The Concept of Revolution in the Sciences: Michael Polanyi's Differences with Thomas Kuhn on Scientific Revolutions

Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) was a blockbuster publication that problematized notions about the origins and nature of scientific revolutions. What became Kuhn's famous rubrics of "normal science" and "paradigms" were similar to concepts of "tacit knowledge" and scientific "frameworks" or "dogmas" in Michael Polanyi's 1958 book Personal Knowledge. What is most significant are not similarities, but the very different commitments to the notion of scientific "Truth." Unlike Kuhn, Polanyi argued that abandonment of Truth-seeking has dire political, as well as scientific, implications if revolutions are decisive ruptures with past knowledge and values.