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Science: Its Successes, Its Mischiefs, and Its Humanness: A Polanyian View
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11948 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1987 |
8,918 Words |
| Author
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William Taussig Scott
William Taussig Scott is professor emeritus of physics at the
University of Nevada, Reno. He is currently working on an
intellectual biography of Michael Polanyi. |
Science is a wonderful and fearsome institution. It has succeeded in discovering and describing an enormous range of truths about our world, truths that almost everybody believes and trusts. It satisfies much of our curiosity and stimulates more interest with each new discovery. It is the source of knowledge out of which have come our modern, truly fantastic technological advances with all their benefits and challenges.
However, in spite of its manifold successes and benefits, science at its very foundation appears to deny our most basic civilized values, and thus to have opened the way to the modern age of terror, violence, and barbaric passions. For many people, the threats to human values appear so demonic that it is hopeless to attack them. The whole process of scientific progress is widely felt to be mysterious, understandable only by the elite few who have learned its language and methods, and unassailable in the certainty of its evidence and logic. Our ideals are made to appear agreeable but unreal, while the world revealed by science appears real but disagreeable. When push comes to shove, people choose the real even in the face of despair.
Michael Polanyi, the physical chemist turned philosopher, provides us with an important reassessment of science. He not only disposes of the philosophical mischief responsible for the threatening aspects of science, but he shows that with its successes and its fundamental humanness it is, in fact, our grandest example of cultural system based on civilized values.
Polanyi's move into philosophy was first stimulated by wondering how the leaders of the Soviet Union could claim to base their system on science in the service of humanity while denying the basic values of science and justifying in the name of humanity, the most brutal and uncivilized methods of government. In reflecting on this puzzle, Polanyi came to see that the ideology of Marxism was derived from philosophical errors built into Western thought. By analyzing the fallacies of the philosophical mischief and establishing the true nature of science, Polanyi went so far as to challenge our view of how we know what we know and what we are as human beings. His is an important contribution to the cure of our tragic twentieth-century disease.
The Four Mischievous Propositions
Polanyi traced the errors he saw in Western thought to particular consequences of the discoveries made by Isaac Newton, based on Galileo, Kepler, and other
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