Tradition and Discovery: The Polanyi Society Periodical

Alicia Juarrero’s insights have much to offer Polanyians, and vice versa. Her works suggest the potential for cross-fertilization between her ideas on dynamical systems and Polanyi’s epistemic approach to ontology. I hope to create a “hybrid space” for future inquiry, based on what I think are Juarrero’s most important ideas for Polanyians interested in ontological hierarchy and complexity.

According to Tihamér Margitay, Michael Polanyi held a strong “correspondence thesis” between the structure of tacit knowing and the structure of ontological emergence. In agreement with Margitay, this article finds a one-to-one correspondence implausible, given our tacit ability to integrate various clues into the apprehension of the same object and given the multiple realization of object types via different components. It is acknowledged, however, that such a correspondence is encouraged by an analytic, scientific approach to understanding objects (as Bedeutungen), when held distinct from linguistic modes of identifying objects (via Sinne). It is then shown how the epistemological and ontological interweave at a deeper level in Polanyi’s participatory or enactive realism. This notion of epistemontology counters a second set of Margitay’s criticisms. It re-affirms a pluralist ontology by demonstrating how machine types, as comprehensive entities, resist a reduction to material parts and lower level physical laws, without violating such laws.

My arguments against Polanyi’s notions of a layered ontology and dual control of entities were introduced in Margitay 2010 and defended against criticism in Margitay 2013. However, it has become clear from Lowney’s and earlier comments that my presentations were not sufficiently clear. So I will explicate some points of my argument against dual control. First, I will contrast the metaphysical thesis of The Causal Closure of the Physical with the semi-empirical thesis I hold, The Completeness of Physical Theories. I have argued that Polanyi’s theory of dual control involving downward determination is inconsistent with standard physics because of the completeness of physical theories. I support this claim by what I term the no difference and the completeness counterarguments. Secondly, I shall show these arguments do not involve or entail any sort of reductionism, and they do not question the ontological autonomy, the reality, and the irreducibility of higher level emergent entities and their properties.

This brief article provides a critical review of several recent interdisciplinary studies of human nature, personhood, and the self (with particular attention given to the work of Christian Smith) and offers some tentative suggestions as to how those interested in the thought of Michael Polanyi might contribute to this area of on-going inquiry and reflection.

Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos, an analytic philosophical excursion into the meaning and implications of the mind-body problem, has striking parallels to Michael Polanyi’s thought, especially as it is captured in Personal Knowledge. Indeed, Nagel’s courageous and honest challenge to the evolutionary naturalistic orthodoxy that is currently ascendant in elite opinion is perhaps best understood, via Nagel’s emphasis on plausibility and common sense, in terms of the faith and commitment that Polanyi places at the center of his thought. But the relationship between the two philosophers moves in both directions: Study of Nagel casts useful light on Polanyi as well.