Fifty years after the publication of Personal Knowledge, philosophers
and theologians have appropriated insights from
the works of Michael Polanyi into their projects, but comparatively
few ethicists have done so.1 This situation is something of
a surprise for several reasons. The first is that Polanyi’s account
of personal knowledge is motivated by an intensely moral concern,
that of moral inversion. This term serves as Polanyi’s answer
to a question that many people were asking in the post–World War
II era: “How could the destructive, totalitarian regimes of Nazi
Germany, fascist Italy, and the communist Soviet Union have
arisen in the cultured, liberal West?” As Polanyi tells the story,
moral reflection is severely damaged by epistemologies developed
in the modern period in which thinkers come to judge all
human knowledge by what they call “scientific objectivity.” The
result is that Western societies develop a deep skepticism about
the truth of moral standards. At the same time, however, human
beings continue to exhibit moral passions that will find expression—
even when de-coupled from belief in the truth of moral
standards. Those passions, according to Polanyi, become inverted
in such a way that they end up directed toward ends that
ultimately destroy, rather than sustain, a free society.2 Because of
this moral vision at the heart of his work, one would expect more
ethicists to have paid attention.

Moreover, Polanyi’s epistemology promises to offer resources
for resolving certain ongoing problems in ethics. Informed by
Gestalt psychology, he specifically calls knowledge personal or
tacit in order to overcome the positivistic divide between objective knowledge and subjective opinion.3 This bifurcation of knowledge
finds its parallels in contemporary debates between moral
dogmatists and emotivists. The former group argues for the
existence of clear moral truths, whereas the latter see moral
statements only as expressions of subjective preferences.4 A final
reason that ethicists should pay attention to Polanyi is that he
argues that all human knowing is personal in nature, and this must,
of necessity, include moral knowing.5 Unfortunately, Polanyi
himself never develops this point in any detail, attending instead
to religion, art, and politics—apparently leaving to later scholars
the task of sorting out the nature of moral knowing.6

Moral knowing therefore is a logical place to begin in connecting
Polanyi’s work with ethics. The traditional terms for moral
knowing are “practical reason” and “prudence,” which have been
understood to consist of both intellectual virtue and moral virtue.
Practical reasoning thus entails sound reasoning about the particulars
needed to attain the good life in community with others
on the part of someone whose passions are appropriately ordered
toward what is truly good. This virtue enables the agent to extend
knowledge from what is known to what is novel and to act
accordingly. Moreover, proficiency in practical reasoning is
taken to be synonymous with being virtuous, so that the development
of practical reasoning can be assumed to be synonymous
with the formation of the moral or virtuous self.7

Albert Jonsen and Stephen Toulmin have spearheaded an
attempt to recover and rehabilitate practical reason as the model
for moral knowing in contemporary ethics, in part because of
what they perceive to be its usefulness in dealing with the
intractable character of moral debate in contemporary society.8
They contrast practical reasoning with theoretical reasoning,
which takes geometry as its model and works by applying universal
starting points to the present situation in order to arrive at
conclusions that are necessarily and universally true (AC 24-36).
In contrast, practical reasoning begins with presumptions established
by previous cases that become paradigms for moral reflection.
New cases, when they arise, are compared to these paradigms;
sometimes they may connect in a straightforward manner,
at other times their connections may be ambiguous, marginal, or
even so radically different as to call established presumptions into
question (AC 323). In order to explain more concretely what they
mean by practical reasoning, Jonsen and Toulmin use clinical
medicine as a paradigm. If a doctor is to cure the patient’s malady,
the doctor must connect her knowledge of medicine with the
particulars of a patient’s symptoms. The doctor makes presumptions
and treats the patient on the basis of on those presumptions,
barring exceptional circumstances, in which case the presumptive
treatment would be changed to something else. There is obviously
a certain degree of give and take in this process that Jonsen and
Toulmin describe as “a matter of personal judgment” and “pattern
recognition” (AC 36–40). It is here that a connection between
Polanyi and these two thinkers becomes explicit, for Polanyi often
compares personal knowing to the making of clinical judgments.
“Medicine offers readily an illustration of what I have in mind
here,” says Polanyi, for “only clinical practice can teach [a medical
student] to integrate the clues observed on an individual patient
to form a correct diagnosis of his illness . . . .”9

In this paper, I intend to demonstrate that Polanyi’s insights
into features of personal knowledge and its formation can help us
better understand the nature of practical reasoning. I will do so
in two steps, the first of which is to recount Polanyi’s description
of tacit knowing and its formation. Then, I will test these insights
by suggesting what they mean for understanding practical reasoning
and its formation, in part by reflecting on using case studies
to teach ethics.

The Nature and Development of Tacit Knowing

The first feature of tacit knowing is that it is, according to Polanyi,
a matter of appraisal or perception; one might also call it a matter
of discernment. In tacit knowing, the perceiver actively and
passionately integrates clues from the environment in order to
discover a meaningful whole. Polanyi often explains this way of
knowing by means of everyday, non-controversial examples, such
as that of viewing stereoscopic pictures. In viewing such pictures,
we simultaneously look at two photographs of the same scene
taken from two points only a few inches apart. The result is that
we perceive the scene in a richer way than if we view only one of
the photographs. We achieve this richer perspective by treating
the disparities between the two perspectives as clues that we then
integrate into a larger whole (KB, 211–212).

A second feature of tacit knowing is its from-to structure.
According to Polanyi, we attend from one or more things that
remain outside of our focal awareness to the something else
whose meaning we are trying to discern. To continue with the
example of viewing stereoscopic pictures, we attend from our
visually related neuro-physiological processes, as well as the two
separate pictures and associated machinery to the scene contained
in the pictures. We focus our awareness on the stereoimage
but are only subsidiarily aware of the two separate pictures.
This structure becomes most transparent in those times when we
are forced to shift our attention to that with which are attending
to the “something else.” As Polanyi notes frequently, “Repeat a
word several times, attending carefully to the motion of your
tongue and lips, and to the sound you make, and soon the word will
sound hollow and eventually lose its meaning. By concentrating
attention on his fingers, a pianist can temporarily paralyze his
movement” (TD, 18). In short, all the physiological mechanisms,
material props, and conceptual apparatuses serve as tools for
finding the meaning of the separate pictures, a meaning that
emerges from the process (KB, 212).

This notion of tools points to the process of indwelling, the
third feature of tacit knowing, one implied by the “from” side of
the “from-to” structure of tacit knowing. Polanyi perhaps best
defines what he means by indwelling when he says, “We may be
said to interiorize these things or to pour ourselves into them” (KB,
183, emphasis his). To what things does he refer? He refers to
those things upon which we rely for the sake of learning about/
discovering something else. On Polanyi’s account our knowing
relies on our indwelling of many things: our body, tools that
extend our bodies (whether they are simple tools like a stick used
to probe a hole or complex telescopes used to scan the skies),
language, and culture—even moral teachings (KB 134, 148–149,
and 183).10 Moreover, if we are to make sense of the actions of
other people, Polanyi says that we must enter into their situation
and see things from their point of view (M, 44). Tacit knowing
therefore also seems to require the capacity of empathy.

A fourth feature of tacit knowing is that the process of
integration, of sense-making, is a fluid process, one not governed
by rules.11 One of Polanyi’s favorite illustrations of this feature of
tacit knowing is that of wearing inverting spectacles, glasses that
make one perceive the world upside-down. One eventually learns
to compensate for the topsy-turvy visual cues and to negotiate the
world again, but one does not learn to do this by following explicit
rules such as, “remember that what you perceive to be below you
is actually above you.” In this situation, Polanyi finds such rules
useless on two counts:

First, they do not tell us that we have to re-integrate our senses,
on the contrary they confirm their normal integration and hinder
their re-integration; second, even if some rule did tell us what we
have to do, this would be useless, since we cannot directly control
the integration of our senses. (>KB, 199)

Instead, what happens is that, with time and effort, the person
develops a new integration of visual clues, muscular cues, and a
sense of balance in which the normal terms of right-side up or
upside down no longer make sense (KB, 198–199). More generally,
Polanyi explains the inability of setting forth rules to guide
the process as self-defeating because we would end up with an
infinite regress of rules for applying other rules (M, 61).

Presupposed by Polanyi’s account of tacit knowing is the
existence of a reality, even if our knowledge of that reality is only
partial and subject to revision. As he says, “From the very start,
the inquiry assumes, and must assume, that there is something
there to be discovered” (KB, 172). Polanyi’s notion of what is real
is anything but straightforward, however. He suggests that reality
is marked by “an unlimited range of unsuspected implications”
(KB, 172), which means that what is real promises to disclose
itself in ever new and unpredicted ways. Thus he argues that
“minds and problems possess a deeper reality than cobblestones,
although cobblestones are admittedly more real in the sense of
tangible” (TD, 32–33, emphasis his).12 Because reality cannot be
fully known, we cannot claim that our knowledge is universal in
the sense of something true for all places and times. That does not
mean, however, that our knowledge is mere whim or preference.
According to Polanyi to claim something is true is to do so with
universal intent. By doing so, we both commit ourselves to its
truth and to the expectation that others ought to adhere to it as
well (see TD, 78 and M, 194–5).

In sum, for Polanyi, all human knowledge grows out of the
knower’s active and passionate integration of clues into a meaningful
whole by means of indwelling a variety of tools. This task
cannot be accomplished by woodenly following a formula or
recipe. Nevertheless, the result should not be seen as mere whim
or preference because it is both responsive to a reality that defies
easy categorization and it is articulated with universal intent.

If all human knowing shares in the structure and dynamics of
tacit knowing, the question naturally arises as to how these skills
are developed. Polanyi’s answer is deceptively simple to understand,
although difficult to practice. For Polanyi, such skills are
learned under the tutelage of a master in a convivial community
of explorers who are committed to a tradition of liberty that
fosters a “dynamic orthodoxy.” This answer suggests two dimensions
of skill acquisition, the first of which is the relationship of
student/apprentice to a teacher or master.

The student first learns by observing the work of the master,
trying to indwell not only the patterns of action but also the
“spirit” of the master, thereby developing “a feel of the master’s
skill” (TD, 29–30). Polanyi uses the evocative phrase “thrusting
forward our imagination” to describe this indwelling, which
amounts to developing a deep empathy with and for the master
(KB, 200). By entering imaginatively into the work of the teacher,
the student “picks up the rules of the art, including those which are
not explicitly known to the master himself” (PK, 53). The student
also learns to make connections between textbooks and life by
analyzing cases. Again making the analogy between personal
knowing and medical training, Polanyi argues that medical students
must learn to recognize symptoms in actual patients, not
books, and that this comes by “repeatedly being given cases . . . in
which the symptom is authoritatively known to be present, side by
side with cases in which it is authoritatively known to be absent,
until he has fully realized the difference between them and can
demonstrate his knowledge to the satisfaction of an expert” (PK,
54–55). Such learning, like adjusting to inverting spectacles, will
likely be protracted and strenuous (KB, 199).

Such learning obviously demands much from the student, not
least of which is that of the student’s “intelligent cooperation”
(TD, 5). The student must therefore submit to the authority of the
teacher, trusting that “a teaching which appears meaningless to
start with has in fact a meaning which can be discovered by hitting
on the same kind of indwelling as the teacher is practicing” (TD,
61; cf. PK, 53). What keeps that submission to authority from
becoming dangerous lies in part with the nature of the community
to which student and teacher belong, a topic that takes us to the
second dimension in which skill in tacit knowing is developed, i.e.,
the communal.

For Polanyi, the scientific community serves as a paradigm of
the virtuous community in which this skillful knowing is developed.
13 This community exhibits several commitments, the first of
which is to scientific method as a way of knowing reality. Moreover,
the community is committed to preserving the liberty
necessary for scientists to coordinate their work spontaneously.
To be committed to liberty does not, however, mean that there are
no authority structures. Scientists share commitments to standards
of plausibility, scientific value, and originality, standards
that are employed in decisions about appointments to position,
publication, and awarding of grants. Perhaps most striking about
this community is the dynamic orthodoxy it fosters, one that
grants the liberty to oppose prevailing ideas in the name of truth.
Polanyi therefore notes that “the authority of scientific standards
is thus exercised for the very purpose of providing those guided
by it with independent grounds for opposing it” (KB, 55). The
initial submission to authority is thus for the sake of becoming
skillful enough later to oppose that authority on its own grounds
when the need arises.

Implications for Understanding Practical Reasoning

Practical reasoning, as we saw earlier, is the form of reasoning
Aristotle thought was appropriate to use when one thinks about
what to do. Up to this point, I have suggested that Polanyi might be
able to enrich our understanding of practical reasoning, and I have
summarized salient features of his description of personal or tacit
knowing. Now it is time to articulate the view of practical reasoning
that emerges when informed by a Polanyian perspective.

First, a Polanyian account would stress that practical reasoning
is a matter of perception in which one imaginatively integrates
clues from the environment for the sake of arriving at a response
fitting or appropriate to the situation. A person who is skilled in
practical reasoning would therefore be someone who exhibits
facility in making perceptive judgments about situations so as to
discern courses of action that promise to open up richer possibilities
for living than other options.

Doing so requires that the agent attend from or indwell
several things. The agent needs to indwell her own moral convictions,
shaped as they are by her experiences and personal history.
Moreover, the agent needs to indwell her own emotional constitution.
In addition, the agent needs to indwell the features of the
situation that define the limits and possibilities of a course of
action. At the same time that the agent subsidiarily reasons from
these things, she must also attend to that elusive course of action
that would be appropriate under the circumstances.

Finally, the agent will be committed to the reality of moral
truth. Polanyi’s perspective suggests that moral truths, despite
their intangible character, may be one of the richest realities, to
the extent that they promise to reveal themselves over time in
surprising and unexpected ways. Polanyi’s perspective also suggests
that whatever course of action one perceives as appropriate
must be one that can be advocated with universal intent.

From a Polanyian perspective, facility in practical reasoning
will be developed in an apprentice-like relationship with someone
who is a skilled practical reasoner. In that relationship, the
student will at first seek to imitate the teacher’s reasoning so as,
later, to surpass the teacher’s skill. One of the chief means by
which such reasoning can be taught is by means of case studies.

At this point it is appropriate to turn to a consideration of case
studies, both to make this discussion more concrete and to
analyze the method in light of these Polanyian observations.
Advocates give many reasons for why case studies can be one
particularly useful way to teach ethics. One is that case studies
promote active learning on the part of students, in part because
the narratives can make abstract ideas come alive. Put differently,
cases can be emotionally engaging in ways that reading and
discussion of theory are not. Moreover, the dialogical character
of case narratives can foster interpersonal relationships among
students, as well as between students and teachers, for case
discussion can create a community in which all participants are
learners.14 Another oft-cited advantage of case studies is their
flexibility. Case studies can serve to attain any number of objectives
(to teach method, to test theory, to analyze problems, or to
form critical consciousness), as well as be taught in a variety of
formats, such as role playing or debate (Stivers, et al, 10). Finally,
case studies allow students to gain experience obliquely by their
learning from and identifying with the characters in a case
narrative (Stivers, et al, 290).

Case studies do not serve as a magic pedagogical bullet,
however. A key factor in successful case discussions is the
willingness of readers to wrestle honestly with issues raised by the
case and to treat various perspectives with an open mind (Stivers,
et al, 293, 296). Moreover, the effectiveness of case studies is
quite difficult to measure. Take for example, one particular form
of case study used by many medical schools, problem-based
learning. Some studies indicate that problem-based learning is no
more effective in training medical students to diagnose conditions
accurately than other pedagogies. The most significant factor in
achieving diagnostic accuracy was the number of years of training.
15 Experience, compared to pedagogy, therefore seems to be
more successful in developing clinical judgment. To the extent
that moral judgment mirrors clinical judgment, then one should
not expect the mere utilization of case studies to be more effective
in the development of moral judgment than it appears to have
been in the development of clinical judgment. Still others worry
that excessive reliance on cases distorts our understanding of the
moral life. Stanley Hauerwas notes that several aspects of moral
experience become hidden or neglected when ethics is treated as
a matter of making the kinds of difficult decisions around which
cases are usually built. Most seriously, this “standard account” of
ethics assumes that the character of the agent is superfluous to the
decision. As he puts it,

the standard account simply ignores the fact that most of the
convictions that charge us morally are like the air we breath—we
never notice them . . . because they form us not to describe the
world in certain ways and not to make certain matters subject to
decision. Thus we assume that it is wrong to kill children without
good reason . . . These are not matters that we need to articulate
or decide about; their force lies rather in their not being subject
to decision.16

Personal experience in teaching case studies bears out both
the promise and difficulty of this pedagogy. I have, off and on over
a period of years, experimented with case studies in ethics classes.
I have most often used them as ways to get students to apply
theory and then reflect critically on where that application of
theory has taken them in light of their own religious and/or moral
convictions. Thus we spend class time discussing a particular
approach to Christian ethics, such as the feminist approach, and
then at the end of that unit discuss a case in which the insights
gleaned from the theory are used to provide advice to the central
character(s) in the case. Students, sometimes singly and sometimes
in groups, lead the case discussion following instructions I
provide. Generally, I first ask students to identify (1) the relevant
actors in the case, (2) the goods at stake for those actors, (3) a
range of live options for action, and (4) the likely consequences,
both good and bad, for each of those options. Then I have students
put themselves in the role of our theorist-author and advise the
actor from the author’s perspective. Finally, I ask students to
reflect on how their personal advice would differ from that of the
author’s.

In monitoring discussions and grading case analyses, I have
found that students do indeed find the cases more engaging than
the standard fair. In addition, I have discovered, not surprisingly,
that students exhibit varying levels of sophistication in their
ability to connect theory with case and to reflect critically in light
of one’s own convictions. However, other parts of my experience
have left me ambivalent about using cases. For one thing, I have
often been surprised at the difficulty that many students have in
articulating their moral convictions. Moreover, I have been
disappointed by the difficulty that many students have in digging
very deeply into the cases, in entering into them imaginatively,
whether to identify goods at stake, options for actions, or even
potential good and bad consequences for a particular course of
action. I have also been frustrated by a very real hesitancy among
students to offer advice to the main character in the case or to
engage critically the advice offered by other students in the class.
The dominant reason students have given to explain this hesitancy
is that “everyone has to make his or her own decision” or “it
depends on what she wants to do.” These comments seem to
reflect a tacit awareness of the personal character of a moral
decision, but are distorted by our culture’s emotivism, that is itself
fueled, I suspect, by the inherent sloppiness of the process (i.e.,
the relative uselessness of following rules in such a way that
everyone will arrive at the same “moral” answer). A final observation
is that I have not witnessed much, if any, increase in abilities
to perform these tasks over the course of the semester.

Understanding practical reasoning as personal knowing can
help explain these difficulties and suggest modifications to the use
of case studies. Here I focus on two of the difficulties mentioned
above. Take, for example, the difficulty that students have in
articulating their moral convictions. From a Polanyian perspective,
this problem should come as no surprise because I am asking
students to make articulate or explicit what they are indwelling
tacitly. As Polanyi is fond of pointing out, the process of knowing
is disrupted when one is forced to focus attention on that from
which one is doing the knowing. This would seem to be just as true
for moral reflection as it is for pianists or bicyclists who, when
asked to explain what they are doing, find their performances
interrupted. That difficulty in articulating the inarticulate, as well
as the disruptive nature of doing so, may well reinforce the
tendency to retreat into emotivism. Nevertheless, it needs to
happen and ways need to be found to encourage such reflection
despite the awkwardness of the process.

Polanyian insights can also help explain the seeming lack of
progress in practical reasoning over the course of a semester. If
Polanyi is correct that the student learns in close relationship with
a mentor, then the relationship between the two must be much
closer than is often the case in a class of even modest size, say 15–
18. The formation of a moral self (where ability to reason
practically is the main measure of moral achievement) might best
be achieved as an independent study in which student and
professor work through cases in a collaborative way—the professor
offering his or her insights, with the student asking probing
questions and making challenging comments along the way.17
Moreover, if the dominant objective of a class is to develop moral
perceptivity, it will be important to give students repeated handson
experience with cases, not simply one case for a grade
combined with hopefully vicarious engagement with the presentations
by other students.

Conclusion

Michael Polanyi’s work has most often been appropriated by
philosophers interested in his epistemology and theologians
interested in the religious implications of that epistemology and/
or what little he says about God and religion. The ethical promise
of his work remains largely untapped, despite the fact that his
project was largely motivated by an analysis of the morally
corrupting nature of modern thought. Polanyi could be seen as a
resource for addressing the moral equivalent of the subjective/
objective split in modern epistemologies, i.e., the divide between
what I have called moral dogmatists and emotivists. Moreover, if
the process of moral knowing that we have associated with
practical reason must be treated as a form of personal knowing,
then there is room for appropriation there.

This last point has provided the point of departure for this
exploratory attempt to unpack the moral implications of one
aspect of Polanyi’s work. The traditional terms used for moral
knowing are “practical reasoning” and “prudence.” In the Classical
thinking of Aristotle and Thomas, practical reasoning is the
virtue or skill that unites moral and intellectual dimensions of
existence because it involves reasoning soundly about how to
attain the good in light of passions that are correctly ordered
toward that which is truly good. Contemporary authors Jonsen
and Toulmin treat clinical judgment in medicine as a paradigm
example of practical reasoning, which offers a direct link to
Polanyi in that he uses clinical medicine as a model for personal
reasoning.

In treating practical reasoning as a form of personal or tacit
knowing, we have seen that practical reasoning must be rooted in
a conviction that there is a moral reality—a good that is not
merely subjective preference yet never fully captured in articulate
thought, a reality that promises to disclose itself in the future
in unexpected ways. The agent, on the basis of that conviction,
reasons with universal intent by indwelling his body, emotions,
and moral convictions, all of which are shaped by his personal
history. In addition, one must passionately and imaginatively
probe the details of the situation—indwell them empathetically—
in search of clues to the moral reality that can be integrated so as
to inform an action congruent with moral reality, i.e., an action
that promises to open up largely unforeseeable possibilities for
living in the particular, concrete confines of this situation.

From a Polanyian perspective, one would expect that the best
way to develop these skills in personal practical reasoning is by
means of practice with case studies under the tutelage of those
skilled in practical reasoning (or at least more skilled than the
student). Such tutelage will require motivated students who will
have to overcome gradually the emotivism that many bring with
them. It will require intensive effort in working with individual
students or small groups of students on a case, for students need
to be prodded to articulate their convictions and to indwell the
particulars of a case. Developing personal practical knowing will
also require engagement with a significant number of cases over
the course of a semester if students are to improve in their abilities
to discern and to act.

Paul Lewis
Mercer University

NOTES

  1. The most sustained investigation of Polanyian ethics can be
    found in the Polanyi Society journal, Tradition & Discovery 29,
    no. 1 (2002–3), the entirety of which is devoted to bringing
    Polanyian insights to bear on ethics. Some other articles that
    relate Polanyi’s thinking to ethics are: Walter E. Conn, “Michael
    Polanyi: The Responsible Person,” The Heythrop Journal 17, no.
    1 (1976): 31–49; Walter Gulick, “Virtues, Ideals, and the Convivial
    Community: Further Steps Toward a Polanyian Ethics,”
    Tradition & Discovery 30, no. 3 (2003–4): 40–51; Terence
    Kennedy, “Epistemology and the Human Sciences: Michael
    Polanyi’s Contribution to the Reshaping of Moral Theology,”
    Tradition & Discovery 20, no. 2 (1993-1994): 11–16; Paul Nagy,
    “Philosophy in a Different Voice: Michael Polanyi on Liberty and
    Liberalism,” Tradition & Discovery 22, no. 3 (1995–6): 17–27;
    Harry Prosch, “Polanyi’s Ethics,” Ethics 82 (January 1972): 91–
    113; and John Rothfork, “Postmodern Ethics: Richard Rorty and
    Michael Polanyi,” Southern Humanities Review 29 (Winter 1995):
    15–48. Stefania Jha devotes a chapter to the topic in her Reconsidering
    Michael Polanyi’s Philosophy (Pittsburgh: University of
    Pittsburgh Press, 2002). While I do not claim that this list of works
    relating Polanyi to ethics is exhaustive, the contrast with the
    number of philosophically or theologically-oriented articles remains
    striking.
  2. Diane Yeager provides a succinct account of moral inversion
    in “Confronting the Minotaur: Moral Inversion and Polanyi’s
    Moral Philosophy,” Tradition & Discovery 29, no. 1 (2002–3): 23.
    See also her discussion of Polanyi’s ongoing use of the concept in
    note 1, p. 47.
  3. I will use the terms personal and tacit interchangeably. In
    his later writings, Polanyi seems to prefer to talk about tacit rather
    than personal knowledge as he comes to emphasize more the
    process of knowing rather than the status of the knowledge
    produced. On Polanyi’s indebtedness to Gestalt psychology, one
    of many places where he acknowledges its value can be found in
    Personal Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962),
    55–58 (hereafter abbreviated PK, with page numbers cited in the
    text).
  4. Alasdair MacIntyre provides a persuasive account of how
    emotivism becomes the dominant ideology of capitalist societies
    in his After Virtue, 2nd ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre
    Dame Press, 1984), 23–35.
  5. See Michael Polanyi and Harry Prosch, Meaning (Chicago:
    University of Chicago Press, 1975), 64–65 (hereafter abbreviated
    as M, with page numbers cited in the text).
  6. Mark Discher comes closest in his “Michael Polanyi’s Epistemology
    of Science and Its Implications for a Problem in Moral
    Philosophy,” Tradition & Discovery 29, no. 1 (2002–3): 49–59.
  7. This account of the classical view of practical reasoning
    draws from Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans., Martin Ostwald,
    Library of Liberal Arts (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co.,
    1986), 158–173 and Thomas Aquinas, excerpts from the Summa
    Theologica I–II, Q. 61, aa. 1-2 and Q. 94, a. 4, in Introduction to
    St. Thomas Aquinas, ed., Anton C. Pegis (New York: Modern
    Library, 1948), 586–589 and 640–642. It should be noted that
    the details of how practical reasoning and moral virtue relate
    remain a matter of debate among interpreters of both Aristotle
    and Thomas.
  8. Jonsen and Toulmin take inspiration from their experiences
    on a federal bioethics commission charged with setting guidelines
    for research with vulnerable populations. They note that commission
    members came from different ethnic, disciplinary, and
    religious backgrounds, and, therefore, did not share many substantive
    moral convictions. Nevertheless—and surprisingly—the
    commission’s work was not paralyzed by interminable and
    unresolvable debate between competing factions. Instead, commissioners
    found that as long as the discussions remained at the
    level of practical conclusions, they were able to agree quite easily.
    It was only when they gave reasons for their conclusions that they
    found that they could not agree with one another. See Albert R.
    Jonsen and Stephen Toulmin, The Abuse of Casuistry: A History
    of Moral Reasoning (Berkeley: University of California Press,
    1988), 16–18. Hereafter, this work will be abbreviated AC, with
    page numbers cited in the text.
  9. Michael Polanyi, Knowing and Being: Essays by Michael
    Polanyi, ed. Marjorie Grene (Chicago: University of Chicago
    Press, 1969), 125. Hereafter, this work will be abbreviated KB
    with page numbers cited in the text.
  10. See also Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (Gloucester,
    MA: Peter Smith, 1983), 12–18. Subsequent references to this
    work will be given in the text, abbreviated as TD.
  11. To say this does not mean that Polanyi has no place for
    rules in the process of knowing, but he is clear that such rules
    come after the fact and serve more as rules of thumb, approximate
    articulations of what cannot be made totally explicit (see PK, 162
    and 200).
  12. The complexity of Polanyi’s view of reality can also be seen
    in his account of the multileveled nature of reality, wherein
    principles pertaining to the lower levels of reality provide boundary
    conditions for the principles characterizing the higher levels.
    See, e.g., The Tacit Dimension, 35–46.
  13. The following description of the scientific community
    draws from Knowing and Being, 49–72. Polanyi discusses these
    matters throughout his writings, perhaps in the greatest detail in
    The Logic of Liberty (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1951) and
    Science, Faith, and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
    1964).
  14. See Robert L. Stivers, Christine E. Gudorf, Alice Frazer
    Evans, and Robert A. Evans, Christian Ethics: A Case Method
    Approach, 2nd ed. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1994), 289.
    Subsequent references will be given in the text as Stivers, et al.
  15. Sebastian R. Alston, “Does PBR Still Work?” presented at
    a workshop at Mercer University, Macon, GA, March 2003, slide
    3, page 3. The study compared three medical schools in Holland.
  16. Stanley Hauerwas, with Richard Bondi and David Burrell,
    Truthfulness and Tragedy (Notre Dame: University of Notre
    Dame Press, 1977), 18–21, emphasis added. Note the Polanyian
    tone of Hauerwas’s remarks: his view of the tacit nature of our
    moral convictions suggests that we indwell them and use them
    subsidiarily in order to respond to situations that require action.
  17. Of course, this is not to say that moral instruction could
    not occur with more than one student at a time, but it would still
    require working with small groups.