{"id":29183,"date":"2022-10-20T18:26:58","date_gmt":"2022-10-21T01:26:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/?p=29183"},"modified":"2022-10-20T18:26:58","modified_gmt":"2022-10-21T01:26:58","slug":"the-tacit-dimension-that-we-know-but-difficult-to-explain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/the-tacit-dimension-that-we-know-but-difficult-to-explain\/","title":{"rendered":"The Tacit Dimension that we know, but difficult to explain"},"content":{"rendered":"

Michael Polanyi was a Hungarian-British chemist and philosopher who passed away in 1976. This week\u2019s reading, The Tacit Dimension<\/em>, is one of the many books he authored. This book was \u201cfirst published in 1966, and it is based on his Terry Lectures delivered four years earlier, at Yale University\u201d[1]<\/a> to explain his concepts and insights of tacit knowledge \u2013 we can know more than we can tell<\/em>. In this book, Polanyi introduces and further explains the workings of management knowledge by using the idea of tacit knowledge. He argues that \u201cif tacit knowledge is a central part of knowledge in general, then we can both (1) know what to look for, and (2) have some idea about what else we may want to know.\u201d[2]<\/a> The book is divided into three sections (Tacit knowing, Emergence, and a Society of explorers), and ultimately Polanyi seeks to understand a higher order of reality that is the foundation and source of tacit knowledge where he concluded his book by saying, \u201cThis cosmic emergence of meaning is inspiring\u2026Truth does that; our ideals do it, and this might be enough if we could ever be satisfied with our manifest moral shortcomings, and with a society that has such shortcomings fatally involved in its workings\u2026there will open up instead a meaningful world that could resound to religion.\u201d[3]<\/a><\/p>\n

This book definitely will go on to rank in the top 5 of \u2018the hardest-to-understand books that I had to read in my life\u2019 list, and I wish that the publishing company printed it in larger fonts. Polanyi wrote that \u201cour body is the ultimate instrument of all our external knowledge, whether intellectual or practical. In all our waking moments, we are relying on our awareness of contacts of our body with things outside for attending to these things.\u201d[4]<\/a> The idea of tacit knowledge and the contents of Polanyi\u2019s discussions were very difficult to connect to and understand for me. But as I thought about it more, I remembered a recent incident where I took my friends to go check out a new restaurant that had opened up. I think I have tacit knowledge of knowing whether the new restaurants will taste good or bad almost instantly when I pass by new restaurants. I\u2019m not always right, but usually I am right most of the time (Thankfully, I was right on the recent one that I convinced my friends to go check out). I know that many food critics have a similar tacit knowledge of food and presentation that almost instantly happens when they encounter a new dish or a menu. In philosophy, this kind of tacit knowledge is termed indwelling or inherent knowledge. Upon pondering, I discovered we actually interact and use tacit knowledge all the time in our daily lives to make decisions, pursue future directions, and helps us connect to reality. Polanyi further reasoned that this kind of internal, instinctive knowledge is the establishment of \u201cthe tacit framework for our moral acts and judgments. And we can trace this kind of indwelling to logically similar acts in the practice of science.\u201d[5]<\/a><\/p>\n

I got curious if Polanyi was a Christian, and I searched and read Wikipedia\u2019s description of his life. He lived a great life and achieved many great things in the world of academia, but I wasn\u2019t sure if he ever arrived at finding the \u2018meaningful world\u2019 he was longing for. The book pushed my imagination to think about tacit spiritual knowledge. Does spiritual tacit knowledge change when we are saved in Christ? If it does change, how and when? From 1 Peter 1:23, I understand salvation as the moment when the imperishable seed<\/em> of the Word of God is planted in our soul. How does this imperishable seed from God change our tacit spiritual knowledge? My tacit internal knowledge tells me that it does change the DNA of tacit knowledge that comes from the flesh that we are born into. Although I couldn\u2019t understand and follow some of his contents, I appreciated Polanyi\u2019s endeavor and efforts in articulating the things that we know but are hard to tell.<\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> Michael Polanyi and Sen Amartya. The Tacit Dimension<\/em>. Revised ed. (Chicago\u202f; London: University of Chicago Press, 2009), vii.<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> Ibid, xi.<\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> Ibid, 92.<\/p>\n

[4]<\/a> Ibid, 16.<\/p>\n

[5]<\/a> Ibid, 17.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Michael Polanyi was a Hungarian-British chemist and philosopher who passed away in 1976. This week\u2019s reading, The Tacit Dimension, is one of the many books he authored. This book was \u201cfirst published in 1966, and it is based on his Terry Lectures delivered four years earlier, at Yale University\u201d[1] to explain his concepts and insights […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":145,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2397],"class_list":["post-29183","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-michael-polanyi","cohort-lgp11"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29183","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/145"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29183"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29183\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29184,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29183\/revisions\/29184"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29183"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29183"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29183"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}