[Interpretationandmethods] Polanyi's Interpretive Method

[WJKELLPRO at aol.com]

Hi Larry! 
Many thanks for reading and commenting on my Polanyi paper!  Fantastic 
points! I am working on a  reply.  However, I don’t think your  comments were 
contained in the email message that went out to the list –  something about being “
scrubbed.”  So I’ll post your message now.  I think everybody should have a 
chance to read them. 
Bill  
PS 
My paper is avalible for viewing or downloading on the Social Science  
Research Network website, at  
_http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/JELJOUR_Results.cfm?form_name=journalBrowse&journ
al_id=998969_ 
(http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/JELJOUR_Results.cfm?form_name=journalBrowse&journal_id=998969)  
(you may need to cut and paste  url). 
LARRY WROTE: 
Bill,  
Thanks for sharing your paper. 
It is a fine piece that surely deserves publication. It did raise some  
questions for me that you may want to consider at some stage of your  
work. 
It seems to me that Polanyi's argument is stronger epistemologically  than 
ethically. It is  
one  thing to argue that positivist and mechanistic  epistemologies miss 
aspects of the 
"objects" they intend to study, quite  another to claim that the failure to 
capture  
these dimensions of social reality  necessarily constitute an ethical lapse 
or  
a general failure of "responsibility" (as opposed to a specific failure 
of professional responsibility). The claim of more general ethical  
lapses would seem to depend on the ethical validity of Polanyi's version 
of evolutionary naturalism, and that seems to me questionable.  
One can agree with Polanyi that an "interior" view of evolutionary processes 
has 
epistemological advantages over a mechanist  account without assigning this 
agreement  
any particular ethical significance. (We also need to consider that mechanist 
accounts  
may reveal things that  "indwelling" will not. Maybe we don't get a working 
picture  
of the circulatory system without "reducing" humans to machines.) 
All evolutionary naturalisms bear a heavy burden of showing that  
an emergent property (say "complexity") are somehow more than merely  
successors of previous qualities. To say that it is different is not to say  
that it is "better." The emergence of consciousness, respect or other  
qualities  could be sanctioned metaphysically, ontologically,  theologically 
or ethically 
or by other standards external to the process of evolution, but it is  
difficult to offer an immanent justification of an emergent property. It 
would  seem to require some ontology to explain why a quality is now more “Human” 
 
than  a quality that was missing in a previous stage of evolution. 
The appeal to rationality is ambiguous. As the comments in Section C seem to 
suggest,  
Polanyi seems to recognize a distinction between the "rational" and "the 
reasonable"  
(to invoke without fully endorsing a distinction from Rawls). One can, for 
instance,  
ruthlessly follow a set of premises to their logical conclusion by acting 
self-destructively or immorally. So far so good. What seems missing is the 
possibility of  
multiple rationalities that are internally coherent, relatively satisfying 
and thoroughly  
incongruent or even incommensurable (Kuhn, Feyerabend, Collingwood, etc.).  
To say that the scientists must intend truth (and thus universality) and is 
thereby  
required to practice respect, seems sound as far as it goes. But how far can 
we carry  
the argument? Does the need to treat other scientists respectfully to learn 
with them  
dictate respect outside "the republic of science"? Maybe, but we need to hear 
more.  
The question is how far we must go toward universalizing the demands of a 
particular  
practice.  
Alasdair MacIntyre does quite well in arguing that the is/ought split is  
unintelligible within a practice, but how does that get us to a binding 
theory of  
practical reason outside the context of a practice or a tradition? If we 
recognize  
competing practices and traditions, that question is vexing. We cannot short 
circuit  
the question by simply assuming the "humanity" of a particular practice or 
tradition  
(or stage of evolution). 
Let me reiterate. None of these comments are intended  
to depreciate the high quality of Dr. Kelleher's work or the value of Polanyi 
for  
interpretive social science. I applaud both. I am grateful for a list that 
allows  
political scientists to discuss these crucial issues. 
BILL:  ME,  TOO!  




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