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Polanyi's paradox

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Philosophical theory

Professor Michael Polanyi on a hike in England<br>Polanyi's paradox , named in honour of the British-Hungarian philosopher Michael Polanyi, is the theory that human knowledge of how the world functions and of our own capability are, to a large extent, beyond our explicit understanding. The theory was articulated by Michael Polanyi in his book The Tacit Dimension in 1966, and economist David Autor gave it a name in his 2014 research paper "Polanyi's Paradox and the Shape of Employment Growth".[1]

Summarised in the slogan "We can know more than we can tell", Polanyi's paradox is mainly to explain the cognitive phenomenon that there exist many tasks which we, human beings, understand intuitively how to perform but cannot verbalize their rules or procedures.[2]

This "self-ignorance" is common to many human activities, from driving a car in traffic to face recognition.[3] As Polanyi argues, humans are relying on their tacit knowledge, which is difficult to adequately express by verbal means, when engaging these tasks.[2] Polanyi's paradox has been widely considered to identify a major obstacle in the fields of AI and automation, since programming an automated task or system is difficult unless a complete and fully specific description of the procedure is available.[4]

Origins<br>[edit]

British-Hungarian philosopher Michael Polanyi regularly studied the causes behind human ability to acquire knowledge that they cannot explain through logical deduction. In his work The Tacit Dimension (1966), Polanyi explored the 'tacit' dimension to human knowledge and developed the concept of "tacit knowledge", as opposed to the term "explicit knowledge".[2]

Tacit knowledge can be defined as knowledge people learn from experiences and internalize unconsciously, which is therefore difficult to articulate and codify it in a tangible form. Explicit knowledge, the opposite of tacit knowledge, is knowledge that can be readily verbalized and formalized.[2] Tacit knowledge is largely acquired through implicit learning, the process by which information is learned independently of the subjects' awareness. For example, native speakers tacitly acquire their language in early childhood without consciously studying specific grammar rules (explicit knowledge), but with extensive exposure to day-to-day communication.[5] Besides, people can only limitedly transfer their tacit knowledge through close interactions (sharing experiences with one another or observing others' behaviors). A certain level of trust needs to be established between individuals to capture tacit knowledge.[6]

Tacit knowledge comprises a range of conceptual and sensory information that is featured with strong personal subjectivity. It is implicitly reflected in human actions; as argued by Polanyi, "tacit knowledge dwells in our awareness".[2] People's skills, experiences, insight, creativity and judgement all fall into this dimension.[7] Tacit knowledge can also be described as know-how, distinguishing from know-that or facts.[6] Before Polanyi, Gilbert Ryle published a paper in 1945 drawing the distinction between knowing-that (knowledge of proposition) and knowing-how. According to Ryle, this know-how knowledge is the instinctive and intrinsic knowledge ingrained in the individual's human capability.[8]

Since tacit knowledge cannot be stated in propositional or formal form, Polanyi concludes such inability in articulation in the slogan ‘We can know more than we can tell’.[2] Daily activities based on tacit knowledge include recognizing a face, driving a car, riding a bike, writing a persuasive paragraph, developing a hypothesis to explain a poorly understood phenomenon.[7] Take facial recognition as an illustration: we can recognize our acquaintance's face out of a million others while we are not conscious about the knowledge of his face. It would be difficult for us to describe the precise arrangement of his eyes, nose and mouth, since we memorize the face unconsciously.[4]

As a prelude to The Tacit Dimension, in his book Personal Knowledge (1958), Polanyi claims that all knowing is personal, emphasizing the profound effects of personal feelings and commitments on the practice of science and knowledge. Arguing against the then dominant Empiricists view that minds and experiences are reducible to sense data and collections of rules, he advocates a post-positivist approach that recognizes human knowledge is often beyond their explicit expression. Any attempt to specify tacit knowing only leads to self-evident axioms that cannot tell us why we should accept them.[9]

Implications<br>[edit]

Polanyi's observation has deep implications in the AI field since the paradox he identified that "our tacit knowledge of how the world...