Between tacit knowing and Pragmatism: linking Polanyi and the Pragmatists

• Autor(a) principal: Innis, Robert E.
• Data de Publicação: 2016
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Cognitio (São Paulo. Online)
• Texto Completo: https://revistas.pucsp.br/index.php/cognitiofilosofia/article/view/27767
• topic: Polanyi. Conhecimento tácito. Capacidades. Pragmatismo. Teoria espectadora do conhecimento. Consciência.; Polanyi. Tacit knowing. Skills. Pragmatism. Spectator theory of knowing. Consciousness.

This paper will explore a number of intersections between the work of the great philosopher-scientist Michael Polanyi and key themes and issues that lie at the heart of the pragmatist philosophical tradition. Polanyi’s notion of tacit knowledge and his construction of a model of consciousness developed from clues from Gestalt psychology has a remarkable set of parallels with pragmatism’s own concerns on both the methodological and substantive levels. I show, through selective examples, how Polanyi’s work can be fruitfully linked with pivotal notions from Dewey’s, Peirce’s, and James’s reflections. Of especially importance is Polanyi’s exploitation of the analytical notion of a skill which allows him to develop a truly experimental theory of knowing that abolishes the spectator model that has haunted the philosophical tradition and which pragmatism opposed on many levels.