Bradie on Polanyi on the Meno Paradox

An argument of Michael Polanyi ([3], pp. 21-24) for the necessity of "tacit knowledge," based upon the paradox of the Meno, is refuted correctly by Michael Bradie [1] who observes that the paradox, in Polanyi's version, rests on the false premise that "if you know what you are looking for, there is no problem." Bradie's refutation is based on an example, but he does not explain how the example works or why Polanyi's premise is generally fallacious. It is the purpose of this note to describe some classes of conditions under which Polanyi's premise will be false. I have given the argument less formally elsewhere ([4] and [5]), but will try to make it more precise here. Polanyi's thesis ([3], p. 4) is that "we can know more than we can tell." In part, he supports the thesis by citing empirical phenomena that appear to imply the existence of tacit knowledge: that we can recognize faces without knowing how we do it ([3], pp. 4-7); that a human subject, in psychological experiments, can acquire certain conditioned responses without awareness of the stimulus that is being conditioned ([3], pp. 7-10); that we can only understand the behavior of another person by an unanalyzed empathetic process ([3], pp. 16-17); that when we attend repeatedly to the pronunciation of a word (i.e., to the tacit knowledge whereby we recognize it), it loses its meaning ([3], p. 18). He follows these examples by a general argument ([3], pp. 20-21): "in order that we may formalize the relations that constitute a comprehensive entity ... this entity ... must be first identified informally by tacit knowing." Finally ([3], pp. 21-23), he argues that "the Meno shows conclusively that if all knowledge is explicit, i.e., capable of being clearly stated, then we cannot know a problem or look for its solution. And the Meno also shows, therefore, that if problems nevertheless exist, and discoveries can be made by solving them, we can know things, and important things, that we cannot tell."