Michael Polanyi: Biography from Answers.com

Michael Polanyi (1891-1976), a medical doctor, physical chemist, social thinker, and philosopher, made his most important contribution in the area of humanizing scientific inquiry. He proposed a new theory of knowledge based on an appreciation of the role of the individual and the individual's and society's values in the seeking and finding of truth.

Michael Polanyi was born on March 11, 1891, in Budapest, Hungary, the fifth child of Michael Pollacsek and Cecilia Wohl. His family life was marked by a rich and stimulating intellectual world that combined theoretical and practical concerns and artistic, literary, and social issues. His father was a civil engineer, and his mother was the center of a circle of poets, painters, and scholars. His two brothers and two sisters were all in their own ways distinguished. In his lifetime Michael Polanyi had four careers - medical doctor, physical chemist, social thinker, and philosopher. Leaving medicine early for the attraction of scientific research, he achieved international recognition in his other fields. His talent and breadth of knowledge made him a polymath and prepared him for the philosophical creativity that crowned his life with a vision and proposal for a new theory of knowledge - a theory intended to save advanced scientific culture from its own self-destruction by its dehumanized notion of objective detachment.

From the time of his entrance to the University of Budapest in 1908 until his death on February 22, 1976, Polanyi's life was devoted to the pursuit of scientific knowledge and to its meaning for the life of humanity. In the first part of his professional life, the advancement of scientific knowledge was his livelihood and the understanding of the implications of science for society was his avocation. In the later part of his life, the understanding of science's intellectual impact on society became his profession for the purpose of maintaining the basis of creative scientific research and for the liberation of humanity from the tyrannies based on scientism.

At the University of Budapest he was a founder in 1908 of the Galilei Circle, a progressive-minded student society devoted to discussions of science, politics, and religion. Barely 19 years old, he published his first scientific paper in 1910 and graduated as a Doctor of Medicine in 1913. His scientific interests led him to further study in chemistry at the Technische Hochschule, Karlsruhe, Germany. During this time he published several papers on the second law of thermodynamics, but the outbreak of World War I involved him as a medical officer and his scientific research was curbed until he contracted diptheria. During his convalescence he wrote a Ph.D. thesis on the adsorption of gases by solids, which not only earned him his doctorate in 1917 but also the attention of Einstein and of Fritz Haber, head of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Physical Chemistry in Berlin. In 1920 he was appointed a member of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Fiber Chemistry, where he developed new methods of X-ray analysis pertinent to fibrous structures, metals, and crystals. His success led to his appointment in 1923 to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry, where he made contributions not only in crystallography but also in reaction kinetics.

Never a one sided person, Polanyi maintained his interest in social and intellectual issues and in 1928 formed a study group on Soviet affairs with Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner, and John Von Neumann (all became distinguished scientists). In 1933, in protest against Hitler's dismissal of Jewish professors, he resigned his position at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. Within a few months he was invited to take the chair of physical chemistry at the University of Manchester in England, and he moved there with his wife and two sons that autumn. He had married Magda Kemeny in 1921, herself an able chemist and author of a dictionary on textile chemistry. Their two sons, George and John, became respectively an economist and a physical chemist.

During the years in Manchester he continued to be productive in research in chemical reaction rates and in transition state theory, but Polanyi's inherent concern for the relations of science and society led him into basic questions about scientific reality and the importance of human freedom. He believed from his experience in science that there was a necessary connection between the premises of a free society and the discovery of scientific truths. Around him, in the Soviet Union and in Nazi Germany, and even among some leaders in Great Britain, Polanyi saw science changing toward control by the state and losing its creative independence and search for truth.

In 1938 he joined with J. R. Baker and others in forming the Society for the Freedom of Science. Between 1935 and 1946 he visited the Soviet Union and published critiques of planned economy, did a film on economics and unemployment, and advocated reform of the patent law. These political and economic concerns were about the way a dehumanized understanding of science was supporting totalitarianism and centralized government control of science in democratic societies. Everywhere Polanyi saw a mistaken view of science as impersonal and strict detachment denying the importance of personal and shared values. In 1946 he published Science, Faith and Society, which set forth a new philosophy to refute scientific objectivism and to restore belief in commitment to the independence of thought guided by the principles of liberty. This paramount problem and Polanyi's grasp of it led his university in 1948 to offer him a chair in social thought in exchange for his chair in physical chemistry.

In 1951 and 1952 Polanyi gave the Gifford Lectures that became his magnum opus, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (1958). In a comprehensive treatment of human knowing he proposed overturning the last three centuries' habit of thinking that our most genuine knowledge is found by a method that separates the observer from the subject of study and proceeds by neutrally collecting data and drawing conclusions from it. Instead, Polanyi showed from the practice of science that discovery of scientific reality is guided by a passionate dedication nurtured by a conscientious community of inquirers. He upheld objective knowledge as "personal knowledge" because it involved human participation in strategic and significant ways. Polanyi's view meant that the most exact facts could not be separated from the values of the knower and the traditions that guided them. The foundations of a free society that saw the truth of reality as independent of people yet found by individuals seeking the truth, stating their findings, and establishing agreement by open discussion are fundamental to the pursuit of science and knowledge generally. Many modern ideologies had produced totalitarianism and nihilism by a belief in naked truth separated from moral convictions that called for respect for persons and ideals.

Polanyi's proposal gained international attention, and he lectured at many universities throughout the world. His theory meant that the truths of science, religion, and art shared a common ground. In 1958 he became senior research fellow at Merton College, Oxford University. Despite the wide recognition he attained in the intellectual world, academic philosophers sometimes ignored Polanyi as too comprehensive and not specialized enough. Polanyi refined his view into a theory called "tacit knowing" that showed more specifically the personal component with its faith-like structure and its decisive role in the nature of all knowing. In the United States and Great Britain societies pursuing Polanyi's thought have developed on a multi-field basis.

Michael Polanyi

Born	March 11, 1891(1891-03-11) Budapest, Hungary, Austria-Hungary
Died	February 22, 1976 (aged 84) Northampton, MA, USA
Occupation	Chemist, Philosopher
Spouse(s)	Magda Elizabeth

Early life

Polanyi was born into a Jewish family. His older brother was Karl the political economist. Their father was an engineer and railway entrepreneur, and his mother's salons were well known amongst Budapest's intellectuals. Polanyi graduated in medicine in 1913, and served as a physician in the Austro-Hungarian army during World War I. During a convalescence (after contracting diphtheria) in 1917 he wrote what became a doctorate in physical chemistry from the University of Budapest (supervised by Gusztáv Buchböck).

In 1920, he emigrated to Germany, ending up as a research chemist at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institut for Fiber Chemistry in Berlin. There, he converted to Christianity and married Magda Elizabeth in a Roman Catholic ceremony. In 1929, Magda gave birth to a son John, who later went on to win a Nobel Prize in chemistry. Their other son became a distinguished economist. With the coming to power in 1933 of the Nazi party, Polanyi accepted the offer of a chair in Physical Chemistry at the University of Manchester. Because of his shift of interest from chemistry via economics to philosophy, Manchester created a new chair in Social Science (1948-58) for him.

Physical chemistry

Polanyi's scientific interests were diverse, embracing chemical kinetics, x-ray diffraction, and the adsorption of gases at solid surfaces.

In 1921, Polanyi laid the mathematical foundation of fiber diffraction analysis.

In 1934, Polanyi, at about the same time as G. I. Taylor and Egon Orowan, realised that the plastic deformation of ductile materials could be explained in terms of the theory of dislocations developed by Vito Volterra in 1905. The insight was critical in developing the field of solid mechanics.

Philosophy of science

From the mid-1930s, Polanyi began to articulate his opposition to the prevailing positivist account of science, arguing that it failed to recognise the part which personal commitment and tacit knowing play in science.

Polanyi argued that positivism encourages the belief that science ought to be directed by the State. He pointed to what happened to genetics in the Soviet Union, once the doctrines of Trofim Lysenko gained the (often coercive) backing of the state. Polanyi, like his friend Friedrich Hayek, supplied reasons why academic freedom is preferable. Together with John Baker, Polanyi founded the Society for Freedom in Science to defend this view.

Polanyi saw absolute objectivity (objectivism) as a delusion and false ideal.^[1] He criticised the prevailing notion that the scientific method yields truth mechanically to the scientist. Instead, he argued that all knowing is personal, and as such relies upon fallible commitments.

Humans are never separate from the universe they observe, but instead participate personally in it, and thus cannot develop purely "objective" (e.g., unbiased) knowledge. Human skills, biases, and passions are not flaws but play an important and necessary role in guiding discovery and validation. Polanyi observes that the mark of a great scientist is the ability to identify for investigation those scientific questions which are likely to lead to successful resolution. This ability derives not only from the scientist's ability to perceive patterns and connections, but also from personal interests and biases. In turn, these biases fuel the scientist's willingness to risk his or her reputation by committing to a hypothesis and advocating it. He gives the example of Copernicus who rejected the reigning interpretation of the evidence of the sun the moon and the stars rising daily in the east and setting in the west to posit that the heavens did not revolve around the earth. Polanyi claimed that Copernicus arrived at the objective truth of the Earth's true relation to the sun, not by following a rigid method, but by giving in to "the greater intellectual satisfaction he derived from the celestial panorama as seen from the sun instead of the earth."^[2]

What saves his claim that all knowledge is personal from relativism is his belief that our tacit awareness connects us with objective realities.

Our tacit awareness however relies upon assumptions acquired within a local context, so we cannot simply assume that they have universal validity; we must seek truth but accept the possibility of error. Any process of articulation inevitably relies upon that which is not articulated. Indeed, reliance upon what is not articulated is how words become meaningful, i.e. meaning is not reducible to a set of rules; it is grounded in our experience - where experience is not something that can simply be reduced to collections of sense data.

Polanyi also acknowledged the role played by inherited practices (tradition). The fact that we know more than we can clearly articulate helps contribute to the conclusion that much knowledge is passed on by non-explicit means, for example via apprenticeship i.e. observing a master, and then practicing under the master's guidance.

His writings about the practice of science influenced the thought and work of both Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend.

Economics

In his 1951 collection of essays, The Logic of Liberty, Polanyi applied his philosophy of science to economics. Polanyi noted that scientists cooperate with each other, or "self coordinate," in a way similar to the way in which agents coordinate themselves within a free market. Within a structure of liberty, people choose how to use their own resources to solve problems: inventors may research and produce new goods and services; scientists may produce and research new theories. Without central direction, consumers then determine the value of those products: buyers validate the best products by purchasing them, and communities of scientists validate the best theories by confirming and endorsing them.

"Profit," for communities of scientists, may loosely be thought of as the revelation of truth. In a similar manner, the legal community is a dedicated community committed to the pursuit of justice.

He argued that because ends such as truth and justice transcend our ability to wholly articulate them, a free society which seeks to give specialist communities the freedom to pursue these ends is desirable. Scientists, like entrepreneurs, require the freedom to pursue discoveries and react to the claims made by their peers. He urged societies to allow scientists to pursue truth for its own sake:

"...[S]cientists, freely making their own choice of problems and pursuing them in the light of their own personal judgment, are in fact cooperating as members of a closely knit organization. ...

"Such self-co-ordination of independent initiatives leads to a joint result which is unpremeditated by any of those who bring it about. Their co-ordination is guided as by an 'invisible hand' towards the joint discovery of a hidden system of things. Since its end-result is unknown, this kind of co-operation can only advance stepwise, and the total performance will be the best possible if each consecutive step is decided upon by the person most competent to do so. ...

"Any attempt to organize the group ... under a single authority would eliminate their independent initiatives and thus reduce their joint effectiveness to that of the single person directing them from the centre. It would, in effect, paralyse their cooperation."

Law

Polanyi's work The Logic of Liberty and his understanding of polycentricity has had a lasting impact on the legal community. The basic idea is that unexpected repercussions make many judicial decisions unworkable because, in deciding a single dispute, the court exercises influence in myriad and unpredictable ways. Imagine tugging at a single strand of a spider web. Its reaction would be complicated enough just with that simple tug, but now double the force. The doubling of force will not simply double all of the previous reactions; the web will react in wholly new pattern of reactions that distributes tensions in a new and complex pattern. As Lon L. Fuller explained in an article in the Harvard Law Review, the judicial question becomes one of "knowing when the polycentric elements have become so significant and predominant that the proper limits of adjudication have been reached."^[3]

Critique of Darwinism and reductionism

In the late 60's and early 70's Polanyi wrote essays dealing with issues regarding the origin of life. In Life's irreducible structure ^[4] he argues that the information contained in the DNA molecule is a non-material phenomenon irreducible to physics and chemistry. Polanyi argued that the reductionist approach which is considered the ideal of science was actually clouding our understanding, and that the recognition of life's irreducibility to physics and chemistry would enable genuine science to advance in the right direction, even if this demonstration should prove of no great advantage in the pursuit of discovery.

In Transcendence and Self-transcendence ^[5] he further criticizes the mechanistic world view science had inherited from Galileo, the paper is also thoroughly anti-reductionist. Using analogies Polanyi makes more arguments against determinism and mechanism in this paper. These papers are still being cited by scientists to this day and the arguments against mechanism and reductionism put forth by Polanyi in these papers makes him a favorite among intelligent design proponents as well as biosemioticians.

Tacit knowing

Polanyi's concept of tacit knowledge is most fully expressed in the Gifford lectures he gave in 1951–52 at the University of Aberdeen, later published as Personal Knowledge. It was while writing this work that he discovered what he calls the "structure of tacit knowing". He regarded this as his most important discovery. In tacit knowing persons experience the world by integrating their subsidiary awareness into a focal awareness, a process he referred to as "indwelling."

Family

Michael Polanyi's son, John Charles Polanyi, is a professor of chemistry at the University of Toronto, Canada. In 1986 John Polanyi was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on the "dynamics of chemical elementary processes."^[6] His brother, Karl Polanyi, was a noted economist, and his niece, Kari Polanyi-Levitt, is Emerita Professor of Economics at McGill University, Montreal.

References

^ Personal Knowledge, p. 18
^ Personal Knowledge p. 3
^ 92 Harv. L. Rev. 353 (1978)
^ Michael Polanyi (June 1968). "Life's Irreducible Structure". Science 160 (3834): 1308-1312. doi:10.1126/science.160.3834.1308. http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/reprint/160/3834/1308.pdf.
^ Michael Polanyi (1970). "Transcendence and Self-transcendence". Soundings 53 (1): 88-94. http://www.missouriwestern.edu/orgs/polanyi/mp-transcendence.htm. Retrieved 2009-06-02.
^ John Polanyi Official Website

Bibliography

1932. Atomic Reactions. Williams and Norgate, London.
1946. Science, Faith, and Society. Oxford Univ. Press. ISBN 0-226-67290-5. Reprinted by the University of Chicago Press, 1964.
1951. The Logic of Liberty. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-67296-4
1958. Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-67288-3
1964. The Study of Man. University of Chicago Press.
1967. The Tacit Dimension. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 9780226672984. (2009 reprint)
1969. Knowing and Being. Edited with an introduction by Marjorie Grene. University of Chicago Press and (UK) Routledge and Kegan Paul.
1975 (with Prosch, Harry). Meaning. Univ. of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-67294-8
1997. Science, Economics and Philosophy: Selected Papers of Michael Polanyi. Edited with an introduction by R.T. Allen. New Brunswick NJ: Transaction Publishers. Includes an annotated bibliography of Polanyi's publications.

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Michael Polanyi

Biography by Mary Joe Nye
Polanyi Society home page
Polanyi resources at erraticimpact.com
Polanyiana, Vol. 8, Number 1-2
Smith, M. K., 2003, "Michael Polanyi and tacit knowledge." The encyclopedia of informal education
(French)Presentation of The Logic of Liberty
"Life's Irreducible Structure". Michael Polanyi. Journal of the American Scientific Affiliation. Volume 22 (December 1970): 123-131. Links to Responses by Stanford Materials Science Professor Richard H. Bube and another member of the ASA Cohn Duricz.

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Michael Polanyi

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