Everything about Michael Polanyi totally explained
Michael Polanyi (born
Polányi Mihály) (
March 11,
1891,
Budapest –
February 22,
1976) was a
Hungarian–
British polymath whose thought and work extended across
physical chemistry,
economics, and
philosophy. He was a
Fellow of the Royal Society and a Fellow of
Merton College, Oxford.
Early life
Michael was born into a
Jewish family. His older brother
Karl is known as an
economist. Their father was an
engineer and
entrepreneur whose volatile fortunes building
railways perhaps encouraged Polanyi to seek a career in
medicine. He graduated in
1913, and shortly afterwards served as a physician in the
Austro-Hungarian army during
World War I, but was hospitalized. During his convalescence he wrote what in 1917 became a doctorate in physical chemistry from the
University of Budapest (supervised by Gusztáv Buchböck).
In
1920, he emigrated to
Germany, eventually ending up as a research chemist at the
Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Fiber Chemistry in
Berlin. There, he married Magda Elizabeth in a
Roman Catholic ceremony. In
1929, Magda gave birth to a son
John, who went on to win a
Nobel Prize in chemistry. 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 his interests later shifted from chemistry to economics and 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
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 stands out among philosophers of science by the extent of his scientific training, and by the amount of scientific research he carried out.
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 were deemed politically correct. Polanyi, like his friend
Friedrich Hayek, supplied reasons why a free society is preferable.
Polanyi embraced the existence of objective truth (
Personal Knowledge, p. 16). However, he criticised the notion that there's something called the
scientific method which enables science to supply us with truths in a mechanical fashion.
Instead, he argued that all knowing is personal, and as such relies upon fallible commitments. Our skills, biases, and passions are not flaws but play an important and necessary role in discovery and validation. Observers can't remove themselves from their observations and judgements, nor should they; it's enough that we act in accordance with the consequences imposed upon us by our beliefs. What saves this claim from relativism is his belief that our tacit awareness connects us with realities, although as our tacit awareness relies upon assumptions acquired within a local context, we can't simply assume that they've universal validity; we must rather be open to the possibility of error while seeking to identify objective truths. Any process of articulation, however, inevitably relies upon that which we've not articulated. Indeed, reliance upon what we've not articulated is how words become meaningful, for example meaning isn't reducible to a set of rules; it's grounded in our experience of the world - where experience isn't something that can simply be reduced to collections of sense data.
Polanyi acknowledged the role played by inherited practices (
tradition). The fact that we know more than we can clearly articulate contributes to the conclusion that much knowledge is passed on by non-explicit means, such as
apprenticeship (observing a master, and then practicing under the master's guidance).
Polanyi's philosophical ideas are most fully expressed in the
Gifford lectures he gave in 1951–52 at the
University of Aberdeen, published as
Personal Knowledge. These ideas later influenced the thought and work of
Thomas Kuhn and
Paul Feyerabend.
Economics
In his 1951 collection of essays,
The Logic of Liberty, Polanyi applied his philosophy of science to
economics. He elaborated on these ideas in a 1962 article.. Polanyi extrapolated his conclusions about the structure of liberty from within the context of science.
Polanyi noted that scientists cooperate with each other, or "self coordinate," in a way similar to the way in which economic agents coordinate their activities in a
free market. Even though each scientist pursues his own goals, the scientist reacts to the limited available knowledge produced by nearby, relevant actors. However, the dedicated communities of scientists are formed by a commitment to truth that transcends the market. Other examples of dedicated communities is the pursuit of justice within the legal community as an end which transcends the rewards of the market. Because ends such as truth and justice transcend our ability to wholly articulate them, a society which gives these 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. In
The Republic of Science, Polanyi thus urged societies to allow science to be pursued 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. ...
"We may conclude that just as there's no proof of a proposition in natural science which can't conceivably turn out to be incomplete, so also there's no refutation which can't conceivably turn out to have been unfounded."
"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."
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."
Further Information
Get more info on 'Michael Polanyi'.
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