Michael polanyi biography

Hungarian-British polymath (–)

The native shape of this personal name is Polányi Mihály. This article uses Western name order when mentioning individuals.

Michael Polanyi FRS
Polanyi in England,
Born	Pollacsek Mihály ()11 March Budapest, Austria-Hungary
Died	22 February () (aged&#;84) Northampton, England
Education	Graduated in medicine, ; PhD in physical chemistry,
Alma&#;mater	Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest Technische Hochschule, Karlsruhe University of Budapest
Occupation(s)	Professor of physical chemistry, professor of social studies
Employer(s)	Kaiser Wilhelm Institute University of Manchester Merton College, Oxford
Known&#;for	Polanyi's paradox Polanyi's sphere Potential theory of Polanyi Bell–Evans–Polanyi principle Eyring–Polanyi equation Flow plasticity theory Transition state theory Harpoon reaction Tacit knowledge Post-critical
Spouse	Magda Kemeny
Children	2, including John
Relatives
Awards	Gifford Lectures(–) Fellow of the Royal Society()

Michael PolanyiFRS^[1] (poh-LAN-yee; Hungarian: Polányi Mihály; 11 Parade – 22 February ) was a Hungarian-British^[2]polymath, who made vital theoretical contributions to physical attraction, economics, and philosophy.

He argued that positivism is a deceptive account of knowing.

His wide-ranging research in physical science included chemical kinetics, x-ray diffraction, and adsorption of gases. He pioneered the theory of fibre diffraction analysis in , and the dislocation theory of plastic deformation of ductile metals and other materials in He emigrated to Germany, in becoming a rapport professor at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, and then in to England, becoming first a chemistry professor, and then a social sciences professor at the University of Manchester.

Two of his pupils won the Nobel Prize, as well as one of his children. In Polanyi was elected to the Royal Society.

The contributions which Polanyi made to the social sciences include the concept of a polycentric spontaneous order and his rejection of a value neutral conception of liberty.

They were developed in the context of his opposition to primary planning.^[3]

Life

Early life

Polanyi, born Mihály Pollacsek in Budapest, was the fifth child of Mihály and Cecília Pollacsek (born as Cecília Wohl), secular Jews from Ungvár (then in Hungary but now in Ukraine) and Wilno, then Russian Empire, respectively.

His father's family were entrepreneurs, while his mother's father, Osher Leyzerovich Vol, was the senior teacher of Jewish history at the Vilna rabbinic seminary.^{[citation needed]} The family moved to Budapest and Magyarized their surname to Polányi.

His father built much of the Hungarian railway system, but lost most of his fortune in when bad weather caused a railway building project to go over budget. He died in Cecília Polányi established a salon that was well known among Budapest's intellectuals, and which continued until her death in His older brother was Karl Polanyi, the political economist and anthropologist, and his niece was Eva Zeisel, a world-renowned ceramist.^[4]

Education

In Polanyi graduated the teacher-training secondary school, the Minta Gymnasium.

He then studied medicine at the University of Budapest, obtaining his medical diploma in ^[5] He was an active member of the Galileo Circle. With the support of Ignác Pfeifer&#;[de; hu], professor of chemistry at the Royal Joseph University of Budapest, he obtained a scholarship to study bond at the Technische Hochschule in Karlsruhe, Germany.

In the First World War, he served in the Austro-Hungarian army as a medical officer, and was sent to the Serbian front. While on sick-leave in , he wrote a PhD thesis on adsorption. His research, which was encouraged by Albert Einstein, and supervised by Gusztáv Buchböck&#;[de], and in the Royal University of Pest awarded him a doctorate.

Career

In October , Mihály Károlyi established the Hungarian Democratic Republic, and Polanyi became Secretary to the Minister of Health. When the Communists seized power in March , he returned to medicine.

When the Hungarian Soviet Republic was overthrown, Polanyi emigrated to Karlsruhe in Germany, and was invited by Fritz Haber to join the Kaiser Wilhelm Institut für Faserstoffchemie (fiber chemistry) in Berlin. A Christian since , in a Roman Catholic ceremony he married Magda Elizabeth Kemeny.^[6] In he became the professorial head of department of the Institut für Physikalische Chemie und Elektrochemie (now the Fritz Haber Institute).

In , Magda gave birth to their son John, who was awarded a Nobel Prize in chemistry in Their other son, George Polanyi, who predeceased him, became a well-known economist.

His experience of runaway inflation and high unemployment in Weimar Germany led Polanyi to become interested in economics.

With the coming to influence in of the Nazi party, he accepted a chair in physical chemistry at the University of Manchester. Two of his pupils, Eugene Wigner and Melvin Calvin, went on to defeat the Nobel Prize. Because of his increasing interest in the social sciences, Manchester University created a new chair in Social Science (–58) for him.

Polanyi was among the 2, names of prominent persons listed on the Nazis' Special Search List, of those who were to be arrested on the invasion of Great Britain and turned over to the Gestapo.

From June to , Polanyi participated in the activities of The Moot, a Christian discussion circle concerned with shaping the post-war society, at the invitation of Karl Mannheim and J.

H. Oldham.

In Polanyi was elected a member of the Royal Society,^[1] and on his retirement from the University of Manchester in he was elected a senior research fellow at Merton College, Oxford.^[8] In he was elected a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.^[9]

Work

Physical chemistry

Polanyi's scientific interests were extremely diverse, including perform in chemical kinetics, x-ray diffraction, and the adsorption of gases at solid surfaces.

He is also well known for his potential adsorption theory, which was disputed for quite some moment.

Polanyi's work as a scientist made significant contributions in the area of physical chemistry. Based on his experiences as a natural scientist, Polanyi turned his attention to the philosophy of science. He argued against dominant theories of positivism and explicated the importance of understanding "tacit knowledge," unspoken knowledge that underlies scientific theories. While the dominant philosophers of science focused on logic and linguistic analyses of scientific theories, Polanyi highlighted the role of pre-linguistic, implicit knowledge "tacit knowledge" in developing scientific theories.

In , he laid the mathematical foundation of fibre diffraction analysis. In , Polanyi, at about the same day as G. I. Taylor and Egon Orowan, realised that the plasticdeformation of ductile materials could be explained in terms of the theory of dislocations developed by Vito Volterra in The insight was critical in developing the field of solid mechanics.

Freedom and community

In , as a consequence of an invitation to give lectures for the Ministry of Heavy Industry in the USSR, Polanyi met Bukharin, who told him that in socialist societies all scientific explore is directed to accord with the needs of the latest Five Year Plan.

Polanyi noted what had happened to the study of genetics in the Soviet Union once the doctrines of Trofim Lysenko had gained the backing of the Declare.

Michael Polanyi, 12 March 1891- 22 February 1976 ...: Michael Polanyi FRS [1] (/ p oʊ ˈ l æ n j i / poh-LAN-yee; Hungarian: Polányi Mihály; 11 March – 22 February ) was a Hungarian-British [2] polymath, who made important theoretical contributions to physical chemistry, economics, and philosophy.

Demands in Britain, for example by the Marxist John Desmond Bernal, for centrally planned scientific study led Polanyi to defend the claim that science requires free debate. Together with John Baker, he founded the influential Population for Freedom in Science.

In a series of articles, re-published in The Contempt of Freedom () and The Logic of Liberty (), Polanyi claimed that co-operation amongst scientists is analogous to the way agents co-ordinate themselves within a free market.

Just as consumers in a free market determine the value of products, science is a spontaneous order that arises as a consequence of open debate amongst specialists. Science (contrary to the claims of Bukharin) flourishes when scientists have the liberty to pursue truth as an end in itself:^[10]

[S]cientists, 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.

Such self-co-ordination of independent initiatives leads to a combined result which is unpremeditated by any of those who take it about.

Any attempt to arrange the group under a solo authority would eliminate their independent initiatives, and thus reduce their joint effectiveness to that of the single person directing them from the centre.

It would, in effect, paralyse their co-operation.

He derived the phrase spontaneous order from Gestalt psychology, and it was adopted by the classical liberal economist Friederich Hayek, although the concept can be traced back to at least Adam Smith.

Polanyi unlike Hayek argued that there are higher and lower forms of spontaneous order, and he asserted that defending scientific inquiry on utilitarian or sceptical grounds undermined the practice of science. He extends this into a general claim about free societies.

Polanyi defends a free society not on the negative grounds that we ought to respect "private liberties", but on the positive grounds that "public liberties" facilitate our pursuit of spiritual ends.

According to Polanyi, a free community that strives to be value-neutral undermines its own justification.

But it is not enough for the members of a free society to believe that ideals such as truth, justice, and beauty, are not simply subjective, they also have to acknowledge that they transcend our ability to wholly capture them.

Michael Polanyi (), was born and raised in Budapest; he trained and served as a physician during World War I. But Polanyi fled from Hungary in the turmoil just after the war and soon became an internationally recognized chemistry researcher at Germany’s famous Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes.

The non-subjectivity of values must be combined with acceptance that all knowing is fallible.

In Full Employment and Free Trade () Polanyi analyses the way money circulates around an economy, and in a monetarist examination that, according to Paul Craig Roberts, was thirty years ahead of its time, he argues that a free market economy should not be left to be wholly self-adjusting.

A main bank should attempt to moderate economic booms/busts via a strict/loose monetary policy.

In , he produced a film, "Unemployment and money. The principles involved", perhaps the first film about economics.^[11] The film defended a version of Keynesianism, neutral Keynesianism, that advised the State to utilize budget deficit and tax reductions to increase the amount of money in the circulation in times of economic hardship but did not seek direct investment or engage in public works.^[12]

All knowing is personal

Main article: Post-critical

In his book Science, Faith and Society (), Polanyi set out his opposition to a positivist account of science, noting that among other things it ignores the role personal commitments perform in the practice of science.

Polanyi gave the Gifford Lectures in –52 at Aberdeen, and a revised version of his lectures were later published as Personal Knowledge (). In this book Polanyi claims that all knowledge claims (including those that derive from rules) rely on personal judgments.^[13] He denies that a scientific method can yield truth mechanically.

All knowing, no matter how formalised, relies upon commitments. Polanyi argued that the assumptions that underlie critical philosophy are not only false, they undermine the commitments that motivate our highest achievements.

He advocates a fiduciarypost-critical approach, in which we recognise that we think more than we can perceive, and know more than we can say.

A knower does not stand apart from the universe, but participates personally within it.

Our intellectual skills are driven by passionate commitments that motivate discovery and validation. According to Polanyi, a great scientist not only identifies patterns, but also significant questions likely to lead to a successful resolution.

Innovators risk their reputation by committing to a hypothesis. Polanyi cites the example of Copernicus, who declared that the Ground revolves around the Sun. He claims that Copernicus arrived at the Earth's true relation to the Sun not as a consequence of following a technique, but via "the greater intellectual satisfaction he derived from the celestial panorama as seen from the Sun instead of the Earth."^[14] His writings on the practice of science influenced Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend.

Polanyi rejected the claim by British Empiricists that experience can be reduced into sense data, but he also rejects the notion that "indwelling" within (sometimes incompatible) interpretative frameworks traps us within them.

Our tacit awareness connects us, albeit fallibly, with existence. It supplies us with the context within which our articulations have meaning. Contrary to the views of his colleague and friend Alan Turing, whose labor at the Victoria University of Manchester prepared the way for the first modern computer, he denied that minds are reducible to collections of rules.

His work influenced the critique by Hubert Dreyfus of "First Generation" artificial intelligence.

It was while writing Personal Knowledge that he identified the "structure of tacit knowing". He viewed it as his most important discovery.

He claimed that we experience the world by integrating our subsidiary awareness into a focal education. In his later work, for example his Terry Lectures, later published as The Tacit Dimension (), he distinguishes between the phenomenological, instrumental, semantic, and ontological aspects of tacit knowing, as discussed (but not necessarily identified as such) in his previous writing.

Critique of reductionism

In "Life's irreducible structure" (),^[15] Polanyi argues that the information contained in the DNAmolecule is not reducible to the laws of physics and chemistry.

Although a DNA molecule cannot exist without physical properties, these properties are constrained by higher-level ordering principles. In "Transcendence and Self-transcendence" (),^[16] Polanyi criticises the mechanisticworld view that modern science inherited from Galileo.

Polanyi advocates emergence i.e. the claim that there are several levels of reality and of causality. He relies on the assumption that boundary conditions supply degrees of freedom that, instead of being random, are determined by higher-level realities, whose properties are dependent on but clear from the lower level from which they emerge.

An example of a higher-level reality functioning as a downward causal coerce is consciousness – intentionality – generating meanings – intensionality.

Mind is a higher-level expression of the capacity of living organisms for discrimination.

Our pursuit of self-set ideals such as authenticity and justice transform our kind of the world. The reductionistic attempt to reduce higher-level realities into lower-level realities generates what Polanyi calls a moral inversion, in which the higher is rejected with moral passion.

Polanyi identifies it as a pathology of the modern mind and traces its origins to a false conception of knowledge; although it is relatively harmless in the formal sciences, that pathology generates nihilism in the humanities.

Polanyi considered Marxism an example of moral inversion. The Mention, on the grounds of an appeal to the logic of history, uses its coercive powers in ways that disregard any appeals to morality.^[17]

Tacit knowledge

Tacit awareness, as distinct from explicit learning, is an influential term developed by Polanyi in The Tacit Dimension^[18] to describe among other things the ability to undertake something without necessarily being competent to articulate it: for example, being able to ride a bicycle or play a musical instrument without being able to fully explain the details of how it happens.

He claims that not only do practical skills rely upon tacit knowledge, all perception and meaning is rendered possible by agents relying upon their tacit awareness. Every consciousness has a subsidiary and a focal awareness, and this distinction also has an ontological dimension, because a lower and a higher dimension is how emergence takes place.

Bibliography

See also

Notes

Further reading

External links