Friday, February 17, 2006

Polanyi approaches the crucial question ...

regarding science. Again, from the The Tacit Dimension:
The declared aim of modern science is to establish a strictly detached, objective knowledge. Any falling short of this ideal is acceptied only as a temporary imperfection, which we must aim at eliminating. But suppose that tacit thought forms an indispensable part of all knowledge, then the ideal of eliminating all personal elements of knowledge would, in effect, aim at the destruction of all knowledge. The ideal of exact science would turn out to be fundamentally misleading and possibly a source of devastating fallacies.
This emphasis on a necessarily personal structure to all knowledge is, in a weird way, why I sometimes think that born again Christians are on to something when they claim Jesus Christ as their personal Lord and Saviour. Much as I grew up disliking the formulation. From a look at the chapter headings, Polanyi explores the religious dimensions of these ideas in Personal Knowledge, and I'm anxious to get my hands on that next.

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