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The Logic of Tacit Inference

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

Michael Polanyi
Affiliation:
22 Upland Park Road, Oxford

Extract

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

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1966

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References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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