Sent: March 18, 2004 18:49
Subject: Re: [TruthTalk] POLYANYI
A valiant effort, Vince. I give that. But no
cigar.
I'm going to include a few comments on Polanyi's
thought, and then get back to some of yours, because I really think if you
will give Polanyi a chance, you will see that he has done much to free
Christian thought from bondage to Enlightenment
philosophies.
What is tacit knowledge? It seems best to begin
this discussion by introducing tacit knowledge as a form of knowing that is
similar to intuition on the one hand and a skill on the other. “Tacit-knowing”
involves more than intuition and skills but the concepts are similar enough, I
hope, to carry us through until a broader understanding emerges. Michael
Polanyi is the thinker most readily associated with tacit knowledge. Polanyi
began his career as a chemist. At the peak of that career and the pinnacle of
his profession, while bordering on a Nobel prize, Polanyi discontinued his
scientific inquiry to focus instead on Philosophy. We will go into the reason
for this shift later in our discussion.
As it relates to
tacit knowledge, Polanyi argues in several of his works that knowing is
participation with the world (he does this most exhaustively in
Personal Knowledge). He argues that neglecting the participatory
nature of knowing and submitting instead to a tendency to think of knowledge
in terms of cognitive belief has misled us in our theories of knowledge
(Christian theories included).
In order to get
a handle on Polanyi’s thought it is essential to immediately grasp a
discovery which takes into view that Polanyi challenges Modernity’s
understanding of knowledge. For Polanyi, we always know more than we can
say. This premise becomes crucial to the rest of his theory of knowledge.
In order to defend such a notion Polanyi makes a distinction between explicit
knowledge and tacit knowledge. To make sense of this distinction we need to
discuss a couple of other distinctions. The first is the distinction between
focal awareness and subsidiary awareness. Let us turn to Jerry Gill to capture
the essence of this distinction: "In any given
cognitive context there are some factors of which the knowing subject is aware
because he (or she) is directing attention to them. Such awareness is termed
focal. In the same context there are also factors of which the knower is aware
even though he (or she) is not focusing on them. This is termed subsidiary
awareness."
For
example, when I see the word “cat” in the sentence “The cat is on the mat,” I
am focally aware of the meaning of the word and subsidiarily aware of the
letters c-a-t. Notice first that this distinction is a relative one: one can
choose to attend to that which is subsidiary before concentrating on the
focal; one can shift one’s focal awareness back and forth from the meaning to
the letters, but the two types of awareness are “mutually exclusive.” In other
words, I cannot at the same time be focally and subsidiarily aware of
the same thing.
But notice also
that focal awareness always requires some subsidiary awareness; i.e., I
recognize the word “cat” because of the letters c-a-t. If I should shift focal
awareness to the letters, I recognize the c-a-t because of a subsidiary
awareness of the curves and lines which go to make up the letters. One’s
subsidiary awareness, in other words, creates the context for focal awareness
to occur. The point Polanyi is making is that not only is the distinction
between focal and subsidiary awareness a related, but there is a logical
priority of subsidiary awareness to focal awareness. One always attends “from”
subsidiary awareness “to” focal awareness. Furthermore, the distinction is
real, and it is important to how we understand the act of
knowing.
The second
distinction that Polanyi makes has to do with different types of human
activity. He categorizes human activity as being on a continuum between bodily
activity and conceptual activity. A bodily activity might be something like
swimming or riding a bicycle, whereas a
conceptual activity something like reading a book or solving a mathematical
equation. For instance, the bodily nature of riding a bike is obvious --
obvious, that is, until you try to tell someone who's never been on a bike how
to ride it. Yet, in learning how to ride one needs very little other than time
to learn the skills of keeping one’s balance, moving one’s hands and feet at
the same time, etc. To try and conceptualize what one is doing in keeping
one’s balance, is not only unnecessary but gets in the way. Bodily activities
are most often spoken of in terms of skills and they are developed with
practice and the mentoring of a skilled instructor.
Notice
how reading this post requires bodily activity as well: the ability to
move the eyes across the screen, to focus on certain groups of letters, etc.
What Polanyi argues is that conceptual activities require bodily activity, but
bodily activity does not require conceptual activity. Few of us could say
conceptually what it takes to keep one’s balance, for example, but most of us
do it very well. Here again, the point is that there is a logical priority of
the bodily activity to conceptual activity. All human activity requires some
bodily activity. Even conceptual activity, such as addition, requires a whole
complex of neurological activity—not to mention the skills developed in math
class.
Now, with these
two distinctions it is possible to understand what Polanyi means by explicit
and tacit knowledge. Explicit knowledge is conceptual activity combined with
focal awareness. Tacit knowledge is bodily activity combined with subsidiary
awareness. Since disclosure is always from subsidiary awareness to focal
awareness and bodily activity is always at the core of conceptual activity,
Polanyi argues that explicit knowledge always involves an emergence of
tacit-knowing. So that we do not miss the thrust of this statement,
let me express it another way: Polanyi would argue that explicit
knowledge—that is the knowledge of Descartes, Newton, Hume, Kant, i.e., the
entire Enlightenment Project, that this knowledge—always comes from tacit
knowledge.
Let us look at
the theoretical implications of this view. If Polanyi is correct, then in
terms of knowledge theory, the “gap” disappears between subjective knowledge
(that terrible subjectivism and relativisation of the truth) and
objective knowledge (that knowledge that we always want to posses but can
never seem to convince others that we have). Prior to Polanyi,
philosophers had spent centuries trying to bridge this subject / object gap --
either that, or they argued that the gap cannot be bridged and therefore we
can know nothing about those things (read God) that we cannot
see.
David
Hume is the most prominent of the "skeptical" thinkers. He did more to
hurt the credibility of Christian thought than any philosopher in the history
of human kind. Hume himself was a psychologically abused son of a staunch
Calvinist. Hume was scared to death of God, and set out, perhaps
subconsciously, to raise doubts about the whole idea of anyone really being
able to know if God were real. Hence, at the beginning of the
Enlightenment, Hume cast dispersions on whether things perceived can
actually bridge-the-gap and become things known. By the term “known,” he was
getting at an idea of knowledge as something which actually contains “factual”
information, i.e., inscrutable knowledge, objective knowledge, knowledge which
cannot be questioned. Now, before flipping out, What did he mean by
that?
The prominent
metaphor throughout the Enlightenment for understanding the mind was that of a
“mirror.” In this metaphor the task of philosophy was understood as the
attempt to gain a meaningful image of how the world really is. The real world,
in other words, is “out there” and our only link to it is the ability
we have to gain a proper image of it “inside” our minds. This
is called the "Representational" theory of knowledge. The problem of course,
with this theory, is that our mirror is smeared by all sorts of biases
and distortions which makes it most difficult to have an accurate (read
objective) knowledge of the world rather than one that is a construct of our
own imagination (i.e. read subjective or relative). Throughout the
Enlightenment and Modernity, it was this unbiased objective reflection on how
reality actually “is” that functioned as the standard by which all claims to
truth were to be judged—since everyone who thinks properly should know the
same reality. Thus, to the Enlightenment, knowing was mirroring. But
what did this do to Christian thought? It pushed it to the margins of
acceptability, because we cannot see God; hence we cannot mirror him in our
minds; hence we cannot bridge the gap; hence we must take a leap of faith,
rather than an objective step to get to God.
Hume took it a
step farther when he called into question the whole idea of whether our minds
can actually mirror reality, if we can actually bridge the gap so to speak
between an event as it happens in reality and the picturing of that event in
our minds. Can we actually get “at” the facts? That was his question. Well, if
the "facts" include the real presence of an unseen God, then the answer,
according to Hume and myriad others since him, is absolutely not. There is no
such thing as objective knowledge in a Christian frame of reference. It
is the spin-off of Hume's critique which has led to the idea of
truth as being relative or, at the very least, totally
subjective.
Now, back to
Polanyi. Polanyi’s approach to knowing frees Christians of that Enlightenment
metaphor. That is to say, there is no gap between knowing and reality
because knowledge is not a mirror. The gap
is an illusion created by the metaphor; it is an emergent property of the
metaphor itself. Take away the metaphor and the reality-gap-knowledge problem
disappears. Reality is not what our knowledge mirrors, but rather
that with which our knowledge participates. Reality is the context for
participation. By localizing this tacit element of knowing Polanyi enables
Christians to think of knowledge as a way of being in reality rather
than as of merely mirroring it. Think of the biblical implications here. The
Bible is all about participation with the God of the universe; it is about
relationship between the Triune Creator and his creatures, namely, human
beings. It is about a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.
That brings us
to the next implication: contrary to Descartes, explicit knowledge can never
stand alone. It grows out of a way of interacting with the world, with
reality. That which can be articulated can never be complete because the
explicit always comes from the tacit. Thus, we always know more than we
can say. What we say is always grounded in ways of participating in the world,
in skills learned in order to function effectively in it.
It is this
ineffable element of tacit-knowing that was the impetus for Polanyi’s eventual
withdrawal from Chemistry. Science is supposed to operate via a strict
protocol: one experiment sets the groundwork for a next experiment; a next
experiment for the next, etc.; and the correct working out of one problem in
mathematics becomes the basis or starting point for the working out of a
subsequent problem. While working on one of these myriad problems Polanyi
proved a theorem which had hitherto stumped his colleagues; however,
subsequent to Polanyi’s proof a colleague noticed that Polanyi had actually
erred on a crucial calculation. Upon inquiring of Polanyi how it was that he
could prove a theorem using faulty logic, Polanyi, who had been unaware of the
error, quickly responded that often times we know an answer before we can
frame its question. Well as you might imagine, in a “scientific” community
given to objectivity, Polanyi’s answer stirred quite a ruckus
(certainly in a way more so than his proof would ever affect future
discoveries). Scientists are supposed to be objective; that is, they are not
supposed to go into experiments with preconceived outcomes; they are supposed
to allow the evidence to do the talking, to supply the proof. In Polanyi’s
case the evidence spoke out-of-turn, but the theorem itself was proven
correctly nonetheless.
Though Polanyi
defended his statement without waver, the problem itself plagued him for most
of two decades: How was it that he knew its answer without being able to
demonstrate it logically? Being himself a scientist of renown, Polanyi knew
well that myriad other scientific discoveries had occurred via this same
disclosure; therefore he struggled with a second question too: Whence came
this claim to objectivity? The answer of course to his first question was, he
proved the theorem through a tacit-type knowing. The answer to the second was,
again, due to a metaphorical problem. Objectivity is crucial only if there
is indeed a gap. Scientists no doubt believed that they had bridged a gap
and that they were therefore working on the side of objectivity; yet, without
overstating the case, they were deceived: their paradigm did not contain
within it the possibility that the “gap” was an illusion produced by a
metaphor; indeed they may never have even heard of the metaphor stated as
such. “Objectivity,” nevertheless, was a term they were familiar with: And who
was there better suited than they to claim it? Hence they overlooked the fact
they were not objective in their analysis;— and this not to deceive us, but
because they were themselves unaware of its
absence.
Polanyi
therefore says of his colleagues in the scientific community that
"An emphatic admission of our infallibility
only serves to re-affirm our claim to a fictitious bar of intellectual
integrity … in contrast to the hide-bound attitude of those (namely
Christians) who openly profess their beliefs as their final personal
commitment." Polanyi knew that the devaluing of
belief-statements by critical thinkers—i.e., scientists and philosophers—as
being merely subjective conjectures involved a logical absurdity: it
presupposed the possibility of an “objective” knowledge, which was not
knowledge only as believed to be true by a knowing self, but as truth because
of a correspondence between a person’s belief and the actual facts.
This definition of objectivity was futile and Polanyi knew it: there is no way of knowing what actual facts
are except by the activity of knowing subjects. Every object
demands a subject if it is to be known; hence there is no such thing as a
purely objective knowledge. There is no way to get outside of oneself to
observe an object. You are the subject of your inquiry. At this Polanyi closed
his science books and set upon a new quest: to localize that way of knowing
which was at once so vitally important to the very community he was leaving,
and also to blame for his rebuke at the hands of that same community. He
called this participatory breakthrough "personal knowledge."
How, through his breakthroughs in knowledge
theory, has Polanyi helped Christians regain credibility in the world?
Christians have always said that true knowledge can only be gained through
relationship with Jesus Christ. Christian knowledge is
relational knowledge. Polanyi is saying the same thing when
he says, "Reality is not what our knowledge mirrors, but rather that with
which our knowledge participates." When Polanyi exposed the
subject-gap-object metaphor as fallacious, he opened the door once again to
relational knowledge, that eternal kind of knowledge in which the Father, Son,
and Holy Spirit participate. It is fellowship knowledge; it is the kind of
knowledge that Adam knew when he knew his wife and she conceived.
The only way that "subjective" knowledge can be
inferior and non-scientific or non-biblical and thus bad, is if the
representational metaphor is correct. But if the metaphor itself is
bogus, then so is objectivity, in a strictly scientific construct. All
knowledge is the Christian kind of knowledge, the biblical kind of knowledge,
whether atheists admit it or not. Because all knowledge involves a subject and
an object, a knower and a known. We know Jesus Christ by participating in the
salvation he provided. We're the subject; he's the object; we know him by way
of relationship with him.
Vince, Polanyi was
not a moral relativist. He did not ascribe to the faulty metaphors which lead
to such conclusions. He was well aware that his theories and realizations were
quite compatible with the relational language of biblical revelation. You
can read about this in his book Meaning.
Thanks. I hope this is helpful.
Bill
Taylor
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Thursday, March 18, 2004 11:55
AM
Subject: Re: [TruthTalk]
POLYANYI
>
>
> > ... Michael Polanyi's ... ideas are based
> > on the belief that all knowledge is either
> > tacit
(silent and unspoken) or rooted
> > in tacit knowledge.
>
> I never heard of Polanyi until this forum
introduced me to his name,
> however, never fearing to rush in where
angels fear to tread, I'll say
> that the short and presumably accurate
sentence above makes little red
> flags go up in my little pea brain.
There's nothing there referring
> knowledge to God or saying that real
knowledge is rooted in God and His
> revelation. I suspect that, if the
summary above is correct, Polanyi's
> logic eventually leads us to
"nobody's grasp of reality is any better
> than anybody else's grasp of
reality, therefore nobody's knowledge is any
> better than another's
knowledge." If Polanyi uses this to conclude that
> the poor certitude
of our own knowledge is a good reason to root
> ourselves in Christ,
then he must have been a wise man. On the other
> hand, if he uses this
to promote moral relativism and ecumenism, then he
> had no wisdom at
all.
>
> So, Polanyi fans, did I come
close, or do I get no cigar?
>
> vincent j fulton
>
----------
> "Let your speech be always with grace, seasoned with salt,
that you may know how you ought to answer every man." (Colossians 4:6)
http://www.InnGlory.org
>
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