polanyi
1891 – 1976
We know more than we can tell. Tacit knowing accounts for what a practitioner sees but cannot yet articulate — the knowledge that arrives as unease before it arrives as words.
Read alongside: Sense
- Start with
- The Tacit Dimension (1966)
- Where they resist the book
- Unease is also how bias arrives. Tacit knowing needs the critical-thinking lens beside it or it becomes a licence for hunch.
Works worth the time
The Tacit Dimension · 1966
We know more than we can tell — the claim that explains why the handover document is never the job.
Read further
- Wikipedia: Michael Polanyi ↗
Wikipedia
Where Polanyi appears
Understanding is participation, not extraction.
Gadamer's fusion of horizons refuses the idea of a neutral observer: you understand a situation by entering it and letting it revise you. Polanyi's tacit knowing accounts for what a practitioner sees but cannot yet articulate — the knowledge that arrives as unease before it arrives as words.