Due to the fact that the College Library, Redeemer Library, Mac Library, and Hamilton Public Library do not have this book by D.A. Carson on the Emerging Church movement, which I wanted to read after finishing McLaren's book, I have begun reading through Personal Knowledge by Michael Polanyi, who is mentioned a number of times by McLaren in the course of his book. So I am reading this book, to see if I can get a glimpse of the thought behind the Emerging Church movement, and so come to understand it better.
This book was recommended to me a long time ago by Dr. Oosterhoff (who used Polanyi quite a bit in her work Postmodernism: A Christian Appraisal which I would recommend to anybody who wants an intelligent yet easy to understand Christian look at the big picture of postmodernism). I never got around to reading it until now, which means, I guess, that I have been starved for good philosophy at the College.
Polanyi, writing in the 1950s in Philosophy of Science, does what the Reformed Epistemologists did (although differently) 30 years later. He critiques the objective, foundationalist view of knowledge and truth which science (and therefore everybody) has pushed and upheld for generations, saying that it is a myth, an unrealizable ideal.
Instead, he states that there is always a personal component to knowledge. We do not just know things, we assent to them. He makes a distinction between statements of fact and the act of assenting to these statements: 'grass is green' is a statement of fact, whereas 'grass is green is true' is an act of assent that I make about the statement 'grass is green.' They are two totally different creatures. 'Grass is green' as a statement can be judged by simply looking at the evidence, whereas an act of assent "can be repeated, improved or cancelled, but not tested or said to be true, in the sense in which a factual statement can be tested and said to be true." Instead of being a sentence in and of itself, it is rather a personal endorsement of the sentence.
As far as I have read (I am not done this book yet [in fact, I skipped a bunch in the middle where he seems to go into more scientific ideas, since he was a noted physical chemist]) seems to suggest that Polanyi sees the mind as the final arbiter of what a person believes and thinks, and we can go no further than this. He writes that what he wants to do "is to restore to us once more the power for the deliberate holding of unproven beliefs."
As I was reading, it struck me (as it did when studying Wolterstorff's theory of knowledge) that this could very well fall into rather extreme subjectivism or radical relativism. This, however, would be missing the point. For now I am understanding Polanyi in terms of my Wolterstorff study, who borrowed from Thomas Reid, a Scottish Common Sense Philosopher from the 18th century. This view responds to the foundationalist understanding of truth and knowledge ('you can only be sure of your beliefs if they have sufficient evidence, and are founded on certain beliefs') by stating that this is not how people come to know. People generally find themselves believing things, because we grow up in a community that knows things, and we are taught (formally and informally) throughout our lives. We are not 'blank slates' (re: John Locke) which we fill up with ideas after carefully weighing them and judging them. We simply find ourselves believing things, and any judging and weighing we do is after the fact. And because of the sheer volume of our beliefs, we cannot judge and weigh them all, so we are always holding beliefs that we cannot 'prove.' Polanyi (and the Reformed Epistemologists and Thomas Reid for that matter) argue that this is our right, for we have a mind that works according to certain personal rules, and we are the final arbiter in what we assent to or not. The trick is to come to know our 'belief-forming dispositions' and through formalization take control of their function (as much as we are able to), but in the full realization that we cannot eliminate them entirely (which is what objectivism seeks to do).
I will end with a quote from Polanyi which encompasses his view, and which he fleshes out through the rest of his 400 page book. This is Polanyi's view in a nutshell:
"Comprehension is neither an arbitrary act nor a passive experience, but a responsible act claiming universal validity."
This book was recommended to me a long time ago by Dr. Oosterhoff (who used Polanyi quite a bit in her work Postmodernism: A Christian Appraisal which I would recommend to anybody who wants an intelligent yet easy to understand Christian look at the big picture of postmodernism). I never got around to reading it until now, which means, I guess, that I have been starved for good philosophy at the College.
Polanyi, writing in the 1950s in Philosophy of Science, does what the Reformed Epistemologists did (although differently) 30 years later. He critiques the objective, foundationalist view of knowledge and truth which science (and therefore everybody) has pushed and upheld for generations, saying that it is a myth, an unrealizable ideal.
Instead, he states that there is always a personal component to knowledge. We do not just know things, we assent to them. He makes a distinction between statements of fact and the act of assenting to these statements: 'grass is green' is a statement of fact, whereas 'grass is green is true' is an act of assent that I make about the statement 'grass is green.' They are two totally different creatures. 'Grass is green' as a statement can be judged by simply looking at the evidence, whereas an act of assent "can be repeated, improved or cancelled, but not tested or said to be true, in the sense in which a factual statement can be tested and said to be true." Instead of being a sentence in and of itself, it is rather a personal endorsement of the sentence.
As far as I have read (I am not done this book yet [in fact, I skipped a bunch in the middle where he seems to go into more scientific ideas, since he was a noted physical chemist]) seems to suggest that Polanyi sees the mind as the final arbiter of what a person believes and thinks, and we can go no further than this. He writes that what he wants to do "is to restore to us once more the power for the deliberate holding of unproven beliefs."
As I was reading, it struck me (as it did when studying Wolterstorff's theory of knowledge) that this could very well fall into rather extreme subjectivism or radical relativism. This, however, would be missing the point. For now I am understanding Polanyi in terms of my Wolterstorff study, who borrowed from Thomas Reid, a Scottish Common Sense Philosopher from the 18th century. This view responds to the foundationalist understanding of truth and knowledge ('you can only be sure of your beliefs if they have sufficient evidence, and are founded on certain beliefs') by stating that this is not how people come to know. People generally find themselves believing things, because we grow up in a community that knows things, and we are taught (formally and informally) throughout our lives. We are not 'blank slates' (re: John Locke) which we fill up with ideas after carefully weighing them and judging them. We simply find ourselves believing things, and any judging and weighing we do is after the fact. And because of the sheer volume of our beliefs, we cannot judge and weigh them all, so we are always holding beliefs that we cannot 'prove.' Polanyi (and the Reformed Epistemologists and Thomas Reid for that matter) argue that this is our right, for we have a mind that works according to certain personal rules, and we are the final arbiter in what we assent to or not. The trick is to come to know our 'belief-forming dispositions' and through formalization take control of their function (as much as we are able to), but in the full realization that we cannot eliminate them entirely (which is what objectivism seeks to do).
I will end with a quote from Polanyi which encompasses his view, and which he fleshes out through the rest of his 400 page book. This is Polanyi's view in a nutshell:
"Comprehension is neither an arbitrary act nor a passive experience, but a responsible act claiming universal validity."
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