29 July 2022 Zoom Presentation
I want to put “Rules of Rightness” into the context of the development of Polanyi’s ideas. I am regularly digging into history and this lecture fits into a particular history.
This is the fifth of an eight-lecture series in 1954 at the U. of Chicago Lecture Series that has been lost.
–In 2009, Walt Gulick discovered lecture seven (“Persons”) in the Karl Polanyi Archives in Canada but the copy in Bill Scott’s materials was dated 1945 (a typographical error). This was published in TAD 34 (3) in 2010.
–In 2021, Alessio Tartaro discovered lectures five and six (“Rules of Rightness” and “Knowing Life”) in the newly updated web materials of the Karl Polanyi Archives. These lectures were delivered Feb. 4 and 11, 1954 on the first or second return visit of Polanyi to the University of Chicago after the debacle of his exclusion from the US in the McCarthy era (and his effort to take a job teaching in the Committee for Social Thought at the University of Chicago).
Lectures 1-4—Polanyi says in his opening lines of “Rules for Rightness” that these preceding lectures are concerned with “the bearing of a formalism on the facts of experience” and this bearing can only be established “by the personal participation of the scientist.”
Lecture 5—“Rules of Rightness”
Lecture 6—”Knowing Life”
Lecture 7—“Persons” available in TAD 36 (3).
Lecture 8—??
Themes about “personal participation.”
–Presumably treated in Lectures 1-4 but also central to “Rules of Rightness.”
–Treated heavily inPolanyi’s Gifford Lectures (1951 and 1952 but note dates on posted lectures—some are revised versions) and particularly in (1) Gifford II, Lecture Six, “Skills and Connoisseurship” (published independently in 1952 and this publication is closer to Gifford II. 6 than PK Chapter 4) and (2) Gifford II, Lecture 7 “Two Kinds of Awareness” (the lecture that develops “subsidiary” and “focal” awareness and identified by Polanyi and Grene as a stepping stone for later discussion). Some paragraphs in “Rules of Rightness” seem to come directly from Gifford Lectures. But the term “rules of rightness” seems to be a new Polanyi term in this 1954 lecture.
–Treated heavily in October of 1949: Polanyi was a participant in a University of Manchester “Mind and the Computing Machine” seminar which included not only Alan Turing, but Max Newman, Maurice Bartlett and Bernhard Neumann (also mathematicians), Dorothy Emmet, Wolfe Mays (philosophers), the neurologists Geoffrey Jefferson and J. Z. Young, and others. There is a literature on this conference and Polanyi’s participation in it (i.e., materials by Mays and Peter Blum).
—-In the archival MPP, there is “Can the mind be represented by a machine?” (subtitled “Notes for discussion on 27 October 1949,” but dated 13 September 1949, Polanyi’s notes prepared before the seminar. Polanyi later wrote and published in 1951“The Hypothesis of Cybernetics,” a 3-page comment that was part of a broader discussion of cybernetics by several philosophers in the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. The published artcle seems to recycle the earlier notes and argues that machines (including computers understood as formalized deductive systems) don’t have minds but people do. It is “logically fallacious to speak of a complete elimination. . . [of] ‘unformalised’ elements of deductive systems” (Polanyi, 1951, 312). Polanyi discusses the importance of the function of “unformalised supplements” provided by any human being using a deductive system, designating these the “‘semantic operations’ of the formalized system” (Polanyi, 1951, 313).
–All of this lies behind “Rules of Rightness” and in part this earlier work is recycled in the lecture itself. All of this is, more or less, again recycled in PK, in various places, particularly in Chapter 11 (“The Logic of Achievement,” especially section 2) and Chapter 13 (“The Rise of Man”).
Themes concerning more general conclusions about all systems of rules. MP applies his conclusions to machines but also to logic, ethics and, more broadly, other components of human life in a social order. Operational principles of machines (or other ordered systems) have a normative character (they are “rules of rightness”) to which always at least some persons are committed. And that commitment may be overtly expressed or expressed in unformalized performances (i.e., tacitly).
Themes concerning matters of causality as distinguished from issues concerned with reasons. Causality is concerned with how particulars come together or interact or jointly constitute a real comprehensive entity (i.e., one that has indeterminate future manifestations for those who inquiry and understand the entity). The causal interaction of particulars themselves, Polanyi contends, have “no normative intent.” Reason is concerned with the purpose of what is and entails “rules of rightness” which necessarily implicates some person who accepts a certain purpose and is thus committed.
From these themes, eventually Polanyi works out (by 1962, according to the third 1966 Wilken Polanyi interview) his ideas about boundary control or the principle of marginal control. This is a significant development in his hierarchical ontology in Polanyi’s view according to this interview. It is about 1962 that Polanyi begins to point to the “ontological aspect” or “reference”) as an aspect of the theory of tacit knowing. TD calls the “ontological aspect” a “deduction” from other aspects.
Themes concerning different degrees (or perhaps kinds) of personal participation. At the end of the lecture, Polanyi emphasizes the kinship of “is” and “ought” and the key to this kinship seems to be degrees (or perhaps kinds) of “personal participation.”