The Projects of Michael Polanyi and Charles Taylor

This essay contends that Polanyi's groundbreaking effort to formulate a more adequate understanding of scientific knowing by acknowledging its practice of operating on the basis of shared assumptions bears striking parallels to Taylor's subsequent efforts to disclose the cultural assumptions sustaining our sense of identity. Both projects had to uncover normally ignored cultural values and practices sustaining scientific knowing and our identities as moral beings. Given this connection, students of Polanyi would be well-served to explore Taylor's works in order to develop further implications of Polanyi's thought. Given Taylor's later exploration of belief in a secular era motived by his Catholic faith, he offers additional examples of developing Polanyi's thinking for students exploring theological questions.