Peer Review (Polanyi's Account)

Peer review, in Polanyi's account, is not the application of a checklist but the exercise of communal connoisseurship. Reviewers assess whether research is methodologically sound, logically valid, and evidentially supported—these are necessary but not sufficient judgments. The crucial evaluation concerns significance: does this work advance understanding in a way that matters to the field? This judgment is irreducibly tacit. It requires the reviewer's deep immersion in the domain, her sense of what the field knows and what it needs to know, her intuition about which directions are promising and which are exhausted. Two competent reviewers may disagree about significance without either being wrong, because each draws on a tacit ground shaped by different research trajectories. What makes peer review epistemologically reliable is not that it eliminates disagreement but that it ensures evaluation by practitioners who possess the tacit knowledge to recognize genuine advances. AI cannot perform this function—it can check explicit criteria but cannot exercise the connoisseurial judgment that separates significant contributions from competent incremental work.