Michael Polanyi was a Fellow of the Royal Society of England, a professor of physical chemistry and of social studies at the University of Manchester and a Fellow of Merton College at Oxford. As few others of his time, he saw how a one-sidedly reductionist, materialistic science undermined the foundations of human culture, and he set out to break the powerful spell of a worldview that seemed to him not only to reject our deepest convictions but to fly in the face of actual scientific experience. The penetrating, core insights which he set forth in Personal Knowledge, his major philosophical work, reflect his experience as a practicing scientist.

By distinguishing between our focal awareness of an object as an integrated, meaningful whole and our subsidiary awareness of its component parts, Polanyi lays the groundwork for a science that recognizes the reality of that which makes the object a whole: the conceptually grasped principle of which it is the expression. This personal knowledge or insight into the lawfulness governing an object, when applied to organic nature, provides the basis for an organic science that affirms the reality of dynamic organizational principles which determine the formation and/or behavior of organisms. Polanyi goes further demonstrating that all skillful, meaningful actions are subject to the same structural lawfulness: all subsidiary parts of the organism are organized to accomplish the purpose of the action. In the case of human speech, for example, our vocabulary, our organs of speech, our breathing, intonation and gestures are orchestrated to convey a certain meaning. The meaning remains our focus and provides the organizational principle guiding our subsidiary movements. While we are focally aware of the meaning we wish to convey, we are subsidiarily aware of our words, intonations, and gestures.

In Personal Knowledge, Polanyi lays the foundations for a science that

1. encompasses human cognitive experience in its fullness. The richness of sense perception and the depth of conceptual insight are validated as two aspects (focal and subsidiary) of one and the same reality.

2. leads to an hierarchical world view in which a “higher” lawfulness such as vegetative growth, sentience, or human insight or love, are understood as innate organizational principles that structure and animate the “lower” levels through which they manifest.

Contents

PART ONE: THE ART OF KNOWING

1. Objectivity
1. The lesson of the Copernican revolution
2. The growth of mechanism
3. Relativity
4. Objectivity and modern physics
2. Probability
1. Programme
2. Unambiguous statements
3. Probability statements
4. Probability of propositions
5. The nature of assertions
6. Maxims
7. Grading of confidence
3. Order
1. Chance and order
2. Randomness and significant pattern
3. The Law of chemical proportions
4. The Law of chemical proportions
5. Crystallography
4. Skills
1. The practice of skills
2. Destuctive analysis
3. Tradition
4. Connoisseurship
5. Two kinds of awareness
6. Wholes and meanings
7. Tools and frameworks
8. Commitment
9. Unspecifiability
10. Summary

PART TWO: THE TACIT COMPONENT

5. Articulation
1. Introduction
2. Inarticulate intelligence
3. Operational principles of language
4. The powers of articulate thought
5. Thought and speech. I. Text and meaning
6. Forms of tacit assent
7. Thought and speech. II. Conceptual decisions
8. The educated mind
9. the re-interpretation of language
10. Understanding logical operations
11. Introduction to problem solving
12. Mathematical heuristics6. Intellectual Passions
6. Intellectual Passions
1. Sign-posting
2. Scientific value
3. Heuristic passion
4. Elegance and beauty
5. Scientific controversy
6. The premises of science
7. Passions, private and public
8. Science and technology
9. Mathematics
10. The affirmation of mathematics
11. Axiomatization of mathematics
12. The abstract arts
13. Dwelling in and breaking out
7. Conviviality
1. Introduction
2. Communication
3. Transmission of social lore
4. Pure conviviality
5. The organization of society
6. Two kinds of culture
7. Administration of individual culture
8. Administration of civic culture
9. Naked power
10. Power politics
11. The magic of Marxism
12. Spurious forms of moral inversion
13. The temptation of the intellectuals
14. Marxist-Leninist epistemology
15. Matters of fact
16. Post-Marxian liberalism

PART THREE: THE JUSTIFICATION OF PERSONAL KNOWLEDGE

8. The logic of affirmation
1. Introduction
2. The confident use of language
3. The question of descriptive terms
4. Precision
5. The personal mode of meaning
6. Assertions of fact
7. Towards an epistemology of Personal Knowledge
8. Inference
9. Automation in general
10. Neurology and psychology
11. On being critical
12. The fiduciary programme
9. The critique of doubt
1. The doctrine of doubt
2. Equivalence of belief and doubt
3. Reasonable and unreasonable doubt
4. Scepticism within the natural sciences
5. Is doubt a heuristic principle?
6. Agnostic doubt in courts of law
7. Religious doubt
8. Implicit beliefs
9. Three aspects of stability
10. The stability of scientific beliefs
11. Universal doubt
10. Commitment
1. Fundamental beliefs
2. The subjective, the personal and the universal
3. The coherence of commitment
4. Evasion of commitment
5. The structure of commitment: I
6. The structure of commitment: II
7. Interdeterminacy and self-reliance
8. Existential aspects of commitment
9. Varieties of commitment
10. Acceptance of calling

PART FOUR: KNOWING AND BEING
11. The logic of achievement
1. Introduction
2. Rules of rightness
3. Causes and reasons
4. Logic and psychology
5. Originality in animals
6. Explanations of equipotentiality
7. Logical levels
12. Knowing life
1. Introduction
2. Tueness to type
3. Morphogenisis
4. Living machinery
5. Action and perception
6. Learning
7. Learning and induction
8. Human knowledge
9. Superior knowledge
10. At the point of confluence
13. The rise of man
1. Introduction
2. Is evolution an achievement?
3. Randomness, an example of emergence
4. The logic of emergence
5. Conception of a generalized field
6. The emergence of machine-like operations
7. First causes and ultimate ends
Index