Polanyi's Personal Knowledge
And graduate school's "major league" intellectual work
Welcome to another edition of The Mueller Report!
Update
Time rolls on and October has arrived. The last couple weekends in September were quite busy at The Abbey with quite a few people coming to the mountains to see the leaves and to get some hiking in at high altitude before winter arrives.
I was in D. C. most of last week with meetings on the Hill, lectures and meetings at the Catholic University of America and George Mason University, and reconnecting with a former student and her family, my first boss out of college, and many others. I was encouraged by many conversations with people who had read about my hopes for building intellectual community in Leadville or who were quite interested in it when I shared about some of its elements. I think there is a lot too this endeavor and many exciting possibilities.
Writing
Last week my second white paper, “The Incoherence of ESG,” was published by AIER. This paper has been in the works for a while, but we had to sprint through the production and publication process to get it out this week for my meetings on the Hill.
I also had a letter to the local Leadville paper about why many Lake County residents are likely skeptical about increasing their taxes in the fall.
Reflection
My visit to George Mason University last week sparked my thinking about two things: God moves in mysterious (and surprising) ways and good graduate programs do deep intellectual work. I arrived at GMU in time to join an extracurricular reading group sponsored by my dissertation adviser (Dan Klein). A friend of mine and fellow grad student when I was at GMU led the discussion. Often these reading groups examine books related to Adam Smith, the Scottish Enlightenment, or classical liberalism.
But now the books they are reading come straight out of the Bible. I was blown away that 20+ people, mostly graduate students in economics at a state institution, were sitting around for an hour and a half working through and discussing the Gospel of Luke. There were certainly many Christians in the group, but not everyone.
My dissertation adviser has always managed to attract, unintentionally I think, the lion’s share of GMU econ graduate students who are Christian and/or who are married. I would guess well over 50% of his students in the past fifteen years fit this bill. For the rest of the PhD program, the rate is probably less than 20%; maybe less than 10%.
But even though I find the reading group’s focus on books of the Bible a happy surprise, it really shouldn’t be surprising. The Bible is well worth studying historically and literarily. It can be seen as a kind of Rosetta stone for western civilization. After all, can one really study western philosophy, history, or literature deeply without knowing the most important book that influenced nearly everyone in those fields for two thousand years? This, by the way, is why I am quite sympathetic to reading and teaching the Bible in public school curricula.
The other thing I was struck by during my afternoon at GMU was the “major league” nature of the intellectual project Dan and his students were engaged in. They had a two-and-a-half-hour class working through Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments section by section. They dwelled on passages and phrases, analogies and examples. Dan has studied this book for decades and has developed dozens of charts, illustrations, diagrams, and terms to make sense of its content.
The class will spend basically the entire semester carefully reading and discussing this one book. Dan has the students write reflections each week and he offers fairly detailed feedback and criticism, not only of the content, but of the writing and effectiveness or clarity of the students’ expressions. I chose to work with Dan as my dissertation adviser in large part because I knew he would give me extensive criticism and suggestions, not only on my topic, but on my writing too.
I have to say, though, that it has been a long time since I’ve been able to sit and dwell on a text in that way. While I read a lot and write a fair amount (which is certainly a form of reflection), and have good conversations now and then, there is nearly always an element of hurry. Perhaps that’s the fate of everyone outside of graduate school as they have greater responsibilities and must think about producing, not just reflecting.
Yet despite the attractiveness of the deep unhurried study of graduate school, and how important that was in shaping my thinking and ideas, I don’t think I would trade what I do now, and certainly not where I am now, to go back to that world.
Bookshelf
I’m working my way through Polanyi’s Personal Knowledge with two friends. We probably won’t finish it until the end of October, but it is so dense that I will address it piecemeal. Before that, I should provide some information about the author and the broad themes of the work first.
Michael Polanyi was a Hungarian-born physician and chemist. He left Hungary for England before the second world war where he took a position in physical chemistry at the University of Manchester. He had a couple students who went on to win the Nobel prize in chemistry. He wrote extensively about all kinds of topics, from science and philosophy of science to economics, epistemology, and more.
In Personal Knowledge, Polanyi attempts to defend knowledge against skepticism. He does so, not by constructing a rationalistic framework as Descartes attempted to do, but by looking closely at the nature of knowledge, how it relates to experience, and the ways in which we verify and validate knowledge.
His approach emphasizes the role of community and tradition in setting standards for science and for knowledge more broadly. He also emphasizes the “tacit dimension” of knowledge – how much of our knowledge is inarticulate and inarticulable. Furthermore, the pursuit of knowledge requires important personal commitments and personal beliefs, not some abstract objective impersonal process.
The first part of Personal Knowledge consists of four chapters: Objectivity, Probability, Order, and Skills. From the get-go, Polanyi points out that the pursuit of science involves passion and judgment, not detached objectivity. If one were to be purely “objective,” there would be little reason to study the phenomena and intricacies found in one small planet in a vast universe. Instead, we have a fundamental relationship with, a deep interest in, the questions we ask, study, and explore.
In the late 19th century, philosophers of science like Ernest Mach and Karl Popper misstate what science is when they try to articulate specific definitions and standards for what counts as scientific standards or as “doing” science. They both emphasized empirical testing and the idea of “falsification.” Yet Polanyi shows that many scientific advances are theoretical and initially untestable – such as Einstein’s theory of relativity or de Broglie’s particle-wave theory of light. These advances eventually led to empirical implications that could be observed and tested, but they were accepted as science well before then.
Similarly, Polanyi points out that scientists will throw out data long before they throw out a theory, a point made by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In fact, bizarre off-the-wall findings (according to the current scientific paradigm) are rarely even given a hearing or deigned worthy of a response. While this is largely a good approach to filter out crackpot ideas, it also reveals how theories and paradigms strongly influence what we count as relevant or persuasive data, observations, or evidence.
Polanyi describes personal knowledge this way:
“Other areas of science will illustrate even more effectively these indispensable intellectual powers, and their passionate participation in the act of knowing. It is to these powers and to this participation that I am referring in the title of this book as ‘Personal Knowledge.’ We shall find Personal Knowledge manifested in the appreciation of probability and of order in the exact sciences, and see it at work even more extensively in the way the descriptive sciences rely on skills and connoisseurship. At all these points the act of knowing includes an appraisal; and this personal coefficient, which shapes all factual knowledge, bridges in doing so the disjunction between subjectivity and objectivity. It implies the claim that man can transcend his own subjectivity by striving passionately to fulfil his personal obligations to universal standards.”
His second chapter on Probability is challenging to follow. In it, he talks about randomness as well as how our statements involve personal commitment to an assertion of truth. That is to say we are making statements about probabilistic events, not probabilistic statements about events. Furthermore, probability can never be proven or observed with certainty. Only with greater or lesser confidence.
In his chapter on Order, Polanyi talks about the ideas of clues, messages, and noise. Our ability to tell that something did not happen randomly by chance is actually rather surprising. How is it that we know that there is order and design when we see a pile of chopped wood or words spelled on the ground with pebbles? Given enough variation and time, perhaps such an arrangement could occur – the infamous monkeys typing on a keyboard for eternity eventually reproducing Shakespear’s works.
Yet we know, instantly and intuitively, that order in the world does not come about through such a process. Polanyi even raises skepticism about natural selection as an explanatory theory. The more difficult question involves assessing the presence of order after chaos and decay set in – ruins, scattered pebbles that used to clearly resemble words, etc.
Polanyi writes: “randomness alone can never produce a significant pattern, for it consists in the absences of any such pattern.” He also says, “that a scientific theory, when it conforms to reality, gets hold of a truth that is far deeper than its author’s understanding of it.”
The Skills chapter really launches the substance of Polanyi’s contribution to our understanding of knowing. In this chapter he distinguishes between rules and practice, articulable and inarticulable, and between focal and subsidiary awareness. While acknowledging that articulated formal rules have their place, the tacit unspoken knowledge embedded in practice is far more important. This is the case whether we are talking about sports, plumbing, or writing. It is also the case when thinking about society and life in general.
Tradition serves as a kind of tacit social knowledge. It passes on the practices of people, families, and institutions through time. To learn by example, people must choose to submit to some authority; and practical wisdom is embodied in action rather than articulated in clear rules.
Polanyi’s discussion of focal and subsidiary awareness is the linchpin to understanding his conception of knowledge: personal integration. When we use tools, or pursue any complex endeavor, we make use of subsidiary focus or knowledge. Consider using a hammer.
For those who have used one a decent amount, when you strike the nail, you feel as if you are hitting the nail directly. But in fact, your hand is not making contact with the nail. Your hand feels the handle of the hammer and you interpret the sensation with hitting the nail. The nail is your focal point, the hammer in your hand is subsidiary.
When you play a song on the piano, individual notes are in your subsidiary awareness while the song is itself your focal awareness. When speaking, usually individual words are recognized only in a subsidiary sense and the meaning is the center of our focal attention. Skill and knowledge develop as we integrate tools into our subsidiary (unconscious) focus.
Polanyi then makes the point that our endeavors and projects fail when what has been subsidiary becomes focal in our awareness. When your attention shifts from the song to finding or remembering individual notes; when your talk becomes hung up on finding the right word. In effect, self-consciousness can be understood as losing sight of the big picture, the broad integrating idea, and focusing on the parts. It is a kind of disintegration or deconstruction of meaning.
Much more could be said about this, but I will leave that for future newsletters.
Game Corner
My oldest son created a game earlier this year that can actually be played (i. e. the rules are clearly specified and you have to make meaningful decisions during play). He calls the game Journey. Players begin at the same spot on a hand-drawn board with multiple paths of rectangles (using pieces he had a friend 3D-print). Many of the rectangles are blank, but they can also be labelled: “town,” “food,” “souvenir,” or “commodity.” You roll a die to determine how many spaces you may move. You must pay a food to do this. If you run out of food or don’t pay one, then you can only move one space each turn.
The goal is to finish the game with the most points. Sets of commodities are worth points. Souvenirs are worth points (sometimes negative points). Food is worth points. And being the first player to reach the finish line also gives you points.
It’s not a game I would pick off the shelf to play, but when either of my sons wants to play it, I’m usually happy to join.
Have a great week!