CHAPTER FIVE
5.3 Understanding the Tacit Dimension
5.3.1 Introduction
In his critique of the Enlightenment’s intellectual heritage and the twentieth century move by philosophers to embrace logical positivism, Polanyi put forth what he termed a ‘fiduciary framework’ for the discovery of knowledge.12
He set out to show a relationship between the objective and subjective poles of knowing and argued that all knowing functions within such a fiduciary framework. Polanyi cited Augustine’s dictum: nisi crederitis, non intelligitis (unless you believe, you will not understand),13 thus recognizing belief as the source of all knowledge:
11 Newbigin suggests that ‘the only hermeneutic of the gospel is a congregation of men and women who
believe it and live by it’ (1989:227). He reminds his readers that ‘Jesus did not write a book but formed a community… [the community] becomes the place where men and women and children find that the gospel gives them the framework of understanding, the “lenses” through which they are able to understand and cope with the world’ (227). Newbigin challenges congregations to renounce an introverted perspective and to ‘recognise that they exist for the sake of those who are not members, as sign, instrument, and foretaste of God’s redeeming grace for the whole life of society’ (1989:233).
12
By ‘fiduciary’ Polanyi indicates that such a framework of knowing disavows the ideal of total objectivity and recognises a knower’s dependence on faith commitments. He says of his work Personal Knowledge: ‘the purpose of this book is to show that complete objectivity as usually attributed to the exact sciences is a delusion and is in fact a false ideal’ (Polanyi 1958:18). At times Polanyi also refers to a ‘fiduciary programme’ (1958:18, 299). ‘Programme’ refers to Polanyi’s epistemological project and ‘framework’ refers to a person’s epistemology.
13 From Augustine’s De libero arbitrio, 1.4 (also 2.6). ‘… [Polanyi] was committed to restore the priority
of belief even in science: he loved to recall the Augustinian statement, “Unless you believe, you will not understand”’ (Torrance gently corrects Polanyi’s attribution of the phrase and claims it derives from Clement of Alexandria). See T. F. Torrance, ‘Michael Polanyi and the Christian Faith—A Personal Report’ TAD 27/2:26-33.
Tacit assent and intellectual passions, the sharing of an idiom and a cultural heritage, affiliation to a like-minded community: such are the impulses which shape our vision of the nature of things on which we rely for our mastery of things. No intelligence, however critical or original, can operate outside such a fiduciary framework. (Polanyi 1958:265-6)
Cardinal Dulles took to heart Polanyi’s insight that all thought depends in some way on a fiduciary commitment.
It will leap to mind of anyone who has read even a few pages of Polanyi that his doctrine of the fiduciary component in human knowledge has immense significance for theology. According to Polanyi, all acts of comprehensive knowledge either are or depend upon faith, in the sense of a free commitment to that which could conceivably be false. If this thesis is true, theology, as the work of faith seeking understanding, is not an anomaly among the cognitive disciplines. Religious ideas are acquired, developed, tested and reformed by methods at least analogous to those pursued in the natural and social sciences. (Dulles 1984:537)
My own interest in Polanyi’s theory of knowledge vis-a-vis Christian mission seeks to connect Polanyian epistemology with mission theology. How does one communicate meaning across cultural divides? How can one discern, in a cross-cultural setting or encounter, that the Christian gospel has been translated fruitfully? What skills must missioners learn in order to become effective translators? How can these skills be taught from masters to apprentices? Can Polanyi’s terms and concepts be utilised fruitfully to describe Christian mission as translation?
Michael Polanyi’s multiple notions of discovery, fiduciary frameworks, the tacit component, embodiment, indwelling, apprenticeship, and the society of explorers all promise to yield insights for mapping mission as translation.14 Newbigin championed Polanyi’s category of the fiduciary framework as a more responsible way of thinking about knowing. He also recognised Polanyi’s key insight having to do with the structure of tacit knowing.15 It is this second insight about Polanyi’s tacit dimension that has the
14 By ‘embodiment’ Polanyi emphasises the view that a knowing person is embodied and that a human
being uses the body as well as one’s mind to perceive and to know. By ‘indwelling’ Polanyi refers to personal participation. One may accept a set of presuppositions and thus ‘dwell in them even as we do in our own body’ (Polanyi 1958:60).
15Polanyi gives particular attention to his notion of the tacit dimension in three books: Personal
Knowledge (1958:69-243), The Study of Man (1959:29-30), and The Tacit Dimension (1966) and in several essays: ‘Knowing and Being’ (1961), ‘Tacit Knowing: Its Bearing on Some Problems of Philosophy’ (1962), ‘The Logic of Tacit Inference’ (1966), and ‘Sense-Giving and Sense-Reading’ (1967). The four essays are collected in a volume edited by Marjorie Grene and titled, Knowing and Being (1969), and they represent Polanyi’s most developed thought about tacit knowing.
potential to guide translators of the Christian gospel in their work of paying attention to various patterns of meaning. I will show how the tacit dimension of personal knowing offers particular insight for detailing fruitful gospel and culture encounters in the work of Christian mission.
Polanyi’s path to developing his philosophy of personal knowledge and articulating the structure of tacit knowing began with the notion of discovery. He became interested in the way of scientific discovery as a practicing chemistry researcher. He wondered how scientists discover findings and articulate theories about this observable universe. The choice of a good problem is a necessary starting point. Significant discoveries only come from tackling good problems. In chapter 4 of Personal Knowledge Polanyi begins his discussion on ‘skills’ by claiming that one may understand the scientist’s personal participation in knowing by examining the scientist’s skills. ‘I shall take as my clue for this investigation the well-known fact that the aim of a skilful performance is achieved
by the observance of a set of rules which are not known as such to the person following them [emphasis is original]’ (Polanyi 1958:49).
The nature of scientific discovery or the practice of an arts discipline cannot be delineated in sufficient detail to be transmitted by prescription according to Polanyi. Such rules or prescriptions do not exist. They belong to the tradition, and the tradition continues as insights are passed from master to apprentice. Polanyi goes on to say that an artist’s work or a scientist’s discovery effort or a physician’s diagnosis of disease all depend upon skills. Similarly, connoisseurship, like skill, depends on example, practice, and apprenticeship (54-5).16 In all of these realms of practice, discovery depends upon knowledge that largely remains unspecifiable (50-55).
16 Polanyi cites as examples of connoisseurship: the wine taster, the expert on tea blends, and the medical
diagnostician (Polanyi 1958:54). Polanyi’s life in Manchester, England, led him to the shipyards where experts graded kinds of cotton, and he observed yet another set of connoisseurs. Cf. Ruel Tyson’s account in an audio conversation about Polanyi (Witmer 1999).
Polanyi eventually describes tacit knowing with the aphorism, ‘we know more than we can tell’ (1966b:4).And our articulation fails to keep up with our knowledge because in addition to our focal awareness and explicit knowledge we operate with a ‘subsidiary awareness’ and an implicit knowledge. Torrance explains that Polanyi’s solution to Plato’s problem in the Meno lies in what he calls ‘a tacit foreknowledge of yet undiscovered things’. He argues that Polanyi’s tacit dimension or foreknowledge is not ‘some kind of preconception’ or some a priori knowledge but is, rather, an intuitive insight, ‘the insight of a mind formed by intuitive contact with reality’. He likens this to the Greek notion of prolepsis, ‘a proleptic conception, an anticipatory glimpse, a tenuous and subtle outreach of understanding with a forward thrust in cognition of something quite new’ (Torrance 1984:113-4). Polanyi’s overall scheme of knowing is aptly summarised by Esther Meeks in the following statement: ‘Knowing is the responsible human struggle to rely on clues to focus on a coherent pattern and submit to its reality’ (Meeks 2003:13).
5.3.2 Lessons from Phenomenology and Gestalt Psychology
i. Embodiment
In order to learn about the knowing process Polanyi examined aspects of creative imagination that produced discoveries. He found clues from the world of Gestalt psychology and the philosophical school of Phenomenology. Polanyi read Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Phenomenology of Perception, 1945) in order to understand the importance of perception and to appreciate the significant role of embodiment for the human knower.17 In contrast to the Cartesian emphasis on the cogito and the notion of a
17 The Gestalt notion of ‘wholes and parts’ influenced Polanyi’s idea of a person’s subsidiary awareness
of particulars. He saw the human body with limbs, eyes, ears and other parts as a paradigmatic example of a whole (body) and particulars (body parts). Furthermore, he understood the person as an embodied agent who relies on a ‘subsidiary awareness of processes withing [one’s] own body’ to apprehend one’s environment (Polanyi 1958:57-62). Torrance insists that Polanyi never saw himself as a phenomenalist (Torrance 2000-2001:30).
mind-body dualism, Merleau-Ponty insisted that human personhood is bound up with both mind and body. Polanyi’s own position is summed up by the following passage:
The way the body participates in the act of perception can be generalized further to include the bodily roots of all knowledge and thought. Our body is the only assembly of things known almost exclusively by relying on our awareness of them for attending to something else … Every time we make sense of the world, we rely on our tacit knowledge of impacts made by the world on our body and the complex responses of our body to these impacts. (Polanyi in Grene 1969:147)
Polanyi went on to posit that the use of tools and probes function as extensions to the body of the knowing person. ‘We pour ourselves out into them [tools] and assimilate them as parts of our own existence. We accept them existentially by dwelling in them.’ (Polanyi 1974:59). Thus the knowing process is one of inference done within the body of a person. Because persons are embodied souls, all knowing, by definition, is embodied knowing.
I have shown how our subsidiary awareness of our body is extended to include a stick, when we feel our way by means of the stick. To use language in speech, reading and writing, is to extend our bodily equipment and become intelligent human beings. 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 our body, we interiorize these things and make ourselves dwell in them. Such extensions of ourselves develop new faculties in us; our whole education operates in this way; as each of us interiorizes our cultural heritage, he grows into a person seeing the world and experiencing life in terms of this outlook. (Polanyi in Grene 1969:148)
Polanyi used the term ‘indwelling’ and a related word, ‘interiorization’, to emphasise the human capacity to look from subsidiaries at a focal subject. In the preceding passage Polanyi’s references to the use of language in speech or to employing a probe or stick are all examples of indwelling. He stated that it ‘is not by looking at things, but by dwelling in them, that we understand their joint meaning’ (Polanyi 1966b:18). Polanyi went on to explain, however, that to the extent knowing is an indwelling it can be ‘the utilization of a framework for unfolding our understanding in accordance with the indications and standards imposed by the framework’ (Polanyi in Grene 1969:134). The idea of indwelling a framework or a category is how I see the missioner moving from
understanding the source to communicating with the receptor in an act of gospel translation.
ii. Gestalt psychology
In his pursuit of the dynamics of the creative imagination, Polanyi discerned a clue in Gestalt psychology. Merleau-Ponty already had posited the primacy of perception. Gestalt theory holds that human knowledge is the integration of certain smaller pieces of perception to form a larger whole. The seeing of bits and pieces became a key influence for Polanyi in noticing that the human proclivity of ‘seeing patterns’ is part of the structure of knowing (1974:vii, 57-9).18 Polanyi’s epistemological interest in categories and patterns dovetails with his understanding that a metaphor is construed when one imaginatively integrates two disparate elements into a single novel meaning (Begbie 1991:238, Polanyi and Prosch 1975:76). In the previous chapter I cited Ricouer who invokes Aristotle’s classic definition of metaphor as ‘transference’. Polanyi also understands ‘metaphor’ as a means of transferring or disclosing meaning.19
Polanyi’s ontological premise presupposed a stance of critical realism.20
Like other scientists, for example physicists and chemists, of his era Polanyi assumed a real world to be perceived and studied for the patterns and insights that could be discovered. He declares:
We can account for this capacity of ours to know more than we can tell if we believe in the presence of an external reality with which we can establish contact. This I do. I declare myself committed to the belief in an external reality gradually accessible to knowing, and I regard all true understanding as an intimation of such a reality, which being real, may yet reveal itself to our deepened understanding in an indefinite range of unexpected manifestations.21 (Polanyi in Grene 1969:133)
18 See Gelwick (1977:26-7, 43) and Gill (2000:41-4) for brief discussions of the influence of Gestalt
thinking upon Polanyi’s philosophy.
19
The previous citation of Ricouer is on pp 107-8. I discuss Polanyi and metaphor more extensively, beginning on p. 182.
20 Critical realism is a philosophy of science that is posed as an alternative to positivist empiricism on the
one hand and constructivism and postmodernism on the other. This view posits that ‘much of reality exists independently of human consciousness of it; that reality itself is complex, open, and stratified in multiple dimensions or levels’ (Smith 2010:90-8).
Polanyi sought to demonstrate that scientific investigation involved more than doing experiments, recording observations, and drawing conclusions. He claimed that the scientist relied upon perceiving phenomena to see or to intuit patterns of previously unknown realities. He believed that scientists can acquire knowledge and understanding through processes of disciplined inquiry, conceptualisation, reflection and collaboration. Polanyi suggested that scientific discovery required the scientist to follow the two steps he described as intuition and imagination. Polanyi defined ‘intuition’ as ‘a skill for guessing with a reasonable chance of guessing right; a skill guided by an innate sensibility to coherence, improved by schooling’. Polanyi defined ‘imagination’ as ‘all thoughts of things that are not yet present—or perhaps never to be present’ (Polanyi 1966a:89). ‘The first step in the discovery process is the deliberate act of the imagination questing for the hidden reality suggested by the intuition’s subsidiary awareness. The second step is in the spontaneous effort of the creative intuition groping toward integration’ (1966a:89).
We may say that when we comprehend a particular set of items as parts of a whole, the focus of our attention is shifted from the hitherto uncomprehended particulars to the understanding of their joint meaning. This shift of attention does not make us lose sight of the particulars, since one can see a whole only by seeing its parts, but it changes altogether the manner in which we are aware of the particulars. We become aware of them in terms of the whole on which we have fixed our attention. I shall speak correspondingly of a subsidiary knowledge of such items as distinct from a focal knowledge of the same items. (1966a:29-30)
5.3.3 The from-to Structure of Tacit Knowing
i. Two kinds of awareness
In his preface to the second edition of Personal Knowledge Polanyi states:
When we are relying on our awareness of something (A) for attending to something else (B), we are subsidiarily aware of A. The thing B to which we are focally attending, is then the meaning of A. The focal object B is always identifiable, while things like A, of which we are subsidiarily aware may be unidentifiable. The two kinds of awareness are mutually exclusive: when we switch our attention to something of which we have hitherto been subsidiarily aware, it loses its previous meaning. (1958:xiii)
Polanyi offered numerous examples of tacit knowing where the knower relies ‘subsidiarily’ on tacit particulars to comprehend a focal pattern or to perform an action where smaller acts are integrated into a larger action. One example has to do with the use of language in the act of reading. A reader relies on subsidiaries such as letters that comprise a word or upon words that make up a sentence in order to read sentences and paragraphs and grasp their meanings. Polanyi writes about reading the correspondence of the day and thinking of passing a letter to his son. Then he has to stop and think about what language was used in the letter and consider whether it was it a language (English) that his son knew well enough to read. Polanyi had grasped the meaning but not paid attention to the tacit particulars of what words were expressed or in what language they were written (1958:186).
Another example Polanyi uses is the act of riding a bicycle. A rider of a bicycle pays attention to following the way of the road and possible obstacles in the path. Additionally, the rider keeps balance and pushes the pedals almost without giving any thought to these subsidiary activities that comprise the riding of a bicycle. If the rider shifts focus and looks down at the rider’s pedalling feet, the bike is apt to steer into an obstacle. A reader attends to reading or a bicyclist to riding a bicycle by assimilating many particulars in support of one focal activity (49-50).
Polanyi categorised the subsidiary elements or nonfocal clues in a perception as either ‘subliminal’ or ‘marginal.’ Subliminal clues refer to aspects of bodily perception such as eye-muscle movements, movements inside bodily organs, or neural traces in the brain. There are also marginal clues that can be described as ‘things one sees out of the corner of an eye.’ A second kind of marginal clue describes what is seen based on past experiences. There must be background knowledge or things remembered ‘at the background of our minds’ that influence what we perceive. Previous integrations of clues—previously achieved meanings also function as subsidiary clues and form the
background for new integrations of clues into focal awareness and focal activity (Polanyi 1974:95-8; Prosch 1986:56-9).
Polanyi sought to express this from-to structure of knowing in various ways. Knowing, according to Polanyi, is ‘relying on’ in order to ‘attend to’ a problem or an activity or in order to perceive meaning. He describes ‘two kinds of awareness’ and writes of subsidiary and focal objects of attention, recognising that focal awareness may appear to be at a distance or may be described as the ‘distal’ term. In the case that one relies on what is close or interiorised, this term he calls the ‘proximal.’ The distinction also may be described by the general terms, ‘tacit’ and ‘explicit’.22
Polanyi refined his understanding of the meaning of tacit knowing in his work given as the Terry Lectures in 1962 at Yale University. The Terry Lectures were edited into book form in 1966 and titled, The Tacit Dimension. In this refining work, Polanyi identifies four aspects of the structure of tacit knowing. The functional aspect (1) is