Faith in science: What can we learn from Michael Polanyi?

Résumé En

In this paper we revisit Michael Polanyi’s overall contribution to the understanding of tacitknowledge and its implications in philosophy of science with a focus on experimental researchin social sciences. We first review and discuss Polanyi’s references to experiments in general.An extensive number of these experiments are summarised in tabular form in the Appendix,distinguishing between experiments on the phenomenon of tacit knowledge, discussed in Subsection2.1, and experiments on the epistemological implications of tacit knowledge, discussedin Subsection 2.2. Secondly, we discuss tacit knowledge as a confounding factor and limitationto replicability in social science experiments (Subsection 3.1) and tacit knowledge as aphenomenon to be elicitated through controlled variation in experimental design (Subsection3.2). In the concluding section, we call for rejuvenation of the study of social epistemology andthe social construction of science, suggested to start with Polanyi and his generation, whereattention now should be directed to social science rather than hard science as in the past.