The Competitiveness of Nations
in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy
April 2003
Philip Mirowski *
On Playing the
Economics Trump Card in the Philosophy of Science: Why It Did Not Work for
Michael Polanyi
Philosophy of Science
Volume 64, Issue Supplement
Dec. 1997, S127-S138.
Index
1. On
the Fondness for Market Metaphors.
3. Science and the
Market Metaphor.
The failure of the attempt by Michael Polanyi
to capture the social organization of science by comparing it to the operation
of a market bears salutary lessons for modern philosophers of science in their
rush to appropriate market models and metaphors. In this case, an initially plausible invisible
hand argument ended up as crude propaganda for the uniquely privileged social
support of science.
1. On the Fondness for Market Metaphors.
In an era when epistemology is being caught in a
renewed tug-of-war between “socialized” and “naturalized” poles, one of the
most noteworthy developments of the 1990s has been the self-conscious
reintroduction of economic models and metaphors into the philosophy of science.
It has become manifest in a variety of
ways, ranging from bald appeals to the “marketplace of ideas” to explicit
appropriation of rational choice models (Kitcher
1993). The extent to which this phenomenon
has been driven by political and cultural upheavals of the recent past cannot
be covered here. Rather, this paper
focuses upon the remarkable dearth of historical self-consciousness which
accompanies the conviction that this development is novel or unprecedented within
the community of philosophers of science. In particular, this paper recounts the tale of
Michael Polanyi, someone not often acknowledged as a philosopher, yet nonetheless
a landmark figure who sought to explain the efficacy of free
* Department of Economics and Program in the History and Philosophy of
Science, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN 46556.
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inquiry
in science by comparing it to the operation of a free market. While this comparison was implicit in many of
his writings, he himself made it explicit in his 1962 essay “The Republic of
Science: Its Political and Economic Theory” (Polanyi
1969). Polanyi’s
struggles with the market metaphor are worth recounting, if only because so
many of his worries are getting replayed in the modern context: questions of
the appropriate response to calls for the planning of science in an era of
reduced funding and diminished expectations; questions as to the implications of
a sociology of knowledge for the public understanding of science; questions
about the meaning of objectivity in a world riven by
self-interested constructions of the legitimacy and significance of science.
Polanyi is best remembered, if remembered at all, for his
advocacy of the tacit character of much knowledge in scientific practice
(Holton 1995). This was widely, and
correctly, regarded as an attack upon the project of an analytical philosophy
of science to render the logic of justification transparent, reliable, and
independent of context; but isolated from the rest of Polanyi’s
crusade, most commentators conclude it makes little sense on its own. Perhaps the fragmentation of intellectual life
into isolated professional specialities is at fault
here: treating it as a generic concept does it the disservice of making it both
larger and smaller than it really was: larger, in that it was intended by Polanyi as complementary to his more encompassing comparison
of science to a free market; and smaller, in that it involved a concerted
attempt to reconcile the individual character of knowledge with its intrinsic
social nature. Only by venturing outside
the narrow ambit of professional philosophy of science do we discover the
closest affinities of Polanyi’s “tacit” knowledge
were with the project of his fellow mitteleuropaisch
economist contemporary and political ally Friedrich von Hayek (1972), who
likewise set out to recast the interwar treatment of knowledge and freedom,
only with the aim of counteracting what he perceived to be dangerous tendencies
in the theory of markets to venture down the road to serfdom.
Both Hayek and Polanyi
emerged from their experience of the 1930s haunted by the conviction that
scientists and capitalists were vulnerable to movements advocating
rationalization and subjugation to state planning, an eventuality which they
believed would sap their vitality and stymie their progress. These movements were embodied in the British
context in, respectively, Bernal’s “Social Relations of Science” section in the
British Association (McGucken 1984), the
interventionist turn taken by the Cambridge economics orthodoxy, and the
growing strength of socialist parties. Polanyi increasingly harbored the conviction that, far from
being merely an external threat, the ultimate source
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of this
vulnerability lay within the communities of economists and scientists
themselves. In a passage more
reminiscent of Hayek, Polanyi wrote in his Personal
Knowledge, “modern scientism fetters thought as
cruelly as ever the church had done. It
offers no scope for our most vital beliefs and forces us to disguise them in
farcically inadequate terms” (1958, 265).
It seems that Polanyi sought
the etiology of the malady he believed he had identified in the essential
instability of Cartesian doubt; this brief summary of his views is distilled
from Prosch (1986) and my own reading of his work. While he acknowledged the necessity of doubt
to emancipate scientific inquiry from religious dogma in the 17th century, the
success of skepticism in eliminating religious authority had done nothing to
abate the moral fervor which had accompanied it. Indeed, Polanyi
asserted that withering skepticism combined with moral enthusiasm had tended to
become fused together in the Enlightenment image of the scientist, the bearer
of the rationalist ideal of the perfect secular society. This ideal was predicated upon a presumption
of unrestrained autonomous individualism which could only flourish within an
environment of absolute freedom and equality, a benchmark against which actual
social relations could only appear as pale and inadequate approximations. This intractable and inevitable discrepancy,
often experienced in adolescence as a debunking of pious verities, then gave
rise to an amoral individualism, asserting the rights of the truly free and
creative individual as against the claims of a corrupt and hypocritical
society, or as Polanyi put it, “the chisel of
nihilism driven by the hammer of social conscience” (1974, 44). While Polanyi
asserted that this “moral inversion” assumed many forms, and deployed his
diagnosis to attack a range of various intellectual movements from Freudianism
to Marxism to cybernetics, it is important to get past his oft-noted propensity
to moralize in order to extract the core implications of his stance for
epistemology and economics, since it is these which governed his use of the
market metaphor for science.
Polanyi sought to indict the Viennese positivists in philosophy
and (less expectedly) the utilitarians in economics
with being prime vectors of “moral inversion” in their respective fields; and
as such, witting or no, they were the thin end of the wedge for the incursion
of the social planners with their contempt for freedom. Insofar as scientists tried to justify their
activities on positivist grounds (or economists on utilitarian grounds), they
set up a field of cognitive dissonance and reflexive contradictions so
devastating that the only escape appeared to be the reimposition
of rationality by means of a Romanticist transcendence,
be it through either revolution or capitulation to “nature.” As Polanyi insisted,
“the freedom of science cannot be defended today on the basis
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of a
positivist conception of science... Totalitarianism is a much truer embodiment
of such a program than a free society” (1974, 64). The task was to understand how a seemingly
reasonable quest to buttress individual rationality by fortifying it against
rational doubt would end up making it impossible for an individual to exercise
any agency at all.
Polanyi was convinced that no productive scientist wanted the
kind of apodictic impersonal certainty that the positivists or their offspring
had portrayed them as wanting. “To think
of scientific workers cheerfully trying this and trying that, calmly changing
course at each failure, is a caricature of a pursuit that consumes a man’s
whole person” (Polanyi and Prosch
1975, 60). Rather than impersonal certainty,
what a scientist operating at the very frontiers of the known desperately
needed was personal commitment. In
a working laboratory, he was fond of saying, one finds the laws of nature
contradicted every hour (1946, 17); well before Kuhn or Collins he pointed out
that skepticism is trained on “the facts” more frequently in science than on
“hypotheses” or theories or metaphysics. Without a personal commitment to the validity
of a whole range of instruments, theories, and practices, no scientist would
have any grounds upon which to discover novel entities or hypotheses and
imagine their consequences. His deftly
chosen example of Einstein’s reactions to empirical disconfirmations of the
theory of special relativity (Holton 1995)
was calculated to shock his audience out of their complacency about
the hardness of the facts versus the nebulousness of metaphysical principles.
The cumulative intention of all these observations was
not to undermine empiricism as a philosophical doctrine so much as to demolish
the positivist notion of “objectivity” as an impersonal reliance on facts to
guide scientific inquiry. Polanyi regarded the positivist quest for foolproof
algorithms for scientific inquiry as a prime example of Enlightenment moral
fervor running rabidly out of control: in their avowed interests of protecting
personal freedom of inquiry and improving upon an imperfect quotidian reality,
the positivists had neutralized all human agency and individuality
indispensable to science, leaving behind nothing but a machine-like
rationality. For Polanyi,
the siren song of “cognitive science” was the prelude to a totalitarian science,
since a process of inquiry which could be programmed could also be planned, and
this played directly into the hands of the Bernalists
and their calls for more accountability in science.
Here we are finally prepared to appreciate the true
significance of Polanyi’s tag line, “tacit
knowledge.” By insisting that the
scientist knows more than she could ever explicitly recount, Polanyi was not appealing to Zeitgeist or anything
remotely approaching a sociology of knowledge; given
his disdain for Freudianism, he was not gesturing
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towards
the unconscious. Rather, the existence
of tacit knowledge was a necessary prerequisite to an appreciation of the
indispensability of individual agency in successful science. The legitimacy of passionate commitment to
entities or theories which were only imperfectly known and inadequately
articulated was, he asserted, the only way that novelty and innovation could be
incorporated into science; and moreover, it was the primary legitimate outlet
for moral fervor in what was widely misunderstood as a “value-free” rationalist
enterprise. Without open acknowledgement
of the tacit component of knowledge, there could be no personal responsibility
for the consequences of one’s actions as a scientist. Unrestrained instrumentalism would lead to
uncontrolled proliferation of cynical exercises consisting of barely concealed
wish fulfillment (or worse, fraud); while conversely, robotic conformity to
rigid rules would strangle all motivation to participate in the inquiry (1946,
27). Tacit knowledge was the means by
which scientists were enabled to navigate between the Scylla of luxuriant
extravagant speculation and the Charybdis of rote
slavish imitation.
Yet tacit knowledge also served a political function,
one which Polanyi acknowledged could be traced back
to a Burkean conservatism (1958, 54), used in a similar way by
Hayek (1972) in his later economics. For
Polanyi, tacit knowledge was not something inbred or
picked up in passing, since that could not then account for the special
progressive character of the scientific enterprise. Instead, the continuity of science should be
traced to the transmission of tacit knowledge across the generations. This conveyance of something which by
definition could not be adequately codified and transmitted might seem an
oxymoron, but Polanyi sought to turn this objection
into a centerpiece of his definition of the scientific enterprise by
associating it with the master/apprentice relationship through which the neophyte
becomes initiated into membership in the scientific community. Far from being an “open society” which revels
in unrestrained criticism, the politics of tacit knowledge dictates that
criticism be muted and restrained by the very process whereby one comes to
understand how science is done. Hence
this conception of tacit knowledge became the lynchpin of the argument that
scientific research could not be centrally planned. Since tacit knowledge was intrinsically
dispersed throughout the community, and could only be passed along piecemeal
through a socialization process inculcating a
particular personal commitment, there could never be any effective
rationalization or codification of the process of research.
Perhaps it becomes clearer in hindsight why Polanyi’s fiercest critics were the Popperians,
even though their political positions vis-à-vis market organization were very
close. Whilst the Popperians
paid lip-service to tradition, they were predisposed to a libertarian
conception of “free-
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dom from” any binding commitments to any social
organization; it is noteworthy that this led many, including Popper himself
(see Caldwell 1991), to defend the utilitarian tradition and neoclassical
economics. For Polanyi,
by contrast, utilitarianism was the economic equivalent of positivism, since it
produced a similar distortion of the ideal of human freedom. The fundamental flaw was its treatment of
individual rationality as autonomous from all social commitments and determinations,
predicated upon an individual knowledge-processing capacity that neither did
nor ever could exist. In his opposition
to utilitarian social theory, Polanyi was remakably consistent throughout his career; he expressed it
unequivocally in his early economic writings, as well as in his later
epistemological work on science. Since
utilitarianism denied tacit knowledge (Polanyi 1958,
142), it produced a twisted conception of the real efficacy of market
operations, which was not to maximize individual welfare, but rather to
coordinate the dispersed and inchoate knowledge of the transactors.
In effect, utilitarianism was the projection of the
Enlightenment image of autonomous knowledge onto society, which then insisted
upon the recasting of society in its own terms. The ideal of machine rationality had indeed
been made quite explicit in the historical development of neoclassical
economics, with its concerted imitation of rational mechanics in the actual
mathematics of utilitarianism (Mirowski 1989). Although his opposition was partially rooted
in hostility to an algorithmic rationality, Polanyi
also remained adamantly opposed to any and all attempts to justify science
along utilitarian ideals. It was his
recognition that the standard defense of the public funding of pure science - namely,
a necessary way station to arrive at technological benefits - had been the
primary argument in favor of J. D. Bernal’s science planning movement (McGucken 1984) that hardened his opposition to
utilitarianism in all its manifestations, be they in economics or in the
philosophy of science.
3. Science and
the Market Metaphor.
The comparison of the social structures of science to
the operation of a market, just as in the comparison of the transmission of
cultural entities to natural selection, bears no necessary content or
implications in and of itself. It is
only with the unpacking of the metaphors within the home and target domains
that one comes to realize the network of claims and assertions that are
freighted within any such comparison. Michael
Polanyi had been implicitly comparing the operations
of science to the market since the later 1930s, although it would invariably
appear in some subordinate illustrative role, more rhetorical flourish than
serious thesis. Over the course of the
1950s, however, the similarities between his convic-
S132
tions about the economy and about science were coming
increasingly into focus in his own mind, but he kept them primarily to himself
and a small circle of confidants, until roughly about 1961.
The reasons for this change of heart probably were
bound up with the reactions to his major book, Personal Knowledge, which
had appeared in 1958, and a subsequent confrontation with Thomas Kuhn at Oxford
in July 1961. In the book, Polanyi had sometimes referred to his own project as an
“invitation to dogmatism” (p. 268), and Kuhn had taken up the gauntlet in a
paper which attempted to assimilate components of Polanyi’s
theses to his own discussions of “normal science” in his soon-to-appear Structure
of Scientific Revolutions (1963, see also 1970, 44, n. 1). Polanyi was not at
all happy with Kuhn’s interpretation of his work. As he wrote to Gerald Holton: “I criticized
Tom Kuhn for not taking up the epistemological difficulties arising from the
acknowledgment of dogmatism as he called it. Personal Knowledge was of course
principally concerned with an attempt to answer this question.” 1
For modern enthusiasts for an “economics of science,” Polanyi’s “Republic of Science” (1969) is a ringing
manifesto, with all its talk of “invisible hands” (p. 51) and scientific organization which “works according to
economic principles similar to those by which the production of material goods
is regulated” (p.
49). Yet for those who bother to read it with some care, the overriding
impression is of someone taking away with a less obtrusive though still visible
hand what he has just given with the other. Rather than concertedly exploring the ways in
which economics characterized market organization and operations, Polanyi instead hinted at a more general theory of
coordination: “I am suggesting, in fact, that the coordinating functions of the
market are but a special case of coordination by mutual adjustment. In the case of science, adjustment takes place
by taking note of the published results of other scientists; while in the case
of the market, mutual adjustment is mediated through a system of prices” (Polanyi 1969, 52). Yet,
of course, the act of formal acknowledgment of published scientific work does
not look very similar to a price system, so the analogy begins to sputter even
before it has left the ground. This
became painfully apparent as Polanyi embarked upon
his discussion of valuation in science, as a segue
into his defense of scientific freedom.
He began the discussion in a seemingly familiar way,
portraying the scientist as making an optimal choice of problem given his
“limited stock of intellectual and material resources.” Yet, clearly apprehensive at the implicit
utilitarian drift, and unwilling to acknowledge what was
1. Polanyi
to Gerald Holton, dated 11/12/63, in Polanyi,
unpublished, box 6, folder 4.
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by then
the microeconomic orthodoxy, he immediately shifted the grounds of the
valuation to “professional standards” and the “authority of scientific
opinion.” If these standards or
authority were merely algorithmic rules within which the individual choice had
to be made, then one could treat them as a laundry list of utilitarian constraints;
however, that would be an anathema to Polanyi. As in more modern authors like Philip Kitcher (1993), Polanyi decided
to recast scientific valuation itself as a problem of authority, but a
species of authority which does not encroach upon the necessary freedom to
choose. Since “no single scientist has a
sound understanding of more than a tiny fraction of the total domain of
science,” the legitimacy of any valuation was sorely in need of justification; Polanyi imagined the problem could be solved if legitimacy
of valuations would monotonically fall off as a function of the “distance” of
the subject matter from that of the speciality of the
scientist at ground zero of the gradient. If we imagine a collection of scientists
arrayed on a grid of specializations, then their individual authorities would
overlap; Polanyi then simply asserts these
overlapping valuations would also become reconciled into a coherent
transpersonal professional opinion, though without specifying precisely how
this would come about. [2] This monolithic and internally coherent
“scientific opinion” not only is able to evaluate individual endeavors with
pinpoint precision, but Polanyi then treats it as
akin to utiliarianism in its posited ability to
direct efficient resource allocation: “Such is in fact the principle which
underlies the rational distribution of grants for the pursuit of research... So
long as each allocation follows the guidance of scientific opinion, by giving
preference to the most promising scientists and subjects, the distribution of
grants will automatically yield the maximum advantage for the advancement of
science as a whole” (p. 57).
However much Polanyi’s
language seems to parallel that of neoclassical economics, it should be
apparent by this point that he has moved very far away from its content. The
“advancement of science”
2. “Each link in these
chains and networks will establish agreement between the valuations made by
scientists overlooking the same overlapping fields, and so, from one
overlapping neighborhood to another, agreement will be established on the
valuation of scientific merit throughout all the domains of science” (1969, 55—56). It is worthwhile to note here that
Philip Kitcher attempts to appropriate Polanyi’s conception of overlapping authority to his own
conception of “rational authority functions” (Kitcher
1993, 320, n. 15). In light of this
revival of utilitarianism, one notes the passage immediately subsequent to that
quoted above: “Scientific opinion is an opinion not held by any single human
mind, but one which, split into thousands of fragments, is held by a multitude
of individuals, each of whom endorses the opinion of the other at second hand...”
(Polanyi 1969, 56).
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is not
coterminous with the welfare of the individual scientists involved; their
cognitive and computational capacities are not those of the utilitarian
rational agent. Indeed, the advancement
of science is not concerned with public welfare at all, which is the primary
thesis of the second half of the article. Polanyi sought to
displace utilitarianism by positing a kind of supra-personal valuation function
which is apparently reflexive, transitive, and complete, although how
controversies, misunderstandings and intransitivities
are ironed out in the process of aggregation is nowhere explicated. The orthodox market theory works in terms of
competition and a transpersonal value index like money, a combination which (in
theory) should allow individual actors to express their individually divergent
valuations as a process of commensurate social valuation; but in Polanyi’s case, all the evaluative action happens before
the resources get distributed and in the absence of any tokens of
valuation. The fact that this scenario
does not work in terms of a rationalist or instrumentalist valuation scheme is
admitted later in the article: “The authority of science is essentially
traditional” (Polanyi 1969, 66).
It is striking that Polanyi
does not once make reference to the key concept of tacit knowledge anywhere in
“The Republic of Science.” Although this
was treated as the centerpiece of his books both before and after the 1962
article, here it is absent, replaced by the quasi-economistic
language quoted above. In one sense,
this was unfortunate, since elaboration of the psychological character of tacit
knowledge could at least have provided reasons (satisfying or no, described
above) for the necessity of a system of traditional authoritarian hierarchy. In their absence, and parachuted into the
middle of a seemingly neoclassical market metaphor, the cognitive dissonance of
a rigid authoritarian hierarchy superimposed on a “naturally” self-optimizing
market could not be banished by any amount of citation of Burke and Paine. The man who had once sneered at Bernal’s glib
appeal to “freedom as the understanding of necessity” ([1940] 1975, 23) had now
come to resemble the very thing he had once despised. But in another sense, the replacement of tacit
knowledge by the market metaphor was probably intentional, the better to
contrast one vision of the Good Society with a threatening rival which belonged
to Thomas Kuhn.
Kuhn, as is well known, had portrayed “normal science”
as a regime of dogmatic belief. Polanyi had glossed his Personal Knowledge as an
“invitation to dogmatism.” Kuhn wrote
about the functions of commitment on the part of the working scientist;
commitment was the keystone of Polanyi’s understanding of science. And yet, when all was said and done, Polanyi wanted to put as much distance between himself and
Kuhn’s paradigms and revolutions as he could muster: but how?
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Since the disagreement was primarily over the
appropriate social theory analogy, why not displace Kuhn’s political
metaphor with an economic one? After
all, market conceptions of order were one class of
locutions that Kuhn had never remotely entertained; nor had he shown much
interest in the history of social theory. Polanyi, on the
other hand, had been meditating about the nature of the merits of the market
for over three decades; the long apprenticeship had convinced him that the market
metaphor was ideal to telegraph precisely the ways in which Kuhn had
misrepresented the nature of personal freedom in his narrative. This explains the final section of the paper,
which expounds a vision of freedom which “has no bearing on the right of men to
do as they please; but assures them the right to speak the truth as they know
it” (Polanyi 1969).
In Polanyi’s own mind,
therefore, he was not tying his system to any particular social science;
rather, he was expostulating a generic theory of the
self-organization of free societies (p. 69). He did not want a politics of science, or an
economics of science, and most definitively, not a sociology of science. What Polanyi wanted
was a society willingly subordinate to the scientific community because that
body was the finest instantiation of a politically unified corporate entity
dedicated to consensual objectives, whereas the actual state could only be a
pale imitation for those who were not privileged to live the life of the scientist.
The “Republic of Science” was quite
literally that: imperium in imperio, a closed corporate entity situated within the
larger commonwealth, the latter obligated to provide certain support services
to it, but incapable of aspiring to the same level of clarity in objectives and
political cohesion.
Harry Prosch, Polanyi’s collaborator in the waning years of his career,
reports that Polanyi believed his crusade for freedom
a failure (1986, 203-204); moreover, Prosch thinks Polanyi’s attempt to compare science to a market was a
“basic error” (p. 287). I concur. There was something fundamentally
self-defeating about Polanyi’s attempt to use the
language of economics to gesture towards his own personal conception of market
organization, even though he was fully aware that his personal image of a
market was at odds with the orthodox view promulgated in economics. This same problem bedevils modern
appropriations of economic models by philosophers of science. It should have been obvious to someone touting
the presumption of a legitimate dominant consensus within science that if his
market metaphor would be understood at all, in his own era it would be embraced
as a neoclassical economics of science. Worse,
by Polanyi’s own criteria, he could be accused of
coming to resemble everything that he had denounced as characteristic of the
“moral inversion” of the En-
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lightenment
project: namely, by trumpeting the existence of ideal rational agents called
“scientists” and setting them above the debased denizens of quotidian reality,
he put out the welcome mat for political movements seeking to revamp that very
same society in his ideal image of the Republic of Science - a world of a single
supra-personal Valuation. The parallels
to the Marxian silence on the structure of operational socialism were too close
for comfort. The road to serfdom is
indeed paved with good intentions.
Should this diagnosis seem too harsh, one need only
consult another major address he delivered essentially at the same time, though
curiously one never reprinted in any of his essay collections. In the lecture, “Science: Academic and
Industrial,” he reveals how a paean to liberty undergoes inversion to become an
exclusionary taunt. As part of his
campaign to uncouple the support of science from any of its putative
utilitarian byproducts, he makes one of the strongest distinctions between pure
science and technology found anywhere in the entire literature on the philosophy
and sociology of science. In effect,
“technology” is associated with any research that is subject to any form of
economic valuation, while pure science is entirely independent of any “change
in the current relative value of things” (1961, 404). A world of such stark contrasts would be hard
to capture in black and white, but Polanyi clearly
signals his intention to resolve all hard cases unambiguously into one category
or the other. The reason for this Solomonic judgment is that “pure science” and only pure
science should inhabit the universities, while “industry” will need to pick up
the tab for the rest. Not only are the
moneylenders to be driven from the temple; Polanyi
then goes to the extraordinary length of assimilating the humanities to “technology,”
as a prelude of excluding them likewise from the groves of academe. [3] A more bald power play to exile all economic
competitors of the natural sciences from public support in the universities on
the a priori unsubstantiated ground
that only the natural science communities can deliver “progress,” while
simultaneously de-
3. “Nature is given to
man ready-made; we may try to elucidate it, but we cannot improve it. But language, literature, history, politics, law
and religion, as well as economic and social life, are constantly on the move,
and they are advanced by poets, playwrights, novelists, politicians, preachers,
journalists and all kinds of other, non-scholarly, writers. These are the primary initiators of cultural
change, rather than the Faculties of Arts...
We may conclude that the profound distinction between science and
technology is but an instance of the difference between the study of nature on
the one hand and the study of human activities and the products of human
activities, on the other. The universities
cannot be the main source of progress either in humanistic or in material
culture, as they are in the natural sciences” (Polanyi
1961, 406).
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nying they be subject to any utilitarian cost/benefit
calculus, can scarcely be imagined. Not
only would the simple freedom of intellectuals to pursue their inquiries into
topics of concern be curtailed, but the irony of a proposal to banish the
philosophers and economists from academe by someone who had himself held a
personal chair in “social studies” at Manchester from 1948-58 could hardly be
lost on his audience.
While there is very little consensus on the exact
meaning and reference of the term “scientism,” I believe a least common
denominator has presented itself in this instance. Scientism here denotes the overweening
confidence and chauvinism on the part of those inducted into a natural science
- or its fellow travelers - that their own local culture represents everything
that is noble, rational, and efficacious about the human race; and further,
anything less than abject tribute and total capitulation to this position
(which includes copious and unquestioned economic support) on the part of those
without passports from the culture in question should be met with scorn,
ridicule, and contempt. It is the chisel
of naturalism driven by the hammer of self-interest.
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