The Thomist: A Speculative Quarterly Review

A COMMENT ON POLANYI AND KUHN MABEN WALTER POIRIER Concordia University Montreal, Quebec FOR SOME TIME NOW we have noted tha:t the names Michael Polanyi and Thomas S. Kuhn are frequently mentioned together in articles and books dealing with specialized topics in the philosophy of science. And if we genera .Ily accept what is said in these publications, there appears to be a belief afield, which is broadly shared amongst students of scientific thought, to the effect that the philosopher of science , Michael Polanyi, and the historian of science, Thomas Kuhn, are in some fundametal manner in accord with one another as to the chara.cter and nature of scientific thinking. In fact, there seems to be no disputing this question amongst some of the most prestigious philosophers of science, nor does there seem to be even the slightest suspicion that maybe Polanyi does not belong to the same school of thought as Kuhn. We are told explicitly, or we are led to believe, that PoJanyi and Kuhn are in lea;gue to do battle against empiricism and empiricists, and that as a result they share a number of perspectives on scientific thinking. This is taken to mean tha;t they broadly hold the same point of view when it comes to thinking about various issues. Now, it is largely true that both are opposed to empiricism, and to the understanding that empiricists have about the way that scientific knowledge is advanced. However, this does not mean that Polanyi and Kuhn are in funOLANYI AND KUBN ~6'/ cessive the,ories grow ever closer to, or approximate more and more closely to, the truth. Apparently generalizations like that refer not to the puzzle-solutions and the concrete predictions derived from a theory but rather to its ontology, to the match, that is, b~tween the entities with which theory populates nature and what is " really there." · Perhaps there is some other way of salvaging the notion of ' truth' for application to whole theories, but this one will not do. There is, I think, no theory-independent way to reconstruct phrases like 'really there'; the notion of a match between the ontology of a theory and its "real" counterpart in nature now seems to me illusive in principle.6 This is no afterthought with Kuhn, nor is it a course correction which he may have felt was required when he wrote "Postscript-1969," for we read the following in the main part of his magnum opus1 in which there are many similar passages: We may, ... have to relinquish the notion, explicit or implicit, that changes of paradigm carry scientists and those who learn from them closer and closer to the truth [and to the real].1 Clearly this is not Michael Polanyi's point of view on this matter. Polanyi may not be an empiricist, but he is by no means a relativist either, radical or otherwise. He is simply not prepared to deny the existence of reality, or to claim that it is nothing more than a fabrication of the creative imagination of practicing natural scientists, great though they ma.y be. He repeatedly makes it very clear that natural scientists investigate what is real-what exists independently of themselves, in the world 'beyond their minds-and not some subjective entity which is a construction of their minds. It is true that Polanyi believ,es that it is very difficult to establish beyond a doubt that this is what the natural scientist investigates , but the fact is that at no point does Polanyi sa.y or even imply that the natural scientist is exploring, either in an arbitrary or reasonable manner, his imaginative constructions. For Polanyi, scientists are simply not engaged in the exploration of s Thomas S. Kuhn, The Btruoture of Boientifio Revolutions, p. 206. 1 Ibid., p. 170. 268 MABEN W.ALTER POIRIER imaginative constructions which are resident in the mind. They are involved in the exploration of what is other and of what is real. He makes this point in many ways and on a number of different occasions during his career as a philosopher of ·science. For example, in the following paissage from his work The...