Gadamer, Polanyi and relativism (A recent presentation)

Michael Dummet (plagiarising Kant) calls it “the scandal of philosophy,” that philosophy has no systematic methodology, while Richard Bernstein says the following:

Hovering in the background of this pursuit [of turning philosophy into a rigorous science] is what might be called ‘the Cartesian Anxiety’—the fear or apprehension that if there are no … basic constraints, no foundations, no determinate ‘rules of the game’, then we are confronted with intellectual and moral chaos where anything goes. 

Today I want to consider two thinkers who have overcome their Cartesian anxiety, but who emphatically do not believe that anything goes. The question I am working on in my doctoral studies is whether they are successful in holding on to a sensible notion of truth without either falling backwards into Cartesian neurosis or tripping over their own feet into the relativist puddle.

It is an interesting accident of history that in the space of a couple of years in the mid 20th century, two of the most significant critiques of the Enlightenment dream of certain knowledge and neutral objectivity were published. Michael Polanyi’s Personal Knowledge in 1958 and Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method in 1960. Yet apparently neither author was significantly influenced by the other.

For Polanyi, once one of the world’s leading physical chemists, the focus of his attention is the knowledge that comes from the natural sciences, while for Gadamer the project is about human understanding, the object of which ranges from history and texts to art and music.

Today I will explore some parallels between Polanyi’s epistemology and Gadamerian hermeneutics, focussing particularly on aspects relevant to the charges of relativism levelled against them.


My own interest in these authors has been sparked because while the objects of their work are distinct, I believe that their epistemic approach is similar, both describing remarkably comparable processes that lead to an understanding of knowledge that goes beyond their different realms. While protesting against objectivism and the notion that knowledge or understanding is the outcome of a neutral method, both also rejected subjectivist, sceptical and relativist implications of their work, all of which accept a rationalist ideal for knowledge but with differing degrees of optimism or pessimism about its success. What makes Polanyi and Gadamer alike and radical, is not that they simply reject the extremes of this spectrum, but rather, they reject the entire paradigm of knowledge implied in such descriptions. Both offer another paradigm that sees subjectivity and objectivity, not as competing poles but as mutually reinforcing qualities of knowledge, and, they hold, without such a view there can be no knowledge.

So, both thinkers maintain that it is possible to talk of truth without falling into the Enlightenment trap that binds truth to an ideal of certainty and detached objectivity. In the sense that both reject the possibility of an Archimedean point which is unmediated by tradition, and unaffected by personal beliefs, they are anti-objectivist. But both stand against relativism and subjectivism by holding that, while certainty is a chimera, we can nevertheless talk of truth and make universal truth claims. In order to escape from what Gadamer calls the “entanglement in traditional epistemology” both dedicate themselves to the task of articulating a description of the actual practice of human understanding or knowledge production.

For Gadamer true understanding is neither subjective nor objective and nor can it ever be final. It is not merely subjective because it is in some sense true. “Meanings cannot be understood in an arbitrary way” he says. And he talks of the danger of failing “to hear what the other person is really saying” or of “ignoring as consistently and stubbornly as possible the actual meaning of the text…” “The important thing”, he says, “is to be aware of one’s own bias, so that the text can present itself in all its otherness and thus assert its own truth against one’s own fore-meanings.” Despite this ideal though, the accusation of relativism is summed up by E.D. Hirsch who says:

If we cannot enunciate a principle for distinguishing between an interpretation that is valid and one that is not, there is little point in writing books about texts or about hermeneutic theory.

Now listen to Polanyi who, although he uses the term ‘objective’, does so in a limited sense. He says,

Comprehension is neither an arbitrary act nor a passive experience, but a responsible act claiming universal validity. Such a knowledge is indeed objective in the sense of establishing contact with a hidden reality; … It seems reasonable to describe this fusion of the personal and the objective as Personal Knowledge.

While Polanyi is happy to talk of ‘knowledge’ and objectivity, he does so in this radically qualified sense of personal knowledge.

So, scientific discovery for Polanyi, or understanding for Gadamer, is to arrive at knowledge of universal truth. But this knowledge cannot be theorised adequately using the model that separates a knowing and impersonal subject from the object of knowledge, and that imagines there are methodical guarantees of success. For both authors, truth is to be had but not by accepting the Enlightenment paradigm. And for both, knowledge is a provisional interpretation, always in the making and which might be wrong. Whether we talk of Newton and Einstein or Romeo and Juliet some interpretations are simply better than others. But conviction and not certainty is the appropriate description of beliefs that no longer lie on a spectrum between certainty and scepticism.
 
It is clear by now why both Gadamer and Polanyi lay themselves open to charges of relativism. Both reject objectivism, both recognise that reason is at least partially historically and culturally constituted, both reject the possibility of a rule-based method for guaranteeing truth and both recognise the provisionality of all knowledge.

Eduardo Echeverria criticises Polanyi’s epistemology arguing that he fails to clarify the link between epistemic justification on the one hand and truth on the other. Polanyi is an epistemic relativist according to Echeverria because Polanyi holds that “justified belief is dependent on epistemic context.” But Polanyi is also a realist, holding that “truth as a reality is distinguishable from [what] one is justified in holding to be true.” “In short,” says Echeverria,

implied in [Polanyi’s] reflections on truth is the doctrine of verification-transcendent truth, which asserts that propositions have truth value independent of our capacity to know what warrants our acceptance of them.

Struan Jacobs makes the point that it is not sufficient for authors like Polanyi (and, I would add, Gadamer) to simply assert their belief in a universal truth. Jacobs recognises that "Polanyi is not a relativist as regards the ideal of truth." But Polanyi also holds that there can be a logical gap between belief systems saying that scientists from different schools, “think differently, speak a different language, live in a different world.” This view, later popularised by Thomas Kuhn, and known as the incommensurability thesis, results in relativism according to Jacobs. If Polanyi is to avoid the charge of cognitive relativism, he needs to provide “good reasons for cognitive choices.” That is, according to Jacobs’ reading, Polanyi’s choice between belief systems is not founded on reasons. So, when seen from the perspective of traditional expectations about knowledge, it seems that Polanyi’s fallibilist position is akin to cognitive relativism, although I question whether Polanyi’s view is not more nuanced than Jacobs’ description.

But perhaps the so-called problem of relativism is a red herring. What if the whole debate about relativism only made sense within an absolutist framework? And what if it could be shown (although by its nature, no absolute proof could be expected) that an absolutist framework is an idea that only exists parasitically on the negation of human finitude? This is the argument of Jean Grondin, in his defence of philosophical hermeneutics against the charge of relativism. In an evocative phrase, he says, “the claim to infinity remains the daughter of finitude.”

Grondin defines absolute relativism as “the doctrine that all opinions on a subject are equally good” and then he argues that Gadamer is not an absolute relativist because “there are always reasons” for choosing one opinion over another. Paraphrasing Rorty, Grondin says, “the philosophers one terms relativists are simply those who estimate that these reasons are less algorithmic than many rationalists imagine.” So, says Grondin, the charge of relativism, “is hardly more than a conceptual bugaboo constructed by those who possess a foundational conception of what truth or interpretation should be like.”

If I understand the argument correctly, the gist is that the question of relativism looks entirely different depending on which side of the fence one is sitting. From the absolutist position, the charge of relativism is to accuse the other of living in a world where there is no truth or at least no knowledge of it. But from the other side, the likes of Gadamer and Polanyi see this charge as naïve because it is dependent not just on impossible expectations of human knowledge but on an incoherent view. They hold that all knowledge is an intrinsically human production and delimited by human historicity and finitude, but that there are, nevertheless, better and worse reasons, some explicit, some tacit, for holding to what we believe to be true. If this is relativism of a sort, so be it, but it is not arbitrary. At which point we imagine the absolutist might reveal their own inability to understand the hermeneutic perspective, by saying, ‘Prove to me that one reason is better than another. How can you know?’ But to ask for proof is, of course, to remain wedded to a model of human knowing that denies the reality of our being-in-the-world and the universality of interpretation.

Brice Wachterhauser sums up Gadamer’s position in a way that could equally apply to Polanyi. He says,

Human knowing always depends on language and history, on a context of commitments and practices to show the thing in itself in a certain way … we never can see the whole truth but only a partial truth or a perspective but a truth about the thing itself nevertheless.

Let’s turn briefly now to how Gadamer and Polanyi describe the intrinsic human element in all knowing and the sense in which they are redefining the concept of knowledge by including a tacit human component that can never be exhaustively defined and which includes a role for authority and tradition.
 
Polanyi highlights the impossibility of formalising the rules of scientific discovery and emphasises the personal agency, commitment and creativity of the scientist. For example:

Desisting henceforth from the vain pursuit of a formalized scientific method, commitment accepts in its place the person of the scientist as the agent responsible for conducting and accrediting scientific discoveries. The scientist’s procedure is of course methodical. But his methods are but the maxims of an art which he applies in his own original way to the problem of his own choice.

And for his part, while Gadamer is happy to talk loosely of procedure and “methodologically conscious understanding”, he, like Polanyi, is firmly against a trust in method to guarantee truth. He talks of the task of hermeneutics in the following terms:

Ultimately, it has always been known that the possibilities of rational proof and instruction do not fully exhaust the sphere of knowledge. … We… must laboriously make our way back into this tradition by first showing the difficulties that result from the application of the modern concept of method to the human sciences. Let us therefore consider how this tradition became so impoverished and how the human sciences’ claim to know something true came to be measured by a standard foreign to it.

For Gadamer, the search for understanding is couched in terms of the ubiquitous nature of our mostly unconscious prejudgments or prejudices--the word is the same in German. According to him, the prejudice against prejudice was the downfall of Enlightenment epistemology and in contrast hermeneutics is based on the doctrine that prejudgments are an essential condition of understanding. In an oft-quoted passage he says:

Long before we understand ourselves through the process of self-examination, we understand ourselves in a self-evident way in the family, society, and state in which we live. … The self-awareness of the individual is only a flickering in the closed circuits of historical life. That is why the prejudgments of the individual, far more than his judgments, constitute the historical reality of his being.

If such prejudgments are an essential part of the understanding process and if the hope of objectivity or final knowledge is in fact a blind alley, then what he calls the “fundamental epistemological question” concerns the legitimacy of prejudgments. To quote Gadamer, the question is:

What distinguishes legitimate prejudices from the countless others, which it is the undeniable task of critical reason to overcome?

Polanyi too is in no doubt about the naivete of a program of Cartesian doubt that aims to eliminate preconceived opinions. He says:

While we can reduce the sum of our conscious acceptances to varying degrees, and even to nil, by reducing ourselves to a state of stupor, any given range of awareness seems to involve a correspondingly extensive set of a-critically accepted beliefs.

While Gadamer’s discussion is in terms of the role of prejudice and of tradition, the conceptual link with Polanyi becomes clearer when Gadamer talks of the sort of authority that can be a valid source of truth. He says:

…authority cannot actually be bestowed but is earned… It rests on acknowledgment and hence on an act of reason itself which, aware of its own limitations, trusts to the better insight of others. … The prejudgments that [the teacher, the superior, the expert] implant are legitimized by the person who presents them. But in this way they become prejudgments not just in favor of a person but a content, since they effect the same disposition to believe something that can be brought about in other ways—e.g., by good reasons.

Now listen to Polanyi talking about authority and tradition in science. He says:

… the knowledge comprised by science is not known to any single person. Indeed, nobody knows more than a tiny fragment of science well enough to judge its validity and value at first hand. For the rest he has to rely on views accepted at second hand on the authority of a community of people accredited as scientists.

We have seen that for Gadamer understanding is entrenched in and presupposes a host of unexamined assumptions or beliefs. We ride a bicycle or read Dostoevsky without a self-conscious attempt to make our presuppositions explicit. The object of our understanding is tacitly intelligible to us, and understanding is just this tacit ability to make sense of the world. It is not something mastered by method or rules, but acquired in practice as we listen and trust others doing the same.

For those who know Polanyi you will have detected my deliberate use of the word ‘tacit’ to describe Gadamer’s hermeneutics. Much of Polanyi’s work is based on his discussion of tacit knowledge summed up in his catch phrase, “we know more than we can tell.” He goes to great lengths to show that such knowledge is ubiquitous and has radical implications for epistemology. He says:

..suppose that tacit thought forms an indispensable part of all knowledge, then the ideal of eliminating all personal elements of knowledge would, in effect, aim at the destruction of all knowledge. The ideal of exact science would turn out to be fundamentally misleading and possibly a source of devastating fallacies.

In both these authors we have seen a turning away from that ideal. But in doing so they do not merely move away from the certainty pole towards scepticism or relativism: they redefine knowledge in a way that is fallibilist but is not open to relativist critiques, based as they are on foundationalist assumptions.

But this is not to say that either author has successfully offered a solution to the problem of the gap between justified belief and truth. In the case of Polanyi, Echeverria’s way forward, is to suggest a transcendental argument. He says “we must resist defending epistemological realism apart from and independently of a metaphysical account of reality.” And so, he continues, the question to be asked is, “what must reality, including I, as a knower, be like in order that human knowledge be intelligible at all?” He cites Thomas Nagel’s naturalist suggestion of “an unheard-of-property of the natural order” that relates us to the world, but Echeverria goes further in suggesting a theological solution. Either way, the point is that the relationship of knower to the world is of such a nature that fallible knowledge is possible although the details of that relationship are stubbornly resistant to philosophical and scientific investigation. But now is not the time to enter into that mind field.