Objective vs. personal knowledge: the question of knowledge and justification in Mihály Polányi’s philosophy

Abstract

Mihály Polányi critiques theories of knowledge that seek to define and justify knowledge on an objective basis. For him, gaining knowledge and justifying knowledge can only be explained in the personal dimension, as knowledge cannot be thought of without a person who knows. If anyone seeks to address the boundaries of his or her knowledge, s/he will arrive at the act of personal trust. The final possibility of justification is the clause “because I think so.”  Yet Polányi distinguishes the personal dimension from the subjective dimension: while personal knowledge leads towards truth, subjective knowledge leads towards failure. Personal knowledge joins two poles, the internal world of the person and the outer world of reality. This meeting point prevents personal knowledge from becoming subjective.

Knowledge that comes together in this framework is a responsible decision which joins a person’s subjective ideas to reality and transforms it into personal knowledge. The paper examines Polányi’s concept of truth and compares it to other theories of it (correspondence theory, coherence theory, Taski’s semantics theory).