This glossary is from Walter Gulick’s Recovering Truths: A Comprehensive Anthology of Michael Polanyi’s Writings (aka “The Polanyi Reader”)
Polanyi wrote using a distinctive vocabulary. He often used ordinary terms in a somewhat idiosyncratic way that one grasps only gradually with careful observation. He seldom defined his terms, but rather allowed usage within known contexts to establish a term’s connotations. Thus, for instance, he writes, “The word ‘commitment’ will be used here in a particular sense which will be established by its usage . . .” (PK 300).
The following list indicates words having a special resonance within Polanyi’s writings. I have supplied definitions or at least guidelines that relate to his typical usage of a term. Succinct quotations that illuminate Polanyi’s meaning are also sometimes given (but without highlighting any terms in bold). Within each Glossary entry I have indicated words in bold type that have their own separate entry in this Glossary. Thanks to Robert Inkster for sharing a list containing some useful suggestions for quotations.
A-critical: tacit acts not based upon critical reflection about alternatives. Critical judgment is directed toward the assertion of an articulate form, while a-critical acts are inarticulate. The act of relying upon unspecifiable clues is an a-critical act. “We should not apply, therefore, the terms ‘critical’ or ‘uncritical’ to any process of tacit thought by itself; any more than we would speak of the critical or uncritical performance of a high-jump or a dance” (PK 264).
Achievement: the fulfillment of some goal or standard. Polanyi uses this term in biology and ultrabiology to underscore the rise and functioning of telic processes within nature. Living things may be assessed as to their degree of achievement at many different levels: for instance, in terms of their shape, their process of growth, and the adequacy of their functioning. Because all living beings are to some extent self-regulating centers seeking some level of achievement (whether consciously or not), their actions cannot be understood simply to be the resultant of external forces or reduced to the laws of physics and chemistry.
Action: forms of cognition and/or motility directed toward some end that is not necessarily understood consciously. “The action of an operational principle can always be distinguished from a natural law by its instrumental context. It is an action, which as such can succeed or fail” (PK 331). A successful action is an achievement. At times Polanyi uses the word “activity” in the same sense as “action” – see, for example, PK 312-313.
Anthropogenesis: the line of ancestors of a human being extending forward from “a seed of submicroscopic living particles” (PK 386-387) many hundreds of millions years ago. “In my description of anthropogenesis I have surveyed the gradual rise of field centres to the rank of full personhood. . .” (PK 404).
Appetites: bodily drives whose motivational force is guided by attention and purpose. The appetites urge individuals toward their own satisfactions, whereas intellectual passions produce results that can be shared communally and satisfy many people. See Chapter IV A.
Apprenticeship: student learning through emulation of one who is a master of some trade, art, skill, practice or discipline. Because there are tacit, unspecifiable elements in the learning of all skills, the apprenticeship of a student to a master is a far more effective way for gaining the tacit knowing that underlies a skill than instruction by necessarily inadequate words combined with trial and error. “By watching the master and emulating his efforts in the presence of his example, the apprentice unconsciously picks up the rules of the art, including those which are not explicitly known to the master himself” (PK 53). See Chapter II D.
Articulation: to give intelligible expression to something. “[M]an’s articulate knowledge represents a panorama of the whole universe, established under the control of critical reflection” (SM 17). Usually Polanyi thinks of articulation as linguistic in nature, but because he understands both intentional movements and thinking to be forms of action, intended physical acts (not compulsive movements) as well as linguistic expressions can be seen as articulations.
Authority: power to influence or control thought or action. Polanyi distinguishes between two types of authority: “one laying down general presuppositions, the other imposing conclusions. We may call the first a General, the latter a Specific Authority” (SFS 57). General Authority establishes a guiding tradition that funds creative interpretations and requires judgments that are fallible. Specific Authority quashes creativity; the imposing of a Specific Authority upon science or any other discipline would destroy its productivity.
Belief: acceptance of and reliance upon basic conceptions or tenets crucial to one’s understanding of and thoughtful engagement with the world. Polanyi argues that the belief-ful state of mind is not only unavoidable, but in contrast to the view of objectivism, he states that belief is a positive tool required to make veridical contact with significant reality, whether or not it has been (or can be) critically justified. “All truth is but the external pole of belief, and to destroy all belief would be to deny all truth” (PK 286).
Boundary conditions: the constraints imposed internally or externally upon a material that allow some open-ended property or properties of the constrained entity to be captured for a higher level function without affecting the properties of the entity. Thus machines impose boundary conditions of specific shapes on steel to employ its properties (tensile strength, durability, stability of shape, etc.) for specific purposes. Sound can be shaped into words without affecting the nature of sound or the laws it obeys. The creative utilization of properties through the imposition of boundary conditions is essential to the process of evolutionary emergence. Polanyi describes two ways boundary conditions function. “In the machine our principal interest lay in the effects of the boundary conditions [machine-type], while in an experimental setting we are interested in the natural processes controlled by the boundaries [test-tube type]” (KB 226). See Chapter V B 2.
Calling: those factors of bodily functioning, external circumstance, and social dependence for which a person is not responsible, but which determine the context within which responsible actions are called for. Polanyi uses the notion of calling broadly, referring at different times to the callings of individuals, communities, and the human species. The term has connotations both of givenness and obligation. “[T]he medium of bodily existence and social dependence . . . lies beyond man’s responsibility and thereby defines his calling” (SM 86).
Civic institutions of society: factors motivating the social transactions supportive of cultural and individual life: group loyalty, property, and authority to act. However, “Loyalty is parochial, property appetitive and public authority violent. Thus the civic pole relies ultimately on coefficients that are essentially at variance with the universal intent of intellectual or moral standards” (PK 215). While morality generally supports civic institutions, it is rendered suspect if its claims are seen merely to be parochial legitimations of property and power. The insights and commonsense wisdom of intellectual leaders in a free society are needed to protect moral principles from declining into ideology. See Chapter IV, Summary Selection.
Coherence: the harmony of parts (perceptual or conceptual) composing a whole. “Our principal clue to the reality of an object is its possession of a coherent outline” (SFS 24). For Polanyi, the intellectual search for clarity and coherence derives from perception. “The shaping of our conceptions is impelled to move from obscurity to clarity and from incoherence to comprehension, by an intellectual discomfort similar to that by which our eyes are impelled to make clear and coherent the things we see” (PK 100-101). We share with the higher animals an urge to achieve coherence (PK 301).
Commitment: a manner of disposing of ourselves through submission to values – for humans, especially the value of truth-seeking – for which we are personally responsible. Commitment involves personal and universal poles. Persons express their commitment publicly through their sincere assertions offered with universal intent and their physical actions consistent with their ultimate concerns. Commitment may be tacit as well as explicit; it occurs in steps of increasing consciousness. It starts “from primordial, vegetative commitment of a centre of being, function and growth, [moves] to primitive commitment of the active-perceptive centre, and hence further again, to responsible commitments of the consciously deliberating person” (PK 363). See Chapter VI D.
Comprehensive entity: an emergent form of being, produced through the integration of particulars existing at a lower level. In some cases the integration is only epistemological, as in the recognition of a face, whereas other times the integration may be ontological, as in the functioning of networks of neurons in the brain (physical) to form consciousness (mental). “Each level is subject to dual control; first by the laws that apply to its elements in themselves and, second, by the laws that control the comprehensive entity formed by them” (TD 36).
Connoisseurship: a largely tacit form of knowing involving evaluative judgment and perhaps artistic sensibility in all sorts of endeavors: from assessing the quality of wine to reading an X-ray. Connoisseurship is “a tacit feat of intelligence which cannot ever be fully specified in terms of explicit rules” (SM 23). See Chapter II D 1.
Conscience: the inner voice of moral personhood. Polanyi’s use of this term is most distinctive when he speaks of scientific conscience. A scientist “when actively engaging in the pursuit of discovery . . . must strive against self-deception and for a true feeling of reality. . . .As he advances in life his professional conscience acquires a variety of new functions; in publishing papers, in criticizing those by other authors, in lecturing to students, in selecting candidates for appointment, in a hundred ways he has to form judgements that are ultimately guided by the ideal of science as interpreted by his conscience” (SFS 55).
Contrivances: objects embodying a certain operational principle and made use of through largely tacit skills. Animals learn certain means-ends relationships that they can exploit for some purpose, and such trick-learning becomes the basis among humans for developing tools, procedures, machines, and other contrivances to achieve certain ends. Polanyi makes the point that the functions accomplished by contrivances cannot be specified in terms of physics and chemistry (PK 329).
Conviviality: the sentiments of social trust and companionship by which culture is transmitted. By conviviality Polanyi means “the primitive sentiments of fellowship” (PK 209) that come in two pure forms: “the sharing of experience” and “participation in joint activities” (PK 211). Conversation, group rituals, and common defense are expressions of our need for convivial experience.
Cultural institutions: organizations necessary to sustain shared beliefs and companionship. “Universities, churches, theatres and picture galleries, serve the sharing of convictions . . . They are institutions of culture” (PK 212). Appropriate sets of rights, duties, and customs are promulgated by cultural institutions, and these help cultivate the thought and standards giving societies creative yet ongoing identities.
Discovery: irreversible intellectual acts making an addition to knowledge. Polanyi’s experience of scientific discovery served as his model for personal knowing. For him, the logic of discovery takes precedence over the logic of verification. “[D]iscovery, far from representing a definite mental operation, is an extremely delicate and personal art which can be but little assisted by any formulated precepts” (SFS 34). It relies on imagination and intuition and becomes “an act in which satisfaction, submission and universal legislation are indissolubly combined” (PK 301).
Emergence: a process of development in which new forms come into being having properties and obeying rules that are different from, and not reducible to, the properties and rules governing their components. In economics, the spontaneous order that emerges in a market has the property of benefiting the whole society even though at the lower level, each individual buying and selling seeks only personal profit. Polanyi’s exposition of anthropogenesis in Personal Knowledge shows how human knowing emerges from animal learning which emerges from purely physical processes.
Evocation: a calling forth. In contrast to causally determining something, evocation draws out an entity based on attraction, resemblance, association, contiguity, or some similar gentle agency. Along with integration, evocation is a fundamental type of process for Polanyi. While he primarily uses it to refer to cognitive processes, it may be used to refer to ontological processes as well. “[T]he emergence of the kind of hierarchy I have defined here can only be evoked but not determined, by atomic or molecular accidents” (KB 235).
Evolution: Polanyi makes evolutionary emergence a centerpiece of his thought: anthropogenesis charts the rise of life from bare specks of living matter to human beings. But Polanyi also questions whether neo-Darwinianism (joining Darwinian natural selection with Mendel’s gene theory) can account alone for not just the survival of the fittest but also for the emergence of higher forms of being discontinuous from their ancestors (e.g., the emergence of life from inert matter or humans from primates). He believes that evolution has to “have been originated by the action of an ordering principle, an action released by random fluctuations and sustained by fortunate environmental conditions” (PK 384).
Explicit knowing: focused, linguistically articulate cognition of which a person is consciously aware. Explicit knowing is contrasted by Polanyi with tacit knowing. Explicit knowing has a public, sharable character and may be reflected upon. Tacit knowing, in contrast, is a-critical, inarticulate, and proceeds by a kind of groping. Explicit knowing, however, always has tacit roots.
Falsification: the thesis that a single piece of contradictory evidence could falsify (disprove) a general scientific claim. Logical positivists like A.J. Ayer had sought to set up a strong demarcation between the objective reliability of claims in science, mathematics and logic because they are verifiable over against the subjective unreliability of claims in other fields. However, the influential philosopher of science Karl Popper realized that while no scientific claim could be conclusively verified because all the evidence was never in, a single piece of contradictory evidence would disprove it – thus rescuing the demarcation project. Furthermore, if no possible event could occur that would falsify a claim, then that claim is not scientific. Polanyi argued that Popper’s notion of falsification is not workable in practice. “[E]xperience can present us only with apparent contradictions and there is no strict rule by which to tell whether any apparent contradiction is an actual contradiction. The falsification of a scientific statement can therefore no more be strictly established than can its verification” (SEP 250). The problematic character of falsification undermines any rigid distinction between scientific and other sorts of claims.
Fiduciary acts: beliefs and judgments which are trusted to be competent to comprehend what is real and good even though they cannot be proven to be truth-bearing. Polanyi’s exposition of personal knowing is an expression of his faith in the reliability of our intellect acting upon tacit knowledge and the beliefs that have proven trustworthy in its commerce with the world. “[T]his self-accrediting is itself a fiduciary act of my own, which legitimates in its turn the transposition of all my ultimate assumptions into declarations of my own beliefs” (PK 265).
Firmament of values (standards, ideals): a poetic reference to the great transcendent values in terms of which human actions are properly judged. Polanyi understands truth, beauty, justice, love, integrity, and other such values (suggestive of Platonic Ideas) to be standards worthy of allegiance in determining the right personal and political actions to pursue. “I have said that at the highest level of personhood we meet man’s moral sense, guided by the firmament of his standards” (TD 51).
Focal awareness: the product of the integration of subsidiary particulars. Focal and subsidiary awareness are two kinds of attention co-existing in our consciousness of some object. Focal awareness is directed toward an object at the center of attention, while we notice subsidiaries “in their participation in a comprehensive entity” (KB 128) upon which we focus. When we recognize a physiognomy, the face we recognize is focally known, while the hair color, type of nose, position of cheekbones, and other patterned particulars function as subsidiaries to the focal whole. See Chapter II B and D for further illustrations.
Framework: an indwelt, interconnected network of presuppositions, beliefs, attitudes, desires, skills and habits through which a person engages the world. Polanyi often speaks of articulate frameworks, but the term “framework” may also be used in a broader sense to include such things as perceptual biases, appetitive urges, and indwelt skills. Frameworks form the anticipations through which we filter raw experience and make sense of it. The Azande framework is so rigidly protected from critique that it keeps its people’s thought from the self-correction that experience potentially can provide – see Chapter VI A 3. Frameworks need not be incompatible nor need they mire people in relativism, for corrective breaking out of inadequate frameworks is made possible by reverting to tacit skills we share as humans and by the common capacity, rooted in perception, to make contact with reality, which can disabuse us from error.
Freedom/Liberty: the range of individual and social actions not prohibited by nature or law. Polanyi distinguishes private from public liberty (see Chapter V E). Polanyi also compares freedom as absence from external restraint with freedom “as liberation from personal ends by submission to impersonal obligations” (LL 40). Public liberty is an example of the latter type of freedom when one freely submits to values and structures that conduce to the common good.
From-to structure of consciousness: Polanyi’s understanding of consciousness as involving two connected forms of awareness. The two forms are: (1) an indwelling in subsidiary particulars that we are conscious from, and (2) a focal awareness of objects that we attend to at the center of our thought. Polanyi based his understanding of the from-to structure on the synthesis of parts into a whole central to Gestalt thought. But rather than accepting the “spontaneous equilibrium” that marked traditional Gestalt psychology – a kind of autonomic occurrence – he added an active, intentional component to mental existence: a quest for coherence and achievement. His articulation of that from which we think (embodied elements) is a crucially important addition to Brentano’s notion of the intentionality of consciousness. Moreover, Polanyi reveals consciousness to be a relationship between an organism and certain things either in its external environment – whereby it is not something inside or private to the organism – or internally, whereby the stream of consciousness is illuminated in reflection.
Focal object: the explicit, intentional object of consciousness. In tacit knowing subsidiary particulars are integrated to form focal wholes.
Gestalt psychology: a movement in the first half of the 20th Century in opposition to introspectionism/empiricism and behaviorism. Polanyi was influenced especially by the anti-reductionism of Köhler, a leading Gestalt thinker, who began his understanding of mental behavior by analyzing the wholes (Gestalten) that are presented within experience. But Polanyi reacted against Köhler’s view that the wholes are created by a process of equilibration that spontaneously follows certain laws of organization. Polanyi augmented Köhler’s theory with his view that effort at achieving coherence is involved in perception and thought. While in his early writings of political organization, Polanyi made use of Köhler’s notion of dynamic order, Polanyi later criticized Köhler’s indifference to whether that order was true or illusory: “I say: gestalt formation is the result of making sense” (“Perspectives of Personal Knowledge,” Polanyi Papers 34:1).
Heuristic passion: a drive to extend one’s understanding of the world. The heuristic act of discovery in humans has evolved from animals’ innate drive to make sense of their surroundings (PK 98). Polanyi speaks of a gradient of increasing coherence which guides discovery; he calls this a “heuristic field” (PK 403). “Intellectual acts of a heuristic kind make an addition to knowledge and are in this sense irreversible, while the ensuing routine performances operate within an existing framework of knowledge and are to this extent reversible” (PK 77).
Hierarchical structure of reality: ontologically different levels that have emerged during the evolution of the cosmos in general and life on earth in particular. Each level obeys its unique set of rules. Basic to Polanyi’s ontology is the “notion of a hierarchy of levels of being, in which higher levels emerge into existence in and through the establishment of new boundary conditions which in turn reorganize elements of the lower level in which they are rooted” (M 176).
Imagination: the creative power of envisioning. “I call all thoughts of things that are not present, or not yet present – or perhaps never to be present – acts of the imagination” (SEP 258). This creative power can be muscular as well as cognitive. “When I intend to lift my arm, this intention is an act of my imagination” (SEP 258). Imagination partners with intuition in creativity and discovery.
Inarticulate learning: feats of a-critical achievement. Polanyi describes trick, sign and latent learning as forms of tacit knowing we share with other animals. See Chapter II A.
Incompatibles: items or event occurring in largely unrelated contexts or at different levels of reality and thus exhibiting no natural coherence. Psychological integration is a non-linear process that can fuse in conception incompatible objects, even those lying in different levels of reality. “The creation of hitherto inconceivable conceptions by the combination of hitherto incompatible features is not, of course, restricted to art, poetry, and religious myth. It is a commonplace in mathematics and modern physics as well” (M 125). The imaginative combination of incompatibles is especially noteworthy with respect to conceiving God “as the focal point that fuses into meaning all the incompatibles involved in the practice of religion . . . [and] all the incompatibles in our own lives” (M 156). Polanyi notes that his use of the term “integration of incompatibles” is reminiscent of Arthur Koestler’s “bisociation” (SEP 358); it can also be traced back to Whitehead’s writings.
Indeterminate/unspecifiable: incapable of being precisely understood or determined. This vagueness is inherent in human consciousness; it is an implication of our reliance on inarticulate learning and unconscious physiological processes. Such processes contribute to thought and action “beneath” our linguistically saturated mentality, which is itself incapable of seamlessly mapping reality. Polanyi points out many indeterminacies involved in our knowing: the bearing that empirical knowledge has upon reality; our rules for establishing coherences that are true; the grounds upon which we think; the process of tacit integration; all the factors contributing to our judgments of truth; and many more (see M 61-62 and PK 316, for instance). The pervasiveness of indeterminacies is one reason that highly formalized thought and the goal of explicit objectivism fail as adequate epistemologies.
Indwelling: the process of interiorizing things in our body so they can function as subsidiaries bearing upon a focal object. “We may say that when we learn to use language, or a probe, or a tool, and thus make ourselves aware of these things as we are of our body, we interiorize these things and make ourselves dwell in them” (KB 148). Indwelling is a feeling-laden type of participation in ideas and objects that in effect extends our bodies, as is evident in the examples of bicycles, hammers, and probes (see Chapter II B). Empathy is possible through indwelling: we come to know another person’s thoughts and emotions by indwelling their words, gestures, and behavior, attending from such bodily behavior to what they mean – what’s “in” their mind. Education is a process of increasing the extent to which we indwell cultural equipment.
Integration: the tacit act of combining two or more particulars into a comprehensive entity or some form of coherence. Three dimensional sight is the result of the integration of the slightly different information supplied by our two eyes. Integration involves the non-linear creation of a whole from parts; it is not an additive process. What is integrated by living beings is meaningful in some way. The notion of integration can be broadened to designate the resultant structure of complex entities – for instance, water is composed of the integration of two hydrogen atoms with one oxygen atom.
Intellectual (mental) passions: the drive to experience the satisfaction of finding coherence in cognition and in solutions to problems. “Passions seek satisfaction and intellectual passions seek intellectual joys. The most general term for this joy is beauty” (SM 37). Polanyi contrasts intellectual with bodily passions (appetites): “[T]he satisfaction of . . . mental passions does not consume or monopolize the objects which gratify it; on the contrary, the gratification of mental passions creates objects destined to gratify the same passions in others” (SM 60). See Chapter IV A.
Intuition: an indeterminate integrative skill that senses coherence. In the solving of a problem, the vague intuition of possible solutions is abetted by the imagination of specific ideas. Polanyi gives different names to roughly comparable sorts of intuitive integration: for instance, anticipatory and final intuition in scientific inquiry (KB 202), strategic and concluding intuition (M 96), and creative intuition (SEP 261). The following passage offers some insight into how broadly Polanyi conceives the processes of intuition. “I have shown how all the proofs and theorems of mathematics have been originally discovered by relying on their intuitive anticipation; how the established results of such discoveries are properly taught, understood, remembered in the form of their intuitively grasped outline; how these results are effectively reapplied and developed further by pondering their intuitive content; and that they can therefore gain our legitimate assent only in terms of our intuitive approval” (PK 188).
Judgment: the “faculty” of decision making, and as such, the fount of responsibility. Per usual, Polanyi is more interested in the action (judging) than the state (judgment). Although Polanyi seems to speak more frequently of believing, indwelling, committing, appraising, accrediting, and knowing than of judging, acts of judgment are involved in each and may be seen as ultimately the most important active component among these terms. “[W]e must accredit our own judgment as the paramount arbiter of all our intellectual performances . . .” (PK 265).
Knowing/knowledge: the action of knowing is more important in Polanyi’s philosophy than the product of such action, namely knowledge (this even though the title of Polanyi’s great work is Personal Knowledge). Polanyi tends to prioritize knowing by acquaintance (arising from the inarticulate learning we share with other animals) over representational knowledge. By emphasizing knowing rather than knowledge, the personal participation of the knower in and relationship to what is known, crucial to Polanyi’s epistemology, is properly acknowledged.
Levels: conceptual and ontological: new higher levels emerge when boundary conditions of lower level phenomena are spontaneously set and appropriated by rules and functions distinct from the rules and functions operating among the particulars at the lower level. Each different level may be seen as having its own ontological integrity (TD 13), but Polanyi acknowledges that strictly speaking often “it is not the emerged higher form of being, but our knowledge of it, that is unspecifiable in terms of its lower level particulars” (PK 393-394). Thus he distinguishes between conceptually different levels of knowing and ontologically different levels of existence. A new conceptual level emerges when a higher level makes use of (but is not reducible to) a lower level, as evident in the difference between a sound and a spoken word. Polanyi speaks of separate ontological levels when each is marked by self-sustaining operational principles (PK 394). Clearly the laws governing inert matter are ontologically distinct from the functions characteristic of a living being. Regardless, what is important to recognize is that reality has a relational and hierarchical structure, not whether a specific level happens to be ontological or conceptual.
Liberalism: the view, grounded in Enlightenment thought and distinct from contemporary American political liberalism, that emphasizes the liberty of the individual as the foundation of individual satisfaction and social progress. Polanyi appreciates the accomplishments of liberalism but also recognizes the important role of public authority to provide the rules and regulations that direct liberal actions so that they may jointly support the good of society. Because of this appeal to the common good of society as well as for other reasons, it is clear that Polanyi’s economic and political views should not be equated with classical Liberalism. See Chapter IV G.
Logic: formal or informal rules of right reasoning. Polanyi thinks formal logic is of limited usefulness. He broadens the notion of logic to include such personal acts as tacit inference, reasoning by analogy, and a logic of discovery. For him logic includes the actions of a person carrying out deductions and the grounds upon which assumptions are based. His use of this informal notion of logic brought Polanyi’s thought into disrepute among many in the analytic tradition – especially in its earlier phases when symbolic logic was seen as an ideal mode of clear and effective thinking. Polanyi denies that the operations of a formalized deductive system are equivalent to the operations of a mind, and the latter takes precedence in his view. Thus he would not feel that his philosophical stance is effectively critiqued if it were accused of psychologism. “I think it is logically fallacious to speak of a complete elimination of what have been called ‘psychological’ but might better be called ‘unformalized’ elements of deductive systems” (SEP 310).
Marginal control: the constraints placed by a higher level organizational principle on lower level particulars and their properties, forming boundary conditions available for use by the higher level. “Thus each level is subject to dual control; first by the laws that apply to its elements in themselves and, second, by the laws that control the comprehensive entity formed by them” (KB 154).
Meaning: in one basic sense, the focal product arising from the integration of subsidiaries. Polanyi borrowed his part-whole understanding of meaning from Gestalt psychology, but altered gestalt thought in several ways. “[M]y theory of meaning differs from gestalt psychology by including the effort of achieving a solid real coherence and also the risk of going astray in our judgment of coherence” ( Meaning Lectures, Polanyiana 15:1-2, 93). Language is a key component of personal meaning. In evoking the right words to express oneself, one endows the chosen words with meaning, while their grammatical integration is their joint meaning. Words, of course, have conventional meanings of their own, as do all sorts of cultural symbols. Beyond the personal meaning we create and the conventional meanings we make use of, there exist in the relations of encompassing reality cosmic meanings we seek to uncover. See Chapter V E.
Metaphor: created by giving the name (idea) of one thing to something else so that an intuitive grasp of similarity in dissimilarity is evoked. The creative metaphor has power because both the tenor and vehicle employed in a metaphor are of interest, but even more because their creative joint meaning is of existential interest. “As in the symbol, so in the metaphor: the subsidiary clues – consisting of all those inchoate experiences in our own lives that are related to the two parts of a metaphor – are integrated into the meaning of a tenor and vehicle as they are related to each other in a focal object (a metaphor)” (M 78-79). Metaphors expand the reach of personal knowing. See Chapter V F 3.
Mind-body problem: classical problem, dominating early modern philosophy, of how the mental is related to the physical. Polanyi, like the great majority of contemporary thinkers, rejects Cartesian mind-body substance dualism. However, he embraces a unique sort of dual aspect theory by speaking of two ways of regarding the body. One can view the body and its behavior as an object of perception. Or one can think of the body in its subsidiary function: as that from which we perceive, think, and act. The body seen focally is indeed the material body; the body and its functioning known subsidiarily is a person’s mind (“Logic and Psychology,” 34). Polanyi does not explore specific mental processes like introspection and self consciousness; his comments about mental processes are quite general: “[I]t is plausible to assume that explicit mental operations are based on fixed neural networks, while tacit integrations are grounded mainly in organizing fields” (KB 219).
Moral inversion: the concept Polanyi uses to explain the sources of the world wars and 20th Century violence. Moral inversion represents a utopian, perfectionist passion for moral righteousness and justice linked to a radical skepticism about the legitimacy of any appeal to traditional moral norms to guide that passion. Thus, for instance, Russian Communists and German Nazis felt no compunction about using immoral means in pursuit of their utopian goals, since traditional moral restraints were supposed to serve vested and unjust interests. “This is moral inversion: a condition in which high moral purpose operates only as the hidden force of an openly declared inhumanity” (KB 16). See Chapter IV B.
Moral judgments: appraisals powered by a thirst for righteousness and to which universal validity is attributed. “Moral judgments cut much deeper than intellectual valuations. . . . Moral rules control our whole selves rather than the exercise of our faculties” (PK 214-215). Polanyi understands morality to be embedded in a person’s socially grounded, overarching structure of commitment with its devotion to transcendent values; he gives little attention such typical moral fare as developing a set of principles or seeking the best argument to resolve a moral dilemma. Indeed, he believes excessive perfectionism and utopianism, when compounded with a scientistic skepticism, led to the great disasters of the 20th Century. See Chapter VI E.
Nihilism: the denial that there are universal social values worthy of respect. In denying that there is any objective transpersonal basis for moral claims, the nihilist tends to retreat into an egocentricity extolling willfulness and the satisfaction of appetite as the highest good. Polanyi blames a false view of science as encouraging nihilistic world views. Through holding up the exact sciences as the model of all knowledge, positivism and other forms of scientific objectivism have promoted a fact-value split that has made moral judgment seem to have only subjective, emotive worth. Positivists devalue anything lacking the empirical grounding of the exact sciences, and the resulting rampant skepticism about moral claims has contributed to the rise of nihilism and its destructive cousin, moral inversion.
Objectivism: the view that the ideal of science and other types of inquiry is to achieve an impersonally available, wholly explicit, exact knowledge uncontaminated by any personal or subjective component, such as unexamined beliefs. Polanyi found this ideal of impersonal exactitude to be not only impossible – asserting instead that all knowing is personal – but heuristically and socially destructive. “If explicit rules can operate only by virtue of a tacit coefficient, the ideal of exactitude has to be abandoned” (SFS 10). However, the goal of seeking intersubjective objectivity, rather than subjective illusion, is affirmed by Polanyi.
Objectivity: evidence-based agreement, arising out of shared contact with reality, and affirmed in properly authoritative circles. In contrast to the ideal of objectivism, for Polanyi intersubjective objectivity is a good to be sought.
Ordering (organizational) principle: a general account that explains how a specific sort of order arises. Evolution is an ordering principle that Polanyi thinks is incomplete in its standard neo-Darwinian form because natural selection by itself cannot explain the creative progress that the rise of life witnesses to (PK 383-385). Polanyi’s groping for an evolutionary ordering principle seems like it would now be satisfied by complexity theory, which includes such ideas as feedback loops, fractal growth, and especially self-organization (already illustrated by Polanyi through his idea of spontaneous order).
Operational principle: an explanation of the functions a machine or a living being uses to achieve a certain end. “These operational principles include the definition of the parts composing the machine and give an account of their several functions in the working of the machine; they also state the purpose which the machine is to serve” (TD 39). The operational principles of healthy organisms “have the same structure as those of pure engineering: they analyse the joint functioning of different bodily organs in the successful achievement of certain purposes” (SM 53-54). As purposive and subject to success or failure, operational principles cannot be reductively accounted for in terms of the laws governing lower levels.
Passions: drives seeking fulfillment and felt satisfaction. Polanyi speaks of bodily passions (appetites), intellectual passions (including selective, heuristic, and persuasive passions), and the passion fueling moral judgment. “The personal participation of the knower in the knowledge he believes himself to possess takes place within a flow of passion” (PK 300). See Chapter IV A.
Personal: Polanyi’s term for the active, responsive agency of selfhood, grounded in tacit processes, which necessarily enter into all acts of knowing. “In so far as the personal submits to requirements acknowledged by itself as independent of itself, it is not subjective; but in so far as it is an action guided by individual passions, it is not objective either. It transcends the disjunction between subjective and objective” (PK 300). The personal pole is connected to the universal pole in the structure of commitment, and one participates in greater personal depth in the arts and humanities than in the sciences.
Polycentrism: the dynamic interconnectedness of the components in a system. The polycentric task is to understand how all the components respond to systemic pressures. An informal example (a system of spontaneous order) is how an organism achieves balance by “reacting to the whole range of impulses that reach it from all the ‘centres’ which it jointly takes into account” (LL 217). A formal (mathematically precise) example would be how an engineer calculates the strain when a building’s framework is put under a certain stress. An economic system, involving a vast number of free and imperfectly predictable decisions, is only theoretically formalizable. In contrast to the imposition of order from a single top-down source in corporate order, in polycentric order the authority for decision making is seated in all the significant centers of activity, so that the proximity between decision and consequence is close at hand and more appropriately responsive to complex circumstances than is possible through command.
Positivism: a 19th and early 20th Century movement in science and philosophy that held that all true knowledge is based on the properties and relations of matter as verified in the natural sciences. The rigorous precision of physics was upheld as an ideal for all systems of knowledge. Polanyi attacked the detached objectivism found in behaviorism and scientism as well as positivism. Positivism supported an assumption that all claims of knowledge outside of science were little more than subjective opinion or arbitrary preference. Such scientific skepticism, when parlayed with moral passion, fostered the moral inversion that devastated civilization.
Post-critical: the title Polanyi gives to his philosophy. The critical movement, at the heart of modernism, arose in opposition to what it thought were the mind-stifling tendencies of medieval orthodoxy which it combated via critical doubt. According to Polanyi, critical modernism produced unprecedented material, social and intellectual progress. But in upholding as an ideal the autonomous individual unburdened by tradition, modernism gradually alienated humans from their embodied, emotional, believing selves. The post-critical stance returns humans to their full humanity by affirming the personal participation of the knower in all intellectual endeavors and modifies the objectivist ideal of science without jettisoning science itself. It recognizes the necessity of belief, our reliance on embodied tacit powers, our social nature, and the joy of commitment. “No intelligence, however critical or original, can operate outside such a fiduciary framework” (PK 266). See Chapter VI Summary Statement.
Proximal/distal: in the from-to structure of consciousness, the proximal is what we attend from and the distal is what we attend to.
Public liberty: free actions that promote the public good. Polanyi contrasts public with private liberty. The latter is the freedom to act as one will so long as what one carries out does not significantly impact the freedom of other individuals. Private freedom is a good, but it is of relatively little interest to Polanyi since it can exist even under a dictatorship. Public liberty, on the other hand, is crucial to good governance. It flourishes in a social milieu that allows free individuals to mutually adjust their actions to the actions of others, thus achieving spontaneous order. Scientists pursuing knowledge within the community of scientists and judges ruling according to common law are examples of persons exercising public liberty through work having appropriate transparency and public benefit. See Chapter IV E for a more detailed account.
Reality: that which is capable of manifesting itself in indeterminate and surprising ways in the future. Polanyi, reflecting on his experiences of scientific discovery, tends to speak of external reality as hidden behind a screen of empirical appearances (SM 20), existing independently of human consciousness (SEP 339, PK 363), and being capable of indeterminate future manifestations. But his considered notion of reality does not exclude the products of human imagination from consideration – as long as they have the power to impact future experience. Indeed, cultural items play a major role in his considered notion of reality, for he accords significance greater importance than tangibility in designating something as real. Thus Polanyi’s understanding of reality is catholic in scope: it transcends any fact-value dichotomy. What is real is also intrinsically relational. It requires personal relationship to become, and be recognized for, what it is. We cannot make meaningful reference to any of the aspects of something real apart from at least hypothetically assuming some means of our apprehending and making sense of them. Reality exists at the universal pole of personal knowing and functions as a lure for committed and meaningful engagement. See Chapter V A.
Responsibility: capacity to be answerable for the actions we take and judgments we make. Polanyi is concerned that our highest values not be seen to be reducible to egocentric rationalizations, parochial politics, or prejudicial socialization. “If we are to vindicate human responsibility against the compulsions exercised by man’s social setting, we shall have to establish first the existence of a mind capable of making decisions of its own within a human body” (SM 43). A person’s post-critical stance of commitment with universal intent as influenced by transcendent values frees the person from the power of egocentric appetite and social pressure. Responsible judgment is grounded in tacit assent and articulated through our “faculty of exercising discretion, subject to obligations accepted and fulfilled by itself with universal intent” (PK 312).
Rules of rightness: the standards defining the successful functioning of a machine or some function of a living being. When the operational principle of a machine is fully realized, it functions as an ideal against which the functioning of similar machines can be judged. “The operational principles of machines [or bodily organs] are therefore rules of rightness, which account only for the successful working of machines but leave their failures entirely unexplained” (PK 329). The laws of the hard sciences are blind to both success and failure of operational principles, which exist at a different level of reality. However, they can explain the failure of a machine to operate in accordance with its intended operational principles.
Science – true and false views: the explicit accounts of science held and propagated during much of the past century include a veneration of objectivism in its various forms (including positivism, scientism, and behaviorism), a rigid demarcation between processes of discovery and verification, and the belief that there is a specific method of scientific procedure. Based on his own experience as a physical chemist, Polanyi insisted that a personal element is found in all knowing. This undermines any inflexible objective-subjective or fact-value dichotomy. Contemporary accounts of science have not only assimilated many of the points about science Polanyi raised, but some postmodern interpretations have gone to the opposite extreme from objectivism by interpreting the scientific enterprise as a species of completely subjective social constructivism. Much of Chapter III expounds Polanyi’s extreme-avoiding understanding of what is true and what is false about science.
Self-centered versus self-giving integration: In somewhat confusing language, Polanyi calls the processes whereby we perceive objects in everyday life “self-centered.” By this he does not mean self-interested or egocentric; self-centered integrations are projected away from the self as a center, and interest is located in the object of focal attention. “By contrast, symbolizations are self-giving” (M 74). In self-giving integrations, some vital personal concern is evoked, and we identify deeply with the meaning of the focal object. Symbols, metaphors, and values are examples of entities that call forth self-giving surrender to meanings of personal interest. Likewise, experiences of great art or religion may involve self-giving integrations.
Self-set standards: norms of thought and behavior that arise out of one’s passion for universality. As originating in biological endowments, cultural heritage, and particularly personal experience, passion and trusted beliefs, the standards one affirms are personal and fallible. But as one strives for truth with universal intent, the standards involved in such a quest transcend the merely subjective or arbitrary. They then contribute to a person’s conscience. Self-set standards become evident within the post-critical stance of commitment and serve as experience-based, tacitly-rooted guides to action. Because of their rootedness, the “paradox of self-set standards is eliminated, for in a competent mental act the agent does not do as he pleases, but compels himself forcibly to act as he believes he must. He can do no more, and he would evade his calling by doing less” (PK 315).
Specifiable/unspecifiable: describes what can or cannot be made explicit. Polanyi states, “Subsidiary awareness and focal awareness are mutually exclusive” (PK 56). If so, then one cannot specify – at the same moment that one is focally aware of something – what the subsidiaries are that are being integrated to form or bring into focus the focal object. In some circumstances, one may retrospectively determine what some of the subsidiaries are by switching focal attention to them, but this new focal awareness will fracture the previous focal meaning, as when a pianist shifts attention from the music she is playing to her fingers and loses the melody. The new focal awareness will, of course, be supported by new subsidiaries. Some deeply embodied tacit skills may be in principle forever unspecifiable.
Spontaneous order: self-organized order rather than imposed order. Polanyi took the notion of dynamic order from Köhler, eventually renamed it spontaneous order, and contrasted it with top-down intentional organization which he called corporate order. Spontaneous order consists in “the spontaneous mutual adjustment of the units; not by specific assignment of the several units to positions in a prearranged plan” (“The Growth of Thought in Society,” 432). It is the order introduced by polycentrism. The way water molecules settle in a jug and the way buyers and sellers adjust supply and demand in a market are among the examples Polanyi gives of spontaneous order. Polanyi argues that a free society can operate successfully on the model of spontaneous order so long as rules and regulations are put in place to keep the overall processes of politics, economics and social change reasonably in balance and promote the overall good of society. See Chapter IV C.
Subjective (vs. objective): a term (subjective) used in three different ways by Polanyi. First, he sometimes praises objective representations as depicting an object that is intersubjectively accepted as true (see objectivity above), whereas representations or claims are described as subjective when they fail to garner intersubjective acceptance and instead seem to introduce distortions because of prejudice, carelessness, an individualistic agenda, etc. Subjective experiences typically arise when self-interest governs one’s thoughts and actions or one uses a fallacious framework (PK 362, 374). Secondly, Polanyi contrasts “subjective states, in which we merely endure our feelings” (PK 300) with objectivity as that which is independent of ourselves (PK 300). The subjective states he has in mind are such experiences as feeling hot or tired or bored or in pain. In addition to such fairly conventional meanings of subjective and objective, Polanyi contrasts personal knowing as actively pursuing truth within the post-critical stance of commitment with subjectivity as remaining in passivity or detachment outside the structure of commitment. Within the structure of commitment, a responsible personal pole is connected to an objective pole in a passionate quest for understanding, for truth. Outside the structure of commitment, both objective and subjective entities, each understood in the second sense, are experienced as relatively meaningless or may even be invisible: life is just “one damn thing after another.”
Subsidiaries: particulars that function as clues to a focal object. “While an object on which we are focusing our attention is always identifiable, the clues through which we are attending to the object may be often unspecifiable. We may well be uncertain of clues seen from the corner of our eyes and we cannot experience in themselves at all such subliminal clues as, for instance, the effort at contracting our eye muscles” (SEP 252).
Symbol: that which has the power to evoke experiences of existential significance. Polanyi uses “symbol” in Personal Knowledge and elsewhere in its common sense meaning as an entity standing for something which it signifies. But in Meaning he uses the word in a narrower, more technical sense: it is an entity which in a self-giving integration refers to something that has great personal emotional significance – a flag, a crucifix, a special tombstone. “The symbol, as an object of our focal awareness, is not merely established by an integration of subsidiary clues directed from the self to a focal object; it is also established by surrendering the diffuse memories and experiences of the self into this object, thus giving them a visible embodiment” (M 74-75). See Chapter V F 2.
Tacit knowing: that inarticulate understanding or skillful doing that we may be aware of but cannot explain in words. All human action depends on tacit processes or abilities such as the inarticulate intelligence we share with other animals (trick, sign, and latent learning – see Chapter II A). Integration and evocation are particularly important processes of tacit knowing. Polanyi’s well-known formula highlighting the importance of tacit knowing is “We can know more than we can tell” (PK x). His general formula for tacit knowing is influenced by his experiences of scientific discovery. “This is the dynamics of tacit knowing: the questing imagination vaguely anticipating experiences not yet grounded in subsidiary particulars evokes these subsidiaries and thus implements the experience the imagination has sought to achieve” (KB 199-200). See Chapter II B.
Teleology: the doctrine that (often unconscious) purpose and achievement are immanent in nature. Polanyi sees purpose first coming into being in the survival strategies of primeval living beings. In opposition to the denial of teleology among some scientists, he describes the evolutionary trajectory of anthropogenesis in Part IV of Personal Knowledge as a teleological flowering. “A theory of knowledge based on tacit knowing does not require that we purify science of references to mind or to the finalistic structure of living beings” (KB 157).
Totalitarianism: a form of government that prohibits any effective public liberty, although it may permit a considerable degree of private liberty. Totalitarian leaders typically claim that their government “completely represents all the collective interests of the community, [and it] must reject the rival claims of individuals to act independently for the benefit of society” (“The Growth of Thought in Society,” 438).
Tradition: while agreeing with the usual notion of tradition as a cultural framework of thought and practice handed down from generation to generation, Polanyi does not concede that traditions founded upon General Authority are necessarily conservative forces opposing change and progress. Yes, traditions serve persons as bases for socialization, continuity, and identity, but Polanyi sees traditions as capable (especially when oriented about truth) of accommodating new insights and even of self-transformation. In any case, contra the Enlightenment rejection of traditions, Polanyi sees them as the virtually indispensable source for the ideals and practices of science and culture in general. “[E]ach of us must start his intellectual development by accepting uncritically a large number of traditional premises of a particular kind; and that, however far we may advance thence by our own efforts, our progress will always remain restricted to a limited set of conclusions which is accessible from our original premises” (SFS 83).
Truth: an understanding of the way things are (and an implied gesture toward the way things ought to be) for any competent knower. Polanyi at one point calls truth “the rightness of an action” (PK 320). This radical claim is not so much a definition of truth as it is Polanyi’s invitation to consider truthfulness as crucial to human flourishing, as the pivotal value in life comparable to goodness in Plato. To be right, truth-seeking actions must meet several conditions according to Polanyi. They must take place within the post-critical stance of commitment. In consequence, they must be carried out in awareness of one’s calling – the context for responsible action. They must involve cognizance of the transcendent values and the immanent standards that apply to the circumstances and goals at hand. When these conditions are met, then what is crucial is apt engagement with reality. “[T]he truth of a proposition lies in its bearing on reality” (KB 172). In the quest for truth one seeks out coherences in focal objects and coherence between what one engages in perception, thought, or action and one’s framework of understanding. One seeks to ensure there is a proper correspondence between one assertions and what is referred to. And one judges all one’s actions in terms of their pragmatic progress towards one’s overarching aims as qualified by the appropriate values and standards. In view of the above, it might prove useful to speak of the pursuit of truth as a verb: truthing (this being the editor’s suggestion, not Polanyi’s). See Chapter VI C.
Ultrabiology: the extension of biology beyond the observation of life processes and physiology to include appreciation of the various sorts of biological achievements culminating in the appraisal of responsible commitments that assess humans’ ways of disposing of themselves. “[B]iology can be extended by continuous stages into epistemology, and more generally, into the justification of my own fundamental commitments. And so this ultrabiology went on extending further into the acknowledgment of all my obligations” (PK 387).
Understanding: a term Polanyi uses in The Study of Man and sometimes elsewhere for the most comprehensive form of knowing. By including the integrations and particulars involved in tacit knowing as well as the explicit products of integrations, it is far more encompassing than the conventional empiricist conception of knowledge. “I have now expanded the function of understanding into that of knowing what we intend, what we mean, or what we do” (SM 22).
Universal intent: a quality of assertions, worthy of any competent truth-seeker, based upon serious inquiry and offered in the post-critical stance of commitment. A person speaks with universal intent when convinced of the truth of what she or he says. “I speak not of established universality, but of a universal intent, for the scientist cannot know whether his claims will be accepted” (TD 18).
Values: things/states of intrinsic worth, or qualities instrumental to something sought. Polanyi is wary of over-intellectualizing values by seeing them as some sort of deliberately chosen objects. “They enter subsidiarily, embodied in creative action. Only after this can they be spelled out and professed in abstract terms and this makes them appear to have been deliberately chosen, which is absurd” (SEP 263).
Verification and validation: verification applies to the demonstration of the correctness of a theory or law in science, whereas validation is a more general appreciation and acceptance of the cogency of thought or practice in such non-scientific realms as the arts and humanities. “Our personal participation is in general greater in a validation than in a verification” (PK 202). When a scientific claim is set forth, the uncertainties surrounding it typically demand a creative clarification in the process of verification, not just a simple replication of an experiment. “[A]ny critical verification of a scientific statement requires the same powers for recognizing rationality in nature as does the process of scientific discovery . . .” (PK 13). Both verification and validation are carried out in the post-critical stance of commitment as one pursues truth with universal intent. See Chapter II C 6.
Visionary art: Polanyi’s term for the sort of art that has been associated with non-literal movements in the various arts and has been called symbolism, intuitionism, and formalism in the domain of poetry. Polanyi mentions that in painting, what he calls visionary art began mildly enough with Impressionism and proceeded through such movements as Futurism, Fauvism, Expressionism, Suprematism, Dada, and Surrealism to the several varieties of abstraction. Similar movements have occurred in music, theater, and film. The point of such artistic creations, according to Polanyi, is not to represent some external reality, but to engage the imagination in a creative act that comprehends the presented details in one vision. Modern art has “accentuated the decomposition of meaning by crying out against [noble sentiments], but its power to transcend this decomposition by new ranges of visionary experience has revealed to us new worlds of the imagination” (M 116). See Chapter V, Summary Selections, for more details about how Polanyi interprets meaning in the arts.