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Michael Polanyi

A black-and-white portrait of Michael Polanyi, wearing glasses and a suit jacket over a collared shirt, set against a dark background.

Hungarian-British physical chemist turned philosopher of science, whose 1958 book Personal Knowledge and 1966 essay The Tacit Dimension argued that all knowing rests on a substrate of unspoken bodily skill. His phrase 'we can know more than we can tell' became the foundational claim of an entire tradition in the philosophy of mind, and is routinely invoked when discussing crafts like chicken sexing, glass-blowing, or surgery.

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