Knowing and Being: Essays by Michael Polanyi [Paperback]

That lady in the white lab coat is exceptionally astute and she's a major player within the global scientific community, but she is so befogged about the source and the proper criterion for justified knowledge that she subjects herself to self-stultification forasmuch as she relies on brute empiricism as her epistemic ground. Herein Michael Polanyi deploys powerful and commanding epistemic fog lights to shine the blazing light of truth on epistemology in relation to science and the pursuit truth (Polanyi, 1891-1976, was a European chemist who became a groundbreaking philosopher and epistemologist).

In the last third of his academic life the author searched for truth and a definitive criterion for knowledge itself. Dr. Polanyi proposed that one must rework the ground and fount for epistemic virtues and privileges as he attempted to partially comprise an accurate theory of knowledge enjoined to the nature of man's cognitive apparatus and the comprehension of epistemic intricacy/complexity.

Polanyi: "I hold that the propositions embodied in natural science are not derived by any definite rule from the data of experience, and that they can neither be verified nor falsified by experience according to any definite rule."

This volume consist of 14 interrelated essays (accumulated by Marjorie Grene) that convey the progress of Polanyi's epistemology first offered in "Science, Faith, and Society." Polanyi offers unique epistemic insights as he asserts that epistemic rights are obtained by central and subsidiary aspects of awareness while fixing on the article at hand while focusing on less important derivative things as epistemic backdrops. For Polanyi "normative structures such as interpretive frameworks, or even languages, work like hammers... I indwell them, I pour myself into them, to attend beyond me a further focus or project. All knowing involves integrative orientation from subsidiary to focal, from `from' to `to' and beyond"

He asserts: "So long as we use a certain language, all questions that we can ask will have to be formulated in it and will thereby confirm the theory of the universe which is implied in the vocabulary and structure of the language." Polanyi emphasizes that the predicament of contemporary epistemic questions are usually left unasked as modernity focuses on alleged detachment and objectivity of scientific knowledge as it too often ignores the necessary ethical structures. Polanyi deems that epistemic rights and true truth arise from internal indications to external facts and concrete evidence. Consequently, to ascertain proper epistemic rights, one is required to build a theory from the web of the ontic reality of biological things and this incorporates the mind as well.

He opines: "Of course language manifests a belief only if we use its words with the implied acceptance of their appositeness." One is not required to limit oneself to Polanyi's epistemic presentation to admire his genius and gain exceptional insight into the formation of a lucid epistemic apparatus that yields epistemic virtues.

On pre-theoretical commitments concerning science: "These maxims and the art of interpreting them may be said to constitute the premises of science but I prefer to call them our scientific beliefs. These premises or beliefs are embodied in a tradition, the tradition of science."

This volume is a necessary addition to the library of epistemologists, ministers, philosophers, and scientists. Those who avow TAs will find much to integrate in their epistemic scheme.

Polanyi analogously conveys: "The fact we can possess knowledge that is unspoken is of course a commonplace and so is the fact that we must know something yet unspoken before we can express it in words" (p. 187).

He adds: "It is a mistake to identify subsidiary awareness with subconscious or preconscious awareness, or with the fringe of consciousness described by William James" (p. 212).

Polanyi: "I shall suggest, on the contrary, that all communication relies, to a noticeable extent on evoking knowledge that we cannot tell, and that all our knowledge of mental processes, like feelings or conscious intellectual activities, is based on a knowledge which we cannot tell."
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