The Competitiveness of Nations
in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy
April 2005
William T. Scott
Tacit Knowing and the Concept of Mind
Philosophical Quarterly, 21 (82)
Jan. 1971, 22-35.
Index
1. Tacit Knowing and Some of
Its Consequences
I wish to show that Gilbert Ryle’s
account of mental processes as given in The Concept of Mind [1] can be significantly extended by
considering certain features of the philosophical position that Michael Polanyi
has developed around the concept of tacit knowing. [2] The Polanyian
themes I wish to employ are outlined in Section 1 and include the integrative
and unitary perception of comprehensive entities, the distinction between
subsidiary and focal awareness and the consequent “from-to” relation, the
hierarchy of levels in the experienced world, the notion of indwelling and the
variability of the boundary between self and world that follows from this
notion, and the indefinite nature and function of anticipatory imagination.
In Sections 2 to 6 I shall apply Polanyian
conceptions to a number of problems arising from Ryle’s
book, including the coherence of the indefinite variety of instances of a
particular disposition, the relation between sensing and observation, the
relation between mind and observed activities to which mental predicates can be
applied, the nature of our ability to recognize a candidate-idea as a solution
to a problem, and the confidence with which we can describe mental life in the Rylean manner.
1. Tacit Knowing and
Some of Its Consequences
I shall begin with a brief account of the tacit
dimension of knowledge in terms of my own
understanding of Polanyi’s work. Polanyi uses the term ‘tacit knowledge’ to
refer to the kind of things which cannot be made explicit in speech - things we
know and know that we know, but cannot tell. For example, we know how to walk or ride a
bicycle but we cannot tell the particulars of co-ordination and control by
which we carry out these muscular activities. [3]
A wide variety of examples of this tacit
property of “knowing how” can be given; Ryle himself
has several, such as that of the humorist, who knows how to make good jokes but
cannot give any recipes for them. [4] Most, if not all, cases
of “knowing how” involve tacit knowledge.
Polanyi shows that tacit elements are also included in
“knowings that” or at least underlie them, in spite
of the fact that “knowing that” is commonly taken to refer only to
propositional knowledge that can by definition be articulated. There are, in the first place, propositions
held by persons
1. London, 1949; hereafter
referred to as CM.
2. M. Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (New
York, 1963).
3. M. Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards
a Post-Critical Philosophy (London, 1958; reprinted New York, 1964), pp.
49-52.
4. CM, p. 30.
22
who have not themselves articulated these
propositions. The success of
philosophers in clarifying thought in a wide range of disciplines is a measure
of the great extent of propositional knowledge which is held partially or
wholly in tacit form. But there are also
non-propositional elements that cannot be fully expressed in much that we know
to be the case. An example from Ryle’s book is that of an actor knowing the moods of
another and being able to act them out, without being able to tell, either at
the time or later, what it is that he knows to be the case about the other
person. [5] Knowing
how to recognize your face entails knowing that a certain face is yours and yet
no rule can be given for this recognition or for any other such case of knowing
by acquaintance. Finally, as Ryle himself says, the use of language involves recognizing
words on saying and hearing them, [6] a
type of recognition that is itself tacit and not propositional.
Polanyi’s conception of
tacit knowledge goes considerably beyond the mere recognition that there are
things we know and cannot tell, by providing a structural account of this
feature of cognition, which utilizes seeing as a paradigm for knowing, in spite
of current philosophical argument against such use. A basic element of Polanyi’s
account is the distinction between focal and subsidiary awareness. [7] Focal awareness is the
ordinary kind of fully conscious awareness we have in focusing attention on a
specifiable object. Subsidiary
awareness, in contrast, refers to the periphera
noticing of features of an object that are not attended to in themselves but
are seen as pointers or clues to the object of focal attention. Polanyi say that we attend from subsidiary
particulars to an entity under scrutiny, and calls the relations between
the particulars and the whole entity the “from to relation”. [8]
In terms of J. J. Gibson’s recent work, we can
describe the focal awareness of a pattern or coherence as the recognition of an invariance in the stimulus information received from the
world about us. [9] Gibson
also describes the gradients in the stimulus field and the variants occasioned
by our moving about, both of which assist us in perceiving the objects and
properties of the real world. Such
variations in the stimulus field are among the elements that Polanyi classifies
as the content of subsidiary awareness. Because the chief character of subsidiary
particulars is that we rely on them for attending to something other
than themselves (that is, the thing we are looking at or listening to), Polanyi
is able to extend the notion of subsidiary awareness to include processes of
both objective and subjective character
5. CM, pp. 262-3.
6. CM, p. 234.
7. Personal Knowledge, pp. 55-7; M. Polanyi, “The Logic of Tacit
Inference” in Knowing and Being, ed. M. Grene
(London, 1969), pp. 140-4 (reprinted from Philosophy Vol. 41 (1966), pp.
1-18).
8. The Logic of Tacit Inference “, p. 146; M. Polanyi, “The Creative
Imagination” Psychological Issues VI, No. 2, monograph 22 (1969),
discussion, pp. 7 1-3.
9. J. J. Gibson, The Senses
Considered as Perceptual Systems (London, 1968). See also “The Creative Imagination”, p. 56.
23
involving all degrees of observability
from the fully clear to the completely unconscious. Besides features of an object which we can
easily notice, there are subtler clues whose function for us is obscure, such
as details of background and context, sensations of colour,
pitch, intensity and the like, motions of the eyes, the focusing muscles and
the head that accompany our efforts to perceive, physiological processes that
are completely subliminal, and elements of memory and expectation derived from
previous experience.
While it may seem to be stretching the term
‘awareness’ rather far to use it for such a variety of more or less subliminal
processes, this use has a close parallel in Ryle’s
extension of the word ‘knowing’ from the propositional kind of “knowing that”
into the unspecifiable kind of “knowing how”. To the argument that the term ‘awareness’ does
not properly belong to events of which we are not conscious, the Polanyian reply is that it is neither simple nor
straightforward to speak of consciousness of that on which we rely for
attending to something else, so that the question of consciousness need not be
raised in devising a special term for such occurrences. [10] Once the term has been
accepted, we can of course go on to discuss the qualities and properties of the
various types of subsidiary awareness, including their degrees of subliminality.
The functional character of reliance by which we
attend from subsidiary particulars to the whole not only unites in one category
a variety of different processes, but plays a basic role in determining the
aspects of things thus sensed in the subsidiary mode. Things look different and sensations feel
different when seen or felt as clues to something else, than when they are
attended to directly. The kinds of
differences that occur depend, of course, on the type of subsidiary element
being considered, but in all cases we can say that the knowledge gained by
subsidiary awareness is tacit. To speak
in the indicative mode about such elements would require focusing attention on
them and then they would no longer be the relied-on subsidiary elements in
question. Of course, some of the
elements cannot be focused on at all, in which case only the subsidiary mode of
attention is possible. I shall come back
to this point below in considering the problem of “sense.data”.
Polanyi uses the term ‘integration’ to describe the
process of recognizing a coherence from subsidiary
particulars. While Gibson describes the
perception of information largely in passive terms of immediate recognition,
another cognitive psychologist, Ulric Neisser, insists that construction by the perceiver is
always involved. [11] The terms ‘integration’ and ‘construction’
should not be taken to refer to acts of imposing structure on unformed sense
data, or of a mechanical or mathematical summation of parts, but rather to mean
that the perceiver is active in forming a perception of what it is that he sees
or hears, while attending to the object from its particulars.
10. “The Creative Imagination”,
pp. 56 and 72.
11. U. Neisser,
Cognitive Psychology (New York, 1967), esp. chs.
4, 5 and 6.
24
This constructive activity is more evident in cases where perception is
not so clear and immediate – “moonlit” in Ryle’s
phrase [12] - rather than in the
immediate, “sunlit” type of seeing which forms the main burden of Gibson’s
work.
The integrative activity involved in perceiving
coherences is generally rapid and automatic. The mechanism that may account for its
operation does not yet seem to have been elucidated, but whatever it is (and
whether or not ‘mechanism’ is the right word for it),
we know that we have such an ability. Because
of its unobservable and uncontrolled nature, Polanyi refers to it as “intuition”.
[13]
Imagination is a feature which is closely related to
perceptive intuition. [14] According to Polanyi, we
construct images of what we may see or expect to see. Imagination guides our powers of integration,
for instance as we “home in” on a vague scene in the moonlight. This is not the imagination of a clear, sunlit
scene, about which Ryle has a good deal to say, [15] but rather a vague anticipation directing
the intuition in trying out various possibilities and providing the basis for
judging the successes or failures of the integrative perceptual system in
finding out clearly what had been only dimly anticipated. [16] Ryle
hints at this kind of anticipatory imagination when he speaks of a person
catching sight of a thimble and “having a visual sensation in a thimble-seeing
frame of mind”. [17]
An important philosophical aspect of the from-to character of perception lies in its bearing on
the conception of the world as composed of a hierarchical set of levels of
complexity and organization. Even
without the from-to relation, we know that perceptual
wholes are not reducible to their parts, and conceptual wholes are not
explainable in terms of laws that apply to their constituents. Ryle has a
persuasive account of the latter point in his attack on the “Bogey of
Mechanism” in which he shows that the laws of physics leave quite open the opportunity
for an independent set of laws for mental behaviour. [18]
12. Ryle quite correctly criticizes the use
in epistemology of analogies drawn only from the perception of the “familiar,
expected, and sunlit” type rather than from the “belated and hesitant
recognition, or misrecognition, of what is strange, unexpected or moonlit” (CM,
p. 303). The former type is a marginal
or limiting case of the latter the effortful species of perception clearly
makes a better paradigm for the development of epistemological models than the
variety in which the components of effort involved have been lost to view as a
result of experience and practice.
13. M. Polanyi, “Sense-Giving and Sense-Reading”, in Knowing
and Being, p. 201 (reprinted from Philosophy Vol. 42 (1967), pp.
301-25).
14. Cognitive Psychology, Chapter
6.
15. CM, ch.
VIII.
16. “Sense-Giving and Sense-Reading”, pp. 199-205; “The Creative
Imagination
17. CM, p. 230.
18. CM, pp. 76-82; also G. Ryle, Dilemmas (Cambridge,
1954), chapter V. This point is
amplified by Polanyi’s recent account of the
principle of marginal control, in which the laws of a lower level, say physics,
leave open the determination of initial and boundary conditions, which are just
those matters that become subject to the laws of a higher level - say chemistry
or biology. M. Polanyi, “Life’s Irreducible Structure “, Science 160
(1968), pp. 1308-12; reprinted in Knowing and Being, pp. 225-39.
25
Since for Polanyi, as it was for Gestaltists,
the perceived character of particulars is determined by the whole to which they
belong, this whole has an ontological status as a real entity, and not just an
explanatory or descriptive status. Ordinary
objects, including mechanisms and living organisms, are real things, whose
meaning is contained in their organizing principles. What about the principles themselves? I do not wish to enter into the question of
whether organizing principles, or patterns, or coherences in general are real
existents in some Platonic sense, or are potencies according to Aristotle or to
Popper, or have some other status. What
is pertinent here is that such entities belong in the same category as
propositions, and constitute an extension of this category in terms of
representing more complex relations than do propositions, and of being knowable
with a more far-reaching component of tacit comprehension. For instance, the concept ‘human being’
expresses an organizing principle of what it is to be human that defies
description and yet is clearly comprehensible not only by human beings but also
by a number of species of other animals. Thus while avoiding the question of whether
the abstract concept exists, we can assert that the
class defined by this tacitly-known concept certainly does exist.
Now if we consider the relation of entities to each
other, and the status of parts of entities, we recognize that we can shift
attention from a whole to one of its parts, or from a generality to one of its
instances, and conversely from a whole to a larger whole, as well as from an
organizing principle to a wider one, of which the first is a particular for the
second. Each real object or entity of
the world is in this respect what Arthur Koestler calls
a “holon “, a whole but also part of a larger whole. [19] Since a holon is
seen differently when looked at focally and when seen as part of a larger holon, the succession of levels of wholes thus generated,
the stratification of the world, has an irreducible character that is a direct
consequence of the from-to relation.
Stratification in the world can also be found in the
realm of thought. Ryle
speaks of many cases of second and higher order processes, such as the
increasing levels of sophistication in which we attend to acts of attention. The second-order character of the recognition
of the acting out of an action, [20] of
the recognition of a person’s skill in recognizing the skill of another, [21] and of the imagination of a scene
previously perceived, [22] are among the
aspects of hierarchical level relations in The Concept of Mind. The joint use of several levels is the
source of Ryle’s concept of a “thick description”. [23]
At the same time that the world is stratified, it is
also unified. A holon and its set of particular features constitute
one entity. While it is true that a part
looked at focally is an entity distinct from the whole, subsidiary particulars
are only such in being integral with the whole. This point is
19. This term is introduced by Koestler in The
Ghost in the Machine (London, 1967), ch. III, p.
48.
20. CM, p. 191. 21CM, p. 171. 22CM, p. 266.
23. “On the Thinking of Thoughts “, University Lectures. No. 18, (University of Saskatchewan, 1968).
26
insisted on by Ryle on the numerous occasions
on which he says that an action, for instance, can be described by multiple
predicates in a thick description but cannot be treated as being or involving
two distinct and independent entities, one physical and one mental. [24] The stratification of the
world has no sharp boundaries between its levels.
The relation between stratification and unification
could be elucidated by classifying Ryle’s multiple
predicates into those characterizing an entity as a whole or in some holistic
way, and those that refer to a part or a collection of parts of an entity. The nearest that Ryle
comes to making this distinction is his reference to main and subordinate
clauses in the description of an action, as exemplified by a person pretending
to be cross. [25] The
person’s acting cross may be described by the main clause of a sentence, and
his doing it by pretence by the subordinate, or we can reverse the emphasis. While different levels of stratification can
be jointly described in this way, the main-subordinate clause distinction fails
to show the essential from-to character of our perception of hierarchical
relations.
I turn now to indwelling, another fundamental Polanyian conception which will assist in my interpretation
of The Concept of Mind. The conception
is derived from the way we experience our bodies. A person’s body is the one thing or collection
of things in the Universe that the person knows almost exclusively in the
subsidiary mode. We rely on our bodies
for all our doing and perceiving; our knowledge of our members is almost
entirely subsidiary. At the same time,
we are aware of our bodies not as identical with our conscious selves but
rather as our dwelling places, using the term ‘dwelling’ to represent that
partial and ambivalent way in which our bodies resemble edifices and yet are
less rather than greater than ourselves and function more as instruments than
as boundaries. Subsidiary particulars
occur within us, and yet we live within them.
A fundamental feature of our dwelling within our
bodies is that our reliance on them and our trust in them constitute a
commitment. We are there, and
cannot retreat in order to examine our position, for we use our position for
all our examination as well as for anything else that we do. [26]
Polanyi uses the term ‘indwelling’ to describe in the
first instance this experienced functional relation of self to body, [27] and extends it by considering particulars outside
our bodies that we rely on for doing things and getting about. We say that we dwell within a set of
particulars, for instance a tool that we are using, when we are attending from
these particulars to something we are doing, or better, relying on the
particulars for doing something. [28] In writing with a pen, I
focus on the words, the
24. CM, p. 50.
25. CM, p. 262.
26. Personal Knowledge, ch. 10.
27. “The Logic of Tacit Inference”, pp. 148-9; Personal Knowledge, p.
59.
28. “Knowing and Being “, in Knowing and Being, pp. 127-8
(reprinted from Mind Vol. LXX (1961), pp. 458-70); “Tacit Knowing: Its
Bearing on Some Problems of Philosophy “, in Knowing and Being, p. 160
(reprinted from Reviews of Modern Physics Vol. 34 (1962), pp. 601-16); Personal
Knowledge, pp. 55-9.
27
page, and the pen-point, while I am only subsidiarily aware of the pen’s contact with my hand and
the motions of my hand. These two sorts
or particulars merge together in a way that can be expressed by saying that the
pen functions as part of my hand, and my bodily habitation is extended to
include the pen - I commit myself to it. A similar extension occurs in driving a car,
and explains the ease with which we learn (tacitly, of course) where the
boundaries of the car are located.
A most important example of the subsidiary-focal
dichotomy and the extension of bodily indwelling is that of ordinary speech. We rely on sounds for attending to the words
of which they are composed; we are subsidiarily aware
of words as we focus attention on a sentence, and in fact as we attend to the
meaning of that sentence. We commit
ourselves to the conceptions involved in the words and grammar of a language as
we come to understand it, and rely on it for thought and communication. In entrusting our mental existence to language,
we dwell within it. Language is
necessarily public language, so that our dwelling in it makes us inherently
social creatures. Ryle’s
book is basically an account of the language we dwell in and confidently use
for describing many kinds of human and therefore mental activity. His very considerable ability to communicate
this rich variety of language use is a measure of joint indwelling in language
by his readers and himself.
The relation between a collection of instances of a
disposition and their joint meaning can be fruitfully discussed in Polanyian terms. Ryle characterizes a skill or “knowing how” as a capability
for an indefinitely large number of similar actions. [29] How is it that we can
identify a skill from given instances of it, and continue to recognize it by
perceiving further instances that were not predictable or specifiable in
advance? Clearly there is a general
coherence among all the actions we lump together as illustrations of a
knowing-how. We can account for our recognition
of a skill if we describe the latter as the focal centre of which the known
examples are subsidiary particulars, and around which we can organize new
examples as pointers to the same skill. In
fact, unless we make some explicit or implicit reference to an organization of
particulars into a coherence, we clearly fail to
account for our conviction that there is a single skill rather than many or
none involved in the actions in question. Ryle gives a hint of
this kind of organization when he says of boredom that it is the “temporary
complexion” of the totatility of all that the bored
person is doing and undergoing. [30]
Similarly, learning something means
being able to use concepts and information in a wide and systematic range of
applications. [31] We
recognize a person’s “knowing that” by attending to his knowledge from
the particulars of his competent use of it. The coherence involved in the concept of
knowing how to do something or knowing that something is the case can be
generalized to all dispositional terms. If a person has a disposition to
29. CM, pp.44-8.
30. CM, p. 104.
31. CM, p. 312.
28
act angrily towards an acquaintance, the
numerous occasions and types of angry behaviour only
cohere into a disposition if we can responsibly integrate these occasions and
types into a single comprehensive entity. To characterize a disposition as anger or
vanity or any other conditional mental entity need not place it in a wrong “causal-mechanism”
category as Ryle seems to think would be implied, [32] but will place it properly and explicitly
in the hierarchy of the organizing principles of mental life.
It is evident that the same analysis applies to the
meaning of words or concepts, and also to propositions which relate concepts. The indefinite range of uses, of a word or
concept, and the indefinite variety of ways in which a proposition can be
expressed, point to the meanings of these entities as their controlling
coherences. The “from-to” aspect of
meaning shows again that articulate, propositional knowledge is rooted in tacit
knowing.
Ryle refers many times to
the manner in which something is done - intelligently or obediently, for
instance - as a characterization in one or another category of the thing done. This is his way of pointing out that we “read”
this or that manner from the particulars. But why stop there? It seems evident to me that we read the
presence of knowledge, intelligence, purpose, heed-taking, obedience, or
whatever in just the same way.
Mind and body are seen in this light to have a
focal-subsidiary relation. More
explicitly, the relation of mind to its disposition is of the same kind as the
relation of a disposition to its instances in action. Polanyi describes it by saying that the mind
is the meaning of the body. [33] Alternatively
one can say that the mind is the coherence perceived when we focus attention on
the person, dwelling in the workings of his mind as subsidiary particulars. [34] The mind is “read”
through its overt workings, and in suitable cases can be read quite
transparently. Ryle
is quite right in rejecting the idea of a completely hidden mind, carrying out
a “second set of shadowy operations [35]
that can only be inferred by some as yet unfathomed procedures from perceptual
evidence. In the present view, mind is perceived
provided we focus attention on it, attending to its workings only subsidiarily. This
generality-to-particular relation for mind and body can be called a whole-part
relation, since in Polyani’s terms we are relating
real entities and not just their organizing principles.
If the workings of the mind were looked at focally,
for instance in seeing a person put a piece of a puzzle into place, what is
seen could equally well be blind, stupid, mechanical or any of several other
kinds of non-intelligent action. Ryle grants that we can see the difference between
intelligent and non-intelligent ways of doing things, of course. The only point
I wish to
32. CM, p. 86.
33. M. Polyani, “The Body-Mind Relation “, in
Man and The Science of Man (Columbus, Ohio, 1969), eds. W. Coulson and C. Rogers, pp. 85-102.
34. Ryle’s closest equivalent to Polanyi’s idea of indwelling is his reference to “merely
thinking what the author is doing along the same lines as those on which the
author is thinking what he is doing “, CM, p. 55.
35. CM, p. 50.
29
make here is that in order to see the difference we must focus on the
meaning and manner of doing rather than on the doing itself, and that when we
direct our attention this way, the particulars of how a thing is done become
seen as pointing to the mental powers manifested in the doing. The extent to which a mind is perceived
in this way is a separate question, which in the present context might be
answered in terms of successive levels of attending from a particular set of
mental occurrences to a higher coherence embodying them.
I think it is the combination of just this kind of
wholly appropriate reading of mental attributes from human activity with the
wholly inappropriate tradition of Cartesian dualism that accounts for the
persistence of the ghost-myth that Ryle attacks so
effectively. The Concept of Mind begins
by asserting that a category mistake underlies this myth, characterizing mind
and mental activities as parallel activities to body and bodily occurrences,
two cases of the same category with a totally mysterious connection between
them. We can now see that this
persistent category mistake can be further specified as a hierarchy mistake of
the kind that substitutes two collections of parts for a single collection of
parts and the comprehensive whole which integrates them. [36] Minds, or more precisely
persons, do not constitute counterpart existences to bodies but more comprehensive
levels of reality than bodies.
I should like to make one more application of the
focal-subsidiary relation before ending this section: a clarification of the
problem of whether I can inherently know more about myself than you can. If we distinguish between subsidiary and focal
knowledge, we can say that you and I have different sets of subsidiary clues
bearing on me, and another range of different sets of clues bearing on you. Each of us can focus attention on me or on
you, but the different subsidiary clues available to each of us does not entail
that I can perceive coherences about myself that are closed to you. [37] In fact, it leaves open
the question as to which kind of observation best provides evidence for which
kind of occurrence or trait.
Another important application of the from-to relation is to the problem of sensation and observation. It is clear from the discussion in section 1 that sensations and sense-data fall into the category of subsidiary particulars. We do not observe them focally while observing something in the world, and thus we neither need to locate them nor are able to discuss and analyse them. Some of the particulars, such as those that constitute our visual field, can be reflected upon and occasionally brought into aware-
36. Ryle
implies this hierarchical nature of the mistake in his example of the colleges at
Oxford and the University of Oxford, but he does not describe it explicitly in
such terms.
37. Ryle insists that the claim that a person
has uniquely privileged access to information about himself is unfounded; CM,
p. 181.
30
ness, but others, such as the physiological
items, cannot be sensed at all. Thus
there can never be a question of looking at an internal image of the object
seen, as Ryle shows from the simple fact that words
like ‘observe’ refer to things and not their sensory images. [38] Both the process of
looking and the achievement of seeing can only be described in terms of the
external focus of the attention of the perceiver. To attempt a description in some other terms,
such as neurological ones, would not only destroy the evidence by changing it,
but would also destroy the coherences which define the very processes under
study. In the ordinary sense of the word
‘data’, there are no sense-data.
In my judgment, a better term than ‘sense-datum’ is
‘sensory clue’. Ryle
says that having sensations is neither discovering nor using clues. [39] He has no other way to
speak of clues than as focally observable, and thus does not consider that
clues, whether or not we could focus on them, have the character of
clues because we do not focus on them but rely on them for their bearing
on their joint but possible hidden meaning. For this reason he is forced to reject
explicitly the idea that sensations are used as tools [40] for perceptive achievement. In spite of this rejection, however, he
effectively grants the subsidiary tool-like functioning of sensations in
referring, several pages earlier, to paying heed to sensations without watching
them. [41]
Ryle’s discussion of
ordinary “sunlit” imagination hinges on the idea that when our imagination
brings to mind a familiar picture, it is the act of seeing which differs from
that of ordinary perception, whereas the picture may be the same one that has
been actually seen. We “see” a picture;
we do not see a “picture “. In terms of Polanyi’s analysis of subsidiaries, we can say that
imagination relies only on a set of “inner” particulars in the nervous system,
excluding the retinal and motor sensors that make contact with the invariances in our surroundings. This set of inner particulars is completely
beyond the possibility of focal attention, so that it makes even less sense to
say that we can look at them than to speak of looking at retinal images.
The language puzzles that develop concerning
sensations like itches [42] arise in those
few cases where we can actually shift our focus of attention to particular
elements of sensitivity. Even then a from-to relation must hold. The knowledge that my finger itches must come from
unconscious bodily clues, which point from themselves to a genuine
or spurious source of irritation in my finger.
Ryle tells amusingly how we
get into trouble if we try to chronicle the process of making a formal
inference. [43] At
what time did we first make
38. CM, pp. 222-4.
39. CM, p. 232.
40. CM, p. 233.
41. CM, pp. 206-7.
42. Ryle admits his own puzzlement concerning
the language about sensations that arises from such cases; CM, pp. 240-4. The approach of this paper eliminates, in my
opinion, most of the difficulties that Ryle is
concerned with.
43. CM, p. 299.
31
the passage from premiss
to conclusion? Did we repeat the trip,
and did we do it hurriedly or did we dawdle? We can present a formal piece of logic in a
report or in a lecture to a class, but this is always long after the time we
first developed or discovered it. It is the
informal process of originally arriving at a piece of deductive logic that can
be chronicled, although it is not always easy to do so. The temporal difference between the formal and
informal processes of reasoning is reflected in a more fundamental distinction
between them, which is that the former are reversible and the latter
irreversible. When we present a formal
argument didactically, as to a class of students, we hold it up for examination
from both ends. The argument can be
traced from premisses to conclusion, or followed
backward from result to beginning. On
the other hand, the making of a discovery, insightful or experimental, is
irreversible, for once we have perceived a coherence, its clues change their
character by becoming subsidiary to that coherence, and we cannot go back to
the state before we perceived the coherence when the meaning of the clues was
uncertain and different. Only if a long enough time elapses for us really to forget the
discovery can we return to our previous state of ignorance.
The term ‘inference’ is not used by Ryle, nor by many others, for the
informal processes of discovery, largely I believe because of a widespread
tradition among philosophers that discovery is a psychological and not a
logical process. However, Polanyi’s analysis of seeing an object or forming a concept
by means of an integration of subsidiary particulars into a coherent focus is a
ground for examining the process of discovery in terms that transcend the
logic-psychology distinction. [44] His use of the term
‘tacit inference’ for this method of arriving at truth [45] appears to me to be an appropriate and useful extension of
the term ‘inference’. It also extends
the notion of tacit knowledge in immediate perception to cases in which a set
of clues is contemplated for some time before the coherence to which they point
is discovered. While the clues after
discovery have different aspects than those before, in each case they point to
the same thing, once vaguely and uncertainly, and later with clarity.
Tacit inference, thus defined, is seen to belong to
the set of mental powers so well described in Ryle’s
chapter on “The Intellect”; [46] specifically, it is an irreversible one, capable of being
chronicled. There are many specialized
arts of tacit inference that are developed by schooling and apprenticeship and
that take their place along with the more explicit learned skills to which Ryle applies the term ‘intellectual’. Among the trained tacit powers are those by
which we recognize other intellectual abilities. Tacit inference, like other powers, operates
in a succession of levels of sophistication.
44. M. Polanyi, “Logic and Psychology”, American Psychologist, Vol.
23 (1968), pp. 27-42.
45. Cf. “The Logic of Tacit Inference
46. CM, ch. IX.
32
One of the characteristics of tacit knowledge is its
real or apparent vagueness. Some of this
vagueness comes from matters we have not yet put into words, some from unclear,
“moonlit” perception, and still more from the subsidiary character of much of
our knowledge. But the widest range of
indefiniteness is that which we have discussed above in connection with
dispositions. All of the terms used to
describe mental events or properties - manners of doing things, varieties of
disposition, and so on - have an inescapable degree of indefiniteness in their
meaning, for they are capable of application to a wide range of as yet
unspecified occasions. Our recognition
of a person’s skill or of his intelligent learning, as contrasted with learning
by rote, rests on a sufficient indeterminacy in the concept recognized that it
can be applied to novel and unexpected features of the asserted skill or
knowledge.
If the ideal of strict exactness were pursued
successfully in a description of mind of Ryle’s type,
the entire edifice would collapse, for we can only be exact in predicting the
results of rote-learning and its analogues, wherein we recognize the absence
of intellect. [47]
A most important aspect of the indeterminacy of tacit
knowledge lies in the process of discovery. In Ryle’s pamphlet “On
the Thinking of Thoughts” [48] he
describes how a person puzzling something out tries many candidates for the
statements or arguments or insights that will solve the problem. The person reflects on each of these and
decides whether it is an appropriate step or guide for moving towards the
solution to the problem. All well and
good, but what Ryle does not tell us is how a person
can make such decisions before the solution has been found. The problem of the Meno
does not appear to be resolved by Ryle’s
description.
The answer to Meno that
Polanyi gives, and that seems to me to be correct, [49]
has been hinted at above in the discussion of tacit inference. We first recognize a problem by a vague
integration from a set of clues, an integration that recognizes the clues as
pointing to something yet to be found. It
is in terms of this vague idea that steps on the way are tested, and their
testing involves further steps of intuitive, clarifying integration. The vision that initially was worse than
moonlit, fog-bound in fact, begins to clear as we move
through the fog towards the landscape we are trying to see.
Since the integration of particulars is needed for
each trial solution as well as in judgments as to how close the trial is to the
correct answer, the continual guidance of the imagination is needed. The imagination is most
47. Correspondingly, if only exact prediction is allowed for validating
a scientific discovery, we are reduced to theories of the type that could
almost as easily be artful inventions as descriptions of what is really the
case. It is the experience of unexpected
new consequences of a discovery that gives us a true sense that something real
has been found.
48. See footnote 23 above.
49. Personal Knowledge, pp. 120-31; “The Unaccountable Element in Science” in Knowing
and Being, p. 117 (reprinted from Philosophy, Vol. 37 (1962), pp.
1-14); “The Creative Imagination “, p. 60.
33
active in the questing part of the process
after starting on a problem and before finally being able to put its solution
into formal terms. [50] But even in the statement of a solution, some
of the imaginative and intuitive scaffolding [51]
erected for purposes of discovery must surely remain, at least for the
discoverer, in the tacit integration that allows him to keep track of and to
make sense of his formal apparatus.
For the readers or hearers of a formal discovery,
tacit components are also needed. The
clues by which the reader or hearer constructs a coherent imaginative
background that makes sense of the formal presentation come not from the
original scaffolding but from a didactic substitute in the form of illustrations
and examples, and more importantly although more subtly, from nuances of
expression in the presenter’s speech or writing.
The innovative and unspeciflable
way in which imagination assists the process of discovery is also the way it
functions in the much simpler and more common case of ordinary speech. What we are about to say will form the
coherence of clues that point to it, primarily clues in the imagination that
knows incompletely what it is we mean and are trying to say. To paraphrase Ryle’s
reference to thimble-seeing, we might say that we begin a certain sentence in
an asserting-the-weather-to-be-good frame of mind. Imagination of this sort provides a type of
anticipatory mental act that precedes speech and yet does not constitute that
explicit private rehearsal which Ryle rejects. [52] It is perfectly
consistent with Ryle’s monistic view of body and mind
to include this function of the imagination along with the more explicit type
which he describes, and it satisfies the unhappy feeling one gets in reading The
Concept of Mind that speech comes as it were out of an empty head. Ryle does not mean
that it does, but in his effort to attack the Cartesian ghost, he has not given
enough attention to our indeterminate, imaginative, anticipatory powers to
allow what I think he really means to become clear.
Ryle’s disposal of the ghost
in the machine is so effective that the value or even the possibility of adding
to the argument might well be questioned. Nevertheless, the from-to
structure of knowledge does add a new dimension to the attack on the ghost. I described above our dwelling within any set
of particulars as a generalization of the way we dwell within our bodies, and
the way in which a tool such as a pen becomes a part of our body, in that the
contact between self and outside world is transferred to the point of the pen. When we focus our attention
on. a complex state of affairs, such as writing a paper, we become so
involved in the many kinds and levels of subsidiary elements that we come to
dwell in them in the same way as for
50. “Sense-giving and Sense-reading”, pp. 199-200; “The Creative
Imagination” pp. 64-6. See also “Genius
in Science “, Encounter, forthcoming.
51. Cf. CM, pp. 291-2, for a graphic description of this scaffolding.
52. CM, pp. 295-6.
34
simpler eases of tool-using. I have already described in more general terms
our dwelling within the whole range of language that we use.
I see no way of actually drawing the line between such
extended in-dwelling and the purely biological type. I can shift my boundary both outward and
inward. If I look at my finger and
contemplate the possibility of losing it, I use a narrower concept of myself
than usual. The boundary shifts with a
shift of the division between the focal and the subsidiary.
Now if the boundary between self and world can shift
with the focus of attention, how about the boundary between mind and body? The difficulty in focusing attention on parts
of our bodies, and the impossibility of objectifying them in toto, means that the limits of inward shifting of the
self-body or mind-body boundary cannot be found. The ghost in the machine was a different
object of the same category as the machine; clearly each half of the dichotomy
had its own fixed boundary. With the
boundary undefinable and movable, we have another
argument against the old dualism.
I pointed out in Section 1 that indwelling is a
measure of our commitment. In these
terms, we can answer a puzzle that must appear to the more behaviouristically
oriented in reading Ryle’s book. How can he be so sure and so convincing to us
about all his ways of describing mental activity when every term has an
indefinite range of meaning and almost none of them can be defined
operationally without destroying the whole enterprise? The answer is that Ryle,
or any of us, is able to describe mental occurrences with confidence because we
dwell in the particulars and in the language used to describe them so
thoroughly as to be completely committed to them. It is a measure of our common commitment that Ryle can elicit from us his readers our confident assent to
nearly all of his descriptions.
I have tried to show that the Polanyian
distinction between subsidiary and focal awareness enriches Ryle’s
account of mind by allowing mind to be a comprehensive entity distinct from its
overt workings and yet unified with them. The concept of attending from a set of
particulars to a focal entity and its generalization in terms of tacit
inference, indwelling, and commitment, provide a firm basis for validating Ryle’s extensive and illuminating account of mental
activities, an account in language of indefinite range of applicability, which
requires judgment in application and yet carries with it both clarity and
conviction.
While Ryle’s account may be
taken as part of the groundwork for a Grammar of Scientific Knowledge in the
field of psychology, [53] the informal
processes of discovery and insight by which we can affirm his account form the
groundwork for a Grammar of Scientific Discovery. How we find things out and how we state our
knowledge of them in the study of mind, both depend on the
from-to relation and on the belief in comprehensive entities that is
affirmed by that relation.
University of Nevada,
Reno.
53. CM, pp. 317-8.
35
The Competitiveness of Nations
in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy
April 2005