Moving beyond fact-checking to a deeper calibration
Apr 06, 2025
Lately, I’ve been thinking about how to trust the things I write.
In a recent post (A Few Words About Method) I leaned on Daniel Dennett’s reminder that science isn’t about revering the words of great thinkers, but about testing ideas through a tradition of criticism. Writing, too, ought to live in that space, as a kind of carefully calibrated guesswork.
Still, there’s a moment that happens (maybe you know it) when you finish a paragraph, sit back, and wonder: Is this real? Not “true,” exactly, not “correct.” Just, real. As in: Does this speak to something that exists beyond my keyboard?
That’s where I find Michael Polanyi’s work a useful addition to the conversation.
"We meet here with a new definition of reality. Real is that which is expected to reveal itself indeterminately in the future. Hence an explicit statement can bear on reality only by virtue of the tacit coefficient associated with it. This conception of reality and of the tacit knowing of reality underlies all my writings."
Let’s take his idea from the top:
“Real is that which is expected to reveal itself indeterminately in the future.”
Now, if that sounds like the philosophical equivalent of watching a buffering video on dial-up, you're not far off. Polanyi challenges the usual assumptions that reality is what’s measurable, visible, or settled. He proposes something richer: that reality is what draws us forward, what continues to disclose itself in ways we can’t yet predict.
This is an ontological stance, sure, but also a deeply writerly one. Because writing starts with intuition, rather than conclusion, a sense that there’s something out there, under the surface, just beyond reach. The act of writing, then, is an attempt to let it emerge, sentence by sentence.
“An explicit statement can bear on reality only by virtue of the tacit coefficient associated with it.”
In other words, the words themselves aren’t enough.
Imagine I say, “The cat is on the mat.” It’s simple. But unless you already know what a cat is, what a mat is, and how English grammar works; unless you bring all that tacit knowledge to the sentence, it’s just a collection of noises. Every statement rests on a foundation of things unspoken and often unspeakable. The map is not the territory, but even the map needs a shared understanding of what “north” means.
Polanyi’s “tacit coefficient” is the web of intuitions, context, experience, and sense-making that makes a sentence more than just ink on paper or pixels on a screen. In writing, this is everything. The shape of a joke, the tension of a metaphor, the way a parenthesis can smuggle in a truth more honestly than a declaration. None of this is strictly reducible to rules. It’s felt, rather than formulated.
Writing, Knowing, and Not-Knowing
If my earlier post was about rejecting the idea that knowledge comes from authority, this one is about trusting knowledge that doesn’t come from anywhere obvious at all. The kind you feel forming before you have a reason for it. The sense that a paragraph is wrong, even when it’s factually correct. The half-formed instinct that something is missing, not necessarily because you can name it, but because the shape of the thing feels incomplete.
Polanyi gives us permission to trust that feeling, not because such feelings are infallible, but because having them is how we know anything at all. Even science, he argues, rests on the feeling. Not just method, but faith in method, and not just reason, but trust in what reason will one day reveal if we’re patient and honest enough to keep following its thread.
Science, Faith and Society
If this feels familiar, it might be because we’ve been here before in Science, Faith and Society (the source of the quote above, and one I go back to often), where Polanyi reminds us that science doesn’t work because it’s codified into universal steps, but because scientists, collectively, believe in the process. They pursue truth on the faith that truth is out there, that reality will yield itself over time, even if only in glimmers.
Science, then, isn’t a rule book, but a craft, a culture, a tradition. And writing, in many ways, isn’t so different. We write because we trust there’s something there to discover, because we feel it at the edge of articulation, just beyond the horizon of what we know how to say.
What Is Real?
So when I ask, Is this real?, I’m not checking for factual correctness. I’m checking for resonance, for the sense that what I’ve written is part of something bigger than itself, and that it hints at something not yet known, but recognizably true.
Polanyi might say that reality is always unfinished, always unfolding. And our job, whether as scientists or writers or readers, is not to capture it, but to stay in conversation with it.
So here’s to writing that listens, to sentences that lean forward, and to the kinds of truths that don’t arrive fully formed but that, with luck and a little patience, might just reveal themselves in time.
