The Tacit Dimension [Paperback]

Polanyi, a scientist turned philosopher, developed this set of three lectures partly in response to a 1935 conversation with Bukharin, a prominent Soviet scientist. Bukharin asserted that pure science was a morbid symptom of a class society; under socialism, science pursued for its own sake would disappear, and scientists would use their knowledge only for a higher social good, such as solving the problems of the current Five Year Plan. Polanyi's defense of free scientific inquiry took the form of describing how we actually acquire knowledge of the world as we move through it. In the process, he made lasting contributions to epistemology, the branch of philosophy that explores how we know what we know.

He starts by examining how scientists actually practice their craft. Scientific problem solving starts with finding a good problem to work on, and Polanyi's interest is in how that problem gets posed. He introduces the idea of tacit knowledge, which consists of things we know without being able to say how we know them. For instance, I know my wife's face, without being able to tell you how I can pick her face out of the billions of faces in the world. Scientists use tacit knowledge all the time to formulate problems. They make indeterminate commitments based on internal feelings that this commitment will be eventually be fruitful.

Having reclaimed individual agency and subjective knowing as part of the scientific process, Polanyi then asserts the value of empirical knowledge against top down ideologies such as Marxism and philosophies such as Existentialism that argue that humans choose their own reality by willing it into existence at the moment of choice. He worries that without the ballast of consensual social tradition, the tendency of the modern state to tie "objective" truth to moral fervor would lead it to veer inevitably toward the suppression of individual freedom.

Returning to the actual practice of science, he demonstrates that scientists don't find problems or create experiments in a vacuum. They draw from a vast arsenal of assumptions about how the world works and accept on faith the discoveries made by other scientists. New realities emerge from pre-existing conditions. He observes that a higher level of structure is never actually manifest in the lower level from which it emerges. Lower levels are stepping stones which can set the conditions of what will emerge, but not determine the outcome of what actually emerges. A swarm of bees is a good example of this: the study of an individual bee will not enable you to predict the behavior of the hive.

The opposite approach to emergence is to propose and propagate top down truths. Top down truths tend to fall short in actual practice. The Enlightenment threw off the constraints of traditional morality in the name of new objective truths, which led directly to the guillotine as truth's enforcing agent. Stalin's forced collectivization of agriculture led to horrible human suffering because it refused to take into account how peasants actually grew their crops and got them to market.

Polanyi describes a realistic free society as one where new truths emerge from the consensus of what actually exists rather than what ought to exist or what exists in the mind only. His "society of explorers" works within the constraints of accepted tradition. Scientists and other explorers are controlled and guided by peer feedback. They have faith that a higher order of reality exists, even though it's hidden from them in the present. In Polanyi's brave new world, seekers of truth are neither constrained by foregone conclusions nor set adrift in meaninglessness.

Even though the dragons loosed by Stalin and Sartre have been driven back toward their caves, the murky postmodern landscape we wander in today seems particularly susceptible to truths that owe more to political expediency than to any moral or social tradition. Polanyi's warning that we can't allow the scientific process to be highjacked for totalitarian purposes feels timely in an age where scientists are forced to fend off the claims of religious fundamentalists. His insight that forging internal knowing with external tradition creates the most durable intellectual freedom might help us battle the poisonous vapors of truthiness.

Just finished Mr. Polanyi's little book---very well done and compelling. It has seemed that the last several books I've read were based mostly on their acceptance of Polanyi's notions of tacit and explicit knowledge. On further investigation I discovered that Polanyi's signature work, Personal Knowledge clocked in at about 500 pages---and with about two feet of books on the must read list, I was happy for the opportunity to get the gist of his thinking. Dimension does the trick. Polanyi's intellectual honesty and devotion to complete development of an idea are as refreshing as they are enlightening.

There are several "money" quotes, but this one jumped off the page:

"Yet it is taken for granted today among biologists that all manifestations of life can ultimately be explained by the laws governing inanimate matter. K.S. Lashley declared this at the Hixon Symposium of 1948, as the common belief of all participants, without ever consulting his distinguished colleagues. Yet this assumption is patent nonsense. The most striking feature of our own existence is our sentience. The laws of physics and chemistry include no conception of sentience, and any system wholly determined by these laws must be insentient. It may be in the interest of science to turn a blind eye on this central fact of the universe, but it is certainly not in the interest of truth. I shall prefer to follow up, on the contrary, the fact that the study of life must ultimately reveal some principles additional to those manifested by inanimate matter, and to prefigure the general outline of one such, yet unknown, principle."

The "unknown" and "hidden realities" play a large part of each of three chapters and he concludes with: "Men need a purpose which bears on eternity. Truth does that; our ideals do it; and this might be enough, if we could ever be satisfied with our manifest moral shortcomings and with a society which has such shortcomings fatally involved in its workings. Perhaps this problem cannot be resolved on secular grounds alone. But its religious solution should become more feasible once religious faith is released from pressure by an absurd vision of the universe, and so there will open up instead a meaningful world which could resound to religion."

Highly recommended. (I'm ordering Personal Knowledge...) Read on!

this is a JEWEL of a book:
my deep gratitude go to AMARTYA SEN for seeing to its reprinting.

having struggled through POLANYI's PERSONAL KNOWLEDGE,
it is fortuitous to find those brilliant ideas lucidly condensed in a much more accessible prose!

what is remarkable and significant about TACIT knowledge is that it validates what thinkers, artists, designers, writers, poets, musicians, and scientists (albeit too few of these) consistently admit: we cannot account as to the origin of the initial idea or notion that launches our investigations.

Paul Feyerabend in his book AGAINST METHOD touches on this enigmatic mental itch or, as he calls it, "a vague urge":

"Creation of a thing, and creation plus full understanding of a correct idea of the thing, are parts of one and the same indivisible process... The process itself is not guided by a well-defined programme, and cannot be guided by such programme... It is guided rather by a vague urge, by a `passion'. "

this book opens up new venues to think about thinking.

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