Tradition and Discovery: The Polanyi Society Periodical

Volume 44, Issue 2, July 2018

Comments on Matthew Crawford’s The World Beyond Your Head

Matthew Crawford invites readers to consider how their contact with the real world has been imperiled by the notion that all experience is mediated by mental representations and how skilled activities providing bodily contact with the environment help recover us from this mistaken perspective. In this brief presentation, I ask whether in his critique of mediated experience by appeal to physical skills Crawford neglects to appreciate Polanyi’s emphasis on intellectual probes as instruments for contacting reality and whether his doing so inappropriately—and perhaps inadvertently—diminishes the all-important place of belief in Polanyi’s epistemology.