Tacit Knowledge: Polanyi and the Unspoken Foundations of Polarization

In 1951, a Hungarian chemist-turned-philosopher stood before his Manchester colleagues with an unsettling claim. Michael Polanyi, who had fled both Communism in Hungary and Nazism in Germany, had already earned fame for his work in crystallography. Yet what he now wanted to discuss was not chemistry but knowledge itself. The reigning philosophical orthodoxy, he argued, had misconstrued science by reducing it to explicit propositions, formulas, and protocols — precisely the part that could be written, tested, and transmitted. But any scientist who had worked at a bench knew otherwise. Laboratory life depended less on formal reports than on skills, judgments, and intuitions that could not be codified. As he wrote in Personal Knowledge, “the aim of a skillful performance is achieved by the observance of a set of rules which are not known as such to the person following them” (1958, p.49). His thesis was encapsulated by the maxim, “We can know more than we can tell” in The Tacit Dimension (1966).

Polanyi’s examples were ordinary but disarming. You can recognize a friend’s face in a crowd, but cannot specify how. A driver weaves through traffic not by consulting Newton’s laws, but through embodied judgment. A physician’s diagnostic “feel” is not reducible to an algorithm. Rules exist, but they are not consciously articulated. They live in practice, as part of the tacit background that sustains all explicit knowledge.

Rules exist, but they are not consciously articulated. They live in practice, as part of the tacit background that sustains all explicit knowledge.

This is why Polanyi warned that “an art which cannot be specified in detail cannot be transmitted by prescription… an art which has fallen into disuse for the period of a generation is altogether lost” (Personal Knowledge, p.53). The vitality of a tradition, and of civic virtues, depends not only on what it writes but on what it apprentices.

At almost the same moment, another Central European exile was offering his own philosophy of science. Karl Popper, who had fled Austria for New Zealand and later Britain, proposed that science advances not by verification but by falsification. Bold conjectures are made, tested, and discarded when found false. For Popper, the safeguard of science was its explicit critical method, its openness to refutation.

Polanyi disagreed. He believed that even falsification rested on a tacit substrate: the scientist’s intuition of plausibility, the laboratory’s unspoken skills, the community’s inherited trust. Where Popper sought to protect science by stripping it of the personal, Polanyi sought to protect it by vindicating the personal.

Yet the two men were not enemies. They converged on a political warning. Both had seen how totalitarian regimes corrupted science — Stalin’s commissars enforcing “Lysenkoism,” Hitler’s racial pseudo-science. Popper feared the arrogance of absolute knowledge: historicism that claimed to foresee history’s end. Polanyi feared the reduction of knowledge to procedure: technocratic systems that denied the tacit. Together they remind us that freedom in science, and in society, requires both: critical openness and tacit trust, the courage to refute and the humility to apprentice ourselves to what we cannot fully articulate.

Together they remind us that freedom in science, and in society, requires both: critical openness and tacit trust, the courage to refute and the humility to apprentice ourselves to what we cannot fully articulate.

For today’s political polarization, the contrast is instructive. Popper explains why conspiratorial ideologies become closed systems, insulated from refutation. Polanyi explains why facts fail to persuade across partisan lines: without shared tacit backgrounds, even evidence cannot translate. One diagnoses the logic of dogmatism, the other the psychology of belonging.

Polanyi explains why facts fail to persuade across partisan lines: without shared tacit backgrounds, even evidence cannot translate.

How, then, is tacit knowledge transmitted? Through apprenticeship, Polanyi suggested. The apprentice “unconsciously picks up the rules of the art” by imitating gestures the master himself cannot explain (Personal Knowledge, p.53). Politics, too, is learned less by reading platforms than by inhabiting communities — the tone of family arguments, the memes of online networks, the rituals of rallies.

QAnon is a chilling example. Adherents did not begin with a coherent doctrine. They apprenticed themselves into an interpretive practice: how to “decode drops,” how to treat coincidence as revelation, how to use jargon as a password. The same holds in other activist movements too sustained not just by graphs but by rituals. Occupy Wall Street, likewise, was less about a detailed economic program than about the tacit practices of encampment — the “people’s mic,” the shared kitchens, the improvised assemblies — through which participants apprenticed themselves into a community of protest that felt like an alternative polity. In each case, identity is absorbed tacitly. Persuasion by argument fails because persuasion targets the explicit, while identity rests on the unspoken.

Persuasion by argument fails because persuasion targets the explicit, while identity rests on the unspoken.

Centuries earlier, Thomas Aquinas gave a theological account of what Polanyi described in secular terms. For Aquinas, beyond rational demonstration lay cognitio per connaturalitatem — knowledge through connaturality. Virtuous persons judge rightly not through abstract reasoning, but because they love rightly. “Rectitude of judgment,” he wrote, “arises from connaturality with the object” (ST, II-II, q.45, a.2). Love itself becomes a mode of knowledge: amor ipse est quo cognoscitur. Here Aquinas completes Polanyi. Political tribes are not only “communities of practice,” but “communities of connaturality” — bound by shared loves and aversions. A partisan’s certainty is not just a deduction; it is an affection. Polarization thus runs deeper than arguments. It is a clash of loves.

Here Aquinas completes Polanyi. Political tribes are not only “communities of practice,” but “communities of connaturality” — bound by shared loves and aversions. A partisan’s certainty is not just a deduction; it is an affection.

Polanyi’s picture of apprenticeship highlights the depth of tacit formation: skills, judgments, even whole ways of perceiving are absorbed without conscious articulation. The apprentice learns not by questioning but by surrendering, by imitating patterns that even the master cannot fully explain. This is precisely why tacit knowledge is so powerful — it forms us at a level beneath explicit reasoning. But this insight also unsettles.

If so much of what we know and who we become is acquired beneath the surface of reflection, how free are we really? Are our political allegiances matters of deliberate choice, or the almost automatic outcome of the communities that shape us? Here lies the tension: Polanyi himself conceded that the apprentice “surrenders himself uncritically” to the master, for only in this way can the hidden rules of a practice be absorbed (Personal Knowledge, p.53). The image of uncritical surrender, when applied to politics, raises an unnerving question: are we agents choosing our tribes, or captives of our tacit training?

If so much of what we know and who we become is acquired beneath the surface of reflection, how free are we really?

Yet to stop at Polanyi’s account of tacit submission would be to miss the further dimension Aquinas opens. For Aquinas, habits and loves shape judgment, but they are not fixed. Loves can be cultivated, redirected, even purified. The drunkard apprentices himself to one desire, the saint to another. Education, liturgy, and moral formation are precisely the arts of re-shaping affection. Thus, while tacit worlds pre-structure our judgments, they do not imprison them.

Freedom, on this view, is not the fantasy of standing outside every tacit frame — no human being can escape embodiment, tradition, or community — but the capacity to recognize that we dwell within such frames and to take responsibility for them. True liberty lies in testing the apprenticeships we have received and choosing anew which practices, which communities, which loves of the good we will bind ourselves to. Politically, this means freedom is not the absence of tacit loyalties but the power to re-order them: to ask whether our partisan loves are worthy of allegiance, and to apprentice ourselves, again and again, to communities that enlarge rather than diminish human flourishing.

In politics, this means freedom is not the absence of tacit loyalties but the ability to re-order them: to ask whether one’s partisan loves are worthy, and to apprentice oneself, again and again, to communities that enlarge rather than diminish human flourishing.

Political science makes the contours of division stark. Ideological sorting has drained the parties of their internal diversity, leaving them ideologically uniform and far apart. Affective polarization has turned political disagreement into animosity, so that opponents are seen not just as wrong but as enemies. Modern media ecosystems intensify this divide, continually rehearsing tribal narratives of heroes and villains, victories and persecutions. Even language itself becomes a password: to say “MAGA” or “equity” is less to advance an argument than to signal one’s tribe.

It is here that Popper and Polanyi converge. Popper shows why such closed systems become impervious to refutation: they construct explanatory frameworks that absorb every objection. Polanyi shows why the rival camps cannot even hear each other: each operates from within tacit worlds of trust and intuition that make the other’s language unintelligible. Together they reveal the condition of our present moment — a society in which incomprehension hardens into suspicion, and suspicion metastasizes into moral hatred.

If the problem lies in the tacit, the remedy must also. Fact-checks and debates operate only at the explicit level; reconciliation requires the slow work of shared practice. Tocqueville observed that Americans learned democracy not from treatises but in juries, town meetings, and voluntary associations — schools of freedom. In our own day, the same formation can emerge through common endeavors: neighbors repairing a storm-damaged block, parents coaching Little League, citizens collaborating to preserve a local landmark or sustain a parish food pantry. These ordinary, cooperative tasks generate what political scientists call “bridging social capital”: unspoken habits of trust that remind us we are also neighbors and fellow citizens.

Aquinas would call this the pursuit of the bonum commune: not the sum of private interests, but the shared life of virtue. Without some vision of a common good, tacit apprenticeships inevitably diverge into irreconcilable tribes. Rebuilding common ground means cultivating not only shared arguments but shared loves — affections that bind us to one another in practice before we ever speak in theory.

Rebuilding common ground means cultivating not only shared arguments but shared loves — affections that bind us to one another in practice before we ever speak in theory.

Our politics is thunderous, yet its deepest realities are silent. Beneath the shouted arguments lies the tacit: the apprenticeships and affections that give facts meaning. Polanyi, from his laboratory, reminded us that knowledge cannot be reduced to propositions. Popper, from his study, reminded us that no theory is beyond refutation. Aquinas, from his Dominican cell, reminded us that love itself is a way of knowing.

Together, they teach that democracy will not be sustained by louder arguments but by deeper apprenticeships in common life. A republic does not collapse when citizens disagree. It collapses when they can no longer understand what their neighbors mean. To endure, we must apprentice ourselves again in the unspoken arts of citizenship, recovering a tacit knowledge of each other rooted not only in arguments, but in practices, traditions, and loves we can share. ◳

A republic does not collapse when citizens disagree. It collapses when they can no longer understand what their neighbors mean. To endure, we must apprentice ourselves again in the unspoken arts of citizenship, recovering a tacit knowledge of each other rooted not only in arguments, but in practices, traditions, and loves we can share.