THE TACIT DIMENSION

Professor Michael Polanyi FRS (1891-1976) was a tutor of leading Network Member Max Payne when he was studying chemistry at Manchester University before pursuing postgraduate studies at Oxford during the time of Gilbert Ryle. His admiration for the former was equalled only by his withering criticism of the latter. Polanyi moved his chair from physical chemistry to social studies in 1948, and gave a famous series of Gifford Lectures published as Personal Knowledge. This short book was one of his last and extends the argument of earlier work that 'we can know more than we can tell': we cannot depersonalise knowledge since the act of knowing is personal, a point often ignored or neglected in research science. Sen notes that thought can live only on grounds which we adopt in the service of a [cultural] reality to which we submit. The three lectures originally given at Yale are entitled Tacit Knowing, Emergence and A Society of Explorers.

Polanyi observes that the mechanistic conception 'denied altogether any intrinsic power to thought and thus denied also any grounds for claiming freedom of thought.' Understanding and interpretation necessarily shape and integrate through a tacit power. He gives as an interesting example of some work on what was then called 'subception', which is effectively equivalent to the later (subliminal) anticipatory presponse in experiments by Radin and Bem. As George Lakoff also argues, 'our body is the ultimate instrument of all our external knowledge.' We never experience our own body as an object, 'but experience always in terms of the world to which we are attending from our body.' Experientially, we incorporate things in our body – 'or extend our body to include it - so that we come to dwell in it.' Hence, we attend from our body (proximal) and perceptual capacity to what we are perceiving (distal) as a phenomenal structure, which in turn creates the functional structure of tacit knowing. How we interpret this is the semantic aspect of tacit knowing. It is tacit knowing that 'establishes a meaningful relationship between two terms' that gives rise to understanding of the comprehensive entity, which Polanyi called the ontological aspect of tacit knowing.

The key concept here is indwelling, 'or empathy, is the proper means of knowing man and the humanities.' Crucially, indwelling or interiorisation (credo ut intelligam in theological terms) also applies to theories: 'to rely on a theory for understanding nature is to interiorise it. For we are attending from the theory to things seen in its light…' (p. 17) In this way, the vast majority of neuroscientists, philosophers and psychologists attend from the theory that the brain produces consciousness, which makes it impossible to accommodate phenomena that seem to contradict this assumption, especially since they are seeking an overall consilience of knowledge within scientific materialism. However, the very notion of objectivity is arrived at through interpersonal means.

As Goethe also intimated, 'if tacit thought forms an indispensable part of all knowledge, then the idea of eliminating all personal elements of knowledge would, in effect, aim at the destruction of all knowledge' – so strictly detached, objective knowledge is impossible: 'the process of formalising all knowledge to the exclusion of any tacit knowing is self-defeating.' Theories have to function within an act of tacit knowing, 'which consists in our attending from it to the previously established experience on which it bears.' This process is very similar to what William James called 'apperception', which is how we accommodate new findings into our existing intellectual structures. Applied to science, research begins with a good and original problem, an intimation of something hidden, 'the coherence of hitherto not comprehended particulars' that may yet be discovered and of which we can have no explicit knowledge – only a hunch: 'we are guided by sensing the presence of a hidden reality towards which our clues are pointing.' (p. 24) This act of commitment cannot be formalised and it points to the failure of logical positivism in philosophy of science, as also argued by R.G. Collingwood in his Essay on Metaphysics.

Polanyi's chapter on emergence must have been pioneering at the time. His overall picture is one of a 'strata of realities' controlled by distinctive principles, as in systems theory. He gives the example of a speech where there are five levels – voice, words, sentences, style and literary composition governed respectively by phonetics, lexicography, grammar, stylistics and literary criticism, forming a hierarchy of comprehensive entities where the principles of each level operate under the control of the next higher level. He then applies this to sentience and the notion that life can be explained by laws governing inanimate matter: 'the laws of physics and chemistry include no conception of sentience and any system wholly determined by these laws must be insentient.' (my emphasis, p. 37)

Biologists try to explain the phenomenon of life in terms of 'machinery based on the laws of physics and chemistry which 'include no knowledge of the operational principles of machines' (!) Since boundary conditions are left open, this leaves scope for emergence. And living functions require a 'combination of a mechanism with organismic regulation.' Applied to organisms, 'each higher principle controls the boundary left indeterminate by the next lower principle.' (p. 49) He then moves on to evolution and 'its misrepresentation as a process of continued selective improvement' that loses sight of the more fundamental question of how any single individual of a higher species ever came into existence.

'A Society of Explorers' refers to the scientific communityinstantiating the modern mind that emerged from a fusion of scientific scepticism with a passion for moral progress/ perfectionism – and for challenging authority as in the Nullius in Verba – don't take anyone's word for it – the motto of the Royal Society) This clears the way for political freedom and humanitarian reforms, although we are currently seeing widespread appeal to scientific authority and suppression of dissidents, as there is a political and social authority/power structure within the sciences as well as in society as a whole. Polanyi points out that acceptance of scientific statements by laymen is based authority. And when it comes to journal submissions, 'only offerings deemed sufficiently plausible are accepted' – though what is considered plausible is tacit and related to prevailing presuppositions.

Max Planck is a good example of the tacit process involved in a radically novel discovery, and his idea was so strange that it took 11 years to gain final acceptance by leading physicists – this was an example of creative dissent where he pursued something as yet undisclosed or formulated, leading to a deeper understanding of reality. He intuited a new approach, which illustrates Polanyi's contention that 'since a problem can be known only tacitly, our knowledge of it can be recognised as valid only by accepting the validity of tacit knowing… herein lies the importance of establishing the validity of tacit knowing.' This point has been restated by Iain McGilchrist in his astute discussion of the role of the right hemisphere in the creative process. Polanyi characterises the scientific ecosystem as one of mutual control: 'each scientist is both subject to criticism by all others and encouraged by their appreciation of him… this is how scientific opinion is formed and leads to a 'mediated consensus' and co-ordination whereby science is steadily reshaped yet its coherence maintained within what Kuhn would call 'normal science.' These essays are a timely reminder that knowledge is intrinsically personal and understanding intuitive, a position consistent with positing consciousness as fundamental.