Tacit Knowledge

Personal Knowledge

Polanyi expanded his Gifford Lectures of 1951–2 into his magnum opus, Personal Knowledge, published in 1958. In this text, he stresses the vital and inescapable role that the personal plays in all human knowing, skill, action and experience. Polanyi proposes that ‘all knowing is personal knowing’, involving ‘participation through indwelling’. In this way, he offers a radical challenge to the simplistic view of normal science; he argues that at the root of claims to objective scientific knowledge, there is always reliance upon personal knowledge. He characterizes these ideas, central to his philosophy, as a post-critical philosophy.

This idea of personal knowing has previously been outlined by other philosophers in their various ways as a kind of knowledge by personal acquaintance, by familiarity with an object, event or situation. This dates back to the ancient Greeks and their idea of a practical knowledge, a knowing by doing. In more recent times, key thinkers such as Hermann von Helmholtz, William James, John Dewey, Bertrand Russell and Gilbert Ryle have all in some way discussed a notion of knowledge by acquaintance. However, Polanyi has, more than anyone else, tried to theorize and explain what knowledge by acquaintance might actually entail. His argument for the participatory, tacit nature of all human knowing is still groundbreaking.

Furthermore, Polanyi’s philosophy bears resemblance to what lies at the heart of Martin Heidegger’s notion of ‘being-in-the-world’. What Polanyi calls participation through indwelling seems to correspond to Heidegger’s notion of ‘readiness-to-hand’. Heidegger describes this as a dealing with things that are closest to what it is to be human, by which he means a kind of ‘concern’ involved in manipulating and using things that we find in our world. He sees this ‘concern’ as having its own kind of knowledge, and presumably precognitive. Indeed, considering the tacit as having its own kind of knowledge lies at the heart of Polanyi’s philosophy.

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