Michael Polanyi and the politics of science studies

Abstract

Tacit knowledge is today a key concept in history and sociology of science and, primarily because of the significance of this concept, Michael Polanyi is regarded, alongside other figures such as Ludwig Fleck, Karl Mannheim, Robert K. Merton, and Thomas Kuhn as a forerunner of contemporary social studies of science. And yet, Polanyi’s major book, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (1958), with its invocation of St. Augustine’s idea of knowledge as a ‘‘gift of grace,’’ its Christian existentialism, its conservative moralism, and its often tortuously complex style of reasoning is much less accessible and amenable to increasingly specialized academics than Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Much of Personal Knowledge seems tangential to today’s social studies of science: for example, its moralistic anti-Communism and teleological conception of the evolution of human intelligence as the ‘‘awakening of the world’’ (Polanyi 1962: 405). A view of Polanyi as contributing to the idea of the social construction of science is paradoxical because of his outright opposition to the sociology of knowledge, which he expressed in correspondence with Mannheim. He paradoxically combined an emphasis on embodied scientific practice with absolute opposition to materialism. He also saw sociology as more generally pernicious, writing disapprovingly in Personal Knowledge that the public is ‘‘taught by the sociologist to distrust its traditional morality’’ (Polanyi 1962: 234; see also Nye: 279). Polanyi’s philosophy of science opposed justifications of scientific truth by logical positivist notions of scientific method and pointed toward a sociological view of the trust-dependence, presupposition-laden, and inherently communal character of scientific practice, themes developed in the sociology of scientific knowledge (Shapin 1994; Collins 1992). But can these aspects of Polanyi’s work be extracted from the overall framework of his thought or do they carry with them