Michael Polanyi’s major work challenges the ideal of detached, purely objective knowledge. Even in the exact sciences, he argues, knowing always involves the personal participation of the knower — judgment, skill, and passionate commitment that cannot be stripped out without losing the knowledge itself. He calls this “personal knowledge”: neither fully subjective nor mechanically objective, but a responsible act of a knower staking a claim on what they believe to be true.
The book matters for AI because it questions whether knowledge can be fully externalized into rules, data, or weights at all. If knowing is inseparable from a person’s committed engagement with the world, something in the picture may resist transfer to any system that has no stake in being right.
