Meaning

By Michael Polanyi and Harry Prosch

Finished  8/28/16

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Chapter 1: The Eclipse of Thought

The achievement of meaning cannot properly be divorced from intellectual freedom.

Here the inconsistency of a liberalism based on philosophic doubt becomes apparent: freedom of thought is destroyed by the extension of doubt to the field of traditional ideals, which includes the basis for freedom of thought.

Freedom of thought is rendered pointless and must disappear wherever reason and morality are deprived of their status as a force in their own right.

(note: Interesting, but I disagree)  Modern thought is a mixture of Christian belief and Greek doubts. Christian beliefs and Greek doubts are logical incompatible.

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Chapter 2: Personal Knowledge

****  Let us look at examples of the absurdities imposed by the modern scientific outlook. Listen to three authoritative voices denying the existence of human consciousness: (1) “...the existence of something called consciousness is a venerable hypothesis: not a datum, not directly observable…”; (2) “...although we cannot get along without the concept of consciousness, actually there is no such thing…”; (3) “The knower as an entity is an unnecessary postulate.” These three statements were made, respectively, by Hebb, Kubie, and Lashley at a symposium on brain mechanisms and consciousness in 1954.

There is no rule - and can be no rule - on which we can rely for deciding whether the discrepancies between theory and observation should be shrugged aside as observational errors or be recognized, on the contrary, as actual deviations from the theory.  The assessment in each case is a personal judgment.

****  Personal, tacit assessments and evaluations, we see, are required at every step in the acquisition of knowledge -- even “scientific” knowledge.

All sensation is assisted by some (however slight) skillful performance.

From-to structure includes all skillful performances, from walking along a street to walking a tightrope, from tying a knot, to playing a piano.

(note: embodied cognition)  to know something by relying on our awareness of it for attending to something else is to have the same kind of knowledge of it that we have of our body by living in it. It is a manner of being or existing.

****  You cannot use your spectacles to scrutinize your spectacles.  A theory is like a pair of spectacles; you examine things by it, and your knowledge of it lies in this very use of it. You dwell in it as you dwell in your own body and in the tools by which you amplify the powers of your body. It should be clear that someone who is said to be “testing” a theory is in fact relying, in this subsidiary and very uncritical way, upon other tacitly accepted theories and assumptions of which he cannot in this action be focally aware.

These facts are common knowledge, but their consequences for the theory of tacit knowledge are remarkable. ...They prove the existence of two kinds of awareness that are mutually exclusive, a from-to awareness, and a focal awareness.  They also confirm that in our from-to awareness of a thing we see it as having a meaning...

To arrive at conclusion may… be called acts of tacit inference. Such inferences differ sharply, however, from drawing conclusions by an explicit deduction.

This difference between a deduction and an integration lies in the fact that deduction connects two focal items, the premises and consequences, while integration makes subsidiaries bear on a focus.

Consciousness is intentional but also that it always has roots from which it attends to its object. It includes a tacit awareness of its subsidiaries. Such integration cannot be replaced by any explicit mechanical procedure.

****  all knowing is action --  ...it is our urge to understand and control our experience

All personal knowing is intrinsically guided by impersonal standards of valuation set by a self for itself. Take first the process of mastering a skill. Here the emphasis of our knowing lies in producing a result.

****  All knowing is personal knowing -- participation through indwelling.

We may now go further. We have seen that our personal knowing operates by an expansion of our person into a subsidiary awareness of particulars, an awareness merged with our attention to a whole, and that this manner of living in the parts results in our critical appraisal of their coherence.

(note: embodied cognition, embodiment)  We share the purpose of a mind by dwelling it s actions. And so, generally, we also share the purposes or functions of any living matter by dwelling in its motions in our efforts to understand their meaning.

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Chapter 3: Reconstruction

Knowledge of other minds

(note: anticipates mirror neurons, long before their discovery)  We know other minds by dwelling in their acts

Mind-Body Problem

Current neurophysiology is based on a parallelism of body and mind as two aspects of the same thing. This theory is false;

The principles of each level operate under the control of the next-higher level. The voice you produce is shaped into words by a vocabulary; a given vocabulary is shaped into sentences in accordance with grammar; and the sentences are fitted into a style, which in its turn is shaped by our efforts to convey the ideas of the composition. Thus each level is subject to dual control: first, by the laws that apply to its elements in themselves and, second, by the laws that control the comprehensive entity formed by them.

Consequently, the operations of a higher level cannot be accounted for by the laws governing its particulars, which form the next-lower level. You cannot derive a vocabulary from phonetics; you cannot derive a grammar from a vocabulary; a correct use of grammar does not account for good style; and a good style does not supply the content of an oral communication.

Universal Terms

The way we see an object integrates, among many other events in the body, innumerable memories beyond conscious recollection; or of a metaphor fusing two disparate ideas in a powerful joint meaning we have never before encountered.

Empirical Generalization

Valid generalizations are commonly arrived at by empirical inquiries based on informal procedures.

No instance of tacit knowing is truly static. The casting-forward of an intention is an act of the imagination.

Most of our speech consists of sentences we have never uttered before… yet we are as a rule confident that we shall find the words wee need...

****  All knowing is therefore either tacit or rooted in tacit knowing.

****  All our knowledge is inescapably indeterminate.  ...There is nothing in any concept that points objectively or automatically to any sort of reality. That concept relates to a reality is established only by a tacit judgment grounded in personal commitments… we are dwelling in these tacit commitments and are unable to focus our attention upon them without destroying their subsidiary function.

***********  We cannot ultimately specify the grounds (either metaphysical or logical or empirical) upon which we hold that our knowledge is true.  ...We cannot look at them since we are looking with them. They therefore must remain indeterminate.

Scientific inquiry is accordingly a dynamic exercise of the imagination and is rooted in commitments and beliefs about the nature of things. It is a fiduciary act. It is far from any skepticism itself. It depends upon firm beliefs.

Its method is not that of detachment but rather that of involvement.  It rests, no less than our other ways of achieving meaning, upon various commitments which we personally share.

***********  the ideal of pure objectivity in knowing and in science has been shown to be a myth.

****  If … personal participation and imagination are essentially involved in science as well as in the humanities, meanings created in the sciences stand in no more favored relation to reality than do meanings created in the arts, in moral judgments, and in religion.

The dichotomy between facts and values no longer seems to be a real distinction upon which to hang any conclusion.

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Chapter 4: From Perception to Metaphor

Man lives in the meanings he is able to discern.

A word has meaning. It bears on something else which has meaning. A word and an object are not equal partners in an association. The explanation of language along associationist lines is thus fundamentally wrong.

… the word in use... is very different from the object it names.

We have, so far, two types of semantic meanings: indication and symbolization.

Instead of being a self-centered integration, a symbol becomes rather a self-giving one, an integration in which not only the symbol becomes integrated but the self also becomes integrated as it is carried away by the symbol -- or given to it.

When a symbol embodying a significant matter has a significance of its own and this is aking to the matter that it embodies, the result is a metaphor. (e.g. a flag)

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Chapter 5: Works of Art

The frame and the story embody each other. ...This integration of parts in the meaning of a work of art is but an instance of the rule that the integration of subsidiaries produces a perception differing in both appearance and content from its constituents.

Brushstrokes and canvas… secures the artistic reality of a painting and so guards its distinctive powers from dissolving into the surroundings of factual reality.

Appreciation of a work of art requires belief in what is means, not unbelief in something it does not and must not assert.

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Chapter 6: Validity in Art

The life of art in society, as we have seen, is the work of the artist’s imagination renewed by the imagination of those who receive it.

Scientific inquiry consists of three parts: first the finding of a problem, then an inquiry into the problem, and finally, if the search is successful, the solving of the problem.

The meaning of a poem comes into existence only with its words.  The poet starts with a problem that is largely indeterminate at both ends: it is open in its aim as much a in the means it uses for achieving it.

****  The arts are works of the imagination, and so are the sciences. But all our hopes and fears, all our memories and our very feeling of ourselves, our suppressed desires and hidden feelings of remorse, all that we see in sleep and indeed in daytime perceptions, and all our deliberate bodily motions -- all these are also works of the imagination.

****  The extension of scientific thinking into the formation of a world view is a work of the imagination, not of the formally critical intellect.

Ethics and religion are also forceful expressions of the imagination and may become powerfully interwoven with works of art.

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Chapter 7: Visionary Art

Art moves us, therefore, through influencing the lived quality of our very existence.

…it seems to be more to the point to call such poetry “visionary,” for its meaning is created by a powerful act of the imagination which comprehends all details in one. It must be grasped by a visionary experience, as the poet himself grasped it in his act of creation.

Impressionism certainly included a novel exercise of the imagination…

Surrealist compositions are filled with utterly incoherent shapes and representation, and this brilliant absurdity is often reinforced by painting interwoven sections in widely disparate perspectives. Surrealism painting is thus visionary painting which belatedly joins visionary poetry as the second visionary art.

It is not that we do not have myths, but rather that those reductionistic, scientistic myths which we do have tend, because of their nature, to destroy the meaning of all rites and ceremonies.

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Chapter 8: The Structure of Myth

Each animal forms the center of the interactions which define its surroundings, and every species has its own distinctive circle of surroundings.

…myths of creation are untranslatable into terms that apply to things within the world. Archaic myths and the invocations of archaic myths are therefore of an intrinsically detached nature. They are wholly other than actual human experience.

…The integration of incompatibles accomplished for us by the creative powers of the imagination are as evident in religious thought as they were in the arts.

…the imaginary entities created by means of the integration of incompatibles in art and myth go beyond those imaginary entities created from incompatibles in mathematics and physics. The latter are acceptable as natural integrations; the former, by contrast, must be called tans-natural.

First, a myth speaks of events recollected instead of events represented – because the events of creation are believed to be true; second, the nature of a myth’s being sacred is deemed to surpass the rapture of art.

Pure contemplation as practiced by Japanese Zen Buddhism aims at sloughing off our pragmatic observation of things and seeing them instead as fused into a comprehensive experience.

Christian thought took a parallel line in the mystic theology of Pseudo-Dionysius. But the Christian mystic does not aim at NOTHING. He too seeks a visionary sight lying beyond the intelligent analysis of his surroundings, but by this via negativa he seeks the presence of God.  

It is, however, in early Indian thought that we find the first theories of the union of opposites as the ultimate foundation of the world. Opposites may conflict, but on a deeper level they are one: “One the one hand there is a distinction… and conflict between the Devas and the Asuras, the gods and the ‘demons,’ the powers of Light and of Darkness… But, on the other hand, numerous myths bring out the consubstantiality of brotherhood of the Devas and Asuras.’

In the West, early attempts to discover a unified reality underlying the manifold appearances of the world were made first by the Ionian philosophers. Later, the predominant Christian theology imposed the mystic unification of Manichaean and Arian dualties.

*******  …under the influence of via negativa of Pseudo-Dionysius. He (Nicholas of Cusa) called it the coincidentia oppositorum and argued that such a coincidentia oppositorum was the least imperfect definition of God.

Zen Buddhism alone applies directly to the creative arts. Since it analyzes both the making and the appreciation of arts in visionary terms.

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Chapter 9:  Truth in Myths

It is an obvious fact that archaic myths form part of a wide system of archaic beliefs that bristle with absurdities.

…but some sort of tacit integrations are, as we have indicated above, truly essential as a basis for all knowledge. Therefore, a scientific method aiming at dispensing with tacit integrations altogether is also nonsensical.

The fact that a coherence established by integration will have qualities not present in the subsidiaries used in composing this focal result is in itself proof of this, since in a formal process the result can be seen to have been fully present in its antecedent premises, i.e., to be a logical implication of them.

It follows that there can be no strict – i.e. – formal – rules for accepting or rejecting the validity of an integration.

…as even David Hume himself pointed out, modern man differs from his archaic ancestors only in judging whether certain observed temporal or spatial contiguities should be deemed coincidental or causal. It is only owing to what we do indeed believe to be our more correct vi3ew of the general nature of things – derived largely from science – that we apply the principles of causation more aptly (to our own way of thinking) than primitive people do.

The idea that a name, an image, and other attributes that bear on a person are real substitutes for the person has been called the principle of the alter ego.

However, the part does not merely represent the whole, but “really” specifies it; the relationship is not symbolic and intellectual, but real and material. The part, in mythical terms, is the same thing as the whole…

****  Ever since Laplace first raised the point in defining Universal Knowledge, philosophers have discussed the notion that from today’s topography of the ultimate particles of an object we can predict, by the laws of mechanics, any future topography of these particles. The immense difficulty of carrying out such computations is easily perceived. This has diverted attention from the far greater difficulty involved in the idea itself, namely, that the results of such a calculation would in themselves tell us nothing of any importance.

****  (Note: transcend meaning)   living beings are characterized by their physiognomies, including the space-time physiognomy of their functions. A physiognomy obeys no mathematical formula; it can be recognized only tacitly by dwelling in its numberless particulars, many of them subliminal.

*******  We can know the emotional and intellectual life of animals only by an even deeper indwelling, deep enough to achieve an empathy with their consciousness. And suppose that we study a great human mind: we can enter into its thoughts only by respectfully submitting to its guidance.

To attribute such levels of existence as these to an atomic topography seems as absurd as it would be to talk about the smell of differential equations, yet the modern mind seems hardly to hesitate in countenancing such incongruities. Cowed by the experience of the Copernican revolution, we dare not trust the testimony of our senses to contradict the teachings of science. To “doubt the sun doth move” was still the epitome of absurdity to Shakespeare seventy years after the death of Copernicus. About this time Galileo spoke triumphantly of the acceptance of Copernicanism as ‘the rape of the senses.” …Man’s acceptance of a seeming absurdity had ushered in the trump of an actual absurdity.

*****  (Note: Paradigm building)  All empirical observation rests ultimately on the integration of subsidiaries to a focal center.  All such integrations – from perception to creative discoveries – are impelled by the imagination and controlled by plausibility, which in turn depends upon our general view about the nature of things.

…we have to maintain that the archaic mind is better in many ways. It is right in experiencing names as part of a named person and an image as part of its subject; for a name is not a name, not an image an image, except as a subsidiary to the focal center on which it bears. And such is the nature of all meaningful relations. Admittedly, the archaic mind tends to exaggerate this coherence to the point of absurdity, but it is closer to the truth than the modern view, which has no place for the quality and depth of these coherences not, therefore, for the full extent of the subsidiaries that are necessary to their composition.  This difference becomes essential in the observation of those comprehensive entities that can be observed only by indwelling. The archaic mind recognized indwelling as the proper means of understanding living things. Modern biology and psychology abhor this approach to life and mind.

******  …our modern scientific education reaches … an even more absurd view about the nature of things when it affirms that all coherent systems of our experience – including our own conscious existence –can ultimately  be represented by their atomic particles interacting according to atomic forces. This too is an aberration of the imagination; a fantastic extrapolation of the exact sciences.

(Note: Against falsification)  There is a myth abroad today that a scientific theory is instantly rejected if we come across any facts that are incompatible with the theory. But, as we have seen earlier in this work, the actual practice of scientists is often t doubt the validity of the demonstration of auch incompatible facts, however inexplicable the evidence may appear to be; or else to include any facts apparently contradicting an accepted theory as anomalies of it; or, in yet another cases, to accept to mutually contradictory principles, ascribing to each its range of applicability in the hope that something will turn up to explain the conflict between them.

Eliade says that the myth of creation makes us aware of a deeper reality that we inevitably lose sight of in our personal pursuits. It sets us free from a “false identification of Reality with what each of us appears to be or to possess… The myth continually re-actualizes the Great Time, and in so doing raises the listener to a super-human and suprahistorical plane; which, among other things, enable him to approach a Reality that is inaccessible tat the level of profane, individual existence.”

Man’s origin is a mystery which the myth of creation expresses in its own way. And the image of man’s destiny, as derived from his mythical origins, is much nearer to our own experience…than is the image of the barren atomic topography to which the ideal of detached observations seeks to reduce these matters.

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Chapter 10:  Acceptance of Religion

Representative arts are thus seen by us to make statements that we accept in some manner, even though we do not find them in the least compelling as facts.

Works of art are in a sense metaphors; and although the power of a metaphor is akin to that of a symbol, such as a flag, there is a difference that ives more meaning to a metaphor than is present in a symbol. We saw that the power of the metaphor lies in our capacity to embody an object of principal interest (the “tenor”) in another remotely similar (but, also, intrinsically interesting) object (the “vehicle”), thus giving the first object a new sharp and emotionally charged meaning.

Religion, we can see, is a sprawling work of the imagination involving rites, ceremonies, doctrines, myths, and something called “worship.” It is a form of “acceptance” much more complex, therefore, than any of the other forms we have been attending to.

First  of all, religion involves sacred myths that inform rites and ceremonies, imbuing their intrinsically metaphoric meaning with something more than the kind of poetic or artistic meaning they would possess simply as metaphorical works of art. Let us take the Christian sacrament of Holy Communion as an example. The eating of the bread and the drinking of the wine are ordinary actions meaningful in themselves as a means of satisfying hunger and of replenishing biological life. There is also a further natural result that occurs wen people dine together, when they “break bread” together.

It is only through belief in the myth, of course, that the whole rich meaning of the ceremony – the congeries of all the sacred, religious meanings – is achieved…

*****  It is therefore only through participation in acts of worship – through dwelling in these – that we see God. God is thus not a benign whose existence can be established in some logical, scientific, or rational way before we engage in our worship of him. God is a commitment involved in our rites and myths.

…God also becomes the integration of all the incompatibles of our own lives.

Visionary art has shown us that, even when the story content of a work of art quite obviously has no plausibility, it is nevertheless possible for our imagination to integrate these incompatible elements into a meaning – a meaning that cannot be expressed in any set of coherent, explicit statements…

****  …the meanings achieved in religion may be of this same sort. The contents may continue to seem completely implausible to us, while yet we see in the creation stories, the miraculous-birth stories, the crucifixion and resurrection stories a meaning expressing the whole significance of life and the universe in genuine and universal feeling terms. Then we can say: it does not matter. If not this story exactly, then something like this is somehow true – in fact, is somehow the highest truth about all things.

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Chapter 11:  Order

For, as many astute thinkers from Socrates on have seen, the world cannot be thought of as ultimately meaningful unless the organization of its parts is meaningful, that is, unless there is some point to the way things are put together or, at least, to the direction in which they are developing.

Intellectual asset to the reduction of the world to its atomic elements acting blindly in terms of equilibrations of forces, an assent that has gradually come to prevail since the birth of modern science, has made any sort of teleological view of the cosmos seem unscientific and woolgathering to us. And it is this assent, more than any other one intellectual factor, that has set science and religion (in all but its most frothy forms) in opposition to each other in the contemporary mind.

The entire complex of terrestrial life is based on chains of the same four DNA compounds, each organism having its own distinctive sequence of them.

The chemical composition of DNA is astonishingly simple, and its sustenance and renewal of all living beings is so comprehensive that it does indeed invite the supposition that it has explained the main features of life in chemical terms. But greats of this secret are missing.

A given DNA molecule guides the successive stages of embryonic development; each stage produces a cellular milieu which will in turn guide this DNA in producing a further cellular milieu for very different actions of this same DNA – those which have to follow next in order to complete the proper development of the embryo. The same DNA particle, in other words, acts differently at different times in the different stages of the development of the embryo. A blueprint does not act differently at different times.

All these considerations seem to point to one of two conclusions: either the DNA is at once the blueprint and the builder (it is a sort of “master molecule,” and it makes adaptations in some kind of purposeful way), or else it functions as merely another “organ” in the body and so is interrelated in an immensely complicated way with every other organ (and cell) in adapting itself to the needs of the organism for growth and maintenance.

Another unsolved problem arises from the continuous quantitative increase in DNA chains from those of bacteria to those of man– from about twenty million DNA alternatives to about twelve billion. There is no chemical model available to explain this enormous growth of the DNA chain from those in bacteria to those in man. We have no chemical explanation for this fundamental fat of the system, just as we have no chemical explanation for the historical origin of DNA or for its capacity to produce media that apparently anticipate the continued development of the embryo.

It has for some time been generally supposed that organisms are mechanisms and that, since mechanisms work in accordance with physical and chemical laws, organisms must also do so.

The organization of the machine’s parts is not a resultant of the operation of physical and chemical laws … a machine is (developed) to achieve. 

One thing obvious about mechanisms is that each one of them has acquired its organization by reference to some aim or goal or purpose that is to be achieved by it.

…we cannot, through the mere physical and chemical study of even simple machines, such as manual tools, tell what the tool is for.

It is because ink blobs do not have a physical or chemical affinity for paper in the particular shape of language symbols, and so do not arrive upon pages in these shapes through merely random equilibrations of forces, that the ink-blotted pages conveying this present message can convey this present message. And it is because the items in a DNA chain do not have to be arranged (chemically) in the manner in which they are that it can function  as the medium for a message.

…the base sequence in a DNA molecule is and must be extraneous to the chemical forces at work in the DNA molecule.

From microscopic one-celled plants, able to do very little more than to provide for their own sustenance and to reproduce, to minute animals, sensitive as individuals to their surroundings and able to learn very rudimentary sustaining habits, to more complex animals, able to do many more things, to higher mammals, and final ty man, who is able to achieve so many things that frequently supposes himself to be a god able to achieve all things – this evolutionary history is a panorama of meaningful achievement of almost breathtaking proportions.

********    And when one considers, in the face of the staggering number of merely chemical possibilities open to DNA, that so many meaningful combinations have come into existence and that these have been oriented in the direction of the achievement of more and more meaning (even when change in this direction did not always relate to the necessities of survival), it is difficult to avoid the notions that some sort of gradient of meaning is operative in evolution in addition to purely accidental mutation and plain natural selection and that this gradient somehow evokes ever more meaningful organizations (ie.e boundary conditions) of matter.

Our modern assumptions that inanimate nature moves in teh direction of an equilibration of forces actually substitutes a new sort of “end” in nature for the old “ends.”

…they… require us to make use of the notion of a “final cause,” since they depend “upon the principle of fitness.”

…we espouse such a principle in modern physics, not because we see its logical entailment in the concepts of matter or energy, but rather because we believe – contrary to the ancients – that physical events do move in this direction. We “believe” this rather than “prove” it from careful observation…

We must assume an equation before we are able to determine the values of any of the variables involved. We thus have no basis for the measurement of any “forces” – independent of the use of this principle – and their supposed balance is therefore assumed, or defined, by this principle. The principle itself is certainly never proved.

The dimension of success of failure is, or course, an emergent feature added to the framework of what goes on at the physical level.

(1) the boundary conditions, which must consist of principles other than those of the material they bound, would in this view acquire these new principles through a creative reorganization of the DNA chain of an existing organism in response to the gradient of deepening meaning; and (2) we should no longer be faced with the hopeless task of attempting to explain sentience (an obvious characteristic of life, at least in thigh animals) in terms  belonging to the insentient. Sentience would no be understood to be a structural feature of higher boundary principles of organization and operation, rooted in and dependent for its existence upon a lower, insentient level, to be sure, but added to those principles which structure that lower, insentient level –

We can now understand scientific inquiry to be a thrust of our mind toward a more and more meaningful integration of clues.

…man’s whole cultural framework, including his symbols, his language arts, his fine arts, his rites, his celebrations, and his religions, constitutes a vast complex of efforts – on the whole, successful – at achieving every kind of meaning.

We might justifiably claim, therefore, that everything we know is full of meaning, is not absurd at all, although we can sometimes fal to grasp these meanings and fall into absurdities.

The religious hypothesis, if it does indeed hold that the world is meaningful rather than absurd, is therefore a viable hypothesis for us.

It is as impossible to be religious without having a  religion as it is to speak without having a language.

…Religious meaning… is a transnatural integration of incompatible clues and is achieved through our dwelling in various rituals and ceremonies informed by myths. These must, of course, be specific rites and myths – not just rites and myths in general. There are no such things. Religion “in general” is thus not religion, just as language “in general” is not language. To be religious we must have a religion.

…what happens when we become converted is that we see at some point that the particular party or religion or epistemology ro world view (or even scientific theory) in front of us holds possibilities for the attainment of richer meanings than the one we have been getting along with. At that moment, we are converted.

*********  …modern science cannot properly be understood to tell us that the world is meaningless and pointless, that it is absurd. The supposition that it is absurd is a modern myth, created imaginatively from the clues produced by a profound misunderstanding of what science and knowledge are and what they require, a misunderstanding spawned by positivistic leftovers in our thinking and by allegiance to the false ideal of objectivity from which we have been unable to shake ourselves quite free.

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Chapter 12:  Mutual Authority

…a free society is regarded as one that does not engage, on principle, in attempting to control what people find meaningful, and a totalitarian society is regarded as one that does, on principle, attempt such control.

The free society was therefore sometimes described as the “open” society – notably by Sir Karl Popper – as against the “closed” one espoused by the totalitarians. However, as apologists for the totalitarians rightfully pointed out, our free societies were by no means so open as this theory maintained.

…a free society rests upon a traditional framework of a certain sort; and, in their mistaken notion that a free society is an open one, they threw out the baby with the bathwater.

A wholly open society would be a wholly vacuous one – one which could never actually exist, since it could never have any reason for existing.

…modern science was founded on a violent rejection of all authority.

The acceptance of scientific statements by laymen is really based, not on their own observations, bu ton the authority that laymen acknowledge scientists to have in their special field; and this is true to nearly the same extent of scientists using results of sciences other than their own: they do not feel called upon, or even competent, to test these results themselves. Scientists must rely heavily for their facts on the authority they acknowledge their fellow scientists to have.

There are at least two other principles that also enter into scientific judgments… systematic importance and the intrinsic interest of the subject matter.

These judgments are tacit judgments, therefore, and always personal. But they are not whimsical. The personal taste in accordance with which they are made leans heavily upon a traditional taste acquired by the scientist in his acculturation to the community of scientists he has succeeded in joining.

…all our knowledge of the external world actually rests on tacitly accepted metaphysical grounds.

But a true description of present scientific procedure implies no justification of it. However, if one trusts, as I do, that the metaphysical beliefs of scientists necessarily assure discipline and foster originality in science, one must declare these beliefs to be true. And i do.

…the principle of mutual control consists, in the present case, of the simple fact that scientists keep watch over one another. Each scientist is both subject to criticism by all other scientists and encouraged by their appreciation of him.

… their personal fields will form chains of overlapping neighborhoods extending over the entire range of science.

The uncertainty and transiency of science have been emphasized and exaggerated for this purpose. Yet all this is beside the point. The affirmation of a probable statement includes a judgment no less personal and no less directed by universal internet than an affirmation of its certainty would include. Any conclusion, whether given as a surmise or claimed as a certainty, represents a commitment of the person who arrives at it.

“Acceptance” is not equivalent to “truth.” To claim validity for a statement merely declares that it ought to be accepted by everyone.  

The affirmation of scientific truth has an obligatory character; in this it is like all other valuations that are declared universal by our own respect for them.

It is a society in which men, being engaged in various activities whose ends are considered worthy of respect, are allowed the freedom to pursue these ends.

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Chapter 13:  The Free Society

Economic ends are thus not spiritual or ideal ends like truth, justice, beauty – ends that can be shared by people (in fact, that can hardly exist at all unless they are shared) and are not used up in their enjoyment.

We have inherent this principle governing the use of individualistic freedoms from the great Utilitarians of our past. They linked it to the idea that the pursuit of a good society is the same as the pursuit of the greatest happiness of the greatest number and that freedom in the sense we are discussing here is a necessary condition for the effective existence of this pursuit.

At its base, however, this is an individualistic, self-assertive conception of freedom and, because this is what it is at bottom, it unfortunately can be used – and has been used – to justify all kinds of especially objectionable and even destructive behavior. The worst kinds of exploitation – of the poor, of children, of women, even the keeping of slaves – have been practiced in its name.

A free society must exist within the context of a tradition that provides a framework within which members of the society may make free contributions to the tasks involved in that society.

The mental activities cultivated by various members of the writing profession – poets, journalists, philosophers, novelists, preachers, historians, economists – are perhaps the most decisive in shaping public affairs and sealing the fate of society.

This same logic can also justify the oligarchic system we have just seen to be involved in the free society, for it shows that the social tasks we have been discussing –science, law, art, etc – can be achieved only by independent mutual adjustments. They are, in a word, polycentric tasks. They can reach a solution only if they are worked at from many centers, free to interact continually with one another in the formation of a system of mutual adjustments.

Truth is the highest object or intention in science – the greatest standard motivation. In political persuasion the highest standard of motivation, perhaps, is what is right or fair or just in a distributive sense; but this can never be separated from the motive of interest, nor this, in turn, from the motive of power.

What can be agreed up on as fair or just by the participants  in a society must become what settles political problems justly there. …

Justice is always a practical or political problem, not a theoretical one.

We must somehow learn to understand and so to tolerate – not destroy – the free society. It is the only political engine yet devised that frees us to move in the direction of continually richer and fuller meanings, i.e., to expand limitlessly the firmament of values under which we dwell and which alone makes the brief span of our mortal existence truly meaningful for us through our pursuit of all those things that bear up on eternity.