Peirce's Abduction and Polanyi's Tacit Knowing

Abstract

Charles Sanders Peirce was born about fifty years before Michael Polanyi. But both demonstrate similar pattern in their intellectual careers, for both were first-rate scientists who became philosophers with particular interest in science. Both figures were especially interested in what might be termed the logic of discovery. The full scope of each figure's philosophical ideas on this topic is too complex to treat in short essay. In what follows, I treat an interesting and more manage able component of this larger topic: I compare some of Peirce's ideas about abduction with Polanyi's account of tacit knowing.1 What is the philosophical significance of such hermeneutic comparison? Peirce and Polanyi are both thinkers critical of the tradition of modern phi losophy. The constructive philosophical thought of each figure departs significantly from much that is modern. Linking Peirce's account of abduction to Polanyi's account of tacit knowing is way quickly to zoom in on some central shared philosophical innovations of these thinkers. It reveals interesting parallels in the ways in which these fig ures think of belief and agency as well as the way they think of the sci entific community and scientific work. Also I hope my comparison will illumine some difficult aspects of each figure's account of knowing. As Marjorie Grene has pointed out, Polanyi's claims for tacit knowing are central to his thought but have frequently been misunderstood by philosophers. It is the relation between what Polanyi calls the tacit underpinning and the explicit focus of knowing that is philosophically important, providing what Grene dubs a one hundred and eighty degree reversal in the approach of philosophers to the problems of epistemol