Polanyi Society scholars reviewing Dreyfus and Taylor's 2015 Retrieving Realism find Polanyi's influence nearly absent, complicating any claim of a durable career-long Polanyi debt

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Retrieving Realism (Harvard University Press, 2015), Hubert Dreyfus's late-career book co-authored with Charles Taylor on the case for direct perceptual contact with reality, covers ground extremely close to Michael Polanyi's own tacit-knowledge epistemology. A 2017 symposium on the book in Tradition & Discovery, the Polanyi Society's own peer-reviewed journal, found Polanyi essentially uncredited in it. John V. Apczynski writes that Dreyfus and Taylor "acknowledge several twentieth century philosophers who attempted to express some variations of this insight, including Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Wittgenstein, but tellingly omit Polanyi." David W. Rutledge, in the same issue, calls Polanyi "a ghost in the room, ignored by almost everyone" in modern realism debates generally, Dreyfus and Taylor included. Apczynski documents the omission concretely: the book cites Polanyi's Personal Knowledge exactly once, illustratively, and even that reference was mis-indexed by the Harvard University Press editor as the work of Polanyi's brother Karl (the economic historian) rather than Michael — which Apczynski reads as evidence of "how peripheral the reference is to their epistemological argument." Apczynski separately notes that "at least in the case of Taylor, he refers to the influence and importance of Polanyi in several of his previous writings," suggesting that if either author has a real, acknowledged Polanyi debt, it is more clearly Taylor's than Dreyfus's.

A third contributor to the same symposium, Esther L. Meek, documents the identical footnote independently — "Polanyi garners only a solitary footnote, an aside to the Polanyian scientist being like the ordinary football player… The footnote was evidently added as an afterthought; the succeeding 'ibid' was never corrected (RR, 76)" — so the omission is attested by two of the issue's contributors working from the book separately, not by one reviewer's count.

This does not contradict claim-dreyfus-1972-wccd-names-quotes-polanyi-as-embodied-skill-source — the 1972 citations are directly verified in Dreyfus's own text — but it means a claim of a settled, lasting influence-relationship overstates what the record shows forty years later, in Dreyfus's closest thematic return to the same ground. The finding is notable in part because it comes from the community with the strongest incentive to find and credit a Polanyi connection, not from a critic.