Vince,
Say it with me. C-A-T, cat {:>)
I'm sorry I lost you. I really wish you would at least jump to the
conclusion. It is relevant to us because, like it or not, we are taught to
think like Enlightenment philosophers. The problem is, the Enlightenment was
wrong; it was all about putting man in the middle and pushing God to the
periphery -- if he was there at all. Polanyi undid the Enlightenment
project. When Christians uncritically cast him aside, they are likely
clinging to an unbiblical way of understanding knowledge. Please try again,
just the last two or three paragraphs. If you have questions, I will be glad
to work you through them.
Bill Taylor
----- Original Message -----
From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Thursday, March 18, 2004 7:14 PM
Subject: Re: [TruthTalk] POLYANYI
>
> If this was meant for me, then it was wasted. I recognize that the
> words are English, but that's as far as my understanding goes. No
> offense, but this seems to fall into the category of what many call
> "psychobabble." I guess my brain is just not suited to philosophy.
>
> vincent j fulton
>
>
> On Thu, 18 Mar 2004 16:49:27 -0700 "Wm. Taylor" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> writes:
> 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 -----
> From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> 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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> >
> ----------
> "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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>
>
----------
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