Purpose, Meaning and the Categories of Knowing

Abstract

Polanyi refers in Personal Knowledge to ‘the purposive tension from which no fully awake animal is free’, and goes on to suggest that this tension underlies a two-stage process of problem solving: first perplexity, then activity in doing and perceiving, which dispels the perplexity (PK, 120). This leads to an analysis of the process of problem solving, especially in the area of scientific and mathematical discovery. Polanyi is at his most impressive when he is discussing the ways in which a scientist thinks and works, and he draws on an immense field of reference. There is nothing that I can add directly to what he says here. None the less I think it may be useful to extend his discussion in some respects within a wider framework.