Faith in Science: What Can We Learn from Michael Polanyi?

Agnès Festré and Stein Østbye

No 2021-40, GREDEG Working Papers from Groupe de REcherche en Droit, Economie, Gestion (GREDEG CNRS), Université Côte d'Azur, France

Abstract: In this paper we revisit Michael Polanyi's overall contribution to the understanding of tacit knowledge and its implications in philosophy of science with a focus on experimental research in 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 Subsection 2.1, and experiments on the epistemological implications of tacit knowledge, discussed in Subsection 2.2 Secondly, we discuss tacit knowledge as a confounding factor and limitation to replicability in social science experiments (Subsection 3.1) and tacit knowledge as a phenomenon to be elicitated through controlled variation in experimental design (Subsection 3.2). In the concluding section, we call for rejuvenation of the study of social epistemology and the social construction of science, suggested to start with Polanyi and his generation, where attention now should be directed to social science rather than hard science.

Keywords: philosophy of science; tacit knowledge; methodology; experiments; replication (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: B25 B31 B41 B5 C9 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 34 pages
Date: 2021-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp, nep-his, nep-hme, nep-hpe and nep-pke
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Working Paper: Faith in science: What can we learn from Michael Polanyi? (2022)
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