Michael Polanyi
1891–1976
“We know more than we can tell.” Polanyi’s work on tacit knowledge explains why some skills resist documentation — and why apprenticeship remains powerful even in an age of abundant information.
The Tacit Dimension
The Tacit Dimension (1966) argued that all knowledge has a tacit component — a layer of understanding that can’t be fully articulated. You can describe how to ride a bicycle, but the description doesn’t enable riding. The knowledge lives in the body, in practice, in the relationship between knower and known.
This isn’t a deficiency in our descriptions. It’s a fundamental feature of knowledge. Some things can only be learned by doing, in the presence of someone who already knows.
Implications for AI
AI systems are explicit-knowledge machines. They operate on what can be written down, formalized, encoded. Polanyi’s insight suggests there’s a permanent boundary: some knowledge will always require human practice, human bodies, human attention.
The cooking mentor can describe how to knead bread. It can’t teach the feel of properly hydrated dough. The knowledge base can document greenhouse management. It can’t teach the smell of soil that’s ready for planting.
This isn’t a limitation to be overcome. It’s a design parameter: know what AI can do (explicit knowledge) and what it can’t (tacit knowledge), and build systems accordingly.
Key Works
- Personal Knowledge (1958)
- The Tacit Dimension (1966)
Connections
- embodied-knowledge — Polanyi’s central concept
- Matthew Crawford — shop class as tacit knowledge in practice
- John Dewey — knowledge through experience
- Masanobu Fukuoka — decades of observation as tacit agricultural knowledge
- appropriate-technology — understanding the limits of formalization
“We know more than we can tell.”