English (United Kingdom)

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/featured_content/oa?rat=en

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/highlighted_journal/

Zendy Plus

Presents the access of premium content as premium feature

Premium Content

Presents the keyphrase highlighting as premium feature

Keyphrase Highlighting

Presents the summarisation as premium feature

Summarisation

Insights

Presents the pdf analysis as premium feature

PDF Analysis

Presents the zaia usage as premium feature

ZAIA

Zendy Tools

Zendy Open

Illumination is a prominent feature of the phenomenon of discovery that is at the heart of Polanyi’s Personal Knowledge. Illumination is prominent as well in Louis Groarke’s “Aristotelian induction” and C. S. Peirce’s abduction. This study pursues the question of whether the term has similar meaning across these three contexts. Close examination of what is said about illumination in each of them shows that Groarke assigns an epistemological autonomy to illumination that is recognized by neither Polanyi nor Peirce. Further, Polanyi and Peirce concur in the role assigned to verification and thereby in the importance of temporality and a community of inquiry. Michael Polanyi in Personal Knowledge strikingly and at length dwells on the “illumination” that is for him an essential aspect and the most dramatic moment in discovery. Speaking enthusiastically from personal experience, he affirms that illumination “is the plunge by which we gain a foothold at another shore of reality.” The further one proceeds into Personal Knowledge, the clearer it becomes why Polanyi begins the book with “The Lesson of the Copernican Revolution” and then acclaims Ernst Mach’s “super-Copernican vision” which was itself a prefiguring of “the great theoretic vision of Einstein” (PK, 12). Such seeing in an unprecedented fashion, whether it belong to a great mind on the frontiers of knowledge or to an ordinary individual coming Tradition & Discovery: The Journal of the Polanyi Society 42:3 43 to understand something in the world, plays a central role in Polanyi’s philosophical anthropology. Readers familiar with Polanyi recognize that his celebration of illumination is married to preoccupation with testing and verification. This is to be expected from a world-class scientist. The question that presents itself is whether, in the midst of this emphasis on testing and verification, there is in Polanyi’s illumination an autonomous epistemological authority. Within Polanyi’s account, is there any sense in which illumination stands alone? In a recent book, the Canadian philosopher Louis Groarke offers a lengthy discussion of epistemologically autonomous illumination under the heading of “Aristotelian induction.” Groarke explains: On the traditional Aristotelian account, induction is not a matter of proof but of discernment. We observe this or that instance and come to see the underlying principle at work. We come to this realization, not through discursive proof, but through epagoge, through the sudden grasping of a necessary insight. We do not prove through tabulation; we recognize, in a flash of illumination, what must always be the case (366-67). Elsewhere, he adds, “Through a primitive but powerful movement of illumination, the mind is able to hit on concepts, universal claims, and definitions describing the world. This inductive process operates by means of the intellectual faculty of nous, which is always true and even more infallible than scientific demonstration” (198). We thereby “discover order in the world...through the kind of creative inductive insight Aristotle champions” (428). Central to Groarke’s account is the conviction that “[i]nduction has epistemological authority in its own right” (196). Nothing is so certain as the insight or illumination it affords. Even if the discerned principle were subsequently to be demonstrated through empirical inquiry, nothing vital has been added. The illumination issuing from Aristotelian induction is epistemologically autonomous. Can the same be said for the illumination that is so important to Polanyi? Groarke vehemently distinguishes Aristotelian induction from the process of abduction that he quite rightly affiliates with C. S. Peirce. For Groarke, Peirce’s abduction amounts to “brainstorming,” which for him represents faux illumination (321 ff.). As part of an extended critique of Bernard Lonergan, Groarke states, We might distinguish traditional and modern theories of intuitive reasoning, what I will call “the inductive view” and “the brainstorming view.” On the inductive view, we inspect the physical evidence

Polanyi’s “Illumination:” Aristotelian Induction or Peircean Abduction?