Polanyi's Personal Knowledge: Articulation

This post continues my comments on Polanyi's book.

In this chapter Polanyi analyzes various levels of intelligence, starting from primitive animal intelligence and working up to full-scale human language and interpretive frameworks. I found this chapter a little rough going, presumably because of my limited background in linguistics and cognitive psychology. But I'll try to comment on a few things that stood out to me in this chapter.

The first is Polanyi's distinction between heuristic and routine stages of learning. It seems to me that this dichotomy fits well with two other dichotomies commonly seen in the philosophy of science. One is the distinction between the context of discovery and the context of justification. The other is Kuhn's distinction between a crisis and normal science. In all three of these dichotomies the former part is where the really interesting (but hard to define) stuff happens, while the latter part is just a matter of working out the details of the ideas generated by the former part. This reminds me that one thing I greatly appreciate about Polanyi is his willingness to tackle the context of discovery. Traditionally philosophers of science have refused to touch this issue, concentrating only on the context of justification. Discovery was left as a mystery. Kuhn tackled the context of discovery from one direction, namely the sociological one. He claimed that the processes of normal science would give rise to anomalies and eventually the social pressures to deal with the anomalies would become so great that a crisis would be created. This may explain why a given discovery happened approximately when it did, but it doesn't say anything about the personal participation of the scientist in discovery. This, of course, is exactly what Polanyi is on about. I particularly like how he points out the irreversible nature of discovery. One cannot un-discover something one has discovered! He also talks about intellectual discomfort as the driving force that shapes new conceptions. This sounds a lot like Kuhn's crisis, but on a personal level.

I was interested in his Laws of Poverty and Consistency for language - the idea that you can't have a word for everything (so that words will be repeated) and you must use words consistently for them to have any meaning. Presumably the same laws apply to scientific theories. You don't want a theory for everything: you want to be able to apply a single theory to a wide variety of situations. But you must also use the theory consistently, so it will not generally be freely adaptable to EVERY situation. I particularly like his use of the map analogy (which I have seen elsewhere, in the work of Thomas Brody). A good map must achieve a balance between accuracy and usability. A 1:1 scale map is useless - you may as well just walk the streets. But a map with insufficient detail may be easy to use, but still useless if it doesn't provide the information you need. Languages and theories are like that. We want them to be accurate and precise, but they must remain tractable and therefore they must contains SOME imprecision and ambiguity. Frankly, I think that it is in the deft handling of these ambiguities that the beauty of both language and science is seen.

I think this ties in well with his point about mathematical formalisms. He claims that mathematics and symbolic logic are tools that simply assist our inarticulate intelligence in working out answers. The formalism does not, and cannot, truly give us anything new. But there is a point here that Polanyi could make that I didn't get from the reading (although maybe it is there). He talks about the fact that much of our inarticulate knowledge can never be made articulate. But it seems as though a good formalism helps you to articulate more than you otherwise could. After all, without some sort of formalism (like a primitive language) you couldn't articulate anything. Are math and logic the BEST formalisms in this sense? Or are they the best at helping us articulate only certain types of knowledge?

Polanyi's big point in this chapter seems to be that all of our articulate knowledge involves a self-assessment, or self-accreditation, or our own act of knowing. We develop and use an interpretive framework, but constantly assess the framework. We even have the expectation that the framework will break down at some point, when we encounter something truly novel, and we are prepared to adapt the framework to this new experience. This adaptation too is subject to our self-appraisal. Polanyi admits that we might very well question our own ability to evaluate our frameworks. He seems to say that the answer to this question involves a leap of faith in which we express confidence in our ability to recognize an objective reality. All adaptations of our interpretive framework are undertaken with the goal of getting closer to closer to reality. He takes it for granted that getting closer to reality is universally satisfying, and therefore also personally satisfying (which is why we can rely on our self-satisfaction, or lack thereof, when judging our theories or utterances or whatever). I agree with him on this, but I'm not sure how well his argument holds up so far.

One quote from this chapter bothered me a bit:

"Man's whole intellectual life would be thrown away should this interpretive framework be wholly false; he is rational only to the extent to which the conceptions to which he is committed are true. The use of the word 'true' in the preceding sentence is part of a process of re-defining the meaning of truth, so as to make it truer in its own modified sense." (p. 112)

I'm not sure I understand what he is saying in the second sentence and I have not yet figured out how he is re-definng truth.

There were a few tidbits in this chapter that were interesting for me as a teacher. He talks about the fact that a problem must be hard, but not too hard, for its solution to be enjoyable for the solver. A problem can only produce intellectual strain in someone who understand the problem, but it will also only produce that strain (the alleviation of which leads to joy) if it is challenging. I agree, and I also agree with his point about needing to work through concrete problems to master a subject like math or physics. But maybe these things are obvious.

Finally I was intrigued by his statement to "look at the known data, but not in themselves, rather as clues to the unknown; as pointers to it and parts of it." (p. 127-128) Just a month ago I was telling my students that Galileo's genius was that he saw the truth as hidden WITHIN experience rather than as hidden BY experience (as Plato and the neo-Platonists saw it) or as equivalent to experience (as the followers of the Aristotelian tradition tended to see it). The Platonists didn't want to look at data at all, they just wanted to think. The Aristotelians wanted to look at the data in themselves, as the actual subject of study, the phenomena to be "saved". But Galileo sought to gain access to a hidden reality not through thought alone, but by thinking ABOUT THE DATA. I think that this is what Polanyi is getting at, and I think this viewpoint does presuppose that there is an objective reality and that it has some meaningful connection with our sense experience.