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Polanyi's Notion of Hierarchy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2008
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Professor Gill's recent defence of the notion of ‘reasons of the heart’ in religion1 depends upon Polanyi's view that through ‘tacit knowledge’ of lower levels of reality we can come to know something of higher levels - even, I take it, of God, himself, as the highest level of all. Unfortunately, Polanyi's argument for such a hierarchy of being is confused and depends for its apparent strength on an illicit mixing together of ontological and what may be loosely called methodological claims. Because of this and other confusions, the argument is difficult to state concisely. For convenience I will first use Marjorie Grene's formulation.
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References
page 97 note 1 Gill, Jerry H., ‘Reasons of the Heart: a Polanyian Reflection’, Religious Studies, XIV (June 1978), 143–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
page 97 note 2 Grene, Marjorie, The Understanding of Nature: Essays in the Philosophy of Biology (D. Reidel Publishing Co., 1974). p. 56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
page 97 note 3 Ibid.
page 98 note 1 Polanyi, Michael, ‘Life's Irreducible Structure’, in Grene, Marjorie and Mendelsohn, Everett (ed.), Topics in the Philosophy of Biology (D. Reidel Publishing Co., 1976), p. 132Google Scholar. Polanyi's article originally appeared in Science, CLX (1968), 1308–12.Google Scholar
page 98 note 2 I leave aside as irrelevant to this issue the fact that the structure of a particular DNA molecule may be impossible in principle to predict because of quantum effects.
page 98 note 3 Ibid. p. 131.
page 98 note 4 Ibid. p. 132.
page 99 note 1 Ibid.
page 99 note 2 Ibid. p. 128.
page 99 note 3 Ibid.
page 99 note 4 Ibid.
page 100 note 1 Ibid.; my italics.
page 100 note 2 Ibid. p. 129.
page 100 note 3 Ibid.
page 100 note 4 Polanyi, Michael, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (Routledge & Kegan Paul 1962), pp. 328–32.Google Scholar
page 100 note 5 See Anderson, John, Studies in Empirical Philosophy (Angus and Robertson, 1962).Google Scholar
page 100 note 6 Passmore, John, Philosophical Reasoning (Duckworth, 1996Google Scholar), ch. 3.
page 101 note 1 Partridge, P. H., ‘Logic and Evolution’, The Australian journal of Psychology and Philosophy (Sept. 1934) p. 161.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
page 101 note 2 Alexander, Samuel, Space, Time and Deity (Macmillan, 1920), II, 47.Google Scholar
page 101 note 3 See Nagel, Ernest, The Structure of Science (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961), p. 376.Google Scholar
page 101 note 4 Op. cit. pp. 48–9.Google Scholar
page 102 note 1 The Tacit Dimension (Routledge & Kogan Paul), pp. 46–8.Google Scholar
page 102 note 2 Ibid. p. 47.