Theory of Constraints & More Epistemology Polanyi Extract

A Guide to Implementing the Theory of Constraints (TOC)
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Deming
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Taylor & Social Darwinism

Toyota, Kaizen, & Lean

Epistemology

Paradox of Systemism

Extract

The following is extracted from Polanyi, M., (1958) Personal Knowledge, pp 150‑152 (1974 Paperback edition).

Heuristic passion seeks no personal possession. It sets out not to conquer, but to enrich the world. Yet such a move is also an attack. It raises a claim and makes a tremendous demand on other men; for it asks that its gift to humanity be accepted by all. In order to be satisfied our intellectual passions must find response. This universal intent creates a tension: we suffer when a vision of reality to which we have committed ourselves is contemptuously ignored by others. For a general unbelief imperils our own convictions by evoking an echo in us. Our vision must conquer or die.

Like the heuristic passion form which it flows, the persuasive passion too finds itself facing a logical gap. To the extent to which a discoverer has committed himself to a new vision of reality, he has separated himself form others who still think on the old lines. His persuasive passion spurs him now to cross this gap by converting everybody to his way of seeing things, even as his heuristic passion has spurred him to cross the heuristic gap which separated him from discovery.

We can see, therefore, why scientific controversies never lie altogether within science. For when a new system of thought concerning a whole class of alleged facts is at issue, the question will be whether it should be accepted or rejected in principle, and those who reject it on such comprehensive grounds will inevitably regard it as altogether incompetent and unsound. Take, for example, four contemporary issues: Freud's psychoanalysis, Eddington's a priori system of physics, Rhine's 'Reach of the Mind,' or Lysenko's environmental genetics. Each of the four authors mentioned here has his own conceptual framework, by which he identifies his facts and within which he conducts his arguments, and each expresses his conceptions in his own distinctive terminology. Any such framework is relatively stable, for it can account for most of the evidence which it accepts as well established, and it is sufficiently coherent in itself to justify to the satisfaction of its followers the neglect for the time being of facts, or alleged facts, which it cannot interpret. It is correspondingly segregated from any knowledge or alleged knowledge rooted in different conceptions of experience. The two conflicting systems of thought are separated by a logical gap, in the same sense as a problem is separated from the discovery which solves the problem. Formal operations relying on one framework of interpretation cannot demonstrate a proposition to persons who rely on another framework. Its advocates may not even succeed in getting a hearing from these, since they must first teach them a new language, and no one can learn a new language unless he first trusts that it means something. A hostile audience may in fact deliberately refuse to entertain novel conceptions such as those of Freud, Eddington, Rhine, or Lysenko, precisely because its members fear that once they have accepted this framework they will be led to conclusions which they ‑ rightly or wrongly ‑ abhor.

Proponents of a new system can convince their audience only by first winning their intellectual sympathy for a doctrine they have not yet grasped. Those who listen sympathetically will discover for themselves what they would have otherwise never have understood. Such an acceptance is a heuristic process, a self‑modifying act, and to this extent a conversion. It produces disciples forming a school, the members of which are separated from the time being by a logical gap from those outside it. They think differently, speak a different language, live in a different world, and at least one of the two schools is excluded to this extent for the time being (whether rightly or wrongly) from the community of science.

We can now see, also, the great difficulty that may arise in the attempt to persuade others to accept a new idea in science. We have seen to the extent to which it represents a new way of reasoning, we cannot convince others of it by formal argument, for so long as we argue within their framework, we can never induce them to abandon it. Demonstration must be supplemented, therefore, by forms of persuasion which can induce a conversion. The refusal to enter on the opponent's way of arguing must be justified by making it appear altogether unreasonable.

Such comprehensive rejection cannot fail to discredit the opponent. He will be made to appear as thoroughly deluded, which in the heat of battle will easily come to imply that he was a fool, a crank or a fraud. And once we are out to establish such charges we shall readily go on to expose our opponent as a 'metaphysician', a 'Jesuit', a 'Jew', or a 'Bolshevik', as the case may be ‑ or, speaking form the other side of the Iron Curtain ‑ as an 'objectivist', an 'idealist', and a 'cosmopolitan'. In a clash of intellectual passions each side must inevitably attack the opponent's person.

Even in retrospect such conflicts can often be appreciated only in these terms. They do not appear as scientific arguments, but as conflicts between rival scientific visions, or else between scientific values and extraneous interests interfering illegitimately with the due process of scientific enquiry.