My own ongoing reflection on the Polanyian understanding of knowing leads me to recommend that we help people acknowledge and reaccredit authority as a key feature of all human knowing. This recommendation I support in this essay by showing the following. First, I argue that reliance on authority is unavoidable. The Polanyian model, along with the complementary insights of a few others, and reflection on human experience, together show that human knowledge is what it is only by virtue of its (...) normative component. Such normativity, I argue, requires persons as mentors and as recipients. Second, I describe some of the ins and outs of responsible reliance on authority in a way that I hope will make it a more palatable and delightful prospect, and will encourage its skillful employment. I believe that this message offers much needed epistemological therapy for philosophy and ordinary people today. (shrink)

After briefly summarizing Blythe Clinchy’s account of connected knowing as a knowing procedure distinguishable from separate knowing and subjectivism, I draw comparisons between it and certainfeaturesof Polanyi’s epistemology. Connected knowing and Polanyi’s indwelling have much in common. Polanyian destructive analysis comparesfavorably with separate knowing, and they concur in the detrimental restriction of knowledge to that procedure. Neither indwelling nor connected knowing should be gender-specific, though their de facto gender-specificity may be challenged along with all the other false dichotomies which are (...) the fall-out of an overweening objectivist ideal.My own experience ofdrawing on Polanyi’s insights to shape my own teaching practices confirm and help to elucidate the implications of revised epistemology for the classroom. Also, my own work developing covenant epistemology underscores and develops the idea of connected knowing. I give practical examples of personal classroom practices. Finally, I offer further comments in response to Clinchy’s collection of quotations regarding the college classroom. (shrink)

In refreshing challenge to the common presumption that knowing involves amassing information, this book offers an eight-step approach that begins with love and pledge and ends with communion and shalom. Everyday adventures of knowing turn on a moment of insight that transforms and connects knower and known. No matter the field--science or art, business or theology, counseling or athletics--this little manual offers a how-to for knowing ventures. It offers concrete guidance to individuals or teams, students or professionals, along with plenty (...) of exercises to spark the process of discovery, design, artistry, or mission."--Publisher description. (shrink)

Your artistry involves you intimately with the world around and beyond you. So your artistry involves profound but simple philosophical matters. As a human person, you are artful and philosophical, at the core of your being. Doorway to Artistry offers a playful, everyday philosophical approach necessary for life, integration, healing, and thriving in artistry. It reflects on the real and how we are involved with it, especially in our creative effort. In short, the real hospitably welcomes us, and in our (...) artistry we reciprocate in noble courtesy. Human persons were made for this communion with the real. Find in this book a hospitable welcome to belong at home beyond where you are. (shrink)

This response to papers on my 2003 book, Longing to Know, presented at the Polanyi Society’s November 2004 meetings, addresses two primary concerns about the book’s argument: first, that the book’s argument depends on an inappropriately unquestioned commitment to the authority of Scripture that falls short of the adjustment required by modern higher critical biblical scholarship; and second, that the book’s argument implies a religious exclusivism that overlooks the fact that the model of knowing it defends suits competing religious positions (...) equally well. I argue that LTK’s strategy is more sophisticated than has been represented, and that the commitment to Scripture as an authoritative guide in knowing God, as over against the commitment to modem higher critical scholarship, may be reasonably justified as a consistent elucidation of the Polanyian model of knowing. I argue that, indeed, the Polanyian model of knowing may be applied to or by competing religious claims, where the claim that we must treat all such claims as having equal validity must itself be treated as a religious claim. In fact, Polanyi’s argument about competing scientific claims makes more sense of how we may (yea, must) maintain the rightness of our own position while acknowledging respectfully the disagreements of others. (shrink)

This essay introduces Michael Polanyi’s work through contrasting his innovative epistemology of subsidiary-focal integration with key distinctives of Christian analytic philosopher Alvin Plantinga. Polanyi’s contrasting proposals helpfully bring to light shaping assumptions of the analytic tradition, contributing creatively to a larger common agenda. Polanyi disputes the unexamined assumption that the simplest epistemic experience is a focally apprehended “find-myself-believing” that is explicitly and propositionally expressed. I also contrast the two regarding infallibilism, foundationalism, externalism, justification, epistemic duty, creative antirealism, and ways of (...) tapping Calvin’s notion of the sensus divinitatis. (shrink)

A reengagement of my 1983 dissertation, this essay describes and amplifies the commitment to realism presupposed by Michael Polanyi’s alternative model of knowing, recommending its value for thought and life. The idea of contact with reality replaces an unworkable traditional notion of correspondence. Truth bears indeterminately on reality and thus its assessment is ultimately unspecifiable. We assess successful contact by our anticipation of the discovery’s indeterminate future manifestations (IFM Effect, the reality criterion) as well as the radicality of the integrative (...) coherence achieved (the integrative criterion). Polanyi’s realism offers grounds for a critique of postmodernism. Alternative concepts of truth and progress as well as the value of the analytic method, are examined in light of the Polanyian model. (shrink)