Michael Polanyi

Michael Polanyi was a Hungarian-British polymath who built a distinguished career in physical chemistry before turning in mid-life to philosophy of science. In chemistry, Polanyi's research spanned chemical kinetics, adsorption of gases onto solid surfaces, and fiber diffraction analysis of the structure of materials, and in 1934 he was among the first scientists to propose the theory of dislocations to explain how crystalline materials deform plastically, an idea developed independently at nearly the same time by others and later confirmed as fundamental to materials science. After his scientific career, Polanyi developed an influential critique of positivism in his 1958 book Personal Knowledge, arguing that all knowing, including scientific knowledge, is inescapably personal, involving a knower's skilled judgment and commitment rather than being reducible to a mechanical, impersonal method. Polanyi's related concept of tacit knowledge, knowledge that cannot be fully articulated in explicit rules yet underlies skilled practice and perception, such as the balance involved in riding a bicycle, became one of the most widely cited ideas in twentieth-century philosophy of science. Polanyi was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1944 for his chemistry work before his later turn to philosophy, and his son John Polanyi went on to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.