Michael Polanyi

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

The native form of this personal name is Polányi Mihály. This article uses Western name order when mentioning individuals.

Michael Polanyi
John Charles Polanyi, George Polanyi
Parent(s)Mihály Polacsek (father)
Cecília Wohl (mother)
RelativesKarl Polanyi (brother)
Kari Polanyi Levitt (niece)
AwardsGifford Lectures (1951–1952)
Fellow of the Royal Society (1944)

Michael Polanyi FRS[1] (/poʊˈlænji/ poh-LAN-yee; Hungarian: Polányi Mihály; 11 March 1891 – 22 February 1976) was a Hungarian-British[2] polymath, who made important theoretical contributions to physical chemistry, economics, and philosophy. He argued that positivism is a false account of knowing.

His wide-ranging research in

Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, and then in 1933 to England, becoming first a chemistry professor, and then a social sciences professor at the University of Manchester. Two of his pupils won the Nobel Prize, as well as one of his children. In 1944 Polanyi was elected to the Royal Society
.

The contributions which Polanyi made to the social sciences include the concept of a polycentric spontaneous order and his rejection of a value neutral conception of liberty. They were developed in the context of his opposition to central planning.[3]

Life

Early life

Polanyi, born Mihály Pollacsek in Budapest, was the fifth child of Mihály and Cecília Pollacsek (born as

Wilno, then Russian Empire, respectively. His father's family were entrepreneurs, while his mother's father, Osher Leyzerovich Vol, was the senior teacher of Jewish history at the Vilna rabbinic seminary.[citation needed] The family moved to Budapest and Magyarized their surname to Polányi. His father built much of the Hungarian railway system, but lost most of his fortune in 1899 when bad weather caused a railway building project to go over budget. He died in 1905. Cecília Polányi established a salon that was well known among Budapest's intellectuals, and which continued until her death in 1939. His older brother was Karl Polanyi, the political economist and anthropologist, and his niece was Eva Zeisel, a world-renowned ceramist.[4]

Education

In 1908 Polanyi graduated the teacher-training secondary school, the

Royal University of Pest
awarded him a doctorate.

Career

In October 1918,

John
, who was awarded a Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1986. Their other son, George Polanyi, who predeceased him, became a well-known economist.

His experience of

Social Science
(1948–58) for him.

Polanyi was among the 2,300 names of prominent persons listed on the

Nazis' Special Search List, of those who were to be arrested on the invasion of Great Britain and turned over to the Gestapo
.

In 1944 Polanyi was elected a member of the

Merton College, Oxford.[7] In 1962 he was elected a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.[8]

Work

Physical chemistry

Polanyi's scientific interests were extremely diverse, including work in

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
.

Freedom and community

In 1936, as a consequence of an invitation to give lectures for the Ministry of Heavy Industry in the

Society for Freedom in Science
.

In a series of articles, re-published in The Contempt of Freedom (1940) and The Logic of Liberty (1951), Polanyi claimed that co-operation amongst scientists is analogous to the way agents co-ordinate themselves within a free market. Just as consumers in a free market determine the value of products, science is a spontaneous order that arises as a consequence of open debate amongst specialists. Science (contrary to the claims of Bukharin) flourishes when scientists have the liberty to pursue truth as an end in itself:

[S]cientists, freely making their own choice of problems and pursuing them in the light of their own personal judgment, are in fact co-operating 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.

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 co-operation.

He derived the phrase

sceptical
grounds undermined the practice of science. He extends this into a general claim about free societies. Polanyi defends a free society not on the negative grounds that we ought to respect "private liberties", but on the positive grounds that "public liberties" facilitate our pursuit of spiritual ends.

According to Polanyi, a free society that strives to be value-neutral undermines its own justification. But it is not enough for the members of a free society to believe that ideals such as truth, justice, and beauty, are not simply subjective, they also have to accept that they transcend our ability to wholly capture them. The non-subjectivity of values must be combined with acceptance that all knowing is fallible.

In Full Employment and Free Trade (1948) Polanyi analyses the way money circulates around an economy, and in a

monetarist analysis that, according to Paul Craig Roberts, was thirty years ahead of its time, he argues that a free market economy should not be left to be wholly self-adjusting. A central bank
should attempt to moderate economic booms/busts via a strict/loose monetary policy.

In 1940, he produced a film, "Unemployment and money. The principles involved", perhaps the first film about economics.[9] The film defended a version of Keynesianism, neutral Keynesianism, that advised the State to use budget deficit and tax reductions to increase the amount of money in the circulation in times of economic hardship but did not seek direct investment or engage in public works.[10]

All knowing is personal

Main article: Post-critical

In his book Science, Faith and Society (1946), Polanyi set out his opposition to a

positivist account of science, noting that among other things it ignores the role personal commitments play in the practice of science. Polanyi gave the Gifford Lectures in 1951–52 at Aberdeen, and a revised version of his lectures were later published as Personal Knowledge (1958). In this book Polanyi claims that all knowledge claims (including those that derive from rules) rely on personal judgments.[11] He denies that a scientific method can yield truth mechanically. All knowing, no matter how formalised, relies upon commitments. Polanyi argued that the assumptions that underlie critical philosophy are not only false, they undermine the commitments that motivate our highest achievements. He advocates a fiduciary post-critical
approach, in which we recognise that we believe more than we can know, and know more than we can say.

A knower does not stand apart from the universe, but participates personally within it. Our intellectual skills are driven by passionate commitments that motivate discovery and validation. According to Polanyi, a great scientist not only identifies patterns, but also significant questions likely to lead to a successful resolution. Innovators risk their reputation by committing to a hypothesis. Polanyi cites the example of Copernicus, who declared that the Earth revolves around the Sun. He claims that Copernicus arrived at the Earth's true relation to the Sun not as a consequence of following a method, but via "the greater intellectual satisfaction he derived from the celestial panorama as seen from the Sun instead of the Earth."[12] His writings on the practice of science influenced Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend.

Polanyi rejected the claim by

British Empiricists that experience can be reduced into sense data, but he also rejects the notion that "indwelling" within (sometimes incompatible) interpretative frameworks traps us within them. Our tacit awareness connects us, albeit fallibly, with reality. It supplies us with the context within which our articulations have meaning. Contrary to the views of his colleague and friend Alan Turing, whose work at the Victoria University of Manchester prepared the way for the first modern computer, he denied that minds are reducible to collections of rules. His work influenced the critique by Hubert Dreyfus of "First Generation" artificial intelligence
.

It was while writing Personal Knowledge that he identified the "structure of

ontological
aspects of tacit knowing, as discussed (but not necessarily identified as such) in his previous writing.

Critique of reductionism

In "Life's irreducible structure" (1968),

Galileo
.

Polanyi advocates

intensionality
.

Mind is a higher-level expression of the capacity of living organisms for

conception of knowledge; although it is relatively harmless in the formal sciences, that pathology generates nihilism in the humanities. Polanyi considered Marxism an example of moral inversion. The State, on the grounds of an appeal to the logic of history, uses its coercive powers in ways that disregard any appeals to morality.[15]

Tacit knowledge

Tacit knowledge, as distinct from explicit knowledge, is an influential term developed by Polanyi in The Tacit Dimension[16] to describe among other things the ability to do something without necessarily being able to articulate it: for example, being able to ride a bicycle or play a musical instrument without being able to fully explain the details of how it happens. He claims that not only do practical skills rely upon tacit awareness, all perception and meaning is rendered possible by agents relying upon their tacit awareness. Every consciousness has a subsidiary and a focal awareness, and this distinction also has an ontological dimension, because a lower and a higher dimension is how emergence takes place.

Bibliography

  • 1932. Atomic Reactions. London: Williams and Norgate. 1932 – via Internet Archive.
  • 1935. U.S.S.R. Economics
  • 1940. The Contempt of Freedom. The Russian Experiment and After. London: Watts & Co. 1940.
  • 1944. Patent Reform
  • 1945. Full Employment and Free Trade. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press – via Internet Archive.
  • 1946. Science, Faith, and Society. Oxford Univ. Press. 1964.
    ISBN 0-226-67290-5
    .    . Reprinted by the University of Chicago Press, 1964.
  • 1951. The Logic of Liberty. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press and Routledge. 1951.
    ISBN 0-226-67296-4 – via Internet Archive
    .
  • 1958. Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (2nd ed.). University of Chicago Press. 1962.
    ISBN 0-226-67288-3 – via Internet Archive
    .
  • 1959. The Study of Man. London and Chicago: Routledge and University of Chicago Press. 1959.
  • 1960. Beyond Nihilism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1960.
  • 1966. The Tacit Dimension. London and New York: Routledge and Doubleday and Company – via
    ISBN 978-0-226-67298-4
    . 2009 reprint)
  • 1969. Greene, Marjorie, ed. (1969). Knowing and Being. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press and (UK) Routledge and Kegan Paul.
  • 1975 Polanyi, Michael;
    ISBN 0-226-67294-8
    .
  • 1997. Allen, R.T., ed. (1997). Society, Economics and Philosophy: Selected Papers of Michael Polanyi. New Brunswick NJ: Transaction Publishers – via Internet Archive. Includes an annotated bibliography of Polanyi's publications.

See also

Notes

  1. ^
    doi:10.1098/rsbm.1977.0016
    .
  2. ^ Lévay, Júlia (20 September 2016). "A holográfia és a hologramok". mimicsoda.hu. Mi Micsoda.
  3. S2CID 225260656
    .
  4. ^ "Eva Zeisel obituary". government-online.net. Government Online. 15 January 2012. Retrieved 6 April 2018.
  5. ISBN 9780195174335
    . Retrieved 6 June 2023.
  6. ^ Torrance, Thomas F. (2002). "Mihály Polányi and the Christian faith: personal report" (pdf). Polanyiana (1–2), pp. 167–176.
  7. ^ Levens, R.G.C., ed. (1964). Merton College Register 1900–1964. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. p. 499.
  8. ^ "Book of Members, 1780–2010: Chapter P" (PDF). American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Retrieved 19 April 2011.
  9. ^ Beira, Eduardo (2019). "pol1b – ebeira". sites.google.com. Retrieved 31 August 2020.
  10. S2CID 225260656
    .
  11. ^ Personal Knowledge, p. 18
  12. ^ Personal Knowledge p. 3
  13. PMID 5651890
    .
  14. JSTOR 41177772
    . Retrieved 25 August 2020.
  15. ^ Personal Knowledge, Ch. 7, section 11
  16. OCLC 262429494
    .

Further reading

External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to Michael Polanyi.
Professional and academic associations
Preceded by President of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society
1944–46 		Succeeded by
Preceded by
Godfrey W. Armitage
 President of the Manchester Statistical Society
1950–51 		Succeeded by
Dr F. C. Toy
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