Rating: 
Summary: In response to "Good for it's time, but..."
Review: "Personal Knowledge" by Michael Polanyi is still a valuable contribution, even now."Magellan" has said that subjectivist investigations don't buy you much anymore, but consider this: Objectivist investigations don't tell you anything about how to use your own mind- the only tool you have for understanding Science to begin with. Yes, our brain is incredibly complex- yes, it has scientifically-investigatable structures which may be responsible for our consciousness- but without the actual, unavoidably personal use of your brain, you have nowhere to begin. I have all the structures that Magellan discussed in my brain, serving me at this very moment- but their function is underneath even what Polanyi calls "subsidiary knowledge". We can be aware of how our mental processes appear to behave to our conscious mind, but we are not aware of the work and usage of our individual neurons. If Magellan can show me how to become aware of the individual structures in my brain with all their individual neurons, and consciously micro-mangage their function in a way that results in me obtaining a better understanding of the world than I have only through the subjective perspective of my conscious mind, then I will say Polanyi is useless. Until then, exclusively Objectivist investigations of the conscious mind won't buy you much, in terms of understanding how you (necessarily working out of the perspective of your own state of consciousness) comprehend the world we live in. If you want to learn something, anything, from science-- and still retain a sense that you can legitimately use your own subjective mind (albiet carefully) as you learn-- then it is worth reading Polanyi.
Rating: 
Summary: Polanyi's brilliant attack on naive objectivism
Review: Books on epistemology tend to be dreary affairs. Epistemology, which is the branch of philosophy that studies how human beings acquire and "validate" their knowledge, tend to be largely speculative and logical. Most theories of epistemology that are inflicted upon the world are nothing more than the highly artificial constructions of some philosopher telling us all how we "ought" to attain and validate our knowledge. Any correspondence to how men really attain knowledge is usually pure coincidence. Moreover, in many instances, the epistemological philosopher has some special agenda which he is seeking to impose on his readers by confusing them with a mass of epistemological pedantry. He may be trying to prove the validity of a largely speculative form of "reason" or of definitions or of certainty or of a perfect and immaculate form of "objectivity" or of some other equally utopian and irrelevant principle. In the light of all this philosophical pretension, it is refreshing to come across a book like Polanyi's "Personal Knowledge." Polanyi was a chemist trained in the methods of science. He understands, as few merely speculative philosophers do, the necessity of deriving theories from facts, rather than facts from theories. Yet Polanyi is more than just a scientist; he is also a very shrewd and critical thinker who does not shrink from challenging long cherished assumptions within his own discipline of science. "Personal Knowledge" is, among other things, an attack on what might be called "naive objectivism," which can be defined as the epistemological view which holds that the only valid knowledge is that which can be articulated and tested by strictly impersonal methods. Polanyi demonstrates why this view of knowledge is untenable. Some of man's most important knowledge, he argues, is tacit and inarticulable, like the knowledge of how to swim or how to judge a work of art. Yet men use such knowledge and even depend on it for their survival. Polanyi's book is rich in such insights. Anyone interested in epistemology needs to read this book. It will change one's thinking about human knowledge and give one a great appreciation of the depth and wonder of the human mind.
Rating:
Summary: Polanyi's brilliant attack on naive objectivism
Review: Books on epistemology tend to be dreary affairs. Epistemology, which is the branch of philosophy that studies how human beings acquire and "validate" their knowledge, tend to be largely speculative and logical. Most theories of epistemology that are inflicted upon the world are nothing more than the highly artificial constructions of some philosopher telling us all how we "ought" to attain and validate our knowledge. Any correspondence to how men really attain knowledge is usually pure coincidence. Moreover, in many instances, the epistemological philosopher has some special agenda which he is seeking to impose on his readers by confusing them with a mass of epistemological pedantry. He may be trying to prove the validity of a largely speculative form of "reason" or of definitions or of certainty or of a perfect and immaculate form of "objectivity" or of some other equally utopian and irrelevant principle. In the light of all this philosophical pretension, it is refreshing to come across a book like Polanyi's "Personal Knowledge." Polanyi was a chemist trained in the methods of science. He understands, as few merely speculative philosophers do, the necessity of deriving theories from facts, rather than facts from theories. Yet Polanyi is more than just a scientist; he is also a very shrewd and critical thinker who does not shrink from challenging long cherished assumptions within his own discipline of science. "Personal Knowledge" is, among other things, an attack on what might be called "naive objectivism," which can be defined as the epistemological view which holds that the only valid knowledge is that which can be articulated and tested by strictly impersonal methods. Polanyi demonstrates why this view of knowledge is untenable. Some of man's most important knowledge, he argues, is tacit and inarticulable, like the knowledge of how to swim or how to judge a work of art. Yet men use such knowledge and even depend on it for their survival. Polanyi's book is rich in such insights. Anyone interested in epistemology needs to read this book. It will change one's thinking about human knowledge and give one a great appreciation of the depth and wonder of the human mind.
Rating:
Summary: Who should read this book?
Review: I am fairly familiar with Polanyi's work and I thought it might be helpful to suggest who could benefit from this book. I would recommend this text to scientists and students who are interested in the philosophical issues and implications of their work, epistemology enthusiasts, philosophy students, and anyone trying to grapple with why Cartesian philosophy doesn't seem to explain reality. Personal Knowledge is a dense read and Polanyi expects the reader to be familiar with many scientific and philosophic histories. It will require several reads to begin to get a grasp on the core of the material, but even a cursory reading is enjoyable and will challenge your thinking. If you are not hip on philosophy, but are still interested in Polanyi's view of knowing reality, there are several texts available. If you don't know what the Cartesian Enlightenment is, then Meek's text "Longing to Know" is an excellent lucid primer that a high-schooler can understand. Drucilla Scott's text, "Everyman Revived" does a good job of expositing Polanyi with some biographical data as well. The reason I rated this text 5 stars is because it is one of the best books I have ever read. However, it is not for everyone. not even a small minority of people will truly enjoy this book. So I hope I helped you become a member of the fractional minority or vice versa.
Rating:
Summary: Who should read this book?
Review: I am fairly familiar with Polanyi's work and I thought it might be helpful to suggest who could benefit from this book. I would recommend this text to scientists and students who are interested in the philosophical issues and implications of their work, epistemology enthusiasts, philosophy students, and anyone trying to grapple with why Cartesian philosophy doesn't seem to explain reality. Personal Knowledge is a dense read and Polanyi expects the reader to be familiar with many scientific and philosophic histories. It will require several reads to begin to get a grasp on the core of the material, but even a cursory reading is enjoyable and will challenge your thinking. If you are not hip on philosophy, but are still interested in Polanyi's view of knowing reality, there are several texts available. If you don't know what the Cartesian Enlightenment is, then Meek's text "Longing to Know" is an excellent lucid primer that a high-schooler can understand. Drucilla Scott's text, "Everyman Revived" does a good job of expositing Polanyi with some biographical data as well. The reason I rated this text 5 stars is because it is one of the best books I have ever read. However, it is not for everyone. not even a small minority of people will truly enjoy this book. So I hope I helped you become a member of the fractional minority or vice versa.
Rating:
Summary: In response to "Good for it's time, but..."
Review: I don't think much of personological/subjective explanations of science, such as Kuhn's and Polanyi's, but I think their views should be heard and considered nevertheless. Western writers seem to have an odd fascination with this sort of approach, for reasons that are understandable historically but that I believe are still untenable, most of which is related to the west's obsession with the individual ego and individual consciousness and with the phenomenological and existential approaches to reality that grew out of that. While I respect Polanyi as a scientist (he was a noted physical chemist), unfortunately I think he's pretty much gone off the deep end in terms of his subjectivistic interpretation of scientific method and of the work of the scientist, which amounts to a form of neo-Kantianism. The first problem I have with this is that by making the human mind the final arbiter of all knowledge and sense data, a systematic ghost of an illusion pervades Polanyi's, and indeed, all Kantian theories, because there is no strong connection to external reality anymore. While I would agree with Polanyi in regard to Kant's basic thesis, that the mind is actively involved in organizing the data of the senses, and that ideas about the external world could not exist unless there were corresponding mental capabilities and constucts to match, this idea, although fine for its day, really doesn't buy you much anymore in my opinion. This is for two reasons, which is the problem of illusionism which I just mentioned, and the second is the approach that has now emerged from the last 75 years of work in neurobiology and the brain sciences, of which these writers seem blissfully unaware. Although we still have a lot to learn, the picture that has emerged so far is both fascinating and impressive. For example, there are 60 trillion cells in a human brain organized into 14,000 major and minor brain centers, and they are all networked together. Each individual neuron has between 3,000 and 100,000 connections with other neurons, producing a neural web of unbelievable complexity. Most sensory neurons are devoted to using feature-detecting algorithms that require advanced calculus to understand, as David Marr has shown. For example, to mention just a few of his important ideas, Marr's demonstrations that retinal receptive field geometry could be derived by Fourier transformation of spatial frequency sensitivity data, that edges and contours could be detected by finding zero crossings in the light gradient by taking the Laplacian or second directional derivative, that excitatory and inhibitory receptive fields could be constructed from "DOG" functions (the difference of two Gaussians), and that the visual system used a two-dimensional convolution integral with a Gaussian prefilter as an operator for bandwidth optimation on the retinal light distribution, showed that the level of mathematical sophistication as well as just brute computational power that is being devoted to sensory information processing is beyond anything we could have imagined. Since Marr's time, there has been further progress in this area, such as the Bela Julesz's demonstrations that the visual system can extract and compute binocular disparity cues point-by-point for depth information from abstract, non-representational pictures such as random-dot stereograms. There is also the extension of Marr's ideas about monochromatic edge detection into color edge detection, the mathematical theories of nonlinear visual field distortions present in optical illusions, and many other areas. Finally, consciousness itself may yield to research on the brain. In the last few years, consciousness has been shown to be composed of many different separate mechanisms in the brain that are being coordinated in time in order for consciousness to occur. It isn't a single process or central program that runs in the brain, nor is there a "master" brain center that one can point to where it can be said that consciousness resides, contrary to classical philosophical models which regarded it as unitary and indivisible. Hence, there is very little reason anymore to insist on the fundamental subjectivity of perception in the Kantian sense. It is true that there are visual illusions at the higher levels of sensory perception, but those are now regarded as special cases, and they are being shown to be explainable in terms of mathematical visual field-distortion theories of these mechanisms that can be quantified just like the basic sensory processes, as I mentioned above. Another reason neo-Kantian theories don't buy you much is to consider the work of cognitive psychologists and psychometricians like J.P. Guilford. Guilford has evidence for 120 different, discrete mental abilities. We have only just started to find out how all these areas and abilities actually work, but the resulting theories will far surpass in detail and complexity the simplistic philosophical generalizations of previous centuries about how knowledge is acquired and ideas are formed. The bottom line at this point is that classical ideas like Kant's really aren't wrong, but they are like what classical Newtonian physics was after Einstein, correct as far as it goes, but just a piece of a much more profound, bigger picture. And the rest of that picture will be filled in by work in neurobiology and cognitive psychology, not by further vague philosophical speculation, which can only propose the most general explanations about these epistemological questions, rather than demonstrate in detail how the mind and the brain actually perceive and extract information from reality and then use the information from sense data to generate ideas about the real world.
Rating:
Summary: Where Philosophy needs to go
Review: I have read this book numerous times over the last ten years and I think it offers the only truly hopeful path for the current impasse that exists between philosophy/religion and the numerous popularizers of contemporary science. What Polanyi shows (himself a chemist turned philosopher) is the way that in reality scientific knowledge, like all knowledge, has an ineradicably personal element to it. That is, you learn to be a scientist not by studying test tubes but by being an apprentice to someone who already is a scientist, who teaches you, disciples you, so to speak, trains you in how to know things in a scientific way. The key element is personal trust, you must trust them, have faith in what they are teaching you, believe in them and the truth, the reality of what they're teaching. This trust aspect is the 'tacit dimension' to all scientific (and every kind of human)knowing. Not only is it interpersonal at the start, all of our knowledge also includes our involvement in a community of fellow knowers (not unlike a church!). They help to validate our knowledge, they correct us, they serve to adjudicate our discoveries. Polanyi's point is that this personal knowledge is the only kind of knowing there is, even though it is not the kind routinely set forth by scientists in their own accounts of what they're doing and what they know. The force of his description is to take away the false dichotomy between supposedly objective 'factual' knowledge and purportedly subjectively impure 'beliefs.' All knowing has a faith-based foundation to it and we're all on the same ground when it comes to arguing for coherent views of the world, of what is and what's not. It's a great book, far from easy, but as important as any book of the last century. Read it!
Rating:
Summary: Vectoring towards a more hopeful perspective on knowing
Review: In Part I, in order to illustrate the concept of the tacit coefficient of knowledge, Polanyi uses the example of handling a hammer in order to drive in a nail. He likens the hammer to the linguistic and symbolic tools that we assimilate into our subsidiary awareness in order to reach towards that which is focal. For his word-picture, not the nail, but the entire act of driving in the nail is part of our focal awareness. As we increase in our skill of knowing, our ability to bring structural tools into subsidiary awareness increases, just as we grow less aware of the hammer's existence until it is merely a sensation against our palm. Part II contains the example of using a map or a diagram to navigate. While we can articulate the relationships between various aspects of a diagram, exactly how we assimilate it in order to find our way is beyond our ability describe. This is another tacit component of knowledge. These illustrations are part of Polanyi's larger project: a critique of the so-called "objectivist" model of scientific knowledge. As he explains it, this model of knowing claims that human beings can, and should, have a disinterested approach to the evidence that lies entirely outside of us. The goal in this project is to determine what reality is without going beyond experience. In Part III, Polanyi describes the corollary to the objectivist model: the "tool" of doubt. The desire for purely empirical data requires that humans doubt voluntary belief, passions that are not justified by evidence. At the end of this doubting enterprise, which Polanyi maintains cannot be carried out consistently, lies modern skepticism. In opposition to this objectivist doubt, the Polanyian model requires the personal involvement of the knower in order to make commitments to knowing, fueled by a passionate interest in a pattern which they sense corresponds to reality. Thus, Polanyi claims, true knowing bridges the disjunction between the objective and the subjective. One way in which he demonstrates the futility of withdrawing personal participation in knowing is the example of the "logical inference machine" (258-9). He says it is "logically absurd" to say that a logical inference machine "draws inferences of its own" because we must ultimately accredit its conclusions as our own. Here he demonstrates that formalization--something which the objectivist model leans upon heavily--can reduce the tacit coefficient to "obvious informal operations" but can never truly eliminate our personal participation. Thus, the machine of the scientific process is never truly autonomous but requires knowers to accredit it. His analysis of the lingual aspect of knowing is subtle and impressive, especially in illustrating the way we use language as a tool. Any critique of his model would necessarily contain formalized logical inferences but yet require those very tacit elements that he has defined. Thus, it seems that once the reader is convinced of, or even brought into a preliminary acceptance of his model, it becomes nearly impossible to refute. Polanyi's highly convincing model does not come from a Christian commitment, and as his own writing would imply, this has a tremendous impact on how he reasons. While I doubt that we can draw a systematic "biblical epistemology" out of the Bible, there are elements of scripture that dovetail neatly with Polanyi's assertions. Psalm 63 is a good example of the passion involved in knowing. The Psalmist "thirsts" for God and as he meditates on Yahweh (most likely through the language of scripture) he is "satisfied as with fat and rich food." John 6:27 uses food as a metaphor for knowing God as well, specifically through the bread that the Son of Man gives. The book of James gives insight into how knowing God occurs within the context of commitment and submission to authority. Can we know something without entering into a commitment to knowing? The proposition that "God is one" is known by demons and believers alike. Yet there is a difference between knowing this truth merely propositionally and knowing it through submission to it and all of the implications of that truth. The Polanyian model, for all its compatibility with a Christian worldview, has a gap when it comes to the problem of sin and evil. While he calls knowing a morally responsible act, he does not address the reason why human beings choose certain biases in their patterning of reality. 1 Corinthians 2:14 says, "The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned." The thrust of this passage and many others is that the effect of sin is so great that humanity cannot know God without intervention from him. While we still may know God in a manner congruous with the Polanyian model, there is no way to enter into this knowledge except through spiritual rebirth-- something Polanyi misses.
Rating:
Summary: Interesting study of tacit knowing and Polanyi's philosophy
Review: Polanyi continues where Gestalt psychology left off, claiming, as Kant also did, that perception is an active reformer of experience (in other words, the mind actively creates meanings out of phenomena at all times). He agrees again with Kant that the mind is not a tabula rasa on which experience writes but rather it is the presupposed structures of the mind (subsidiary and focal awareness) that form our perception of the world. The author eventually leads us to the question of epistemology itself, "How do we know what we know?" Polanyi believes that via tacit thought, say knowing how to play a piece of music fluently yet not being able to adequately describe our knowledge of it, we make knowledge personal. Skills such as music can only be inarticulately known, that is, they can somehow be understood tacitly and though our cognition may understand the relation of their parts we have difficulty describing these relations through our ability to communicate, i.e. explicit language. This is only the tip of the iceberg in Polanyi's thought but I highly recommend this in-depth study of personal knowledge. If you can get through the first few chapters the book gets easier to understand. It's heavy but it's very much worth your time.
Rating:
Summary: Hard stuff, but worth being read
Review: Polanyi's book is hard stuff, indeed. His arguments and examples especially from his own field, i.e. chemistry, are often not too easy to understand let alone to be verified. But the book lacks any kind of obscurantism. The difficulties might stem from the actual thesis of the book itself: Knowledge is not gained by an objective flow of events and therefore the necessary outcome of a determined scientific endeavour, but it's grounded in so human conditions as the sense of beauty and passion. There's always a foreshadowing of the kind of enterprise and even of probable results that make scientists follow some line of argument or experiment and letting the other, so Polanyi's thesis. The decision therefore is not guided by any objective and given fact, but mainly lies in the realm of the scholar's interest, which gains a sense of reality, yet. I'm not sure, whether Polanyi would be pleased by that, but certainly he stands in the tradition of Kant and Wittgenstein, who in their respective develepment of a theory of knowledge point to the fact, that it's always human condition that shapes knowledge. There's no such thing as the being itself but always being as perceived through our senses (Kant) or language (Wittgenstein). In a time, where in the so-called life- sciences the human being is in danger of being reduced to his/ her genes and by that to the raw material of any kind of possible experiments, the voice of Polanyi should be heard, because the refutation of objectivism gets into the heart of the matter.
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