Tradition and Discovery: The Polanyi Society Periodical

This essay celebrates the life and achievements of Richard Gelwick, the man perhaps most responsible for not only recognizing the importance of the thought of Michael Polanyi, but also for communicating its significance and giving it institutional continuity.

Both Polanyi and many of his interpreters saw the implications of tacit knowing for restoring the Augustinian principle that faith precedes understanding. Polanyi’s contribution to the rediscovery of the essential role of faith in the achievement of knowledge has, however, had a limited impact in science, philosophy, and in Christian theology. Polanyi’s epistemological contribution, nevertheless, is much more than a restoration and a reformulation of tradition. Tacit knowing provides a new vehicle for deeper interpersonal understanding.

This essay contends that Polanyi’s groundbreaking effort to formulate a more adequate understanding of scientific knowing by acknowledging its practice of operating on the basis of shared assumptions bears striking parallels to Taylor’s subsequent efforts to disclose the cultural assumptions sustaining our sense of identity. Both projects had to uncover normally ignored cultural values and practices sustaining scientific knowing and our identities as moral beings. Given this connection, students of Polanyi would be well-served to explore Taylor’s works in order to develop further implications of Polanyi’s thought. Given Taylor’s later exploration of belief in a secular era motived by his Catholic faith, he offers additional examples of developing Polanyi’s thinking for students exploring theological questions.

Neil Gascoigne and Tim Thornton’s Tacit Knowledge is an attempt to find a place for tacit knowledge as “knowledge” within the limits of analytic epistemology. They do so by reference to Jason Stanley and Timothy Williamson’s analysis of the term “way” and by the McDowell-like claim that reference to the tacitly rooted “way” of doing something exhausts the knowledge aspect of tacit knowledge, which preserves the notion of tacit knowledge, while excluding most of Michael Polanyi’s examples, and rendering Hubert Dreyfus’s and John Searle’s accounts irrelevant. This is more a redefinition of terms than an account of tacit knowledge.