Abstract

These Terry Lectures for 1962 develop Polanyi's notion of tacit knowing through three stages: its epistemological analysis and justification, its ontological generalization to a doctrine of emergence, and its social dimension and implications. and may be briefly characterized as follows: Tacit knowledge refers to the set of particulars implicitly grasped in the explicit grasping of a comprehensive entity, the latter being the meaning of the former. Mutually supporting doctrines of epistemological isomorphism and critical realism underlie the argument, but the crucial, unjustified assumption is that tacit "knowing" is a knowing. Why not assimilate it to patterned-governed behavior explicable on an S-R model? Ontologically, the tacit component shows up as the set of particulars with their attendant structural laws which underlie but do not exhaustively define the comprehensive entities of which, due to the mechanism of emergence, they are components. Non-reducibility is evidenced by the dynamic or operational laws which govern the emergent entities, but which do not show up in the lower level account. The qualitative irreducibility of sentience is mentioned but not developed as an argument. In justifying his notion of a mechanism of emergence, Polanyi at first makes some rather obscure references to vitalism, an organismic principle, and élan vital, but then comes out with a more properly metaphysical analysis in terms of the eliciting function of a principle of potentiality. There is a definite Whiteheadian ring to the analysis, but Whitehead is nowhere mentioned. Polanyi's work deserves serious attention, and this compact presentation of some of the essentials of his thought will serve to send more readers on to, or back to, Personal Knowledge.—E. A. R.