Tradition and Discovery: The Polanyi Society Periodical

Scholars in the field of social studies of science marked the year 2012 as the 50th anniversary of the publication of Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn’s book is routinely cited as the beginning of a new intellectual movement that jettisoned logical and empiricist accounts of scientific progress in favor of sociological and psychological explanations of scientific practice. In contrast, this essay argues that the roots of the social construction of science lie earlier, in the 1930s, in the political milieu, scientific careers, and intellectual debates of a generation in which Michael Polanyi was a central figure. Crucial elements in the development of Polanyi’s philosophy of science are examined, with comparisons to J. D Bernal, Karl Mannheim and others of their generation, as well as to the younger Thomas Kuhn and to Karl Popper.

A central aim of Michael Polanyi’s philosophy is to demonstrate the many ways in which human existence is meaningful to counter the nihilistic and positivistic accounts that contributed to the world wars and totalitarian governments in the twentieth century. Yet Polanyi’s references to various sorts of meaning is suggestive rather than systematic and coherent. The objective of this essay is to show the relationship between the different aspects of meaning by viewing their emergence in cosmological perspective beginning with simple forms of life and culminating in the ways signals, perception, and language support human experiences of significance. Emergence, embodiment, and “from-via-to” interpretation are key ingredients in this Polanyian version of biosemiotics.

The following three related contributions jointly serve to lift up elements of the thought of the anthropolo­gist Gregory Bateson that can be fruitfully compared with elements of Michael Polanyi’s thought. In a brief introduction, William Stillwell reviews Bateson’s life and developing interests. Stillwell also provides, in a creative dialog form akin to Bateson’s own dialogs, a short review article on Noel Charlton’s Understanding Gregory Bateson: Mind, Beauty and the Sacred Earth. The third piece is Jere Moorman’s short 1991 essay (now out of print) discussing Polanyi’s ideas about tacit knowing and their connection with Bateson’s ideas about the double bind.

This is an overview of the publications of Jerry Gill, sketching his background, common themes in his work, and some strengths and weaknesses in that work. I note the accessibility of his treatments of postmodern philosophy, and the usefulness of these works for undergraduate classrooms. The “search for a post-critical philosophy” of religion, language, epistemology, and education has given direction to Gill’s career.

This article is a review of Deep Postmodernism by Jerry H. Gill. In this book Gill juxtaposes and compares the philosophies of Whitehead, Wittgenstein, Merleau-Ponty, Polanyi, and Austin—philosophies that on the surface are very different but, examined closely, are remarkably complementary and convergent in respect of their challenging and revising key assumptions of modern thought relating to topics of reality, linguistic meaning, embodiment, and knowing. Their critiques resonate with several of the critiques of well-known postmodern thinkers but go deeper by reconstructing the key assumptions in question. I compare Gill’s conception of deep postmodern philosophy with Polanyi’s conception of post-critical philosophy. Gill’s book is significant in setting out in one place the beachhead that these five thinkers (and others akin to them) have established in overcoming the philosophically sterile dead-ends that modernist and postmodernist thought have bequeathed us.

This response to review essays (covering all of my major scholarly writing) by David Rutledge and Dale Cannon appreciatively affirms most points emphasized in their respective analyses. I acknowledge that my scholarship has served my teaching, as Rutledge notes; I frequently use diagrams because I believe they usually are pedagogically very effective. My writing has strong interdisciplinary overtones and I have special interest in religion, art and education. Slowly, I have worked to integrate the ideas of Polanyi and other important thinkers emphasized by my teacher William Poteat, and, as Cannon recognizes, this is not an easy task. I frequently use the term “postmodern” rather than Polanyi’s “post-critical” because the term engages the current philosophical dialogue outside of Polanyi circles. I believe that metaphorical thinking and speaking is the heart of our embodied, everyday discourse and it liberates our language and thought from the restrictions imposed by the “pseudo-objectivism” of the standard way of carrying on philosophical endeavor. I have focused on the epistemological rather than the existential aspects of Polanyi’s thought.