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The Logic of Tacit Inference

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

Michael Polanyi
Michael Polanyi
Affiliation:
22 Upland Park Road, Oxford
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I propose to bring fresh evidence here for my theory of knowledge and expand it in new directions. We shall arrive most swiftly at the centre of the theory, by going back to the point from which I started about twenty years ago. Upon examining the grounds on which science is pursued, I saw that its progress is determined at every stage by indefinable powers of thought. No rules can account for the way a good idea is found for starting an inquiry; and there are no firm rules either for the verification or the refutation of the proposed solution of a problem. Rules widely current may be plausible enough, but scientific enquiry often proceeds and triumphs by contradicting them. Moreover, the explicit content of a theory fails to account for the guidance it affords to future discoveries. To hold a natural law to be true, is to believe that its presence may reveal itself in yet unknown and perhaps yet unthinkable consequences; it is to believe that such laws are features of a reality which as such will continue to bear consequences inexhaustibly.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 41 , Issue 155 , January 1966 , pp. 1 - 18
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1966

References

page 1 note 1 See my Science, Faith and Society (O.U.P., 1946, and as Phoenix Book expanded, 1964)Google Scholar, also Personal Knowledge (London and Chicago, 1958, and as Torch Book, New York, 1964).Google Scholar

page 2 note 1 Buytendijk, F. J. J., Mensch und Tier (Hamburg, 1958), p. 59.Google Scholar

page 3 note 1 Whewell, William, Philosophy of Discovery (London, 1860), p. 254.Google Scholar

page 4 note 1 Brentano, , Franz, , Psychologie Von Empirischem Standpunkt (1874) quoted from edition by Oskar Kraus, Leipzig, 1942.Google Scholar

page 5 note 1 Lazarus, R. S. and McCleary, R. A., J. Person 18 (1949), 191Google Scholar and Psychol. Rev. 58 (1951), 113.Google Scholar These results were called in question by Eriksen, C. W., Psychol. Rev. 63 (1956), 74CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and defended by Lazarus, , Psychol. Rev. 63 (1956), 343.CrossRefGoogle Scholar But in a later paper surveying the whole field (Psychol. Rev. 67 (1960), 279Google Scholar) Eriksen confirmed the experiments of Lazarus and McCleary and accepted them as evidence of subception.

page 6 note 1 Eriksen, C. W., Pychol. Rev. 67, p. 279 (1960).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 7 note 1 Lorenz, Konrad in General Systems, ed. von Bertalanffy, L. and Rapoport, A. (Ann Arbor 1962), p. 50.Google Scholar

page 8 note 1 See e.g. Quine, W. V. O. in Word and Object (New York and London, 1960) p. 221.Google Scholar He rejects any reference to intentions as conceived by Brentano.

page 9 note 1 Hefferline, F., Keenan, B. and Herford, A., Science 130 (1959), 1338–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 9 note 2 Razran, G., Psychol. Rev. 68 (1961), 81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 10 note 1 This distinction is most widely developed in Merleau-Ponty, M., Phenomenology of Perception (London, 1962).Google Scholar Eng. Translation of Phenomenologie de la Perception (1945).Google Scholar

page 14 note 1 This view was expressed, e.g. by ProfessorZiff, Paul in The Feelings of RobotsGoogle Scholar in Minds and Machines, ed. Anderson, A. R., Prentice-Hall Contemporary Perspectives in Philosophy Series (1964).Google Scholar Other authors contested it. I regard my argument in its favour as decisive.

page 16 note 1 Polanyi, Michael, Reviews of Mod. Physics, 34, 601 (1962).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 18 note 1 Scriven, Michael, Explanation, Prediction and Laws in Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. III (Minneapolis, 1962), p. 172.Google Scholar

page 18 note 2 Nagel, Ernest, The Structure of Science (New York, 1961), p. 417.Google Scholar

page 18 note 3 I have published simultaneously with this paper a more fully developed statement of my Body Mind theory in Brain under the title The Structure of Consciousness.