Fenomenologie Hermeneutiek Kennissociologie Logisch positivisme Algemeen Popper SciëntismeIncididunt nisi non nisi incididunt velit cillum magna commodo proident officia enim.
Michael POLANYI[Dit is het klassieke boek van Michael Polanyi over de inbedding van (het verwerven van) kennis in allerlei meer persoonlijke emotionele kaders zoals nieuwsgierigheid, de drang om een oplossing te vinden, de wil om de waarheid te kennen, weerzin, jaloezie, en zo verder. Ook wetenschappelijk onderzoek verloopt niet op de afstandelijke en rationeel-logische manier zoals in de schoolboeken beschreven staat. Daarmee was Polanyi een van die denkers die kennisverwerving een persoonlijke en maatschappelijke context gaven. Toch is het boek als zodanig niet geweldig. Ik begrijp niet dat Polanyi zichzelf blijkbaar niet afgevraagd heeft of het niet korter kon: hij heeft wel erg veel woorden nodig om een aantal simpele punten duidelijk te maken. Daarnaast schrijft hij ook nog eens heel afstandelijk en blijft hij veel te lang in abstracties hangen. Tot slot wordt min of meer stiekem toch weer de religie binnengesmokkeld. Want als alles een kwestie is van geloof in uitgangspunten en als wetenschap in die zin niet anders is dan kunst of filosofie of religie, dan kunnen we volgens Polanyi niet meer doen wat de objectivisten eeuwenlang gedaan hebben: de religie en de metafysica en zo verder aan de kant gooien als te subjectief, onbetrouwbaar etc. Als je het op de manier van Polanyi benaderd worden alle uitgangspunten even belangrijk. Het ontbreekt dus uiteindelijk aan een antwoord op de meest wezenlijke vraag: kun je verdedigen dat sommige normatieve uitgangspunten, sommige waarden en normensystemen beter zijn dan andere? Ik denk dat dat kan en dat dat moet. Maar Polanyi laat het daar juist afweten.]
"This is primarily an enquiry into the nature and justification of scientific knowledge. But my reconsideration of scientific knowledge leads on to a wide range of questions outside science. I start by rejecting the ideal of scientific detachment. In the exact sciences, this false ideal is perhaps harmless, for it is in fact disregarded there by scientists. But we shall see that it exercises a destructive influence in biology, psychology and sociology, and falsifies our whole outlook far beyond the domain of science. I want to establish an alternative ideal of knowledge, quite generally."(vii)
[Dit is de eerste alinea. Is er een mooier manier om met de deur in huis te vallen? :-)]
"Such is the personal participation of the knower in all acts of understanding. But this does not make our understanding subjective. Comprehension is neither an arbitrary act nor a passive experience, but a responsible act claiming universal validity. Such knowing is indeed objective in the sense of establishing contact with a hidden reality; a contact that is defined as the condition for anticipating an indeterminate range of yet unknown (and perhaps yet inconceivable) true implications. It seems reasonable to describe this fusion of the personal and the objective as Personal Knowledge."(vii-viii)
"Any attempt rigorously to eliminate our human perspective from our picture of the world must lead to absurdity."(3)
"Thus, when we claim greater objectivity for the Copernican theory, we do imply that its excellence is, not a matter of personal taste on our part, but an inherent quality deserving universal acceptance by rational creatures. We abandon the cruder anthropocentrism of our senses — but only in favour of a more ambitious anthropocentrism of our reason. In doing so, we claim the capacity to formulate ideas which command respect in their own right, by their very rationality, and which have in this sense an objective standing."(4-5)
"This is not, however, what we are taught today. To say that the discovery of objective truth in science consists in the apprehension of a rationality which commands our respect and arouses our contemplative admiration; that such discovery, while using the experience of our senses as clues, transcends this experience by embracing the vision of a reality beyond the impressions of our senses, a vision which speaks for itself in guiding us to an ever deeper understanding of reality — such an account of scientific procedure would be generally shrugged aside as out-dated Platonism: a piece of mystery-mongering unworthy of an enlightened age. Yet it is precisely on this conception of objectivity that I wish to insist in this introductory chapter. I want to recall how scientific theory came to be reduced in the modern mind to the rank of a convenient contrivance, a device for recording events and computing their future course, and I wish to suggest then that twentieth-century physics, and Einstein’s discovery of relativity in particular, which are usually regarded as the fruits and illustrations of this positivistic conception of science, demonstrate on the contrary the power of science to make contact with reality in nature by recognizing what is rational in nature."(5-6)
[Ik blijf het maar vreemd en eenzijdig vinden dat altijd weer beweerd wordt dat de 'wetenschappelijke beweging' startte in de Griekse Oudheid. Er wordt daarbij voorbijgegaan aan de wetenschap in China en India en de Arabische wereld, wetenschap die vaak al eeuwen eerder op allerlei principes uitkwam en tot technische uitvindingen leidde.]
"Mathematics represented all rational thinking which appeared necessarily true; while reality was summed up in the events of the world which were seen as contingent — that is, merely such as happened to be the case."(9)
"Accordingly, scientific theory is denied all persuasive power that is intrinsic to itself, as theory. It must not go beyond experience by affirming anything that cannot be tested by experience; and above all, scientists must be prepared immediately to drop a theory the moment an observation turns up which conflicts with it. In so far as a theory cannot be tested by experience — or appears not capable of being so tested — it ought to be revised so that its predictions are restricted to observable magnitudes. This view, which can be traced back to Locke and Hume, and which in its massive modern absurdity has almost entirely dominated twentieth-century thinking on science, seems to be the inevitable consequence of separating, in principle, mathematical knowledge from empirical knowledge. I shall now proceed to the story of relativity, which is supposed to have brilliantly confirmed this view of science, and shall show why in my opinion it has supplied on the contrary some striking evidence for its refutation."(9)
Einstein kwam op een heel andere manier op de relativiteitstheorie dan in de tekstboeken staat.
"The usual textbook account of relativity as a theoretical response to the Michelson-Morley experiment is an invention. It is the product of a philosophical prejudice. When Einstein discovered rationality in nature, unaided by any observation that had not been available for at least fifty years before, our positivistic textbooks promptly covered up the scandal by an appropriately embellished account of his discovery."(11)
"The layman, taught to revere scientists for their absolute respect for the observed facts, and for the judiciously detached and purely provisional manner in which they hold scientific theories (always ready to abandon a theory at the sight of any contradictory evidence), might well have thought that, at Miller’s announcement of this overwhelming evidence of a ‘positive effect’ in his presidential address to the American Physical Society on December 29th, 1925, his audience would have instantly abandoned the theory of relativity. Or, at the very least, that scientists — wont to look down from the pinnacle of their intellectual humility upon the rest of dogmatic mankind — might suspend judgment in this matter until Miller’s results could be accounted for without impairing the theory of relativity. But no: by that time they had so well closed their minds to any suggestion which threatened the new rationality achieved by Einstein’s world-picture, that it was almost impossible for them to think again in different terms. Little attention was paid to the experiments, the evidence being set aside in the hope that it would one day turn out to be wrong.
The experience of D.C.Miller demonstrates quite plainly the hollowness of the assertion that science is simply based on experiments which anybody can repeat at will. It shows that any critical verification of a scientific statement requires the same powers for recognizing rationality in nature as does the process of scientific discovery, even though it exercises these at a lower level. When philosophers analyse the verification of scientific laws, they invariably choose as specimens such laws as are not in doubt, and thus inevitably overlook the intervention of these powers. They are describing the practical demonstration of scientific law, and not its critical verification. As a result we are given an account of the scientific method which, having left out the process of discovery on the grounds that it follows no definite method overlooks the process of verification as well, by referring only to examples where no real verification takes place."(12-14)
"The beauty and power inherent in the rationality of contemporary physics is, as I have said, of a novel kind. When classical physics superseded the Pythagorean tradition, mathematical theory was reduced to a mere instrument for computing the mechanical motions which were supposed to underlie all natural phenomena. Geometry also stood outside nature, claiming to offer an a priori analysis of Euclidean space, which was regarded as the scene of all natural phenomena but not thought to be involved in them. Relativity, and subsequently quantum mechanics and modern physics generally, have moved back towards a mathematical conception of reality."(14)
"We cannot truly account for our acceptance of such theories without endorsing our acknowledgement of a beauty that exhilarates and a profundity that entrances us. Yet the prevailing conception of science, based on the disjunction of subjectivity and objectivity, seeks — and must seek at all costs — to eliminate from science such passionate, personal, human appraisals of theories, or at least to minimize their function to that of a negligible by-play. For modern man has set up as the ideal of knowledge the conception of natural science as a set of statements which is ‘objective’ in the sense that its substance is entirely determined by observation, even while its presentation may be shaped by convention. This conception, stemming from a craving rooted in the very depths of our culture, would be shattered if the intuition of rationality in nature had to be acknowledged as a justifiable and indeed essential part of scientific theory. That is why scientific theory is represented as a mere economical description of facts; or as embodying a conventional policy for drawing empirical inferences; or as a working hypothesis, suited to man’s practical convenience — interpretations that all deliberately overlook the rational core of science."(15-16)
"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."(17)
[Dat die passie van de wetenschapper, breder: de waarden en normen van de wetenschapper, een grote rol spelen in het doen van onderzoek en het uitwerken van theorie, en dat allerlei sociale aspecten een rol spelen in het (blijven) accepteren van een theorie vind ik heel voor de hand liggend. Dat wetenschappelijke ontwikkeling niet alleen maar geleid wordt door strenge methoden van observatie vind ik ook aannemelijk. Ik begrijp alleen zo'n uitdrukking als 'what is rational in nature', 'rationality in nature unaided by any observation' niet. Wordt bedoeld dat we allerlei theoretische inzichten kunnen bedenken over de werkelijkheid zonder dat we nog de obervaties hebben die die inzichten kunnen bevestigen - Einsteins gedachtenexperimenten, de voorspellingen van deeltjes die moeten bestaan? Dan snap ik de bedoeling.]
"The purpose of this book is to show that complete objectivity as usually attributed to the exact sciences is a delusion and is in fact a false ideal. But I shall not try to repudiate strict objectivity as an ideal without offering a substitute, which I believe to be more worthy of intelligent allegiance; this I have called ‘personal knowledge’."(18)
"The avowed purpose of the exact sciences is to establish complete intellectual control over experience in terms of precise rules which can be formally set out and empirically tested. Could that ideal be fully achieved, all truth and all error could henceforth be ascribed to an exact theory of the universe, while we who accept this theory would be relieved of any occasion for exercising our personal judgment: we should only have to follow the rules faithfully. Classical mechanics approaches this ideal so closely that it is often thought to have achieved it. But this leaves out of account the element of personal judgment involved in applying the formulae of mechanics to the facts of experience."(18-19)
Er zitten persoonlijke verschillen in waarnemingen in de zin van het aflezen van instrumenten. Persoonlijke inschattingen spelen zelfs nog meer een rol bij het verifiëren van een wetenschappelijke theorie. Men weet dat ook: een theorie wordt echt niet zo maar aan de kant gegooid wanneer er wat observaties opduiken die afwijken van voorspelde waarden / er mee in tegenspraak zijn.
"Contrary to current opinion, it is not the case that a proven discrepancy between theoretical predictions and observed data suffices in itself to invalidate a theory. Such discrepancies may often be classed as anomalies. The perturbations of the planetary motions that were observed during 60 years preceding the discovery of Neptune, and which could not be explained by the mutual interaction of the planets, were rightly set aside at the time as anomalies by most astronomers, in the hope that something might eventually turn up to account for them without impairing — or at least not essentially impairing — Newtonian gravitation. Speaking more generally, we may say that there are always some conceivable scruples which scientists customarily set aside in the process of verifying an exact theory. Such acts of personal judgment form an essential part of science."(20)
"I shall mention in the next chapter a wide range of universally valid appraisals within the exact sciences which are all essentially incapable of being contradicted by any conceivable event."(22)
"A sincere allegation is an act that takes place in speaking or in writing down certain symbols. Its agent is the speaking or writing person. Like all intelligent actions, such assertions have a passionate quality attached to them. They express conviction to those to whom they are addressed. We have on record the outcries of dizzy exultation to which Kepler gave vent at the dawning of discovery, as well as those of others at the false dawn of supposed discoveries. We know the violence with which great pioneers like Pasteur have upheld their claims against their critics and can hear the same angry impatience expressed today by fanatical cranks like Lysenko. A doctor deciding on a serious diagnosis in a difficult case or a juryman bringing in a fatal verdict in dubious circumstances will feel the weight of a heavy personal responsibility. In routine observations, unobstructed by opposition and unworried by doubts, these passions are dormant but not absent; no sincere assertion of fact is essentially unaccompanied by feelings of intellectual satisfaction or of a persuasive desire and a sense of personal responsibility. Therefore, in a strict usage the same symbol should never represent the act of sincerely asserting something and the content of what is asserted."(27)
"If language is to denote speech it must reflect the fact that we never say anything that has not a definite impassioned quality. It should be clear from the modality of a sentence whether it is a question, a command, an invective, a complaint or an allegation of fact."(27)
"To select good questions for investigation is the mark of scientific talent, and any theory of inductive inference in which this talent plays no part is a Hamlet without the prince. The same holds for the process of verification. Things are not labelled ‘evidence’ in nature, but are evidence only to the extent to which they are accepted as such by us as observers. This is true even for the most exact sciences."(30)
"The selection and testing of scientific hypotheses are personal acts, but like other such acts they are subject to rules and the probability scheme may be accepted as a set of such rules."(30)
Polanyi noemt dat soort regels maximes.
"I wish to suggest that the conception of events governed by chance implies a reference to orderly patterns which such events can simulate only by coincidence. To test the probability of such coincidences and hence the permissibility of assuming that they have taken place, is the method of Sir Ronald Fisher for establishing a contrario the reality of an orderly pattern. On these grounds I suggest, quite generally, that the appraisal of order is an act of personal knowledge, exactly as is the assessment of probability to which it is allied."(36)
"For the moment, it is enough to recognize here that, in affirming these fundamental laws of nature, we accredit our capacity for knowing randomness from order in nature and that this distinction cannot be based on considerations of numerical probabilities, since the calculus of probabilities presupposes, on the contrary, our capacity to understand and recognize randomness in nature."(40)
Het inschatten van orde en regelmatigheid wordt verder gedemonstreerd aan de scheikunde en aan de kristallografie.
"We see emerging here a substantial alternative to the usual disjunction of objective and subjective statements, as well as to the disjunction between analytic and synthetic statements. By accrediting our capacity to make valid appraisals of universal bearing within the exact natural sciences, we may yet avoid the sterility and confusion imposed by these traditional categories.(48)"()
Uit iemands vaardigheden blijkt zijn of haar persoonlijke rol in wetenschappelijk onderzoek. In vaardigheden worden zoals bekend regels gevolgd, maar:
"Rules of art can be useful, but they do not determine the practice of an art; they are maxims, which can serve as a guide to an art only if they can be integrated into the practical knowledge of the art. They cannot replace this knowledge."(50)
"The fact that skills cannot be fully accounted for in terms of their particulars may lead to serious difficulties in judging whether or not a skilful performance is genuine. The extensive controversy on the ‘touch’ of pianists may serve as an example."(50)
"This example should stand for many others which teach the same lesson; namely that to deny the feasibility of something that is alleged to have been done or the possibility of an event that is supposed to have been observed, merely because we cannot understand in terms of our hitherto accepted framework how it could have been done or could have happened, may often result in explaining away quite genuine practices or experiences. Yet this method of criticism is indispensable, and without its constant exercise no scientist or technician could keep a steady course among the many spurious observations which he has to set aside unexplained every day.
Destructive analysis remains also an indispensable weapon against superstition and specious practices."(51)
[Je zou ook kunnen zeggen dat dat wegverklaren van dingen bijzonder onverstandig is omdat het ons te voorzichtig en conservatief maakt. Die piano 'touch' was blijkbaar geen bijgeloof, tenslotte. Van een kant probeer je vaardigheden dus te analyseren en geloof je niet in wat je analyses niet kunnen verklaren, van de andere kant kunnen je analyses blind zijn voor ongewone dingen die we in eerste instantie nog niet begrijpen. Het lijkt me verstandig om respect te hebben voor die zaken die we niet meteen kunnen verklaren zonder toe te geven aan mensen die menen dat de eisen van verklaarbaarheid en controleerbaarheid voor hen niet gelden.]
"An art which cannot be specified in detail cannot be transmitted by prescription, since no prescription for it exists. It can be passed on only by example from master to apprentice. This restricts the range of diffusion to that of personal contacts, and we find accordingly that craftsmanship tends to survive in closely circumscribed local traditions."(53)
Internationale contacten en uitwisselingen van mensen zijn dus erg belangrijk om die vaardigheden te kunnen overdragen. Dat geldt ook voor de vaardigheid om wetenschappelijk onderzoek te doen.
"Again, while the articulate contents of science are successfully taught all over the world in hundreds of new universities, the unspecifiable art of scientific research has not yet penetrated to many of these."(53)
"To learn by example is to submit to authority. You follow your master because you trust his manner of doing things even when you cannot analyse and account in detail for its effectiveness. By watching the master and emulating his efforts in the presence of his example, the apprentice unconsciously picks up the rules of the art, including those which are not explicitly known to the master himself. These hidden rules can be assimilated only by a person who surrenders himself to that extent uncritically to the imitation of another. A society which wants to preserve a fund of personal knowledge must submit to tradition."(53)
[Weet niet. Op gezag en traditie aannemen is dubbelzinnig: je neemt in veel gevallen ook allerlei zaken over die later volkomen onbelangrijk of zelfs schadelijk blijken te zijn. Ik denk dat we moeten proberen die 'hidden rules' zo veel als kan op te sporen en te expliciteren en vervolgens te onderzoeken of ze effectief zijn. Autoriteit en traditie zijn al te vaak ook remmers van nieuwe inzichten gebleken.]
Vaardigheden vragen verschillende soorten aandacht: bijvoorbeeld een besef van achterliggende zaken en aandacht gericht op het doel van de handelingen.
"The kind of clumsiness which is due to the fact that focal attention is directed to the subsidiary elements of an action is commonly known as self-consciousness. A serious and sometimes incurable form of it is ‘stage-fright’, which seems to consist in the anxious riveting of one’s attention to the next word — or note or gesture — that one has to find or remember. This destroys one’s sense of the context which alone can smoothly evoke the proper sequence of words, notes, or gestures. Stage fright is eliminated and fluency recovered if we succeed in casting our mind forward and let it operate with a clear view to the comprehensive activity in which we are primarily interested."(56)
"I suggest now that the supposed pre-suppositions of science are so futile because the actual foundations of our scientific beliefs cannot be asserted at all. When we accept a certain set of pre-suppositions and use them as our interpretative framework, we may be said to dwell in them as we do in our own body. Their uncritical acceptance for the time being consists in a process of assimilation by which we identify ourselves with them. They are not asserted and cannot be asserted, for assertion can be made only within a framework with which we have identified ourselves for the time being; as they are themselves our ultimate framework, they are essentially inarticulable."(59-60)
[Nou, ben ik het ook niet zo mee eens. Vooronderstellingen kunnen opgespoord en geëxpliciteerd worden, onkritische acceptatie is een raar woord in deze samenhang. Het feit dat we binnen een bepaald kader bewegen betekent niet dat we de vooronderstellingen van dat kader niet kunnen ontdekken.]
"Like the tool, the sign or the symbol can be conceived as such only in the eyes of a person who relies on them to achieve or to signify something. This reliance is a personal commitment which is involved in all acts of intelligence by which we integrate some things subsidiarily to the centre of our focal attention. Every act of personal assimilation by which we make a thing form an extension of ourselves through our subsidiary awareness of it, is a commitment of ourselves; a manner of disposing of ourselves."(61)
Dit hoofdstuk gaat over verschillende vormen van intelligentie, namelijk 'articulate and inarticulate intelligence' (70).
[Moeilijk te vertalen, expliciet en impliciet, bewust en onbewust, uitgesproken en onuitgesproken.]
"The enormous increase of mental powers derived from the acquisition of formal instruments of thought stands also in a peculiar contrast with the facts collected in the first part of this book, which demonstrate the pervasive participation of the knowing person in the act of knowing by virtue of an art which is essentially inarticulate. The two conflicting aspects of formalized intelligence may be reconciled by assuming that articulation always remains incomplete; that our articulate utterances can never altogether supersede but must continue to rely on such mute acts of intelligence as we once had in common with chimpanzees of our own age."(70)
"If everywhere it is the inarticulate which has the last word, unspoken and yet decisive, then a corresponding abridgement of the status of spoken truth itself is inevitable. The ideal of an impersonally detached truth would have to be reinterpreted, to allow for the inherently personal character of the act by which truth is declared. The hope of achieving an acceptable balance of mind in this respect will guide the subsequent enquiry throughout Parts Two and Three of this book."(71)
[Ik weet niet, ik heb steeds het gevoel dat ik iets mis in die redenering. Ik denk dat ik het in de tegenoverstelling van 'inarticulate' en 'articulate' wel eens ben met de kritiek op overschatting van het expliciete karakter van kennisverwerv ing, maar tegelijkertijd vind dat Polanyi het impliciete karakter ervan juist weer overschat. Hij heeft me iets te veel liefde voor het onuitgesprokene. Waarom zou het impliciete het laatste woord hebben zoals hij hierboven zegt, wanneer we constateren dat het expliciete overschat werd. Ik denk dat het expliciete simpelweg niet breed genoeg is getrokken: de hele normatieve dimensie in de kennisverwerving is juist NIET geëxpliciteerd en de kunst is om die juist wél te expliciteren. Mijn visie is dat we het impliciete altijd moeten wantrouwen omdat controleerbaarheid daar onmogelijk is, en dat we beter moeten worden in het expliciteren van allerlei uitgangspunten in onze kennisverwerving, dus ook de normatieve. Daarnaast vind ik waarschijnlijk niet dat het individu zo bepalend is voor de betrekkelijkheid van wat we waarheid noemen. Bepalend is het individu-in-sociale-context. Maar ik moet nog nader bekijken, of Polanyi zo individualiseert.]
Beschrijving van allerlei leertheorieën naar aanleiding van onderzoeken bij primaten en kinderen.
"I shall now try to define the main principles by which language becomes the instrument for the tremendous feats of articulation. There are three main kinds of utterances, namely: (1) expressions of feeling, (2) appeals to other persons, (3) statements of fact. To each of these there corresponds a different function of language. The transition from the tacit to the articulate which I am envisaging here is restricted to the indicative forms of speech, as used for statements of fact. Admittedly, language is primarily and always interpersonal and in some degree impassioned; exclusively so in emotional expression (passionate communication) and imperative speech (action by speech), while even in declaratory statements of fact there is some purpose (to communicate) and passion (to express belief). In fact, it is precisely the ingredient of personal passion inherent in and necessary to even the least personal forms of speech which my argument seeks to exhibit. But the peculiar intellectual powers conferred by articulation can be recognized more clearly if we disregard this possibility for the moment, and attend principally to the bare indicative solitary use of language. Even so, language should be taken from the start to include writing, mathematics, graphs and maps, diagrams and pictures; in short, all forms of symbolic representation which are used as language in the sense defined by the subsequent description of the linguistic process."(77-78)
"The following examples should illustrate the immense range of mental powers generated by the simple machinery of denoting, reorganizing and reading, and should show at the same time that though our powers of thought be ever so much enhanced by the use of symbols, they still operate ultimately within the same medium of unformalized intelligence which we share with the animals."(82)
"In all these instances of the enhancement of our intellectual powers by suitable symbolization, it is clear that the mere manipulation of symbols does not in itself supply any new information, but is effective only because it assists the inarticulate mental powers exercised by reading off their result. This may not be so obvious for the process of deriving new information by means of mathematical computations; but it is true all the same here too."(83)
"We have now before us the following sequence of sciences relying decreasingly on the first and increasingly on the second operational principle of language: (1) the descriptive sciences, (2) the exact sciences, (3) the deductive sciences. It is a sequence of increasing formalization and symbolic manipulation, combined with decreasing contact with experience. Higher degrees of formalization make the statements of science more precise, its inferences more impersonal and correspondingly more ‘reversible’; but every step towards this ideal is achieved by a progressive sacrifice of content. The immense wealth of living shapes governed by the descriptive sciences is narrowed down to bare pointer-readings for the purpose of the exact sciences, and experience vanishes altogether from our direct sight as we pass on to pure mathematics."(86)
[Dat ben ik met hem eens. Het probleem van het reductionisme. Ik vind heel die uitwweiding naar de taal niet zo interessant, hij leidt af van het geconstateerde probleem.]
"More precisely speaking, we should say that we are referring in both these cases to a state of mental uneasiness due to the feeling that our tacit thoughts do not agree with our symbolic operations, so that we have to decide on which of the two we should rely and which we should correct in the light of the other."(93)
"The mind which entrusts itself to the operation of symbols acquires an intellectual tool of boundless power; but its use makes the mind liable to perils the range of which seems also unlimited. The gap between the tacit and the articulate tends to produce everywhere a cleavage between sound common sense and dubious sophistication, from which the animal is quite free."(94)
"Thus to speak a language is to commit ourselves to the double indeterminacy due to our reliance both on its formalism and on our own continued reconsideration of this formalism in its bearing on experience. For just as, owing to the ultimately tacit character of all our knowledge, we remain ever unable to say all that we know, so also, in view of the tacit character of meaning, we can never quite know what is implied in what we say."(95)
"Different languages are alternative conclusions, arrived at by the secular gropings of different groups of people at different periods of history. They sustain alternative conceptual frameworks, interpreting all things that can be talked about in terms of somewhat different allegedly recurrent features. The confident use of the nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs, invented and endowed with meaning by a particular sequence of groping generations, expresses their particular theory of the nature of things. In learning to speak, every child accepts a culture constructed on the premises of the traditional interpretation of the universe, rooted in the idiom of the group to which it was born, and every intellectual effort of the educated mind will be made within this frame of reference. Man’s whole intellectual life would be thrown away should this interpretative framework be wholly false; he is rational only to the extent to which the conceptions to which he is committed are true. The use of the word ‘true’ in the preceding sentence is part of a process of re-defining the meaning of truth, so as to make it truer in its own modified sense."(112)
"Established rules of inference offer public paths for drawing intelligent conclusions from existing knowledge. The pioneer mind which reaches its own distinctive conclusions by crossing a logical gap deviates from the commonly accepted process of reasoning, to achieve surprising results. Such an act is original in the sense of making a new start, and the capacity for initiating it is the gift of originality, a gift possessed by a small minority."(123)
"There are three major fields of knowledge in which discoveries are possible: natural science, technology and mathematics. I have referred to examples from each of these fields to illustrate the anticipatory powers which guide discovery. These are clearly quite similar in all three cases. Yet the efforts of philosophers have been almost wholly concentrated on the process of empirical discovery which underlies the natural sciences — i.e. on an attempt to define and justify the process of induction, while by contrast, nobody seems to have tried to define and justify the process by which technical innovations are made, as for example when a new machine is invented."(124-125)
[Ook hier weer die typische eenzijdigheid van iermand met een exacte achtergrond. Bestaan er geen sociale wetenschappen waar uitvindingen gedaan kunnen worden? Bestaat er geen techniekfilosofie? Die was er al toen Polanyhi dit boek schreef.]
"The affirmation of a great scientific theory is in part an expression of delight. The theory has an inarticulate component acclaiming its beauty, and this is essential to the belief that the theory is true. No animal can appreciate the intellectual beauties of science."(133)
"A scientific theory which calls attention to its own beauty, and partly relies on it for claiming to represent empirical reality, is akin to a work of art which calls attention to its own beauty as a token of artistic reality. It is akin also to the mystical contemplation of nature: a kinship shown historically in the Pythagorean origins of theoretical science. More generally, science, by virtue of its passionate note, finds its place among the great systems of utterances which try to evoke and impose correct modes of feeling. In teaching its own kinds of formal excellence science functions like art, religion, morality, law and other constituents of culture."(133)
"If the upholding of scientific truth requires that we justify such passionate valuations, our task expands inevitably also to the justification of those equally passionate valuations on which the affirmation of the several domains of culture is predicated. Science can then no longer hope to survive on an island of positive facts, around which the rest of man’s intellectual heritage sinks to the status of subjective emotionalism. It must claim that certain emotions are right; and if it can make good such a claim, it will not only save itself but sustain by its example the whole system of cultural life of which it forms part."(134)
[Natuurlijk, er zijn ook allerlei normatieve vooronderstellingen, maar dan nog is wetenschap heel anders dan kunst en religie en moraal, etc.]
"Science is regarded as objectively established in spite of its passionate origins. It should be clear by this time that I dissent from that belief; and I have now come to the point at which I want to deal explicitly with passions in science. I want to show that scientific passions are no mere psychological by-product, but have a logical function which contributes an indispensable element to science. They respond to an essential quality in a scientific statement and may accordingly be said to be right or wrong, depending on whether we acknowledge or deny the presence of that quality in it."(134)
"Though not definable in precise terms, scientific value can as a rule be reliably assessed. Its appraisal is required and depended upon every day in the process of advancing and disseminating science. Referees consulted by journals have to judge whether the scientific interest of a contribution would justify the expense of its publication. Others have to decide whether the award of a research grant is worth while. Scientists must be able to recognize what is manifestly trivial, just as what is manifestly false."(136)
"Scientists — that is, creative scientists — spend their lives in trying to guess right. They are sustained and guided therein by their heuristic passion. We call their work creative because it changes the world as we see it, by deepening our understanding of it. The change is irrevocable. A problem that I have once solved can no longer puzzle me; I cannot guess what I already know. Having made a discovery, I shall never see the world again as before. My eyes have become different; I have made myself into a person seeing and thinking differently. I have crossed a gap, the heuristic gap which lies between problem and discovery.
Major discoveries change our interpretative framework. Hence it is logically impossible to arrive at these by the continued application of our previous interpretative framework. So we see once more that discovery is creative, in the sense that it is not to be achieved by the diligent performance of any previously known and specifiable procedure. This strengthens our conception of originality. The application of existing rules can produce valuable surveys, but does not advance the principles of science. We have to cross the logical gap between a problem and its solution by relying on the unspecifiable impulse of our heuristic passion, and must undergo as we do so a change of our intellectual personality."(143)
"Intellectual passions, then, may be altogether misdirected, as were those of Laplace in formulating his objectivist ideal; and even those which lead aright, as in the case of Kepler, may be interwoven with others that are inherently erroneous. A further example will confirm this conclusion, by showing us once more how closely mingled are truth-bearing and fallacious components in the intellectual passions of even the greatest scientists, and in what sense we can yet distinguish between the two."(144)
"I have watched many a university audience listening to my account of intuitive discoveries silently, with sullen distaste. Then an ironical voice would ask whether the speaker thought that there was any use at all in making experiments; and yet another, whether on such grounds as these, explanations in terms of astrology would not be equally justified. These are important questions.
The answer to the first is that experience is an indispensable clue to the understanding of nature, even though it does not determine its understanding. Einstein speaks of ‘ein intuitives Heranfühlen an die Tatsachen’, which I should call a groping for the meaning of the facts. In this empirical guidance of our groping lies all the difference — elusive and yet utterly decisive — between a merely formal advance and a new insight into the nature of things. Whence this elusiveness? It is a reflection on the canvas of the highest scientific achievement of the fact that we can never tell exactly what we mean, or even whether we mean anything at all. Indeterminacy of meaning is not eliminated, but only restricted, when we eventually decide to accept a theory as a true statement of something new about nature. For, while we heavily commit ourselves thereby to a belief concerning certain things, such a belief can have no bearing on reality unless its scope is still left indeterminate.
The answer to the second question, why we should prefer science to astrology, cannot be given briefly. In the next section I shall approach it by one step and a fairly conclusive reply will be reached at the end of Part Three; but the whole of this book is but a quest for a substantial reply to a question of this kind. In the end I should be able to say as a statement that will appear neither dogmatic nor trivial: ‘I do not entertain explanations in terms of astrology, for I do not believe them to be true.’"(150)
"Heuristic passion seeks no personal possession. It sets out not to conquer, but to enrich the world. Yet such a move is also an attack. It raises a claim and makes a tremendous demand on other men; for it asks that its gift to humanity be accepted by all. In order to be satisfied, our intellectual passions must find response. This universal intent creates a tension: we suffer when a vision of reality to which we have committed ourselves is contemptuously ignored by others. For a general unbelief imperils our own convictions by evoking an echo in us. Our vision must conquer or die."(150)
"The two conflicting systems of thought are separated by a logical gap, in the same sense as a problem is separated from the discovery which solves the problem. Formal operations relying on one framework of interpretation cannot demonstrate a proposition to persons who rely on another framework. Its advocates may not even succeed in getting a hearing from these, since they must first teach them a new language, and no one can learn a new language unless he first trusts that it means something. A hostile audience may in fact deliberately refuse to entertain novel conceptions such as those of Freud, Eddington, Rhine or Lysenko, precisely because its members fear that once they have accepted this framework they will be led to conclusions which they — rightly or wrongly — abhor."(151)
"Scientific opinion eventually repudiated Kolbe’s attack on van’t Hoff and Wislicenus, but his suspicion of speculative chemistry (‘paper chemistry’) continues to be shared by most of the leading chemical journals, which refuse up to this day contributions containing no new experimental results. In spite of the fact that chemistry is largely based on the speculations by Dalton, Kekulé and van’t Hoff, which were initially unaccompanied by any experimental observations, chemists still remain suspicious of this kind of work. Since they do not sufficiently trust themselves to distinguish true theoretical discoveries from empty speculations, they feel compelled to act on a presumption which may one day cause the rejection of a theoretical paper of supreme importance in favour of comparatively trivial experimental studies. So difficult is it even for the expert in his own field to distinguish, by the criteria of empiricism, scientific merit from incompetent chatter."(156)
"Another example. Neurologists today accept almost without exception the assumption that all conscious mental processes can be interpreted as epiphenomena of a chain of material events occurring in the nervous system. Some writers, like Dr. Mays, myself and Professor R.O.Kapp, have tried to show that this is logically untenable, but to my knowledge only one neurologist, namely Professor J.C.Eccles, has gone so far as to amend the neurological model of the brain, by introducing an influence by which the will intervenes to determine the choice between two possible alternative decisions. This suggestion is scornfully ignored by all other neurologists, and indeed, it is difficult to argue profitably about it from their point of view.
A similar schism is present today between the ruling school of genetics, which explains evolution as a result of a haphazard sequence of mutations, and writers like Graham Cannon in England, Dalcq in Belgium, Vandel and others in France, who consider this explanation inadequate and support the assumption of a harmonious adaptive power controlling the most important innovations in the origin of higher forms of life.
Some people may listen to these illustrations with impatience, for they believe that science provides a procedure for deciding any such issues by systematic and dispassionate empirical investigations. However, if that were clearly the case, there would be no reason to be annoyed with me. My argument would have no persuasive force, and could be ignored without anger."(158-159)
"What happens is that each recognizes as scientists a number of others by whom he is recognized as such in return, and these relations form chains which transmit these mutual recognitions at second hand through the whole community. This is how each member becomes directly or indirectly accredited by all. The system extends into the past. Its members recognize the same set of persons as their masters and derive from this allegiance a common tradition, of which each carries on a particular strand.
This analysis of the scientific consensus will be carried further in the next chapter, on Conviviality. Suffice it here to say that anyone who speaks of science in the current sense and with the usual approval, accepts this organized consensus as determining what is ‘scientific’ and what ‘unscientific’. Every great scientific controversy tends therefore to turn into a dispute between the established authorities and a pretender (Elliotson, Kützing, Rhine, Freud, van’t Hoff, Lysenko, etc.) who is as yet denied the status of a scientist, at least with respect to the work under discussion."(163-164)
"We have now before us a true image of science in the process of emerging from initial vagueness and conjecture to greater precision and certainty. It is here, in the course of discovery and verification, that the premisses of science exercise their guidance over the judgment of scientists."(165)
"Admittedly, other controversies, like those of fermentation, hypnotism and extra-sensory perception, seem to centre altogether on questions of factual evidence. But looking at these disputes more closely it appears that the two sides do not accept the same ‘facts’ as facts, and still less the same ‘evidence’ as evidence. These terms are ambiguous precisely to the extent to which the two opposing opinions differ. For within two different conceptual frameworks the same range of experience takes the shape of different facts and different evidence. Indeed, one side may disregard some of the evidence altogether in the confident expectation that it will somehow turn out to be false."(167)
"Science is a system of beliefs to which we are committed. Such a system cannot be accounted for either from experience as seen within a different system, or by reason without any experience. Yet this does not signify that we are free to take it or leave it, but simply reflects the fact that it is a system of beliefs to which we are committed and which therefore cannot be represented in non-committal terms. In leading up to this position, the logical analysis of science decisively reveals its own limitations and points beyond itself in the direction of a fiduciary formulation of science, to which I propose to move on at a later stage of this enquiry."(171)
Als je naar de schoolboeken kijkt zie je dat alle intellectuele passies weggefilterd zijn. Toch voelen studenten zelfs dan nog de fascinatie en zo verder die er op de achtergrond van wetenschappelijke ontdekkingen plaats vond en dat speelt een grote rol in de acceptatie van wetenschap.
"Knowledge can be true or false, while action can only be successful or unsuccessful, right or wrong.
It follows that an observing which prepares a contriving must seek knowledge that is not merely true, but also useful as a guide to a practical performance. It must strive for applicable knowledge.
The conceptual framework of applicable knowledge is different from that of pure knowledge. It is determined primarily in terms of the successful performances to which such knowledge is relevant."(175)
"The beauty of an invention differs accordingly from the beauty of a scientific discovery. Originality is appreciated in both, but in science originality lies in the power of seeing more deeply than others into the nature of things, while in technology it consists in the ingenuity of the artificer in turning known facts to a surprising advantage. The heuristic passion of the technician centres therefore on his own distinctive focus. He follows the intimations, not of a natural order, but of a possibility for making things work in a new way for an acceptable purpose, and cheaply enough to show a profit. In feeling his way towards new problems, in collecting clues and pondering perspectives, the technologist must keep in mind a whole panorama of advantages and disadvantages which the scientist ignores. He must be keenly susceptible to people’s wants and able to assess the price at which they would be prepared to satisfy them. A passionate interest in such momentary constellations is foreign to the scientist, whose eye is fixed on the inner law of nature."(178)
"Nothing could have appeared more obvious until recently than this difference between pure science and technology. It is unquestioningly embodied in the general framework of higher education, as shown by its division into universities and colleges of technology; it is expressed in the current distinctions between pure and applied chemistry, pure and applied physics, pure and applied mathematics, etc., in the description of university chairs, journals and international congresses; it determines the conditions of employment of scientists in universities on the one hand and industrial laboratories on the other; it underlies the operation of the patent law.
This framework survives practically unchanged in the countries not subject to Marxism and has not been altogether abandoned in the Soviet Union either. But since the rise around 1930 of the Neo-Marxian theory of science, which became within the subsequent decade the official doctrine of the U.S.S.R. and gained widespread influence outside it, the distinction between science and technology, even where still upheld in practice by the continued operation of these institutions, is violently challenged in principle."(180)
[Dat lijkt me toch erg een ideaalbeeld, dat Polanyi daar ophangt. Bestaat zuivere wetenschap hoe dan ook nog in deze samenleving, vraag ik me af. Het boek is op dit punt volkomen verouderd. In het Westen is die scheiding al lang niet meer zo scherp, omdat het bedrijfsleven direct en indirect een steeds dikkere vinger in de pap heeft gekregen in het onderzoek aan de universiteiten. De economie speelt dus een bijzonder grote rol vandaag de dag en daarmee is het onderscheid tussen het Westen en andere grootmachten als Rusland en China helemaal niet meer zo groot. Ze willen allemaal hetzelfde. Wat er gebeurt is door Polanyi in feite al geformuleerd voor die USSR:]
"This is part of the drive, described earlier on, for subordinating cultural values to a radically utilitarian conception of the public good: a materialistic outlook paradoxically imbued by inordinate moral aspirations. Such an attack is of course double-edged. It denies the effectiveness of pure intellectual passions in guiding scientific discovery, by affirming that every important step in the progress of science occurs in response to a specific practical interest; while it also denounces the pursuit of science for its own sake as irresponsible, selfish, immoral."(1801)
[Alleen geldt dat alles nu dus ook voor het Westen. Het laat ook zien dat het erg gemakkelijk is om te schelden om een andere ideologie, maar dat het minder gemakkelijk is om zelf niet te vervallen tot die ideologie. Wat maken 'onafhankelijke' intellectuelen en mensen die 'zuivere wetenschap' bedrijven zichzelf wijs? Je ziet hier echt de sluier van de Koude Oorlog over Polanyi's redeneringen liggen.]
"Encircled today between the crude utilitarianism of the philistine and the ideological utilitarianism of the modern revolutionary movement, the love of pure science may falter and die. And if this sentiment were lost, the cultivation of science would lose the only driving force which can guide it towards the achievement of true scientific value."(182)
"The scientific method was devised precisely for the purpose of elucidating the nature of things under more carefully controlled conditions and by more rigorous criteria than are present in the situations created by practical problems. These conditions and criteria can be discovered only by taking a purely scientific interest in the matter, which again can exist only in minds educated in the appreciation of scientific value. Such sensibility cannot be switched on at will for purposes alien to its inherent passion. No important discovery can be made in science by anyone who does not believe that science is important — indeed supremely important — in itself."(183)
[Nou, dat is een behoorlijk vage stelling, moet ik zeggen.]
"Love of truth and of intellectual values in general will now reappear as the love of the kind of society which fosters these values, and submission to intellectual standards will be seen to imply participation in a society which accepts the cultural obligation to serve these standards."(203)
[Krijgen we nu weer een verdediging van de neoliberale samenleving en kritiek op elke vorm van communisme?]
"The intellectual control exercised by modern revolutionary governments differs from this in principle. Its rulers propose to re-shape society, including its thought, in the service of its welfare. They deny thereby any independent status or free activity to thought, even though they may in fact often admit its authority as a tacit concession to common sense.
This is totalitarianism. By contrast both to it and to a static society, a free society accords both independent status and a theoretically unrestricted range to thought, though in practice it fosters a particular cultural tradition, and imposes a public education and a code of laws which uphold existing political and economic institutions.
In principle, the free society claims the right of self-determination for the purpose of self-perfection as absolutely as the modern revolutionary regimes. Indeed, these aspirations form part of the original forces that created the free societies; they stem from the unfettered thoughts and generous feelings which overthrew the static authoritarianism of the Middle Ages. Yet at the same time they have set up a menacing contradiction in the free society that they produced. The great movement for independent thought instilled in the modern mind a desperate refusal of all knowledge that is not absolutely impersonal, and this implied in its turn a mechanical conception of man which was bound to deny man’s capacity for independent thought. Such objectivism must represent the public good in terms of welfare and power and set in motion thereby the self-destruction of freedom. For when open professions of the great moral passions animating a free society are discredited as specious or Utopian, its dynamism will tend to be transformed into the hidden driving force of a political machine, which is then proclaimed as inherently right and granted absolute dominion over thought."(213-214)
[En, ja hoor, ik heb gelijk, we krijgen een verdediging van de 'vrije samenleving' - wat een vage term is dat toch - waarin intellectuelen en wetenschappers en onderzoekers volledig vrij kunnen bezig zijn met hun dingen, nuttig of niet nuttig. Niet alleen dat dat toen het boek geschreven werd al niet zo was - hoe rijm je het idee 'vrije samenleving' met het McCarthyisme in de Verenigde Staten bijvoorbeeld? -, maar je moet je ook afvragen of het normatief zo 'n goed idee is.]
"The principal purpose of this book is to achieve a frame of mind in which I may hold firmly to what I believe to be true, even though I know that it might conceivably be false. The cultivation of thought in general is only examined as the context in which truth may be upheld. Yet I shall now have to include explicitly the domains of morality, custom and law within the system of culture."(214)
"We see now that throughout my previous text, in which I spoke confidently of such things as science and art as forming part of our culture, and of law and morality preserving justice and decency, I have been begging some decisive questions. I was referring to ‘bourgeois’ science, ‘bourgeois’ art, and generally ‘bourgeois’ culture, law, morality, justice, etc., which are not acknowledged as genuine science, art, culture, law, morality, justice, etc. by their Marxist-Stalinist critics, but are condemned by them as corrupt, objectivist, idealist, cosmopolitan, formalist or undemocratic. They deny the whole set of standards which I took for granted when speaking of science, art, culture, law and morality, and reduce the intellectual and moral passions upholding these standards, which I have agreed to share, to the status of an illusory subjectivity. The instability of these standards in the light of critical reflection is to them no source of anxiety but of triumphant satisfaction. The consummation of this instability, which looms to me as the final self-destruction of the human mind, would be to them but the final unmasking of my idealistic deceptions. Within a society based on Dialectical Materialism, the forces of coercion, anchored to the centre of a supreme power, become in fact the agents of valid appreciation. If, then, standards are seen to be upheld by force, this no longer makes them appear questionable but marks them instead with the stamp of authenticity."(239-240)
"A modern revolutionary government aiming at the total renewal of society inevitably sets off this change by severing all ties with its opponents. Whoever is not its unconditional supporter is held to be its mortal enemy. The dictatorship thus creates a situation in which any dissenter must in fact become its mortal enemy, and this justifies unlimited suspicion. When all open dissent is eliminated, disaffection can manifest itself only in trifles, and hence the secret police must be allowed to construe trifles as potential conspiratorial acts. The presuppositions of such investigations become analogous to those governing the Freudian analysis of a neurotic. On the assumption of an Oedipus complex, the patient’s every word and action, whether uttered or unspoken, done or undone (and even events in which he became involved by accident), can be interpreted as expressing his hidden hostility to his father. Similarly, once you assume that any trifles may be interpreted as a sign of disaffection which, in its turn, may be construed into an act of high treason, the methods of fact-finding practised in Stalin’s prisons will appear to have been altogether appropriate to the purpose. Even the exercise of physical pressure bordering on torture will become inevitable — for the same reasons which made torture indispensable to the Inquisition. Accusations concerning a man’s hidden intentions cannot be regarded as firmly established unless the accused eventually admits them, and for this he must be morally, intellectually and physically broken. The extorted confessions of others confront those still resisting pressure with an increased persuasive force and thus extend further the fictitious universe established by violence or sophistry."(241-242)
[En inderdaad volgde er dus een zielloze kritiek op het marxisme en communisme dat voor het gemak op één hoop wordt gegooid met de stalinistische uitwerking ervan, zielloos want zonder enig besef van de maatschappelijk ellende die tot marxistisch denken en de communistische beweging leidden. Het is me te gemakkelijk. Vooral omdat er een vage waarde als 'de vrije samenleving' en een geidealiseerd beeld van 'vrije intellectuelen' aan ten grondslag ligt. Ik vind het ook belachelijk dat Lysenko elke keer weer wordt opgevoerd als illustratie van hoe slecht die staatsdwang is. Je hoort nooit wat over de fantastische wetenschappelijke en technologische prestaties die onder dictatoriale regimes net zo goed bereikt werden en worden. Je hoort nooit wat over alle onzin die door wetenschappers in het 'vrije Westen' allemaal uitgekraamd wordt. Blijkbaar is de relatie tussen het een en het ander niet zo simpel.]
"In every modern country, national prejudice tends to obfuscate the establishment of public facts of political interest. In a free society this tendency is counteracted by the rivalry of opinions, which will maintain a universe of true facts so long as people can mutually trust each other to observe a proper level of factuality in drawing their conclusions from contradictory arguments. The élite of a modern revolutionary party is trained, on the contrary, to exercise its political bias to the utmost. "Its members’ whole education" (writes Hannah Arendt) "is aimed at abolishing their capacity for distinguishing between truth and fiction. Their superiority consists in the ability immediately to dissolve every statement of fact into a declaration of purpose.""(242)
[Ook weer zo simpel. Wanneer je het over de 'vrije samenleving' hebt en de 'rivalry of opinions' die daar mogelijk is, dan moet je het ook uitgebreid hebben over de media die die 'open discussie' frustreren, of over allerlei economische partijen die het belangrijker vinden om iets te verkopen dan om de waarheid over dat product te spreken of over de politieke instanties die ook in het Westen zo graag inlichingendiensten in het leven roepen die in het geniep allerlei zaken beïnvloeden. Wanneer Polanyi over marxisme en zo schrijft duikt de hele tijd de term 'propaganda' op, maar blijkbaar is daar volgens hem geen sprake van in onze 'vrije samenleving'. Wat een onzin. Natuurlijk was er en is er van alles mis met dictaturen als die van Hitler en Stalin en Mao, maar er is ook van alles mis in het 'vrije Westen' of de 'vrije samenleving' en het is duidelijk dat die 'vrije samenleving' niet veel geleerd heeft van die dictaturen en er zelfs steeds meer op gaat lijken.]
"My own insistence on the reality of facts in public life implies therefore that I am speaking from inside a free society to which I give my allegiance, just as my insistence on the independent status of science, art and morality implies such participation and allegiance."(242-243)
[Ja, ontroerend, hoor. Maar erg naïef ook.]
"The liberation of thought that has since been going on and has culminated so far in the Hungarian and Polish revolutions of October, 1956, has been called the Revolution of Truth. The designation is apt, if the meaning of truth is taken to comprise the fruits of all independent thought. For the rights of art, morality, religion and patriotism were restored to some extent along with the right to the knowledge of facts."(244)
[Schokkend vaag: de 'bevrijding van het denken'. Ook het woord 'waarheid' wordt door Polanyi te pas en te onpas gebruikt alsof het een universele stand van zaken betreft waarin we ons niet kunnen vergissen. 'Onafhankelijk denken'? Sinds wanneer is het denken van mensen onafhankelijk?]
"For this is the fact. The recognition granted in a free society to the independent growth of science, art and morality, involves a dedication of society to the fostering of a specific tradition of thought, transmitted and cultivated by a particular group of authoritative specialists, perpetuating themselves by co-option. To uphold the independence of thought implemented by such a society is to subscribe to a kind of orthodoxy which, though it specifies no fixed articles of faith, is virtually unassailable within the limits imposed on the process of innovation by the cultural leader-ship of a free society. If this is what Lenin meant by saying that "The absence of party spirit (partinost) in philosophy is nothing but despicable and disguised servility towards idealism and fideism", we cannot deny the charge. And we must face also the fact that this orthodoxy, and the cultural authorities which we respect, are backed by the coercive power of the state and financed by the beneficiaries of office and property. The institutions by which their authority is exercised, the schools, universities, churches, academies, law courts, newspapers and political parties, are under the protection of the same policemen and soldiers who guard the wealth of the landowners and capitalists.
Must this institutional framework be accepted as the civic home of a free society? Is it true that the absolute right of moral self-determination, on which political liberty was founded, can be upheld only by refraining from any radical action towards the establishment of justice and brotherhood? That indeed, unless we agree that within our lifetime we must no more than loosen the ties of a free society, however iniquitous they may be, we shall inevitably precipitate men into abject servitude?
For my part, I would say: Yes. I believe that, on the whole, these limitations are imperative. Unjust privileges prevailing in a free society can be reduced only by carefully graded stages; those who would demolish them overnight would erect greater injustices in their place. An absolute moral renewal of society can be attempted only by an absolute power which must inevitably destroy the moral life of man.
This truth is unpalatable to our conscience. Does it follow that we must suppress our conscience, or else accept the totalitarian teaching that violence alone is honest? I said in the introduction to this chapter that I would renew within a social setting the question, how we can keep holding beliefs that can conceivably be doubted. The attempt made in this book to stabilize knowledge against scepticism, by including its hazardous character in the conditions of knowledge, may find its equivalent, then, in an allegiance to a manifestly imperfect society, based on the acknowledgment that our duty lies in the service of ideals which we cannot possibly achieve."(244-245)
[Dit is te laat en te weinig. Als je communistische samenlevingen wilt bekritiseren, moet je ook bereid zijn om het 'vrije Westen' te bekritiseren. Maar ik zie hier niet eens een uitwerking van de samenhang tussen het kapitalisme en het objectivistische karakter van de wetenschappen dat Polanyi zelf in dit boek ter discussie stelt. En daardoor wordt het toch een soort van krom pleidooi voor een 'freischwebende Intelligenz', voor een intellectueel bestaan waarin Polanyi zelf een boek als dit kan en mag schrijven.]
"By now I have surveyed a series of facts which seriously suggest a reappraisal of our capacity to acquire knowledge. This reappraisal demands that we credit ourselves with much wider cognitive powers than an objectivist conception of knowledge would allow, but at the same time it reduces the independence of human judgment far below that claimed traditionally for the free exercise of reason."(249)
[Eigenlijk was dat in 1958 toch al een open deur, vind ik, in ieder geval voor mensen die thuis waren in hermeneutiek en fenomenologie en kritische theorie en zo.]
"I have also said before that we must accept the risks of semantic indeterminacy, since only words of indeterminate meaning can have a bearing on reality and that for meeting this hazard we must credit ourselves with the ability to perceive such bearing. This decision would eliminate precision of meaning as an ideal, and raise the question in what sense (if any) we may apply the term ‘precise’ or ‘imprecise’ to the meaning of a descriptive term."(251)
[Mij lijkt dat het ideaal van een zo exact mogelijk taalgebruik juist nooit losgelaten moet worden, ook niet wanneer je accepteert dat het helemaal niet zo gemakkelijk is om elkaar via taal goed te begrijpen. Ik ben niet erg onder de indruk van de taalfilosofische uitwerking van 'precies taalgebruik of niet' die hierna volgt.]
"According to these definitions of ‘mind’ and ‘person’, neither a machine, nor a neurological model, nor an equivalent robot, can be said to think, feel, imagine, desire, mean, believe or judge something. They may conceivably simulate these propensities to such an extent as to deceive us altogether. But a deception, however compelling, does not qualify thereby as truth: no amount of subsequent experience can justify us in accepting as identical two things known from the start to be different in their nature."(263)
Noot 1 op die pagina bij dit citaat luidt:
"I dissent therefore from the speculations of A.M.Turing (Mind, N.S., 59 (1950), p. 433) who equates the problem: ‘Can machines think?’ with the experimental question, whether a computing machine could be constructed to deceive us as to its own nature as successfully as a human being could deceive us in the same respect."(263)
[En daar ben ik het geheel mee eens. Wat ik dan weer vreemd vind is dat Polanyi dan later met de stelling komt dat de kritische beweging - wat is dat? - aan zijn eind gekomen is en dat we ons moeten wenden tot Augustinus. Tot Augustinus? Kom op, zeg.]
"Belief is here no longer a higher power that reveals to us knowledge lying beyond the range of observation and reason, but a mere personal acceptance which falls short of empirical and rational demonstrability. The mutual position of the two Augustinian levels is inverted. If divine revelation continues to be venerated, its functions — like those of the Kings and Lords in England — are gradually reduced to that of being honoured on ceremonial occasions. All real power goes to the nominally Lower House of objectively demonstrable assertions.
Here lies the break by which the critical mind repudiated one of its two cognitive faculties and tried completely to rely on the remainder. Belief was so thoroughly discredited that, apart from specially privileged opportunities, such as may be still granted to the holding and profession of religious beliefs, modern man lost his capacity to accept any explicit statement as his own belief. All belief was reduced to the status of subjectivity: to that of an imperfection by which knowledge fell short of universality.
We must now recognize belief once more as the source of all knowledge. Tacit assent and intellectual passions, the sharing of an idiom and of a cultural heritage, affiliation to a like-minded community: such are the impulses which shape our vision of the nature of things on which we rely for our mastery of things. No intelligence, however critical or original, can operate outside such a fiduciary framework."(266)
"Innocently, we had trusted that we could be relieved of all personal responsibility for our beliefs by objective criteria of validity — and our own critical powers have shattered this hope. Struck by our sudden nakedness, we may try to brazen it out by flaunting it in a profession of nihilism. But modern man’s immorality is unstable. Presently his moral passions reassert themselves in objectivist disguise and the scientistic Minotaur is born.
The alternative to this, which I am seeking to establish here, is to restore to us once more the power for the deliberate holding of improved beliefs. We should be able to profess now knowingly and openly those beliefs which could be tacitly taken for granted in the days before modern philosophic criticism reached its present incisiveness. Such powers may appear dangerous. But a dogmatic orthodoxy can be kept in check both internally and externally, while a creed inverted into a science is both blind and deceptive."(268)
[Wat een akelige verwarring zet Polanyi hier in de wereld. Dat de onuitgesproken vooronderstellingen van wetenschappelijke kennisverwerking een soort van geloof vormen betekent nog niet dat het gaat om geloof als in religies. Het lijkt er hier zwaar op dat Polanyi een terugkeer naar een gelovige religieuze wereld zit te bepleiten van de tijd vóór de Verlichting. Hoe we een dergelijke 'dogmatische orthodoxie' onder controle kunnen houden wordt voor het gemak maar niet uitgelegd.]
"It has been taken for granted throughout the critical period of philosophy that the acceptance of unproven beliefs was the broad road to darkness, while truth was approached by the straight and narrow path of doubt. We were warned that a host of unproven beliefs were instilled in us from earliest childhood. That religious dogma, the authority of the ancients, the teaching of the schools, the maxims of the nursery, all were united to a body of tradition which we tended to accept merely because these beliefs had been previously held by others, who wanted us to embrace them in our turn. We were urged to resist the pressure of this traditional indoctrination by pitting against it the principle of philosophic doubt. Descartes had declared that universal doubt should purge his mind of all opinions held merely on trust and open it to knowledge firmly grounded in reason. In its stricter formulations the principle of doubt forbids us altogether to indulge in any desire to believe and demands that we should keep our minds empty, rather than allow any but irrefutable beliefs to take possession of them.(...)
The method of doubt is a logical corollary of objectivism. It trusts that the uprooting of all voluntary components of belief will leave behind unassailed a residue of knowledge that is completely determined by the objective evidence. Critical thought trusted this method unconditionally for avoiding error and establishing truth."(269)
Het heeft er toe geleid dat allerlei filosofen en andere intellectuelen hun persoonlijke overtuigingen probeerden te verbergen, voor zichzelf en anderen, en zich hulden in een pseudo-objectiviteit die op geen enkele manier is vol te houden: fundamentele overtuigingen kun je niet weerleggen of bewijzen.
"The test of proof or disproof is in fact irrelevant for the acceptance or rejection of fundamental beliefs, and to claim that you strictly refrain from believing anything that could be disproved is merely to cloak your own will to believe your beliefs behind a false pretence of self-critical severity."(271)
"Doubt has been acclaimed not only as the touchstone of truth, but also as the safeguard of tolerance. The belief that philosophic doubt would appease religious fanaticism and bring about universal tolerance goes back to Locke, and this belief is still vigorously alive in our own day."(271)
[En terecht, vind ik.]
"It remains deeply ingrained in the modern mind—as I find even in my own mind—that though doubt may become nihilistic and imperil thereby all freedom of thought, to refrain from belief is always an act of intellectual probity as compared with the resolve to hold a belief which we could abandon if we decided to do so. To accept a belief by yielding to authority, is felt to be a surrender of reason. You cannot teach the necessity for doing this without incurring — even in your own heart — the suspicion of obscurantism."(271)
Maar wat IS twijfel eigenlijk? Het staat op hetzelfde niveau als geloven ('ik geloof dat p' tegenover 'ik betwijfel dat p').
Maar ook op allerlei andere terreinen (juridisch, religieus, natuurwetenschap) is het al gauw duidelijk dat twijfel samen gaat met het geloof in bepaalde uitgangspunten. Scepticisme kan daarom doorslaan in het onterecht ontkennen van zaken.
"The belief in the efficacy of doubt as a solvent of error was sustained primarily — from Hume to Russell — by scepticism about religious dogma and the dislike of religious bigotry. This has been the dominant passion of critical thought for centuries, in the course of which it has completely transformed man’s outlook on the universe. It must, accordingly, form the main subject of my critique of doubt."(279)
[Maar daarmee verdedig je dus de andere kant, als je geen alternatief weet uit te werken.]
"This will lead us back to the conception of religious worship as a heuristic vision and align religion in turn also with the great intellectual systems, such as mathematics, fiction and the fine arts, which are validated by becoming happy dwelling places of the human mind. We shall see then that in spite of its a-critical character, the force of religious conviction does depend on factual evidence and can be affected by doubt concerning certain facts. Let me develop this programme."(280)
[Religie wordt hier op één lijn gesteld met wiskunde, literatuur, kunst en zo en zo indirect weer in ere hersteld. Polanyi is een gelovig christen en voelt zich gedwongen de religie te verdedigen tegen haar critici. Daarbij haalt hij de truuk uit die zo vaak wordt uitgehaald door gelovigen: als alle kennisverwerving gebaseerd is op geloof dan is religie dus net zo belangrijk als wetenschap. Nee, dat is niet zo, religie is heel wat anders dan wiskunde en kunst en wetenschap.]
"The assumption that the world has some meaning which is linked to our own calling as the only morally responsible beings in the world, is an important example of the supernatural aspect of experience which Christian interpretations of the universe explore and develop. In chapter 13, I shall show how we can arrive by continuous stages from the scientific study of evolution to its interpretation as a clue to God."(285)
"The weakening of religious beliefs under the impact of advancing historical and scientific knowledge during the past 300 years represents, therefore, a case in which the effect of doubt was substantial. It destroyed the religious meaning of things without fully compensating for this loss by a different meaning, and the total volume of belief, from which all meaning flows, was effectively reduced. If the universe were in fact meaningless, the destruction of religious beliefs would have been fully justified. Since I do not believe that the universe is meaningless, I can admit only that the rejection of religion was reasonable in view of the grounds on which religious doctrines were asserted at the time. Today we should be grateful for the prolonged attacks made by rationalists on religion for forcing us to renew the grounds of the Christian faith. But this does not remotely justify the acknowledgment of doubt as the universal solvent of error which will leave truth untouched behind. For all truth is but the external pole of belief, and to destroy all belief would be to deny all truth. Though religious beliefs are often formulated more dogmatically than other beliefs, this is not essential."(286)
[Alsof we god en religie nodig hebben om betekenis aan de wereld en het leven te geven! Wat een stupide argumentatie.]
"Thus the programme of comprehensive doubt collapses and reveals by its failure the fiduciary rootedness of all rationality."(297)
"In his Conway Lecture of 1922, republished in 1941, Bertrand Russell revealed this in a single sentence. After condemning both Bolshevism and clericalism as two opposite dogmatic teachings, which should both be combated by philosophic doubt, he sums up by saying: "Thus rational doubt alone, if it could be generated, would suffice to introduce the Millennium." The author’s intention is clear: he intends to spread certain doubts which he believes to be justified. He does not want us to believe the doctrines of the Catholic Church, which he denies and dislikes, and he also wants us to resist Lenin’s teaching of unbridled revolutionary violence."(297)
"Since the sceptic does not consider it rational to doubt what he himself believes, the advocacy of ‘rational doubt’ is merely the sceptic’s way of advocating his own beliefs. Russell’s previously quoted sentence should therefore read: ‘The acceptance of rational beliefs such as my own would suffice to introduce the Millennium.’ Rationalism expressed in this form would renounce its illusory principle of doubt and face up to its own fiduciary foundations."(297)
[Het zijn dus allemaal; 'geloven', bedoelt Polanyi. Scepsis bepleiten tegenover de uitgangspunten en aannames van christendom of marxisme kan alleen maar vanuit andere uitgangspunten en aannames. Dat is zo, maar Polanyi stelt niet de essentiële vraag of we niet kunnen laten zien dat die laatste aannames beter te verdedigen zijn dan de eerdere religieuze enz. aannames.]
"Any enquiry into our ultimate beliefs can be consistent only if it presupposes its own conclusions. It must be intentionally circular.(...)
The moment such a programme is formulated it appears to menace itself with destruction. It threatens to sink into subjectivism: for by limiting himself to the expression of his own beliefs, the philosopher may be taken to talk only about himself. I believe that this self-destruction can be avoided by modifying our conception of belief. My previous suggestion, that for the sake of precision declaratory sentences should be formulated in the fiduciary mode, with the words ‘I believe’ prefixed to them, was a step in this direction, as it eliminated any formal distinction between statements of belief and statements of fact. But this reform, which would link every asserted sentence to its asserter, has yet to be supplemented in order to keep the sentence linked also to its other pole, that is, to the things to which it refers. For this purpose the fiduciary mode will have to be merged in the wider framework of commitment."(299-300)
"The stage on which we thus resume our full intellectual powers is borrowed from the Christian scheme of Fall and Redemption. Fallen Man is equated to the historically given and subjective condition of our mind, from which we may be saved by the grace of the spirit. The technique of our redemption is to lose ourselves in the performance of an obligation which we accept, in spite of its appearing on reflection impossible of achievement. We undertake the task of attaining the universal in spite of our admitted infirmity, which should render the task hopeless, because we hope to be visited by powers for which we cannot account in terms of our specifiable capabilities. This hope is a clue to God, which I shall trace further in my last chapter, by reflecting on the course of evolution."(324)
[Zie je, uiteindelijk loopt het toch weer op een christelijke theologie uit.]
[Ik heb het opgegeven om de rest te lezen. Weer eindeloze uitweidingen over van alles zonder dat ook maar ergens duidelijk wordt wat nu precies de conclusie is die Polanyi wil bereiken. Woorden woorden woorden. Het gaat over 'personal knowledge', maar dit is een bloedeloos boek dat totaal niets persoonlijks heeft.]