EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

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

Agnès Festré and Stein Østbye ()
Additional contact information
Stein Østbye: UiT - The Arctic University of Norway [Tromsø, Norway]

Post-Print from HAL

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 as in the past.

Keywords: Michael Polanyi; tacit knowledge; experiments (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published in Springer. Science, Faith, Society: new essays on the philosophy of Michael Polanyi (Peter Hartl and Gabor Biro, eds.), inPress, Historical-Analytical Studies on Nature, Mind and Action

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
Working Paper: Faith in Science: What Can We Learn from Michael Polanyi? (2021) Downloads
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:halshs-03909394

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:hal:journl:halshs-03909394