Michael Polanyi

The Republic of Science: Its Political and Economic Theory

My title is intended to suggest that the community of scientists is organized in a way which resembles certain features of a body politic and works according to economic principles similar to those by which the production of material goods is regulated. Much of what I will have to say will be common knowledge among scientists, but I believe that it will recast the subject from a novel point of view which can both profit from and have a lesson for political and economic theory. For in the free cooperation of independent scientists we shall find a highly simplified model of a free society, which presents in isolation certain basic features of it that are more difficult to identify within the comprehensive functions of a national body. The first thing to make clear is that scientists, 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. The point can be settled by considering the opposite case where individuals are engaged in a joint task without being in any way coordinated. A group of women shelling peas work at the same task, but their individual efforts are not co-ordinated. The same is true of a team of chess players. This is shown by the fact that the total amount of peas shelled and the total number of games won will not be affected if the members of the group are isolated from each other. Consider by contrast the effect which a complete isolation of scientists would have on the progress of science. Each scientist would go on for a while developing problems derived from the information initially available to all. But these problems would soon be exhausted, and in the absence of further information about the results achieved by others, new problems of any value would cease to arise, and scientific progress would come to a standstill. This shows that the activities of scientists are in fact coordinated, and it also reveals the principle of their co-ordination. This consists in the adjustment of the efforts of each to the hitherto achieved results of the others. We may call this a coordination by mutual adjustment of independent initiatives--of initiatives which are co-ordinated because each takes into account all the other initiatives operating within the same system.

The Logic of Tacit Inference

I propose to bring fresh evidence here for my theory of knowledge and expand it in new directions. We shall arrive most swiftly at the centre of the theory, by going back to the point from which I started about twenty years ago. Upon examining the grounds on which science is pursued, I saw that its progress is determined at every stage by indefinable powers of thought. No rules can account for the way a good idea is found for starting an inquiry; and there are no firm rules either for the verification or the refutation of the proposed solution of a problem. Rules widely current may be plausible enough, but scientific enquiry often proceeds and triumphs by contradicting them. Moreover, the explicit content of a theory fails to account for the guidance it affords to future discoveries. To hold a natural law to be true, is to believe that its presence may reveal itself in yet unknown and perhaps yet unthinkable consequences; it is to believe that such laws are features of a reality which as such will continue to bear consequences inexhaustibly.

Sense-Giving and Sense-Reading

I propose to enquire here into the way we endow our speech with meaning and into the way by which we make sense of speech that we hear spoken. I shall show that, notwithstanding their informal character, these acts possess a characteristic pattern, a pattern that I shall call the structure of tacit knowing ; I shall show that to form such a structure is to create meaning . Both the way we endow our own utterances with meaning and our attribution of meaning to the utterances of others are acts of tacit knowing. They represent sense-giving and sense-reading with in the structure of tacit knowing. My enquiry shall outline the total structure of language, comprising both its formal patterns successfully established by modern linguistics and its informal semantic structure, studied so far mainly by philosophy.

Science and reality

The purpose of this essay is to re-introduce a conception which, having served for two millennia as a guide to the understanding of nature, has been repudiated by the modern interpretation of science. I am speaking of the conception of reality. Rarely will you find it taught today, that the purpose of science is to discover the hidden reality underlying the facts of nature. The modern ideal of science is to establish a precise mathematical relationship between the data without acknowledging that if such relationships are of interest to science, it is because they tell us that we have hit upon a feature of reality. My purpose is to bring back the idea of reality and place it at the centre of a theory of scientific enquiry. The resurrected idea of reality will, admittedly, look different from its departed ancestor. Instead of being the clear and firm ground underlying all appearances, it will turn out to be known only vaguely, with an unlimited range of unspecifiable expectations attached to it. It is common knowledge that Copernicus overthrew the ancient view that the sun and the planets go round the Earth and that he established instead a system in which it is the sun that is the centre around which all planets are circling, while the Earth itself goes round the sun as one of the planets. But we do not see it recognised that in the way Copernicus interpreted this discovery, he and his followers established the metaphysical grounds of modern science. We cannot find this recognised, since these grounds of science are predominantly contested today. The great conflict between the Copernicans and their opponents, culminating in the prosecution of Galileo by the Roman hierarchy, is well remembered. It should be clear also that the conflict was entirely about the question, whether the heliocentric system was real. Copernicus and his followers claimed that their system was a real image of the sun with the planets circling around it; their opponents affirmed that it was no more than a novel computing device. For thirty years Copernicus hesitated to publish his theory, largely because he did not dare to oppose the teachings of Aristotle by claiming that the heliocentric system he had set up was real. Two years before the

The Growth of Thought in Society

A MOVEMENT denying the justification of pure science was started in England in 193I by a group of Soviet delegates, including Bucharin and Hessen,2 at an International Congress of the History of Science, held in that year in London. It has been carried on since with considerable success by a number of able writers, mostly Marxists, under the leadership of L. Hogben, J. D. Bernal, and J. G. Crowther. As a result the idea of pure science is considered to-day as obsolete and reactionary by most of the scientists who take an active interest in the position of science in society. Though such scientists form a comparatively small minority, they have now brought considerable influence to bear on important organisations and publications dealing with scientific policy. The doctrine of this school can be summed up in three points. (i) Pure science, as distinct from scientific technology, has no real existence. All science, pure or applied, arises in response to the specific practical needs of contemporary society. The ideals of a disinterested search for truth and of the cultivation of science for its own sake are unsocial and futile.3 (2) Modern science in the last 300 years pursued this wrong tendency, which must now be replaced by a social control of science in the interests of the community.4 It follows that resistance of scientists to social control of research and their claim for freedom of research is unreasonable. (3) Instead of urging such claims, scientists ought to join in the struggle for the establishment of the right kind of political power, which may be expected to advance science in the right direction.5

Reaktionsleuchten und Reaktionsgeschwindigkeit

Der A u t o r ware aber wahrsche in l i ch fflr die Bese i t i gung dieser A b w e i c h u n g e n d a n k b a r gewesen. D e m W e r k gr6Bte V e r b r e i t u n g zu wt inschen , h a b e n wir n i c h t n6t ig. Wi r g lauben , d a b es au f den Gebieten, die es behande l t , als Spiegel des gegenw~r f igen Wissens s t a n d e s eine d a u e r n d e k lass i sche Ge l t ung s ich e rwerben wird . E. SCHRODINGER, Zfirich.

Faith and Reason

RECENTLY there fell into my hands -by the kindness of its authora book which has revealed to me a new, and I think much better, understanding of the situation we are facing today in consequence of the modern scientific revolution. The authors name is Josef Pieper, professor of philosophical anthropology at the University of Miinster, and his book which so impressed me is entitled Scholastik. (It will be published in English by the Phaedon Books in New York.) Owing to this book, I can see now that the conflict between faith and reason evoked by natural science today is but a modern variant of a problem which has filled the thoughts of men in other forms ever since the dawn of

Bildung und Zerfall von Molekülen

Diskussion der Annahme spontanen Zerfalles und einfacher Bildung gequantelter Systeme auf Grund der Annahme endlich breiter Quantenniveaus.

Genius in Science

We accept the results of science, and we must accept them, without having any strict proof that they are true. Strictly speaking all natural sciences are inexact. They could all conceivably be false, but we accept them as true because we consider doubts that may be raised against them to be unreasonable. Juries base their findings on the distinction between reasonable doubts which they must accept, and unreasonable doubts which they must disregard. They are instructed to make this distinction and to do it without having any set rules to rely upon. For it is precisely because there are no rules for deciding certain factual questions of supreme importance that these questions are assigned to the jury to decide them by their personal judgment. The scientist combines the functions of judge and jury. Having applied to his findings a number of specifiable criteria, he must ultimately decide in the light of his own personal judgment whether the remaining conceivable doubts should be set aside as unreasonable.

The creative imagination.

The enterprise that I am undertaking here has been severely discouraged by contemporary philosophers. They do not deny that the imagination can produce new ideas which help the pursuit of science or that our personal hunches and intuitions are often to the point. But since our imagination can roam unhindered by argument and our intuitions cannot be accounted for, neither imagination nor intuition are deemed rational ways of making discoveries. They are excluded from the logic of scientific discovery, which can deal then only with the verification or refutation of ideas after they have turned up as possible contributions to science.