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Product Description
In this work the distinguished physical chemist and philosopher, Michael Polanyi, demonstrates that the scientist's personal participation in his knowledge, in both its discovery and its validation, is an indispensable part of science itself. Even in the exact sciences, "knowing" is an art, of which the skill of the knower, guided by his personal committment and his passionate sense of increasing contact with reality, is a logically necessary part. In the biological and social sciences this becomes even more evident.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Polanyi continues where Gestalt psychology left off, claiming, as Kant also did, that perception is an active reformer of experience (in other words, the mind actively creates meanings out of phenomena at all times). He agrees again with Kant that the mind is not a tabula rasa on which experience writes but rather it is the presupposed structures of the mind (subsidiary and focal awareness) that form our perception of the world. The author eventually leads us to the question of epistemology itself, "How do we know what we know?" Polanyi believes that via tacit thought, say knowing how to play a piece of music fluently yet not being able to adequately describe our knowledge of it, we make knowledge personal. Skills such as music can only be inarticulately known, that is, they can somehow be understood tacitly and though our cognition may understand the relation of their parts we have difficulty describing these relations through our ability to communicate, i.e. explicit language. This is only the tip of the iceberg in Polanyi's thought but I highly recommend this in-depth study of personal knowledge. If you can get through the first few chapters the book gets easier to understand. It's heavy but it's very much worth your time.
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This book was first published in 1958, and if anything it is more relevant today. It is a long, subtle and detailed book, one you cannot rush, just like a fine old wine. Polanyi was a distinguished physical chemist, and a Fellow of the Royal Society, and this work was his extended and articulate rebuttal of the positivist account of science that was prevalent then and is growing again now.
Many (most) people today have only a very hazy idea of what proper scientific method is, and what characterises good science practise. Polanyi shows that far from being all cut and dried as popular mythology would have it, the progress of science depends to a much greater extent than commonly recognised on what he calls "tacit knowledge": the hunch, the smell of a problem, a sense of how it ought to be.
If you want to know how science really works, from a master of the art, and you like engaging in profound thought, then this book is for you.
Many (most) people today have only a very hazy idea of what proper scientific method is, and what characterises good science practise. Polanyi shows that far from being all cut and dried as popular mythology would have it, the progress of science depends to a much greater extent than commonly recognised on what he calls "tacit knowledge": the hunch, the smell of a problem, a sense of how it ought to be.
If you want to know how science really works, from a master of the art, and you like engaging in profound thought, then this book is for you.
14 of 18 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Trying to summarize Personal Knowledge is not something I am going to try to do - nor am I going to say that it contains all of his philosophical ideas. It is however the key work by one of the greatest philosophers of the century. Read it if you want to spend some time with somebody who is humane as well as smart and original.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
A great book, a beautiful book
I just quoted Mr. Raymond Aron's opinion on this book: "Un grand livre, un beau livre"
Yes, by the greatest french intellectual of the 20th century, speaking about the... Read more
Yes, by the greatest french intellectual of the 20th century, speaking about the... Read more
Published 1 month ago by Claude Carranza
Interesting study of tacit knowing and Polanyi's philosophy
Polanyi continues where Gestalt psychology left off, claiming, as Kant also did, that perception is an active reformer of experience (in other words, the mind actively creates... Read more
Published on 10 Mar 1998
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