![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
A semester of leave from my teaching and administrative duties at Deakin University enabled me to complete this project more efficiently than would otherwise have been the case. I thank the University and its Faculty of Arts for having provided me with the leave.
My work on the topic has been assisted immeasurably by several people and I am particularly grateful to each of them. My wife, Anne, has been stoically forbearing throughout the time of my immersion in the project, and she has proven to be a good sounding board when I thought aloud about the research. Reading the biography, Michael Polanyi: Scientist and Philosopher (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), that Marty Moleski S.J. (Canisus College) coauthored with the late William Scott, apprised me of the correspondence between William Poteat and Kuhn. Moleski subsequently directed me to its location, and effectively cleared the way for me to research the correspondence and its context. Moleski’s study, ‘Polanyi vs. Kuhn: Worldviews Apart’, Tradition & Discovery, 33:2 (2006–2007), 8–24, with its illumination of Polanyi’s attitude to Kuhn and his work, has been a valuable resource for this article. By soliciting an article from me for a special issue of the journal on relations between Polanyi and Kuhn, Phil Mullins (Missouri Western State University) as Editor of Tradition & Discovery, rekindled my interest in the topic. The present article serves to complement that study and others in which I have pondered over relations between the works of Polanyi and Kuhn. I am also indebted to Mullins for having alerted me to Kuhn’s interview of Polanyi in 1962 and for having obtained a copy of the transcript for me. Richard Gelwick generously recalled in an email to me details of a discussion he had with Kuhn at Berkeley in 1964.
Jeff Mifflin, MIT Archives, could not have been more obliging in providing me with copies of William Poteat’s letters to Kuhn, and of Kuhn’s to Poteat. I thank him very sincerely for the gracious and efficient manner in which he responded to my questions, and for his providing me with permission to publish Kuhn’s letter. I am also indebted to Patricia Poteat for permitting me to publish the letters from her late husband to Kuhn. The location of the letters is: Thomas S. Kuhn Papers. MC 240. Box 4, Folder 13. Institute Archives and Special Collections, MIT Libraries, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Deakin University’s Library staff kindly assisted me by obtaining several works that I needed for the project that were not locally available. Perceptive comments from a peer reviewer for Intellectual History Review led me to make several stylistic and structural improvements to the text. I am grateful to the reviewer for that guidance. I owe a perennial debt to Emeritus Professor Preston King whose guidance to me on matters of intellectual style some years ago has been beneficial to all that I have written since.
Notes
1 T. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1962, revised edition, 1970). Scholars who have noted Kuhn’s striking similarities to Polanyi include: C. Daly, ‘Polanyi and Wittgenstein’, in Intellect and Hope, edited by T. Langford and W. Poteat (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1968), 136–68 (161–2); R. Gelwick, The Way of Discovery (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 81, 116, 128–9; A. MacIntyre, ‘Epistemological Crises, Dramatic Narrative and the Philosophy of Science’, in Paradigms and Revolutions: Applications and Appraisals of Thomas Kuhn’s Philosophy of Science, edited by G. Gutting (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1980), 54–74 (67); S. Fuller, Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for our Times (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 140; S. Jacobs, ‘Polanyi’s Presagement of the Incommensurability Cconcept’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 33:1 (2002), 105–20; M. Moleski, ‘Polanyi vs. Kuhn: Worldviews Apart’, Tradition & Discovery, 33:2 (2006–2007), 8–24; S. Jacobs, ‘Michael Polanyi and Thomas Kuhn’, Tradition & Discovery, 33:2 (2006–2007), 25–36.
2 T. Kuhn, A. Baltas, K. Gavroglu, and V. Kindi, ‘A Discussion with Thomas S. Kuhn’, in The Road Since Structure: Philosophical Essays, 1970–1993, with an Autobiographical Interview, edited by J. Conant and J. Haugeland (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 255–323. (The ‘Discussion’ first appeared in the journal Neusis, 1997.)
3 Kuhn, ‘A Discussion with Thomas S. Kuhn’, 296.
4 T. Kuhn, ‘Preface’, in The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change, edited by T. Kuhn (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1977), xviii, emphasis added.
5 Kuhn, ‘A Discussion with Thomas S. Kuhn’, 296.
6 Kuhn, ‘A Discussion with Thomas S. Kuhn’, 296. Inferring from Scott and Moleski, Michael Polanyi, 235, Polanyi gave the lecture late in 1958.
7 Kuhn, ‘A Discussion with Thomas S. Kuhn’, 296, emphasis added.
8 Kuhn, ‘A Discussion with Thomas S. Kuhn’, emphasis added.
9 Kuhn, ‘A Discussion with Thomas S. Kuhn’. See also Kuhn, ‘Preface’, Essential Tension, xi; T. Kuhn and G. Borradori, ‘Paradigms of Scientific Evolution’, in The American Philosopher, edited by G. Borradori (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 153–67 (156); R. Merton, ‘The Sociology of Science: An Episodic Memoir’, in The Sociology of Science in Europe, edited by R. Merton and J. Gaston (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1977), 3–141 (92–3); G. Gutting, ‘Kuhn, Thomas S(amuel’, in Thinkers of the Twentieth Century, edited by E. Devine et al. (London: Firethorn Press, 1986), 306–7 (306). It is noteworthy that another teacher in Conant’s program, Leonard K. Nash, later appointed to a Chair in Chemistry at Harvard, and the dedicatee of Kuhn’s first book, The Copernican Revolution, was deeply impressed by the work of Polanyi. Nash published an erudite book of metascience in 1963, The Nature of the Natural Sciences (Boston: Little Brown, 1963), in which he cited Polanyi’s Personal Knowledge approvingly and probably more often than he did the work of any other author. While Kuhn was among those who read Nash’s ‘entire manuscript,’ neither he nor his writing is mentioned in the body of Nash’s book (The Nature of the Natural Sciences, x). Nash devoted space in his book to analysing the structure of scientific theories into postulates, theorems, formalism, and a model of experience that imparts meaning to a theory’s terms (The Nature of the Natural Sciences, 214ff., 242). Scientists’ agreement on these aspects of their theory – particularly the model – is assumed by Nash whereas Kuhn in the ‘Discussion’ of 1995 indicated that it was his belief that there is little if any such agreement that led him to his discovery of paradigms as concrete achievements (exemplary problem solutions). See Kuhn, Essential Tension, xix.
10 Kuhn, ‘A Discussion with Thomas S. Kuhn’, 296, emphasis added. Kuhn’s appreciation of Polanyi’s early books notwithstanding, it is noted here that Personal Knowledge is the first book in which he deals with our topics – tacit knowledge, frameworks in science and their logical gap – clearly and fully.
11 M. Polanyi, Science, Faith and Society (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 35 (first published 1946).
12 Polanyi, Science, Faith and Society, 35. Polanyi’s appreciation of Rhine’s research apparently was not reciprocated. Having gone with Rhine to a lecture by Polanyi at Duke University, James Hall remembered Rhine as having taken an instant dislike ‘to Polanyi’s thought for reasons that’ Hall could never fathom. J. Hall, ‘Three Explorers: Polanyi, Jung, and Rhine’, Tradition & Discovery, 27:1 (2000–2001), 16–21 (16).
13 Kuhn, ‘A Discussion with Thomas S. Kuhn’, 296.
15 Kuhn, ‘A Discussion with Thomas S. Kuhn’, 296–7.
14 Kuhn, ‘A Discussion with Thomas S. Kuhn’, 296.
16 Kuhn, ‘A Discussion with Thomas S. Kuhn’, 297.
17 Moleski, ‘Polanyi vs. Kuhn’, 9, emphasis added. Another meeting between the two men occurred on 15 February 1962, when Kuhn interviewed Polanyi for approximately two hours at Berkeley, where Polanyi was giving the McEnerney Lectures. The subject of the interview was, broadly speaking, science and scientists in Berlin during the years of the Weimar Republic.
18 Kuhn, ‘A Discussion with Thomas S. Kuhn’, 296
19 Kuhn, ‘A Discussion with Thomas S. Kuhn’, 296
20 P. Hoyningen‐Huene, ‘Two Letters of Paul Feyerabend to Thomas S. Kuhn on a Draft of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 26:3 (1995), 353–87 (353).
21 Daly, ‘Polanyi and Wittgenstein’, 161–2.
22 T. Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution (New York: Random House, 1959), 134 (first published 1957).
23 Kuhn, Scientific Revolutions, emphasis added; see also Kuhn, ‘Discussion’, 291–3.
24 Kuhn, Essential Tension, xiii.
25 Kuhn, Essential Tension, xii–xiii.
26 Kuhn, Essential Tension, xiii n3.
27 Kuhn, Scientific Revolutions, v–vi and nn1 and 2. In the transcript of Kuhn’s discussion with Borradori we read that Meyerson ‘introduced’ Kuhn to Popper. This is most probably a mistranslation, Meyerson having died in 1933. Kuhn and Borradori, ‘Paradigms of Scientific Evolution’, 153–67 (158–9); see also Kuhn, ‘A Discussion with Thomas S. Kuhn’, 286–7.
28 Kuhn, Scientific Revolutions, vi.
29 P. Hoyningen‐Huene, ‘Three Biographies: Kuhn, Feyerabend, and Incommensurability’, in Rhetoric and Incommensurability, edited by R. Harris (West Lafayette, IN: Parlor Press, 2005), 150–75 (158).
30 See, for example, Kuhn, Copernican Revolution, 136, 140–1, 264.
36 Kuhn, Copernican Revolution, 96–7.
31 Kuhn, Copernican Revolution, xi.
32 Kuhn, Copernican Revolution, 140, 251–2.
33 Kuhn, Copernican Revolution, 183, 224.
34 Kuhn, Copernican Revolution, 14.
35 The reference is in Kuhn, Copernican Revolution, 279 n7, and the bibliographical note is at 285.
37 Kuhn, ‘Preface’, Essential Tension, xviii.
38 Kuhn, ‘The Essential Tension’, Essential Tension, 237.
39 Kuhn, Essential Tension, 233–4.
40 Kuhn, Essential Tension, 236.
41 Kuhn, Essential Tension, 226–7, 230.
42 Kuhn, Essential Tension, ix, 229–33.
43 Kuhn, Essential Tension, 229, 233, emphasis added.
44 M. Polanyi, Personal Knowledge (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958), 125, emphasis added.
45 Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, 125; cf. 31, 49, 50, 62.
46 Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, 53, 165–71.
47 Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, 162.
48 Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, 81, 206.
49 Kuhn, ‘Essential Tension’, 229; see also Essential Tension, 296. The argument of this article does not require, and would be choked were, all of Kuhn’s similarities to Polanyi to be described. The article is specifically concerned with three key similarities in the form of paradigm in relation to tacit (unformulated) knowledge, frameworks/paradigms as world pictures, and incommensurability as resembling a feature of Polanyi’s account of frameworks and framework‐change. Any reader who is interested in studying further similarities is referred to Daly’s list of Kuhn’s ‘remarkable confirmations’ of Polanyi’s ideas in Daly’s ‘Polanyi and Wittgenstein’, 161.
50 T. Kuhn, ‘The Function of Dogma in Scientific Research’, in Scientific Change, edited by A. Crombie (London: Heinemann, 1963), 347–69 (347 n1); see also Kuhn, Essential Tension, xviii n6.
51 Kuhn, ‘Function of Dogma’, 347–50, 363.
52 Kuhn, ‘Function of Dogma’, 347 n1.
56 Kuhn, ‘Discussion’, in Scientific Change (1963), 392.
53 Kuhn, ‘Function of Dogma’, 351–3; T. Kuhn, ‘Discussion’, in Scientific Change (1963), 386–95 (393).
54 Kuhn, ‘Discussion’, in Scientific Change (1963), 391–4.
55 Kuhn, ‘Discussion’, in Scientific Change (1963), 392 emphasis added.
57 In a personal email to me (7 May 2007), Richard Gelwick recalled having had a discussion with Kuhn at Berkeley in the ‘spring [or thereabouts] of 1964’ when Gelwick was a Th.D. student at the Pacific School of Religion, researching Polanyi’s thought. Writes Gelwick: Kuhn ‘astounded me when he said that he had tried to read Personal Knowledge, but he could not get through it […] How [wondered Gelwick] could a historian of science, a student of theoretical physics, not be able to go through Personal Knowledge?’
58 Hoyningen‐Huene, ‘Three Biographies’, 165.
59 Kuhn, Scientific Revolutions, xi–xii.
60 Kuhn, ‘Discussion’, in Scientific Change (1963), 44 and n., emphasis added.
61 Kuhn, ‘A Discussion with Thomas S. Kuhn’, 295–6, emphasis added.
62 Kuhn, ‘A Discussion with Thomas S. Kuhn’, 292.
63 Kuhn, ‘A Discussion with Thomas S. Kuhn’, 293.
64 Kuhn, ‘A Discussion with Thomas S. Kuhn’, 226–7, 230.
65 Kuhn, Copernican Revolution, 134. One scholar who is especially deserving of credit for having called attention to The Copernican Revolution as expressing a different account of scientific revolutions from that of Scientific Revolutions is R. Westman, ‘Two Cultures or One?’, Isis, 85:1 (1994), 79–115 (83).
66 Kuhn, Copernican Revolution, 135.
67 Kuhn, Copernican Revolution, 135, 183, 227–8.
68 Kuhn, Copernican Revolution, 264–5, emphasis added.
69 Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, 151, 155, 159, 163.
70 Kuhn, Scientific Revolutions, 103ff, 159.
71 Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, 151, 163.
72 Kuhn, Scientific Revolutions, 96, 112.
73 Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, 135, 155, 160, 161; Kuhn, Scientific Revolutions, 10–11, 17, 141.
74 Kuhn, Scientific Revolutions, 46–7, 80 emphasis added, 109, 148, 150; Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, 53.
75 Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, 135–6, 152, 154, 158, 160–1.
76 Kuhn, Scientific Revolutions, 103, 106, 109–10.
77 Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, 135, 151, 155.
78 Kuhn, Scientific Revolutions, 111, 118, 121, 134–5, 144, 150.
79 Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, 151.
80 Kuhn, Scientific Revolutions, 136, 146.
81 Kuhn, Scientific Revolutions, 125, 126, 146.
82 Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, 143, emphasis added, 150.
83 Kuhn, Scientific Revolutions, 111, 117–19, 128.
84 Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, 167, emphasis added.
85 Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, 150, 151.
86 Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, 135, 161.
87 Kuhn, Scientific Revolutions, 15, 25.
88 Kuhn, Scientific Revolutions, 141.
89 Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, 151, also 138.
90 Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, 293.
91 Kuhn, Scientific Revolutions, 18, 146–7.
92 Kuhn, Scientific Revolutions, 82.
93 Kuhn, Scientific Revolutions, 81.
94 Kuhn, Scientific Revolutions, 82, also 110.
95 Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, 160–1, emphasis added, also 135.
96 Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, 135.
97 Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, 147, also 144–5, 148–9. Among their few important differences is Polanyi’s view that truth is the aim of theoretical science, whereas truth has no place in Kuhn’s account of science.
98 Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, 120–31.
99 Kuhn, Scientific Revolutions, 37, also 23–4, 103ff.
100 Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, 153, 158, 161.
101 Kuhn, Scientific Revolutions, 38ff, 103, 106ff, 137–8, 144–5.
102 Kuhn, Scientific Revolutions, 44, 88, also 45–6.
103 Kuhn, Scientific Revolutions, 10, 42, 44–7. As noted by Kuhn, some of this view is akin to Wittgenstein’s idea of ‘family resemblance’.
104 Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, 103, 106, 110, 112, 128.
105 Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, 163, 101.
106 Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, 125.
107 Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, 123, 125–6, 143, 150, 152.
108 Kuhn, Scientific Revolutions, 92, 102–10, 139–41.
109 Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, 151, 288–92; Kuhn, Scientific Revolutions, 94, emphasis added, 109–10.
110 Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, 151; Kuhn, Scientific Revolutions, 151, 152.
111 Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, 264ff.; Kuhn, Scientific Revolutions, 158.
112 Polanyi, ‘Commentary’, in Scientific Change, 375–80.
113 Polanyi, Science, Faith and Society, 13.
114 M. Polanyi, letter to W. Poteat, 1967, quoted by Moleski, ‘Polanyi vs. Kuhn’, 13–14. The letter is sourced at Box 6, Folder 9 in the Papers of Michael Polanyi, held by the Department of Special Collections of the University of Chicago Library.
115 Moleski, ‘Polanyi vs. Kuhn’, 15.
116 M. Polanyi, letter to P. Helmos, 1971, quoted by Moleski, ‘Polanyi vs. Kuhn’, 17. The original is in the Polanyi archives, Box 10, Folder 2.