Animal Farm

Polanyi begins his book with an introduction into objectivity and personal knowledge. What I think might be most important here are his examples, which bring home what he wants to say about how knowing functions. His position, as stated, is that “any attempt rigorously to eliminate our human perspective from our picture of the world must lead to absurdity.” He flushes this out first be a brief discussion of quantum vs. physical mechanics and peppers it with some historical examples and some mathematical discussions of axioms and maxims. His strongest examples, however, follow in a section on probability. Here he claims that statements of probability don’t necessarily reflect real happenings, but only deal with mathematical models of what is possible.

To demonstrate this he uses the example of a series of white pebbles spread over a train station yard. Suppose that the pebbles spell out “Welcome to Wales, by British Railways” on the lawn. We would be right to assume that a stationmaster has spelled these words, rather than to think that natural occurrences have caused them to happen. He goes on to say that suppose that in the same yard, over 1000 years, the pebbles get dispersed and scatted so that they no longer spell any words. Here we might assume the lack of a station master. However in both cases the probability of the pebbles being in the spots they are in is exactly the same. In a given sized field, with a set amount of stones, either pattern would be equally likely to have arisen from chance. Without the conventions of language to decide that there is a seeming order to the earlier arrangement of pebbles we would not expect one outcome over the other. So probability cannot account for what actually has happened, but can only give us statistical guidelines as to what may happen, given certain parameters. Accounting for what actually happened is acutely a function of personal knowledge.

In another example he says “suppose you walked into a store and were informed that you were the 500,000^th customer.” You would speak about how improbable that was, and how unlikely it might be to occur to you. But no one would think it improbable to be the 522,796^th customer. This is because people attach significance to round numbers, and hence see 500,000 being highly improbable even though from a probability standpoint it is more probable to be the 500,000^th customer than the 522,796^th customer.

Hence in both cases the fact that we (the subjective knower) attach meaning to the events is what gives them their meaning. While still based on probability, the meaning is yet a derived function of the subjective knower, not an objective function of probability factors. In fact a thing which is less probable might be forgotten as common, while a more probable event might be praised as wildly improbable.

As an aside, I can’t help but here to think that this has a great deal of applicability to Hume’s famous maxim about miracles being highly improbable events. Hume argues that for a given occurrence X, we may have thousands of times where a certain outcome occurs. For instance, given a dead body (X) we have thousands of occurrences of the dead staying dead. So therefore given the claim that a dead body has risen, we should disbelieve it based on the improbability of such a thing. Hume argues t he the high improbability of that happening derails considering it an option. This, however, is problematic, since it uses probability as a function not of subjective knowledge, but of objective fact which (it would seem) he has literally no real access to. So Hume has then assumed what Polanyi warned us against, to think that probability makes a difference in real world events. What is interesting here is how this will relate to the positive gathering of knowledge, rather than the simple deconstruction of ideas. More on this topic later.