Tradition and Discovery: The Polanyi Society Periodical

This text is the seventh of an eight-lecture series given by Michael Polanyi at the University of Chicago in the spring of 1954. The lecture focuses on the nature of human knowledge of other living beings.

This book discussion focuses on Theodore L. Brown’s Imperfect Oracle. Richard Moodey, a sociologist, and Jay Labinger, a scientist, raise questions about some of Brown’s views on the epistemic and moral authority of science and Brown responds.

This article is a discussion of Philip A. Rolnick’s Person, Grace, and God with comments by Andrew Grosso, Paul Lewis and Paul Gavrilyuk and a response by Philip Rolnick.

New moral ways of being are answers to fundamental problems in the human condition regarding the best way to be and the best way to be with each other. Entering a new way of being entails crossing a logical gap into a new interpretive framework. Michael Polanyi’s from-to structure of knowing and discovery is used to show both how we can acquire the state of the good person through an imitation of their behaviors and why those behaviors must be practiced for themselves. The good person experiences a happiness that the person pursuing happiness as a goal cannot fully understand. One thus practices virtues, and heeds their codification into law, not for the sake of one’s own happiness, but for the sake of the happiness of the person one will become.

Michael Polanyi and Karl Popper offer contrasting accounts of social tradition. Popper is steeped in the heritage of the Enlightenment, while Polanyi interweaves religious and diverse secular strands of thought. Explaining the liberal tradition, Polanyi features tacit knowledge of rules, standards, applications and interpretations being transmitted by “craftsmen” to “apprentices.” Each generation adopts the liberal tradition on “faith,” commits to creatively developing its art of knowledge-in-practice, and is drawn to the spiritual reality of ideal ends. Of particular interest to Popper is the rationality of social traditions. Likened by him to scientific theories, Popper’s traditions are criticizable and improvable, assisting agents to understand, and act in, the world as stable and predictable. Polanyi’s is the more informative rendering of tradition. Polanyi delves deeply into important areas where Popper only scratches their surface: the tacit dimension, transmission by way of apprenticeship, the meaning of tradition for those who participate in it, and the extent of its authority over them.