In the two chapters, Polanyi pushes two distinct but complementary views:
scientific theoretical knowledge has a personal aspect
and scientific practical knowledge or skill has a personal aspect
Scientific theoretical knowledge has a personal aspect
The first view runs counter to Williams. Recall, Williams tries to do justice to the idea that knowledge is objective ie it answers to something independent of us. In trying to explain that idea, Williams has to cash out the idea that our knowledge, on the one hand, answers to how the world is, on the other. But his problem is that in filling out what he means by the world (or reality) he has to avoid simply using another bit of our supposed knowledge (our representations). So in the end – in a bit of the lecture that went quite quickly – he has to characterise the world (say what he means by ‘world’) by saying it is what will be revealed by a future science.
(By the way, I am not convinced that he does need to do all this. The escalation from talking about one bit of knowledge or one representation to talking about the interconnections between all possible bits of knowledge seems suspicious. Surely, if one grasps what someone means when they say that Sootica is in her basket, then one knows that the bit of reality it anwers to is the fact that Sootica is in her basket. That stops Williams' escalation before it gets puzzling. But I will ignore this worry here.)
But when Williams characterises the world by saying it is what will be revealed by science, he suggests that one of the directions in which science goes is away from local perspectives on the world (the sun goes round the earth; there are colours out there) to a universal or absolute conception of it (the earth goes round the sun; there are no colours – since they are merely the product of our eyes and visual system – just atoms, and radiation etc). So an absolute conception of the world is a conception from no particular perspective: a view from nowhere. It is independent of our subjectivity. It is what is out there ‘anyway’ independent of us. (Even if one does not need to follow Williams need to adopt this interconnected view to understand what individual knowledge claims answer to, one might still think that the absolute conception describes all the world that there really is. There are no colours out there!)
Polanyi disagrees with this connection between proper knowledge of the world and a conception from no particular perspective. He thinks that the move from an earth centred view of the universe to a sun-centred view of our little bit of the universe may look less human centred but it is not.
Copernicus gave preference to man’s delight in abstract theory, at the price of rejecting the evidence of our senses... In a literal sense, therefore, the new Copernican system was as anthropocentric as the Ptolemaic view, the difference being merely that it preferred to satisfy a different human affection. [3-4]
The moral of his story about the development of Einstein’s theory is that far from resting on simple experimental tests, Einstein’s theory was embraced because of its attractiveness: a kind of aesthetic value.
[M]odern physics has demonstrated the power of the human mind to discover and exhibit a rationality which governs nature... 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. [15]
So we adopt theories because they appeal to us, given our particular natures. So human subjectivity does not drop out of science. In seeing the world as having a rational structure, we see it as having OUR rational structure. (You will find echoes of this in the Kuhn reading.)
Questions:
1) Why should we think of the rational structure we seem to find in nature (the thing that makes theories seem just right) as merely our view? Why is it not a universal idea that even the Martian’s would agree with? (If it is, the it could be part of Williams’ im-personal and objective absolute conception.)
2) Does Polanyi show that science must include our subjectivity, or just that it generally does? If the latter, perhaps Williams’ guess is right about a future science. (Of course the suggestion is that Polanyi is arguing that it must always be like that. But does he have an argument?)
Scientific practical knowledge or skill has a personal aspect
The second claim looks more straight-forward but less radical. Science also has a practical side (eg. actually running experiments) and these depend on practical skill. His claim here is that such know-how cannot be put into words and so, if it isn’t codified in words, teaching it must involve just grasping what is involved in some non-codified way. So what would that be? Answer: a personal grasp that THIS! is the right way to ride a bike etc.
If what we are interested in is a general question of whether knowledge is objective (as Williams thinks) then this claim is less radical than the claim that theoretical knowledge is personal / has a personal element. Williams might just agree that know-how is personal but deny that it plays a role in describing how things are (which is what knowledge-that does).
The other question is whether Polanyi actually has an argument for the claim that know-how cannot in general be put into words. (Some know-how clearly can be. If I know how to get to the station I know that it is down Corporation Street etc.) I do not think that he has. That’s why I summarsied Ryle’s argument that all knowledge-that ultimately depends on know-how.
Suppose all know-how can be explicated (put into words) as a piece of know-that: grasping some proposition that p.
But grasping the proposition that p is itself something one can do successfully or unsuccessfully, so it is also a piece of know-how.
So it will be grasping some proposition q.
But grasping the proposition that q is itself something one can do successfully or unsuccessfully, so it is also a piece of know-how... etc
So not all know-how can be explicated as a piece of know that. Instead, to grasp a proposition - that is to grasp a piece of knowledge-that - is ultimately a piece of know-how.