Personal Knowledge #1

Personal Knowledge is a book by Michael Polanyi published in 1958. He was a chemist and philosopher. It is an inquiry into the nature and justification of scientific knowledge. He rejects the ideal of scientific detachment. There is personal participation of the knower in all acts of  understanding, without making it subjective. Knowing is objective in the sense of making contact with a hidden reality, such contact being the condition for anticipating an indeterminate range of yet unknown true implications.

Polanyi uses the the Copernican revolution and subsequent ones in physics to elaborate this with reference to skills and explicit versus tacit knowledge. I may try to summarize what he said later after finishing the book. I will cite some of his interesting points on the nature of science in this and later posts.

"Scientists -- that, creative scientists -- spending their lives in trying to guess right. They are sustained and guided therein by their heuristic passion. We call their work creative because it changes the world as we see it, by deepening our understanding of it. The change is irrevocable. A problem that I once solved can no longer puzzle me; I cannot guess what I already know. Having made a discovery, I shall never see the world again as before. My eyes have become different; I have made myself into a person seeing and thinking differently. I have crossed a gap, the heuristic gap which lies between problem and discovery.
     Many discoveries change our interpretive framework. Here it is logically impossible to arrive at these by the continued application of our previous interpretive framework. So we see once more that discovery is creative, in the sense that it is not to be achieved by the diligent performance of any previously known and specifiable procedure.  This strengthens our conception of originality. The application of existing rules can produce valuable surveys, but does not advance the principle sof science. We have to cross the logical gap between a problem and its solution by relying on the unspecifiable impulse of our heuristic passion. ... Originality must be passionate" (143).