Between Tacit Knowing and Pragmatism: Linking Polanyi and the Pragmatists Entre O Conhecimento Tácito E O Pragmatismo: Relacionando Polanyi Aos Pragmatistas
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Between tacit knowing and pragmatism: linking Polanyi and the pragmatists Entre o conhecimento tácito e o pragmatismo: relacionando Polanyi aos pragmatistas Robert E. Innis Department of Philosophy University of Massachusetts Lowell—USA [email protected] Abstract: This paper will explore a number of intersections between the work of the great philosopher-scientist Michael Polanyi and key themes and issues that lie at the heart of the pragmatist philosophical tradition. Polanyi’s notion of tacit knowledge and his construction of a model of consciousness developed from clues from Gestalt psychology has a remarkable set of parallels with pragmatism’s own concerns on both the methodological and substantive levels. I show, through selective examples, how Polanyi’s work can be fruitfully linked with pivotal notions from Dewey’s, Peirce’s, and James’s reflections. Of especially importance is Polanyi’s exploitation of the analytical notion of a skill which allows him to develop a truly experimental theory of knowing that abolishes the spectator model that has haunted the philosophical tradition and which pragmatism opposed on many levels. Keywords: Polanyi. Tacit knowing. Skills. Pragmatism. Spectator theory of knowing. Consciousness. Resumo: Este artigo explorará várias interseções entre a obra do grande filósofo-cientista Michael Polanyi e os temas e questões que estão no cerne da tradição filosófica pragmatista. A noção de Polanyi do conhecimento tácito e sua construção de um modelo de consciência desenvolvido de indicações da psicologia da Gestalt possui um notável conjunto de paralelos com as próprias questões do pragmatismo em ambos os níveis, metodológicos e substantivos. Demonstro, através de exemplos seletivos, como a obra de Polanyi pode ser proveitosamente relacionada às noções cruciais das reflexões de Dewey, Peirce e James. É de especial importância a exploração de Polanyi da noção analítica de uma capacidade que lhe permite desenvolver uma teoria do conhecimento verdadeiramente experimental, que suprime o modelo espectador que tem perseguido a tradição filosófica e ao qual o pragmatismo se opôs em muitos níveis. Palavras-Chave: Polanyi. Conhecimento tácito. Capacidades. Pragmatismo. Teoria espectadora do conhecimento. Consciência. In this paper I want through schematic exemplification to show how to profitably link the philosopher/scientist Michael Polanyi’s theory of ‘tacit knowing,’ with its foundation in a rich model of conscious awareness, to James’s, Dewey’s, and Cognitio, São Paulo, v. 16, n. 2, p. 291-304, jul./dez. 2015 291 Cognitio: Revista de Filosofia Peirce’s attempts to pinpoint the fundamental distinctions to be drawn in the way we encounter the world at the very ‘thresholds of sense.’ Polanyi, coming from outside ‘professionalized philosophy,’ with a deep knowledge of science and its philosophical and social import, both confirms them, expands them, and maybe even twists them in ways that light up new features of each of the points of intersection that I will pass in review. Polanyi supplies new analytical tools, rooted in his account of tacit knowing, for coming to grips with the fundamental ways we endow our experience with meaning within the whole continuum of our interactions with the world. What I am presenting here is not so much a detailed argument, which is impossible in the present circumstances, as a provocation and invitation to ‘see connections,’ which Wittgenstein thought was the fundamental role of philosophy. I have treated these issues extensively in my books, Consciousness and the Play of Signs (Innis 1994) and Pragmatism and the Forms of Sense (Innis 2002). In the preface his The Tacit Dimension (Polanyi 1996), summarizing and extending the model of knowing of his magisterial work Personal Knowledge (Polanyi 1958), Polanyi wrote: All thought contains components of which we are subsidiarily aware in the focal content of our thinking, and all thought dwells in its subsidiaries, as if they were parts of our body. Hence, thinking is not only necessarily intentional, as Brentano has taught: it is also fraught with the roots it embodies. It has a from-to structure. (x) This from-to structure, according to Polanyi, applies to all acts of awareness by means of which, as he put it in his essay, ‘The Structure of Consciousness,’ we are “not only conscious of something, but also conscious from certain things which include our body” (in Polanyi 1969: 219). Further, in the preface to Personal Knowledge: Toward a Post-Critical Philosophy he wrote: I regard knowing as an active comprehension of the things known, an action that requires skill. Skilful knowing and doing is performed by subordinating a set of particulars, as clues or tools, to the shaping of a skilful achievement, whether practical or theoretical. We may then be said to become ‘subsidiarily aware’ of these particulars within our ‘focal awareness’ of the coherent entity that we achieve. Clues and tools are things used as such and not observed in themselves. They are made to function as extensions of our bodily equipment and this involves a certain change in our own being. Acts of comprehension are to this extent irreversible, and also non-critical. For we cannot possess any fixed framework within which the reshaping of our hitherto fixed framework could be critically tested. (vii) Skilful action aims toward various kinds of achievements, ‘whether practical or theoretical,’ and thus the model of skills repudiates the ‘spectator’ view of knowing that the pragmatist tradition also opposed in various ways. 292 Cognitio, São Paulo, v. 16, n. 2, p. 291-304, jul./dez. 2015 Between tacit knowing and pragmatism: linking Polanyi and the pragmatists Indeed, in his concise and profound 1896 critique of the reflex arc model of experience (‘The Reflex Concept in Psychology,’ also known as ‘The Unit of Behavior’) Dewey had argued that experience quite generally, like a skill, is a circuit and in “continual reconstruction” (1896: 5), much as Peircean semiotics sees semiosis. What Dewey said about life as such also applies to the development of a skill: in these words of his 1938 Logic it is a “continual rhythm of disequilibrations and recoveries of equilibrium” (p. 34). A skill is a self-developing emergent whole that integrates a complex set of subsidiary elements upon which it relies in order to achieve a goal or to meet the demands of what Dewey called a ‘problematic situation’ whose resolution elicits skilful action of various sorts. A skill is way of ‘being-knowingly-in-the-world,’ of being attuned to it and coping with it, whether the ‘world’ is a tennis court, a physics lab, an operating room, the kitchen stove, or a lecture hall. These are all matrices of knowing, clearly involving complex fusions of ‘knowing how’ and ‘knowing that,’ and they illustrate, in their rich diversity, how the model of skills explodes the spectator or ocular bias of epistemology that puts a ‘subject’ over against an ‘object.’ According to Polanyi, and also Dewey, in skillful action we cannot objectify or focus upon, in actu, all the elements we rely upon, although clearly we can formalize up to a point the ‘rules’ we are following, but this comes afterwards by a process of reflection and the development of complex symbolic systems such as the algorithms that inform automated activities that extend our skills and allow us to fly advanced aircraft, land them on aircraft carriers, produce scientific instruments, and so forth and so on. Polanyi argued that being in a skill, even if underpinned by automated systems which we have constructed, is a tacit operation, embodied in a ‘knack,’ and accompanied by a feeling of ‘rightness’ that is rooted in application to problematic situations that have to be resolved, such as riding a bicycle, stitching a wound, wielding a hammer, and so on. And being within an articulate framework, ‘indwelling’ it in Polanyi’s terminology, involves relying on it as a subsidiary, as a support, just as a blind man uses his cane or a surgeon his scalpel. Moreover, an ‘articulate’ framework is not just something ‘in the head’ but involves affects and habits of behavior, which are rooted in the body, and this makes it all the more difficult, yet at times necessary, to stand outside it and to subject it to the type of control Peirce proposed as the fourth method for the fixation of belief, at least in the first instance. In this regard, we find another link between Polanyi and Dewey in the following passage in Dewey’s essay, ‘Context and Thought,’ which also avails itself of reference to the body and, indeed, extends the notion: We cannot explain why we believe the things which we most firmly hold to because those things are a part of ourselves. We can no more completely escape them when we try to examine into them than we can get outside our physical skins so as to view them from without. Call these regulative traditions, apperceptive organs or mental habits or whatever you will, there is no thinking without them. (1931: 211-212). It appears, unpacking Dewey’s text, that we have two bodies that are intertwined: (1) a living material body, an ‘endosomatic’ body, subject to the felt stresses and Cognitio, São Paulo, v. 16, n. 2, p. 291-304, jul./dez. 2015 293 Cognitio: Revista de Filosofia strains of the physical world, which we all inhabit and which is the permeable boundary between us and world, and (2) a body of supervening regulative traditions, apperceptive organs, mental habits, and so forth with which we are inextricably intertwined and in which, as Polanyi claims, we dwell and upon which we rely. This is an ‘exosomatic’ body that is shared and which informs us, individually and socially, by providing the ‘access structures’ to the world. Both bodies, in all their complexities and levels, make up the ‘roots’ of thought out of which all our thinking grows and is nourished.