Polanyi -- The Tacit Dimension

The Tacit Dimension

Michael Polanyi, Anchor Books, Garden City (1967)

I picked up this book some years ago at some used book store. I had run across references to Polanyi, I think, when I was working on my Master's in Teaching. He was a scientist who wrote about how people solve problems, 'problem solving' in the literature.

This is one direction my PhD work will be going, so I decided to look into this before I dig into the current literature on the matter.

Polanyi was an interesting guy. To illustrate, here's a little quote from the first page of the introduction:

I first met questions of philosophy when I came up against Soviet ideology under Stalin which denied justification to the pursuit of science. I remember a conversation I had with Bukharin in Moscow in 1935. Though he was heading toward his fall and execution three years later, he was still a leading theoretician of the Communist party.

'Heading toward his fall and execution.' Talk about an attention getter at a party.

For those in the know, Stalin is synonymous with state terror and Bukharin was a darling intellectual of the early party in revolutionary Russia. Polanyi was circulating in some tough circles.

From the tiny biographical note in the book:

Dr. Michael Polanyi was born in Budapest in 1981, and received doctoral degrees both in Medicine and in Physical Sciences from the University of Budapest. In 1929 hd was made a Life Member of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry, and in 1933 was elected to the Chair of Physical Chemistry at the Victoria University of Manchester, England. He exchanged this Chair for a Chair in Social studies in 1948, and has lectured since then, as Visiting Professor, or Senior Fellow, at the universities of Chicago, Aberdeen, Virginia, Stanfard, and Merton College, Oxford. in 1965-66 he was a Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies at Wesleyan University.

I especially am interested in him since he was a practicing physical chemist—a hard scientist—who became absorbed in the question of how knowledge is built by humans. That is, he was a well-developed practitioner of a mathematical science looking inside, at how this business works.