[Interpretationandmethods] Polanyi’s Interpretive Method

[WJKELLPRO at aol.com]

Hi All! 
Here is my reply to Larry’s comments on my Polanyi paper.  
(That paper is available 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)  ) 
First, a general statement about my reading of Polanyi.  Second, direct 
replies to  Larry. 
PART ONE. 
Polanyi’s primary project is to recognize, articulate, and carry on what  he 
sees as the work of nature.  He  ends Personal Knowledge (PK), his  main book, 
by saying that when he contemplates evolution he feels like a  Christian 
probably feels when worshipping God.  Evolution looms so large in his thought  
that all his other writings go back to it.  Thus, Larry is quite right to require 
Polanyi to defend his ethics on the  basis of his interpretation of 
evolution. 
As my paper shows, Polanyi sees the distinctive, or  defining, quality of 
humanity as being our vast capacity for creative abstract  thinking, our language 
abilities, and the immensely rich human culture that we  are always in the 
process of creating.  Like Aristotle, Polanyi defines humanity by its 
"rationality."   
Unlike Aristotle, however, Polanyi has his own  understanding of that term.  
People  can be logical, but human reasoning is based upon a vast "tacit 
dimension."  That includes our natural gifts and  limitations for knowing, as well 
as a wide array of  "intellectual passions," which  move gifted people towards 
discoveries and creativity in all the various  fields of human interest – art, 
science, law, technology, medicine, politics,  even religion, to mention a 
few.   
Polanyi’s "ethics," then, are not based on Aristotelian-like  pronouncements 
about what he considers to be good, or in The Golden Mean.  Instead, his 
ethics are based on what he  calls "appraisal."  That is, actions  in any realm of 
human endeavor can be appraised for the degree of rationality  they have 
achieved.  The expert in  the field is usually the best judge of this achievement. 
When a biologist calls  an organism a "frog," he or she is making an appraisal 
of the organism’s  developmental achievement, it used to be a "tadpole."  
Personal Knowledge is an extended  appraisal of the degree of rationality 
achieved in the natural  sciences. 
That book is less a treatise on epistemology, as is often  wrongly thought, 
and more a critique of the poor showing natural science has  made to date in 
its collective effort to realize the full human potential for  rationality in 
its field of endeavor.  Polanyi’s "post-critical philosophy" is his statement of 
the standards by  which he criticizes natural science as a field.   
In short, humans are distinct in evolution because of their rationality,  or 
enormous mental capacities.  Polanyi shows that natural scientists are full of 
self-delusions and  self-ignorance about what it is they are actually doing 
and believing.  From the rationality point of view, it’s  a piss poor 
performance.  But he  shows how natural scientists can become more self-aware, and 
hence more  rational. 
If natural science isn’t up to snuff, social science is a disaster, and a  
threat to human survival!  (He calls  it a sacrilege.)  The efforts of  social 
scientists to ape outmoded notions of natural science are "a fit subject  for 
ridicule."  (SM 27)  The self-ignorance of social scientists  is so dangerous 
because their superficial and false ideas of "scientific  neutrality" threaten 
to completely desensitize humanity to its capacity to  appreciate our natural 
feelings of intrinsic value, or respect, for one  another.  To fail to account 
for  this moral aspect of human nature amounts to a complete abandonment of  
rationality.  This point is argued  extensively in his books, and in my paper. 
Polanyi understands humanity as having a natural  "calling" to strive to be 
ever more fully human.  Since our rationality is our distinctive  quality, our 
calling is to be ever more rational.  As he defines that word, it includes  
being respectful of others.  This is  not a moral commandment, but our healthy 
nature.   
Interpretive social, and political, science necessarily entails the use  of 
Polanyi’s empathic method of "indwelling."  That, in turn, requires for its 
success  significant respect for other people.  In The Study of Man (SM), Polanyi 
models the use of a social  science methodology based on respect.  Followed 
to its logical conclusion, this idea re-situates social  scientists as 
discoverers of secular moral lessons in human behavior, and as  teachers of such moral 
lessons in the university.  That is how he concludes SM.  In my view, 
knowledge of what is  respectful in human behavior will go out of , what I call, "The 
Republic of  Social Science," and into an ever more civilizing society – 
which I believe was  Polanyi’s ultimate aim. 
PART TWO (A-D). 
A)  LARRY WROTE: 
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.) 
BILL REPLIES: 
For Polanyi, any mechanistic model of human nature is ipso facto both a  
gross diminishment of human value, and a failure to grasp the truth about the  
freedom and creativity of our minds.  This is especially egregious in 
neuroscience for Polanyi.  The machine metaphor for our physiology  is acceptable, 
because it does not diminish our minds.  (But Polanyi conceded this point without  
considering the holistic medicine of today.) 
B)  LARRY WROTE: 
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. 
BILL REPLIES: 
Polanyi goes to great lengths in PK to show how human rationality is both  an 
emergent property of prior animal intellectual capacities, and a distinct  
improvement over them.  Animals  (including lowly earthworms) seek to know the 
world around them, but no animal  achieves such success at this than we humans. 
 Its their game, our  improvement. 
C)  LARRY WROTE: 
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.  
BILL REPLIES: 
Very subtle points.  First,  Polanyi does not shrink from the fact of 
ambiguity in human knowledge.  That is largely what having tacit  knowledge means. 
Second, he includes "reasonable" in his understanding of  "rational."  Reason is 
applied in  multiple fields of meaning – art, science, etc.  Each field draws 
upon different talents  and sensitivities.  (Cf. Polanyi’s  last book, 
Meaning.) 
D)  LARRY WROTE: 
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). 
BILL REPLIES: 
If you mean choosing paradigms, then: [A] Polanyi recognizes that it’s a  
matter of persuasion and conversion.  (Kuhn learned from Polanyi.)  [B] Everyone 
ultimately relies on his or her personal judgment to  determine the merits of 
a competing paradigm.  [C]  There is no practical reason outside a  field of 
practice. 
I hope you will see this as my reply with my own hope that you, and  
everybody on this list, will reply back.  In other words, I don’t mean any of what I 
have said here to be my last  word, just part of a conversation.  (Or, a 
revolutionary conspiracy among social science qualitative  methodologists!) 
Bill Kelleher



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