Tradition and Discovery: The Polanyi Society Periodical

According to Richard Gelwick, one of the fundamental implications of Polanyi’s epistemology is that all intellectual disciplines are inherently heuristic. This article draws out the implications of a heuristic vision of theology latent in Polanyi’s thought by placing contemporary theologian David Brown’s dynamic understanding of tradition, imagination, and revelation in the context of a Polanyian-inspired vision of reality. Consequently, such a theology will follow the example of science, reimagining its task as one of discovery rather than mere reflection on a timeless body of divine revelation. The ongoing development of a theological tradition thus involves the attempt to bring one’s understanding of the question of God to bear on the whole of the human experience. The pursuit of theology as a heuristic endeavor is a bold attempt to construct an integrated vision of nothing less than the entirety of all that is, without absolutizing one’s vision, and without giving up on the question of truth.

At the end of Personal Knowledge, Polanyi discusses human development, arguing for a view of the human person as emerging out of but not constituted by its material substrate. As part of this view, he argues that the human person can never be likened to a computer, an inference machine, or a neural model because all are based in formalized processes of automation, processes that cannot account for the contribution of unformalizable, tacit knowing. This paper revisits Polanyi’s discussion of the emergence of consciousness and his rejection of neural models in light of recent developments in connectionism. Connectionist neural modeling proposes an emergentist account of brain structure and, in many ways, is compatible with Polanyi’s philosophy, even if it ultimately neglects questions of meaning.

In Understanding the Tacit, Stephen Turner contends that 1) neo-Kantian frameworks, understood as identical (tacit) possessions collectively shared, do not exist and 2) in communicating with a person from another perspective, a speaker is not making explicit one’s tacit knowledge, but rather improvising an articulation relative to a given context. Turner establishes the first point in convincing fashion. However, he does not allow for the possibility of similar tacit knowledge that is in some sense “shared.” While Turner has positive things to say about the embodied nature of tacit knowledge, other contentions seem to undermine the crucial nature of embodiment. Turner is also correct on his second point, though he could have strengthened his argument by recognizing Polanyian implications and insights on the difficulty or impossibility of making the tacit explicit.

In this response to David Nikkel’s review essay on Understanding the Tacit, his suggestion that the book fails to incorporate insights from embodiment theorists is addressed. It is noted, against his appeal to the example of Lakoff’s and Johnson’s discussion of the bodily origins of metaphors used in reasoning, that there are problems with treating particular embodied elements as ineliminable. Also noted is the evidence of Luria’s studies of reasoning among the unschooled, which suggest that syllogistic inference is learned, which raises questions about the relation of embodied knowing and these kinds of inferences. It is suggested that another kind of embodiment thinking, involving emulation, is a better way to approach higher reasoning, and by extension also the kind of specialized knowledge usually discussed as tacit knowledge by Polanyi.

This brief essay summarizes Nicholas Wapshott’s Keynes Hayek: The Clash that Defined Modern Economics and relates the early economic thought of Michael Polanyi to the dispute by raising questions for further reflection: Should we classify Polanyian economic thought as Hayekian or Keynesian, or is it something in between? How can it help us better understand the debate between these two? How is the agenda of the economist and social theorist Polanyi revealed through its connection to one of the most important episodes of the history of economic thought in the twentieth century?