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Polanyi and Juarrero: From Tacit Knowing to Ontic Emergence
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Takaki, Kyle |
| Copyright Year | 2013 |
| Abstract | There are potentialities to be harnessed in a fusion between elements of Alicia Juarrero’s views and a Polanyian framework. In this brief response piece, I address the latent Polanyian dimensions of Juarrero’s ontic approach to dynamical systems. “If all men were exterminated, this would not affect the laws of inanimate nature.” So begins Michael Polanyi’s essay, “Life’s Irreducible Structure” (LIS), appearing to convey a sort of common-sense realism. However Polanyi’s realism is not flatly commonsensical, for all inquiry irretrievably bears the marks of the embodied sorts of creatures we are, where our personal commitments make contact with (or enact) reality via universal intent. It should be kept in mind that Polanyi is neither an idealist (Hegelian or otherwise), a mere empiricist, nor even a transcendental idealist. Polanyi’s philosophy is post-Kantian (and more generally post-critical), where his pragmatic realism is both commonsensical in its recognition of orders of being “greater than ourselves,” as it were, and radical in its manner of grounding ontologies in tacit knowing’s epistemic workings. Furthermore, this is a realism not adequately characterized as “mutualistic” if such a conception implicitly divides knower from known, placing what is to be known in dialectical relation to knower (forming a reticulatory arc between the two). Such a divide is something Polanyi struggled with in attempting to form a philosophical framework where knower and known are inextricably bound up in a field of (semiotic) inquiry rather than related via poles of implicit division. Exactly how is Polanyi post-Kantian (and post-critical more generally)? A simple answer lies in inquiry’s consequential dimension: given the sorts of creatures we are, our inquiries are bounded by these constraints that are simultaneously enabling constraints allowing for exploration and discovery. So one initial sense in which Polanyi is post-Kantian has to do with the ways in which he examines the nature and contours of inquiry, in its indefinite manifestations. Kant delimits reason’s capacities; Polanyi, as it were, starts there and then fleshes out the various creative capabilities of inquiry (which, as discussed below, is a broader notion than “reason”). But there is a deeper element to Polanyi’s post-Kantian investigations that actually subtly undermines the Kantian framework itself. The open-ended nature of inquiry, in tandem with commitments, made with universal intent, actually reflect back upon the nature of cognition itself and its Kantian assumptions: the self-reflexive arc of inquiry also applies to the nature of inquiries made, and thereby changes just what “reason” and the like are. Thus a deeper sense in which Polanyi is post-Kantian has to do with this opening up of the very limits of the Kantian project: inquiry is affective, imaginative, fraught with risk that comes from commitments, bound up with communities of inquirers, and makes contact with realities. Knower and known are crisscrossed (and not merely dialectically related), as are the rather static Kantian notions like theoretical and practical reason, aesthetic and pragmatic judgment, and the like. Noumena, which are transcendental conditions of knowing for Kant, would be for Polanyi inextricably ensnared with the consequential fruits of indefinite inquiry—or in Peircean fashion, of indefinite semiosis.1 This general picture of Polanyi’s philosophical orientation I think has crucial bearing on the important work that Alicia Juarrero is doing in relating dynamical systems and emergence to a new metaphysics. Tradition & Discovery: The Polanyi Society Periodical, 40:3 17 There are potentialities to be harnessed in a fusion between elements of Juarrero’s views and a Polanyian framework. In this brief response piece, I hope to convey some of the promise that this synthesis may hold. Boundaries and Implicit Importations Polanyi’s ideas on types of boundary conditions and how they relate to dual control, emergence, and hierarchies have received discussion elsewhere (e.g., see TAD 39:2 and 40:1). The new issue that Juarrero raises concerns the status of boundaries as they relate to second-order constraints. Specifically, she discusses the notion of endogenously generated, emergent constraints, most especially exhibited in chemical processes like the Belousov-Zhabotinsky (BZ) reaction. As Juarrero insightfully observes, it is probably not coincidental that chemist-philosophers like Polanyi, Ilya Prigogine, and Charles Sanders Peirce took special interest in emergence. What Juarrero is arguing for—beyond mere resonance with Polanyi’s active boundary conditions that exhibit controlling principles—is the endogenous, autonomous (in the sense of being self-generating and sustaining) character of second-order constraints, which she thinks can ultimately divorce itself from Polanyi’s notion of active boundary conditions. In other words, even if a Polanyian account were to be given of the BZ reaction using the language of dual control, emergence, boundary conditions, tacit intimations of hidden realities made manifest via connoisseurship and universal intent, etc., such an account would miss the significant ontic dimension of what the BZ reaction and other similar phenomena reveal, namely, the endogenous generation of second-order constraints whose emergent and actual properties act on the world in novel ways. Given the emergence of such stable/resilient phenomena, which have claim to a significant degree of autonomy (even as they depend-on-and-enable their lower-level processes), such phenomena can, as it were, jettison the purportedly epistemic categories of dual control (active boundary conditions, etc.) by which we, in coarse-grained fashion, understand such phenomena. Ontics trump epistemics, in a nutshell. How might a Polanyian respond? I think extended reflection on some of Polanyi’s writings on physico-chemical laws and their intersections with biology can address Juarrero’s concerns, as I hope to reveal. Let’s first start with some insights on how biology differs from chemistry and physics. In LIS Polanyi writes: In the light of the current theory of evolution, the codelike structure of DNA must be assumed to have come about by a sequence of chance variations established by natural selection. But this evolutionary aspect is irrelevant here; whatever may be the origin of a DNA configuration, it can function as a code only if its order is not due to the forces of potential energy. It must be as physically indeterminate as the sequence of words is on a printed page (1308). What Polanyi is drawing attention to here, I suggest, is that however order arose, resulting in fixed accidents like DNA (or any sort of adaptive complexity at any phenotypic level), the point is that the laws of chemistry and physics underdetermine the code aspect of DNA. For such a code is not merely an informational configuration; it also functions algorithmically, processing particular kinds of information in structured ways.2 To borrow a distinction from the eminent biologist and philosopher of biology Ernst Mayr, Polanyi can be interpreted as distinguishing between “teleomatic” and “teleonomic” processes. Teleomatic processes (purposive, mechanical types of behavior) are studied throughout the sciences, most especially in physics where, say, inanimate objects are modeled when tracking projectile motion, whose end-state would be the projectile’s predicted target. Teleonomic processes or behaviors, by contrast, owe their “goal-directedness to the operation of a program.”3 It is a mistake to conflate these two sorts of phenomena, for example by collapsing a physico-chemical description of DNA with the coding/ programming functions it serves, which occur at a higher-level of understanding. On this very point Polanyi has been critiqued, in hindsight, as being wrong about life’s irreducible structure on the grounds |
| Starting Page | 16 |
| Ending Page | 22 |
| Page Count | 7 |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| DOI | 10.5840/traddisc2013/201440331 |
| Volume Number | 40 |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://polanyisociety.org/TAD%20WEB%20ARCHIVE/TAD40-3/TAD40-3-fnl-pg16-22-pdf.pdf |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://doi.org/10.5840/traddisc2013%2F201440331 |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
