CONCEPT
Commitment (Polanyi)
The personal act by which a knower stakes herself on a claim—accepting responsibility, risking error, exercising judgment that transforms information into knowledge.
Commitment, in Polanyi's epistemology, is not mere belief or psychological conviction but the structural act that converts information into knowledge. When a scientist publishes a finding, she commits herself to its truth—staking her professional reputation, accepting responsibility for having evaluated the evidence with due care, asserting that the claim deserves the community's trust. This commitment is what gives the finding its epistemic weight. A claim that no one commits to, that arrives without a personal knower standing behind it, lacks authority regardless of its surface quality. Commitment is risky—it involves the possibility of error, the acceptance of responsibility for being wrong. But the risk is constitutive of knowledge: only someone who can be wrong can know that she is right. AI outputs are produced without commitment. The machine has no stake in their truth, no reputation to risk, no responsibility to bear. This absence is not a contingent limitation but a structural feature of systems that process information without possessing the personal dimension that makes information meaningful.
