The Tacit Dimension by Michael Polanyi & Amartya Sen

Author:Michael Polanyi & Amartya Sen [Polanyi, Michael & Sen, Amartya]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Philosophy, Science, [No data]
ISBN: 9780226672984
Google: zfsb-eZHPy0C
Amazon: 0226672980
Goodreads: 6379692
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
Published: 1967-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

* Thus the usual chemical kinetics, based on mass action, is a more comprehensively statistical description of chemical change than would be the tracing of the causal chain giving rise to a single new molecule. The modern dynamics of chemical reactions (as studied by D. R. Herschbach, R. B. Bernstein, J. C. Polanyi, and others) is comprised altogether in this causal chain.

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A SOCIETY OF EXPLORERS

My first lecture dealt with our power of tacit knowing. It showed that tacit knowing achieves comprehension by indwelling, and that all knowledge consists of or is rooted in such acts of comprehension. The second lecture showed how the structure of tacit knowing determines the structure of comprehensive entities. By studying the way tacit knowing comprehends human performances, we saw that what is comprehended has the same structure as the act that comprehends it. The relation of a comprehensive entity to its particulars was then seen to be the relation between two levels of reality, the higher one controlling the marginal conditions left indeterminate by the principles governing the lower one. Such levels were then stacked on top of each other to form a hierarchy, and this stacking opened up the panorama of stratified living beings. This stratification offered a framework for defining emergence as the action which produces the next higher level, first from the inanimate to the living and then from each biotic level to the one above it. This holds both for the development of an individual and for the evolution of living things.

Thus emergence took over from tacit knowing the function of producing fundamental innovations; but, as emergence continued to scale the heights leading on to the rise of man, it gradually resumed its encountered form of human knowing. So in the end we were confronted again with the mind of man, making ever new sense of the world by dwelling in its particulars with a view to their comprehension.

Now we enter a new range of subjects. We must ask whether intellectual powers, grounded in tacit knowing and descended from evolutionary emergence, can exercise the kind of responsible judgment which we must claim if we are to attribute a moral sense to man. Could, in fact, my rebuttal of exactitude as the ideal of science open the way toward a theory re-establishing the justification of moral standards?

Let me take my bearings once more from the questions which formed my point of departure. I told you how I was struck by the theory that prevailed for a considerable time under Stalin in Soviet Russia, which denied the justification of science as a pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. I said that this violent self-immolation of the mind was actuated by moral motives, and that a similar fusion of unprecedented critical lucidity and intensified moral passions pervades our whole civilization, inflaming or paralyzing both reason and morality.

The story has often been told how scientific rationalism has impaired moral beliefs, first by shattering their religious sanctions and then by questioning their logical grounds; but the usual account does not explain the state of the modern mind.

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