Philosophia Christi

Vol. 14, No. 1 © 2012

Michael Polanyi and Alvin Plantinga

Help from Beyond the Walls

Esther L. Meek
Department of Biblical Studies, Christian Ministry, and Philosophy
Geneva College
Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania

The purpose of this essay is to acquaint a wider philosophical audience

with key features of Michael Polanyi’s epistemology and to commend this
epistemological approach.1 A greater percentage of thoughtful Christian be-
lievers and philosophers know the work of Alvin Plantinga than that of Po-
lanyi. In comparing the two on a handful of defining features, I will assume
the reader’s familiarity with Plantinga, and I will expound Polanyi’s insights.
In showing how Polanyi’s stance compares to Plantinga’s at certain touch
points, I hope I may open this rich lode of Polanyian epistemology for more
people to tap into in our thoughtful engagement of the world and of life.
I also assume that Plantinga’s assumptions share much in common with
the wider analytic philosophical tradition, even as he so creatively has chal-
lenged it. So this essay will also display how Polanyian epistemology abuts
that wider tradition.2 And just as some in the analytic tradition draw on the
phenomenological tradition as a fruitful, creative source of insight outside
its walls, or just as people find in the later Wittgenstein a creative corrective
that challenges the most fundamental assumptions of the tradition, we may
also expect Polanyian epistemology (which compares favorably to both3) to
lend insights that bring into relief assumptions which need not be treated as
Abstract: This essay introduces Michael Polanyi’s work through contrasting his innovative
epistemology of subsidiary-focal integration with key distinctives of Christian analytic phi-
losopher Alvin Plantinga. Polanyi’s contrasting proposals helpfully bring to light shaping as-
sumptions of the analytic tradition, contributing creatively to a larger common agenda. Polanyi
disputes the unexamined assumption that the simplest epistemic experience is a focally appre-
hended “find-myself-believing” that is explicitly and propositionally expressed. I also contrast
the two regarding infallibilism, foundationalism, externalism, justification, epistemic duty, cre-
ative antirealism, and ways of tapping Calvin’s notion of the sensus divinitatis.
1. This paper was presented at the meeting of the Evangelical Philosophical Society,
November 18, 2010, Atlanta, Georgia. The meeting solicited papers connected with Alvin
Plantinga’s thought, in honor of his retirement and of his plenary talk.
2. I also associate analytic philosophy with some overarching features that characterize the
Western philosophical tradition. In particular, the Western tradition has privileged knowledge as
rationally supported propositions, with certainty as a shaping aspiration.
3. In brief, Polanyi’s account of subsidiary knowledge, which this essay will explain, makes
better sense of the matters that ordinary language philosophy and phenomenology are concerned
58 Philosophia Christi

sacrosanct, and that offer lines of thought that contribute creatively to our
common agenda to understand the world, life, ourselves, and God.
The two epistemologies differ in fundamental ways. I will describe the
way Polanyi envisions the knowledge they both labor to understand. I will
also compare the two with regard to a cluster of commitments characteristic
of or at issue in the analytic tradition: infallibilism, foundationalism, exter-
nalism, justification, epistemic duty, creative antirealism, and ways of tap-
ping Calvin’s notion of the sensus divinitatis.
I have great respect for Plantinga’s superior work, for its significant and
influential contribution within the traditional analytic discussion of knowl-
edge, and for its value as a resource beyond it. But I will show that Polanyi’s
epistemology helpfully challenges tacitly held definitive parameters of ana-
lytic philosophy. There are a few points of accord between Plantinga’s and
Polanyi’s projects: the rejection of classical foundationalism, a kind of sym-
pathy with regard to realism, and an account of knowing that lends itself to
embracing the idea of the sensus. But it will be seen, as I sketch Polanyi’s
approach, that the shape of, or rationale for, these commonalities differ. The
touch points nevertheless encourage me to suggest that Polanyian insights
can be seen to forward deeper Plantingan commitments, by opening a door
to a wider, richer epistemological vision. Having been trained professionally
in it, I view the analytic tradition as a city enclosed and somewhat cut off
by the walls of its defining commitments. Yet within and without are people
striving for a common purpose. Those who battle within the walls are often
under siege and need a way out onto the plain, nearer the towns of ordinary
life. The wall must be breached for the sake of the good guys. The banner I
fly reads, “Polanyi helps.”

Introducing Polanyi

It is odd to “introduce” a philosopher who worked half a century ago,

and to commend his work as a fresh way forward at the current time. But
representations of Polanyi’s claims over the last decades have been inac-
curate and dismissive. The mainline philosophical discussion generally by-
passed his work.4 In part, this is due to the fact that he offered so radical a
challenge to the prevailing epistemic tradition. The shift in milieu since that
to address. Additionally, Polanyi offers the vantage point of an expert connection to working
science.
4. There are, however, at least three widely known thinkers—T. S. Kuhn, Alasdair
MacIntyre, and Charles Taylor—whose work shows the influence of time spent with Polanyi.
Polanyi’s influence on them is not generally acknowledged, nor, it may be argued, has Polanyi’s
epistemology been wholly represented in their thought (John Apczynski, “The Relevance of
Personal Knowledge: Reflections on the Practices of Some Contemporary Philosophers,” paper
presented at the Polanyi Society’s “Personal Knowledge at Fifty” conference, Loyola University,
Chicago, June 2008). Polanyi himself expressed concern about Kuhn’s appropriation and
Esther L. Meek 59

time means that the twenty-first century may better hear and appropriate his
insights.
Michael Polanyi, a Hungarian scientist of Jewish descent, was born in
1889 in Budapest, and died in 1976 in England.5 He began his career as a
productive and promising scientist, publishing hundreds of scientific papers,
drawing the attention and approval of Albert Einstein, making some notable
discoveries that led to X-ray technology, a lifelong member of the presti-
gious Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin. The necessity of flight from Hitler’s
growing control pressed Polanyi to respond to a repeated request to join the
faculty at Manchester University. While there, Polanyi’s interest shifted from
science to economics and political theory, and thence to philosophy: the uni-
versity magnanimously created new chairs in these areas to accommodate
him. The shift was prompted by Polanyi’s concern to challenge the rising
popularity of socialized science. Eventually Polanyi became convinced that
the free practice on which science depends could only be preserved through
a substantially revised epistemology. He felt that the Western philosophical
tradition failed to offer an account that accorded truly with scientific prac-
tice. For the entire tradition, held in thrall by a false ideal of certainty and
a false understanding of objectivity, subscribed unquestioningly to the false
presumption that knowledge, to be knowledge, must be explicit—that is,
articulable without remainder in statements that were justified exhaustively
by other explicit statements. Western epistemology did not represent what
scientists do, and if it did, no discovery could ever happen.6
Polanyi is more widely known to have called fresh attention to the role
of tradition and apprenticeship in science and knowledge generally, and to
have lauded tacit knowledge in addition to explicit knowledge. His early
emphasis on faith and commitment, citing Augustine’s credo ut intelligam,
drew the attention of Christian thinkers, especially those longing for some
rapprochement between religion and science (something that was never
Polanyi’s own agenda). Polanyi’s 1951–52 Gifford Lectures, with the expert
collaboration of later-renowned philosopher of history, Marjorie Grene,
misrepresentation of his ideas; this matter has continued to be discussed in the Polanyi Society;
see Tradition and Discovery: The Polanyi Society Periodical 33, no. 2 (2006–7).
5. William Taussig Scott and Martin X. Moleski, SJ, Michael Polanyi: Scientist and
Philosopher (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). A shorter introduction to Polanyi is
Ken Myers, Tacit Knowing, Truthful Knowing: The Life and Thought of Michael Polanyi, Mars
Hill Audio Report #2, http://marshillaudio.org/catalog/reports.asp.
6. Ironically, the Western ideal of knowledge holds scientists in thrall also. Everyone that
has anything to do with science has had it represented to them that the scientific method is what
scientists practice. In actuality, the scientific method under represents the main dynamism driv-
ing knowing—because it is not deemed rational or objective. James Loder calls this the “eikonic
eclipse” because it eclipses the imagination. He also offers this critique of the scientific method
(James E. Loder, The Transforming Moment, 2nd ed. (Colorado Springs, CO: Helmers and
Howard, 1989), chap. 2. Polanyi points out that, nevertheless, in actuality scientists’ work goes
forward even if they are mistaken about how it does so. But it is reasonable to believe that not
being mistaken about it would make for better knowing.
60 Philosophia Christi

became his magnum opus, Personal Knowledge: Toward a Post-Critical

Epistemology.7 But a few accidents of history served to eclipse his work,8
as has an undying commitment to an epistemic paradigm of knowledge
as statements and proofs. Yet Polanyian epistemology offers a stunningly
unique account of how we know, which makes sense of every sort of human
knowing. Polanyi’s central claim is that all knowing is “subsidiary-focal
integration,” which I will proceed to explain. Of it, Grene says both that its
essential insight is not the existence of tacit knowledge, for which Polanyi is
more widely known, so much as “the way that the subsidiary relates to the
focal.” And she says that it is “grounds for a revolution in philosophy”—no
modest claim.9
Although he did not live to address postmodern reactions to modern-
ism, Polanyi’s epistemology offers a positive third alternative a way to move
beyond both modernism and postmodernism.10 The point of this essay is that
his fresh proposal offers the same for epistemology in the analytic tradition.
Western culture continues to need his insights.

Polanyian Epistemology

To begin with, Polanyi argued, Western philosophy has unwaveringly

focused on knowledge in the context of explanation rather in the context
of discovery. In this its consistent response to Plato’s dilemma described in
the Meno, regarding how we can ever come to know, has been to sidestep it
rather than solve it.11 It is only possible to achieve certainty and exactitude in
an epistemic account if we keep the focus on knowledge already attained and

7. Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy, corr. ed.

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).
8. Karl Popper’s Logic of Scientific Discovery and Conjectures and Refutations, as well as
T. S. Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, appeared in the same time frame as Polanyi’s
Personal Knowledge. Popper’s and Kuhn’s works were immediately popular, and remain widely
known, as representing the major alternatives that are familiar to people in the Western tradition.
By contrast, sadly, Polanyi would have been heard (and was so) as Kuhnian conventionalist
or relativist, or as irrationally subjectivist. It takes acknowledgement of Polanyi’s legitimate
critique of the parameters of the tradition, and taking seriously what he says about the practice
of science, to recognize that he offers a more sophisticated and profoundly viable alternative.
9. Marjorie Grene, “Tacit Knowing: Grounds for a Revolution in Philosophy,” Journal of the
British Society for Phenomenology 8 (1977): 164–71.
10. Jerry H. Gill’s The Tacit Mode: Michael Polanyi’s Postmodern Philosophy (New York:
SUNY Press, 2000) makes this case explicitly. My work shows this, also. Esther Lightcap Meek,
Longing to Know: The Philosophy of Knowledge for Ordinary People (Grand Rapids, MI:
Brazos, 2003); Loving to Know: Introducing Covenant Epistemology (Eugene, OR: Cascade,
2011).
11. A shorter entrée to Polanyi’s ideas is “Tacit Knowing,” the first lecture in The Tacit
Dimension (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). Regarding the Meno dilemma, see
also Grene’s introduction to Knowing and Being: Essays by Michael Polanyi, ed. Marjorie
Grene (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969).
Esther L. Meek 61

widely held to be obviously true. This requires an artificially imposed myo-

pia, as I call it in this paper, as do optical illusions, which blocks out factors
on which epistemic achievement ordinarily relies.12 But how does knowing
work in first acts of coming to know? Obviously this is what would matter
to an expert research scientist. Attending to discovery, Polanyi felt, enables
us to understand all knowing, including verification, more truly.13 Not to do
this, he felt, would lead to the end of science.
Polanyi the scientist understood that no first act of knowing could occur
apart from vast reaches of nonexplicit, noninformational, person-responsi-
ble, contributions. Here are some of them:
(1) Moving toward a discovery involves a plunging, groping, imagina-
tive, orientation, from what is more-than-articulable toward what is
not yet known.
(2) It involves from the outset a responsible submission to a wider sci-
entific tradition by means of apprenticeship.
(3) It involves a tacit indwelling of our proposal and of the yet-to-be-
known, to sense inarticulably the bearing of the one on the other—
the way you indwell a map to explore a region.
(4) It involves relying on hunches and clues that by definition cannot be
confirmed at the time we rely on them.
(5) It involves an acritical stance with respect to vast reaches of logi-
cally unspecifiable subsidiary knowledge.
(6) It involves inarticulably sensing and being guided by one’s inarticu-
lable increasing proximity to the solution.
(7) It involves exercising risky responsibility to affirm any truth claim.
(8) It involves exercising intellectual passions to pursue and then de-
fend knowledge.
(9) It takes something distinctively personal, or personed, to hold a
claim as the credo that every claim is.
Thus, knowledge is not, exclusively, articulated propositions; it is responsi-
bly shaped and professed understanding, or insight, in submission to it as a
token of reality.

Subsidiary-Focal Integration

Polanyi identifies a central mechanism of knowing that concretizes all

this: subsidiary-focal integration. The following extended quotation of Po-
lanyi’s identifies this central mechanism and also sets it in the context of
other signature Polanyian claims:
12. Myopia is a metaphor akin to Loder’s eikonic eclipse; see note 5.
13. Polanyi opts to speak of knowing, more than of knowledge, so as to foreground the
activity, and also thereby to merge theoretical and practical knowledge (Tacit Dimension, 7). All
knowing is skilled activity.
62 Philosophia Christi

Skillful knowing and doing is performed by subordinating a set of

particulars, as clues or tools, to the shaping of a skillful achievement,
whether practical or theoretical. We may then be said to be ‘subsidi-
arily aware’ of these particulars within our ‘focal awareness’ of the
coherent entity that we achieve. Clues and tools are things used as
such and not observed in themselves. They are made to function as
extensions of our bodily equipment and this involves a certain change
of our own being. Acts of comprehension are to this extent irrevers-
ible and also non-critical. . . . Such is the personal participation of the
knower in all acts of understanding. . . . Comprehension is neither an
arbitrary act nor a passive experience, but a responsible act claiming
universal validity. Such knowing is indeed objective in the sense of
establishing contact with a hidden reality; a contact that is defined as
the condition for anticipating an indeterminate range of yet unknown
(and perhaps yet inconceivable) true implications. . . . Personal knowl-
edge is an intellectual commitment, and as such inherently hazardous.
Only affirmations that could be false can be said to convey objective
knowledge of this kind.14

Elsewhere he speaks of the “from-to structure” of the subsidiary-focal,15 and

he calls our shaping of subsidiary clues into a focal pattern, “integration”—
“the great and indispensable tacit power by which all knowledge is discov-
ered, and once discovered, is held to be true.”16
Knowing always involves relying on clues to focus on a pattern that we
submit to as a token of reality. It involves two kinds of mutually connected
awareness, subsidiary awareness of the clues within the pattern, and focal
awareness of the pattern. So all knowing is “from-to”: we attend from clues
to pattern. We integrate from subsidiaries to focus—hence, “subsidiary-focal
integration.” Any act of coming to know we can identify a shift in the know-
er’s manner of relating to any particulars she has identified as germane to a
puzzle. We must shift from looking at seemingly unrelated particulars, to, in
the feat of integration, looking from or through them, to apprehend the focal
pattern. Integration is a logical leap, a personal feat, a nonlinear move from
parts to whole that innovatively links hitherto disparate particulars, trans-
forming the meaning and appearance of all it encompasses.
And subsidiary knowledge is not subconscious; and it is only partly un-
conscious. Rather, we are aware of it—we “indwell” it—in its bearing on
the focal pattern. Within the integrative dynamic that links clues to pattern,
the subsidiary is logically unspecifiable, acritically indwelt, but very pres-
ent. The integrative achievement melds subsidiary clues from three sectors:
the world or situation, our body as subsidiarily felt and lived, and layers of

14. Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, vii–viii.

15. Polanyi, Tacit Dimension, xviii.
16. Ibid., 6.
Esther L. Meek 63

normative features, from language to maxims to theoretical frameworks and

authoritative guides.17
As a common example of this all-pervasive phenomenon, think of learn-
ing to read: you move from looking at the script to looking “through” or from
the script. You attend to the joint meaning, the focal pattern, of what are now
clues, the subsidiary. The script has become subsidiary rather than focal.
You are aware of the script subsidiarily as it bears on the focal meaning. You
no longer gawk at the ridiculous-looking word, quidditch; you start rooting
for Gryffindor. Particulars-turned-subsidiary-clues change in appearance and
meaning. Accompanying this shift is the felt sense that it roots the claim in
the felt body sense of the knower and the knower in the world. Polanyi calls
these the phenomenal, semantic, and ontological aspects of subsidiary-focal
integration.18 But to revert to focus on letters disintegrates the pattern.
Subsidiary-focal integration is a freeing, skilled navigation of the world,
as one inhabits one’s bike and unlocks the world in the skilled riding of it.
All coming to know and all sustained understanding, from the simplest per-
ception to the most breathtaking discovery, to theoretical work involving the
greatest precision, or the most critical verification, involves these two “lev-
els” of awareness, subsidiary and focal, dynamically linked. It also requires
responsible, risky commitment, what Polanyi called personal, our manner
of disposing ourselves toward the world. This leads me to talk of truth as
profession.19 In my experience of three decades since finding Polanyi’s work,
his account has made profoundly helpful sense of knowing in every corner
of life.

Epistemic Myopia

Now we can explore a series of comparisons and contrasts between Po-

lanyi’s and Alvin Plantinga’s epistemology. An obvious preliminary one has
to do with the sort of knowing each is concerned to account for. Plantinga is
interested in what seem to him to be obviously not-even-chosen, obviously

17. I have appropriated John Frame’s triad to organize the array of clues that Polanyi
identifies. See John Frame, The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R,
1987. In Longing to Know, Part 3, I call them, the world, the lived body, and the directions. In
Tacit Dimension, 15–16, Polanyi affirmed “the bodily roots of all thought,” noting the kinship
between his own commitment and the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (The Phenomenology of
Perception, trans. Donald Landes (New York: Routledge, 2012)). In my dissertation, Contact
with Reality: An Examination of Realism in the Thought of Michael Polanyi (PhD diss., Temple
University, 1983), I devoted Part 4 to a comparison of these two thinkers. I determined that
Merleau-Ponty’s profound and helpful work does not contain within it the idea of subsidiary-
focal integration.
18. Polanyi, Tacit Dimension, 11–13.
19. Meek, Loving to Know, 157, 176.
64 Philosophia Christi

true, “find-myself-believings,” such as, “I see a tree,” or, “The sky is blue.”20
For Plantinga, “find-myself-believings” are properly basic—I find myself
believing them not on the basis of evidence that justifies them, and I am
within my epistemic rights to do so21—and require a properly functioning
belief-producing mechanism in an environment it was designed to suit.22 He
believes that this analysis also allows us to understand Calvin’s sense of de-
ity as a mechanism that produces true belief statements about God, to display
the rationality of religious belief.23
It is implied that find-myself-believings are easily explicit claims, fo-
cally apprehended, no effort required. It is implied that these are unarguably
basic, epistemologically speaking; that these are the most obvious, simple,
common knowings we all experience. But this simple and unquestioned be-
ginning would be where Polanyi might be seen to begin the dispute, and to
argue that the shape of the starting place disfigures the entire project. The
starting place reveals what I am calling epistemic myopia, because of what
it presumes to exclude. Polanyi disagrees regarding the most basic, simple
knowings we all experience—not only whether we should start with them as
paradigmatic, but whether they even exist at all.
In contrast to Plantinga’s find-myself-believings, Polanyi is concerned
to make sense of epistemic achievements of discovery and insight, and to see
these as paradigmatic for all ordinary knowing, including anything we might
have deemed a find-myself-believing. Actually, he describes his chosen epis-
temic paradigm this way: “We must conclude that the paradigmatic case of
scientific knowledge, in which all the faculties that are necessary for finding
and holding scientific knowledge are fully developed, is the knowledge of an
approaching discovery.”24 That means that, in effect, the Polanyian paradigm
is, by contrast, “on-the-way-to-believings,” “anticipative, half-understood,
about-to-change-everything-including-me-believings.” And these are para-
digmatic of all knowing because these riskily embraced not-yet-knowings
share the dynamic of insight or imminent disclosure, as well as of any subse-
quent critical verification or responsible submission to their truth.
All knowing consists in the responsibly active shaping of a pattern that
links particulars transformatively in a whole. For any such feat, undergird-
ing the explicit or focal is a vast expanse of subsidiarily indwelt clues. Even
the simplest knowing involves both subsidiary and focal awareness, and has
been arrived at through a transformative shift from one to the other. Ad-
ditionally, from Polanyi’s perspective, no account of knowing could ever

20. Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief (New York: Oxford University Press,
2000), 175; “Justification and Theism,” in The Analytic Theist: An Alvin Plantinga Reader, ed.
James F. Sennett (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), 165.
21. Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief, 177–8.
22. Ibid., xi.
23. Ibid., 170–5.
24. Polanyi, Tacit Dimension, 25.
Esther L. Meek 65

be “at time T,” a qualifier commonly attached to find-myself-believings in

epistemic accounts. The act of coming to know is a trajectory that unfolds
over time. Knowing “on the way” is half-understood, liable to be upended in
the moment of insight, but even then hinting of more that cannot be exhaus-
tively specified.
It would seem, then, that Polanyi would dispute that there are any such
timeless find-myself-believings in the sense that the dominant epistemologi-
cal vision of Western philosophy has led us all to choose as instances of
knowledge. But perhaps we can hypothesize regarding to what, in a Polany-
ian account, an experience of “find-myself-believing” might be adjusted to
correspond. You could possibly call the Polanyian focal pattern a find-my-
self-believing. The act of insight which produces a focal pattern, although it
is a responsibly creative integration, is often attended by a sense of having
made profound contact with the real, irreversibly. In the moment of insight,
the knower is taken with the sense of the rightness of the discovery; the
knower finds her- or himself believing. But such a find-myself-believing
crests the rich understory of subsidiaries it has transformatively melded. It
itself is an instance of subsidiary-focal integration.
You could also perhaps construe the way we indwell clues subsidiarily a
find-myself-believing. Polanyi says that the subsidiaries are acritically held;
in that respect, they are akin to Plantinga’s find-myself-believings. But they
would be so precisely because they are not focal; they are the lived, felt,
relied-on awareness, not the focus, of our epistemic effort. And they would
be inarticulate and unspecifiable in our reliance on them within the focal pat-
tern. What is really unbelievable about “I am seeing a tree” is not that I am
seeing a tree, but that I stop and think about it and utter such a sentence. That
is because generally this claim, or something akin to it, is subsidiarily in-
dwelt. Casting these as subsidiary does render them believings, but does not
render them articulate or focal. I don’t “seem to see a tree.” I tap it for syrup.
It is more likely that what is generally in view in the phrase, find-myself-
believings, refers, in Polanyian epistemology, to something that you actually
want to move beyond. Looking at particulars obscures their deeper, integra-
tive, meaning. You want to find a different, subsidiary, way of relating to
them, of coming to indwell them as clues. Think again of reading: at some
point I achieved a focal understanding of the letter A; this I continue to in-
dwell responsibly but subsidiarily in every written line of this paper. I would
argue that what Plantinga has in view occurs nowhere in the process of read-
ing. I spend little time in the focal identification of the letter A.
One could characterize even the simplest perception as a find-myself-
believing exhaustively articulated in a propositional statement only if one
artificially blocked out a wider understory of indwelt and bodily felt sub-
sidiary awareness, much as the famous Ames Room illusion can only occur
if you look through a tiny slit. While I do not mean to be disrespectful in
66 Philosophia Christi

using the term, myopia, to describe this, the term rightly suggests that this
is an unnatural stricture. Often artificial stricture of some sort is helpful for
specific, temporary studies, as in a controlled scientific experiment. But even
this arrangement only crests a vast span of tacit subsidiaries, commitments,
and powers.
Thus, Polanyi would not agree with Plantinga and others regarding the
actual items for which epistemology must offer an account. He would not
agree that find-myself-believings, as that is commonly understood, even ex-
ist. An epistemic inquiry regarding a hypothesized epistemic action can, of
course, nevertheless be valuable as a hypothetical inquiry. But a nonexistent
epistemic action such as a find-myself-believing should not be taken to stand
for the expanse of knowing. Retaining the myopic stricture systemically
skews one’s entire epistemic account. Of course, this matter is just what is at
issue in accepting or rejecting a Polanyian epistemology.

Knowledge as Explicit

Related to this epistemic myopia is the presumption that knowledge is

restricted to explicit propositions. This in turn requires that any justification
and any epistemic account must be constructed exclusively of propositions.
Trafficking exclusively in explicit propositions just is the analytic method
of doing philosophy. The historic presumption in Western epistemology has
been that knowledge, exclusively, is explicit propositions. Thus all epistemic
accounts must also be worked out explicitly, line by line, reason by reason,
argument by argument.25
This reveals a fundamental distinction between Polanyi and the defin-
ing commitment of the analytic tradition. I coin these terms to make the
point: where Plantinga, the analytic tradition, and in good measure the entire
Western philosophical tradition, are “explicitarian,” Polanyi is “nonexplici-
tarian.” While contemporary epistemologies often acknowledge the role of
other sorts of factors in knowledge—society, power, technology, emotions,
and so on—these factors are generally not considered cognitive. They are
not considered implicit, subsidiary, inarticulable, unspecifiable knowledge,
integral to all knowing.
That Plantinga is explicitarian is evident throughout his careful and
professional work in the analytic tradition. For Plantinga, this means that
even his externalist account must be propositionally stated and derived. And
there is an elegance and power to Plantinga’s employment of statements and
logical analysis; this is an example of how a temporarily imposed artificial
restriction often, creatively, brings hidden factors to light. Plantinga milks
25. It might be objected that most epistemologists recognize the existence of nonpropositional
knowledge such as acquaintance and skill. However, these kinds of knowledge often are named
even as they are distinguished from knowledge that and dismissed from consideration.
Esther L. Meek 67

this ingeniously in his famous critique of the claim that belief in God is
necessarily false.26 But this example itself betrays the impropriety, yea, self-
referential absurdity, of a permanent artificial restriction on knowledge as
explicit: Such would disqualify the very genius which led Plantinga respon-
sibly to hold the restriction artificially for the sake of the argument.
An explicitarian deems “inarticulable knowledge” an oxymoron. It is
ironic, and telling, however, that this conviction itself is not articulated!27
This explicitarian presumption is just what Polanyi felt must be disputed for
science, philosophy, and Western culture, to continue. He warns of the soci-
etal and scientific damage of “unbridled lucidity.”28 He expresses his position
aphoristically: we know more than we can tell.29 He remarks that the inar-
ticulate outruns and undergirds all that is articulate.30 All epistemic achieve-
ments, even the “simplest,” are rooted in knowledge subsidiarily held, some
of which is unspecifiable, all of which is logically unspecifiable while it is
indwelt. It is not that Polanyi eschews explicit articulation and careful justi-
fication. It is rather that these thrive only as rooted in a far greater, creative-
ly dynamic, risky, and responsible, main act: the personal and subsidiary.
Actually, articulation serves the inarticulate: it works as “a mere toolbox,
a supremely effective instrument for deploying our inarticulate faculties.”31
Articulation expands our tacit, subsidiary, grasp, creativity, and know-how.

Infallibilism

Infallibilism is the conviction that knowledge, to be knowledge, cannot

prove false. In epistemology it requires an analysis whose necessity and suf-
ficiency must be proven to withstand any sort of counterexample from this or
any possible world. Infallibilism, at least as an ideal, is implied in the pursuit
of that factor that takes true belief and renders it knowledge. Infallibilism
requires explicitarianism. Standard accounts of knowledge might settle for
fallibilism, but in so doing tacitly honor the ideal.

26. Plantinga, “The Free Will Defense,” in The Analytic Theist, 22–49.
27. This reality indicates, additionally, that on a Polanyian account, subsidiary knowledge
is fallible. We can be mistaken in our tacit commitments, and need to find a way first to identify
them and then to revise them. This reality shapes the overall argument of my book, Loving to
Know.
28. Polanyi, Tacit Dimension, 18. Unbridled lucidity cuts knowing off from its essential
inarticulable wellspring, from unnamable, potentially transformative future prospects, and from
the dynamism that drives coming to know. It dehumanizes the knower and disconnects and
disengages the knower from him- or herself and from the known. Thus it also inflicts the damage
of careless disrespect on the yet-to-be-known. I argue this throughout Loving to Know.
29. Ibid., 4.
30. Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, chap. 5.
31. Polanyi, The Study of Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), 25.
68 Philosophia Christi

Plantinga’s search for warrant implies that he shares the infallibilist

ideal, along with much of Western epistemology.32 Polanyi is a fallibilist.
In Personal Knowledge he writes: “The principal purpose of this book is to
achieve a frame of mind in which I may hold firmly to what I believe to be
true, even though I know that it might conceivably be false.”33 To develop a
fallibilist stance in epistemology is what Polanyi left science in order to do.
Nor is he a fallibilist because he failed at infallibilism. Rather, he believes
that only a fallibilism would accord with humans’ most characteristic, glo-
rious efforts to know. Where care, risk, and responsibility are essential to
knowing, knowing must be fallible.
Polanyi is a fallibilist because he keeps in view a wider understanding of
the epistemic act. All professed facts are rooted in the felt, lived, subsidiary
awareness and commitments that binds us in the world. Elsewhere I argue
that no exact set of subsidiaries, even if such could be delineated, is either
necessary or sufficient for an integrative pattern.34 Also elsewhere I argue
that the integrative feat is able to “get off the ground” with something short
of exhaustive rectitude with regard to its components, meaning, and implica-
tions.35 You can be mistaken about some things and still get a piece of it right
(that’s good news for our understanding of God, by the way!).
Further, knowing is a transformation in which we tacitly shift how we
are relating to whatever we first took the evidence to be, and in which we
even tacitly shift our sense of rationality in advance of the discovery, in or-
der to accommodate it.36 Such half-understanding is a kind of anticipative
knowledge—knowledge of an approaching discovery, Polanyi said. It isn’t
even wholly articulable, let alone verifiable or infallible. For all that, in our
passion-fraught, risky vectoring toward the yet-to-be-known, these half-un-
derstandings are the only, and best, grist to our mill. And when I say best,
I mean better than anything exhaustively explicit could ever be. They are
clues. Clues, by definition, are both half-understood and the thing we most
need at the time we half-understand them. They are not justifiable—or even
entirely articulable—until after we no longer need to cling to them for their
guidance. We can only be guided by them if we embrace them, despite the
possibility that our interpretation of them might prove false.
Plus, the integrative feat testifies to its having made contact with reality
by virtue of unspecifiable future prospects—prospects which may turn out to
reshape the claim or our understanding of it.37 Hinted prospects hint in turn of
the reality of the aspect we are grasping. The reality we seek to understand is

32. Plantinga, Warrant and Proper Function (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993),
89, 112.
33. Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, 214.
34. Meek, Loving to Know, chap. 4.
35. Meek, Longing to Know, chap. 23.
36. Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, 160–70.
37. This was the focus of my PhD dissertation, Contact with Reality.
Esther L. Meek 69

profoundly richer than Western epistemology has typically acknowledged.38

This is another reason we often get only a piece of it right, and can even
have to figure out the respect in which it is right. These rich unspecifiabilities
render human knowing fallible even as it renders it a masterful achievement.
This is not the realm of certainties. But neither is it a second-best realm
of probabilities, either. It is the realm of risky commitment and profession,
where our efforts to know responsibly take hold of our world—for blessing,
it is hoped; but, to the extent we are mistaken, often for cursing.

Foundationalism

Infallibilism is strongly associated with foundationalism of a classical

sort, and with internalism and epistemic duty. Infallibilism can be seen to
require foundationalism, and foundationalism, internalism. Traditionally,
foundationalism holds that for us to have knowledge, at least some of our
claims must be self-evident, evident to the senses, or incorrigible, thus pro-
viding an epistemic anchor from which we may justifiably derive all else that
we take to be knowledge. 39 The obvious assumption is that such foundation-
al claims are evident consciously to the knower—what is generally known as
internalism. Plantinga persuasively has argued that classical foundationalism
is self-referentially absurd.40 For the foundationalist thesis itself, ironically,
is neither self-evident nor derivable from self-evident claims. Plantinga is
therefore a nonfoundationalist.
Some may argue that Plantinga’s own properly basic beliefs are them-
selves foundational. Properly basic beliefs are those which need no justifica-
tion to be rational.41 Properly basic beliefs are not self-evident so much as
in need of no justification.42 They in turn serve as justification for all our
derived claims. Other modified foundationalisms might allow for fallible
claims to be foundational. However, all would agree in the tacit presump-
tion that foundational claims are self-consciously, articulably, evident to the
knower.
Polanyi is no foundationalist. It is not a body of self-evident claims, fo-
cally apprehended and exhaustively explicit, that anchors truth. Such a body
would occlude truth, not anchor it. What gives entrée to truth is subsidiaries
indwelt artfully, not to mention anticipatively, not focally explicit sentences.
Our earlier discussion of “find-myself-believings” pertains here: even the

38. Meek, Longing to Know, passim; Loving to Know, passim.

39. Plantinga, “Reason and Belief in God,” in The Analytic Theist, 135.
40. Ibid., 135–61.
41. Kelly James Clark, Return to Reason (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1990), 141.
42. Plantinga himself acknowledges that some propositions are self-evident in the sense that
a properly functioning human who understands them will also see them to be evident, in need of
no further justification (Warrant and Proper Function, 109).
70 Philosophia Christi

“simplest” and most obvious perception, what we might take to be a matter

of direct acquaintance, is itself the result of subsidiary-focal integration; and
it is apprehended authentically by the knower, not focally and explicitly, but
in its subsidiary bearing on something else.43
But this is not nonfoundationism either.44 If all there is to knowledge is
the explicit, epistemologies rejecting foundationalism are left with coher-
entism, or some sort of pragmatic or naturalistic account. These are neither
helpful nor true to human experience. Recognizing and accrediting their sub-
sidiary anchor roots truth claims palpably in our felt body sense, our inter-
pretive frameworks, and in the world, binding them together. Lady Drusilla
Scott says that this isn’t either a pyramid or a raft, so much as a swamp.45
The inarticulable subsidiary is neither foolproof nor evident with “unbridled
lucidity” to our minds. On the other hand, it is in us, and we in it, indwell-
ingly, and it holds far more prospect for even greater insight.
For Polanyi, the anchor of knowledge is not a foundation so much as it
is responsible personal commitment. Additionally this means, as he argues
in Personal Knowledge, probabilities never can be mirrored in our commit-
ment regarding a truth claim.46 We do not always have the option of believ-
ing something at a 60 percent level of commitment.47 Responsibility—and,
I would add, responsibility embedded in personlike interrelationship of
knower and yet-to-be known48—moves epistemology out of the question of
foundationalism and nonfoundationalism into another dynamic.

Externalism

Classical foundationalism requires internalism. Internalism involves

epistemic access, on which can be founded epistemic duty to one’s evidence,
as part of justification.49 If foundationalism is rejected, no doubt Plantinga
has reasoned, perhaps internalism is not necessary to knowledge. This, plus

43. Polanyi would hold, by implication, that subsidiary-focal integration is inherently

interpretive.
44. Colin Gunton lauds Polanyi’s epistemology as being neither foundationalist nor non-
foundationalist. He argues that both alternatives result from the same defective epistemic and
ontological heritage, which in turn results from a defective cultural outplay of a defective doc-
trine of the Trinity. Only an epistemology such as Polanyi’s moves beyond this false dichotomy
(The One, the Three and the Many (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), chap. 5).
See Meek, Loving to Know, chap. 12.
45. Drusilla Scott, Everyman Revived: The Common Sense of Michael Polanyi (Grand
Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1985), 59–61. This is an immensely rich swamp, I might add: perhaps
more of a primordial soup! See Meek, Loving to Know, chap. 4.
46. Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, chap. 2.
47. Meek, Longing to Know, chap. 21.
48. Meek, Loving to Know, Part 4.
49. Plantinga, Warrant: The Current Debate (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993),
5–6.
Esther L. Meek 71

its additional advantage of sidestepping the conundrums of epistemic jus-

tification, suggests externalism. Plantinga is an externalist. He argues that
warrant is the commodity which when added to belief makes up the differ-
ence to produce knowledge. Plantinga proposes that a belief has warrant for
a person if and only if the segments involved in the production of the belief
are functioning properly in a cognitive environment sufficiently similar to
that for which the person’s faculties are designed.50
Subsidiary-focal integration is not an externalism. Our bodily mecha-
nism and minding, I agree, are wonderfully designed for their distinctively
earth-caring task. Earth-caring is well-nigh irresistible: we are compulsive
problem-solvers. But it is our body mechanisms subsidiarily indwelt—not
body as object but as subject—body and brain as artfully lived and felt,
which cares toward the world. Yes, we know more than we can tell. The
part we cannot tell we nevertheless know indwellingly. The subsidiary is not
external, not automatic; it is not even subconscious.
Polanyi is concerned to understand understanding, insight. Insight,
like justification, involves—and is about—at least partial epistemic access.
Properly functioning mechanisms are in fact superseded transformatively in
the integrative leap. In a sense, there isn’t any warrant that is sufficient or
necessary for the integration. Our mechanism may not have been properly
functioning.51 The fresh pattern brings with it the transparency in which we
now indwell more subsidiaries than we can tell, including our mechanisms,
as well as a transparency to the part of the world we had hoped to understand.
We have epistemic access in this transparency. But this is not exhaustively
lucid, focally conscious with no confusion (or potential) before the mind’s
eye: there is always so much more than we can tell.

Justification

Because Polanyian epistemology concerns insight, making a truth claim,

especially in science, does involve justification. In line with Plantinga’s his-
tory of the idea of justification, Polanyian justification involves epistemic
duty.52 But for Polanyi, in contrast to the positions Plantinga engages, duty
is not the whole of justification, nor is it a duty primarily to evidence. In ex-
pounding this we can also contrast his position helpfully with respect to the
traditional justified, true belief model of knowledge.
First, justification of a truth claim involves our tacitly indwelling both
it and the yet-to-be-known, to sense inarticulably the bearing of the one on

50. Plantinga, Warrant and Proper Function, 19.

51. It might be argued that the elderly lack properly functioning mechanisms, yet compensate
with wisdom.
52. Plantinga, “Justification in the 20th Century,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Re-
search, supplement 1 (1990): 45–71.
72 Philosophia Christi

the other. As I said before, it is the way you indwell a map to explore a re-
gion. Subsidiarily indwelling the claim makes it a sort of lens, tool, or part
of our body, from or through which we responsibly own, to see, evoke, open
the world. Truth lies in its indeterminate bearing on reality, says Polanyi.53
The oddness of a correspondence theory of truth, or an idea of a statement
matching the world, has recently been captured in the aphoristic statement
that there is no God’s-eye view. We can’t step outside ourselves to see if
our claims match the world. But only an explicitarian epistemology would
have misconstrued correspondence in the first place. We lay our professed
claims alongside the world from within the claims, viewing the world from
the claims subsidiarily, participatively, held.
Philosopher Marjorie Grene, who embraced Polanyi’s ideas, in her own
work sifts through the long-standing puzzle about the relationship between
knowledge and belief.54 There are two basic options, she says: that knowl-
edge isn’t belief, and that it is. In the first, there are two sorts of response:
we can have such knowledge, and we can’t. Plato, Descartes, and much of
Western philosophy embrace the first of these. The fact that it is problematic
to spell out fuels the persistence of the second, skeptical, alternative. Grene
believes that skepticism is the only logical conclusion of the assumption that
knowledge and belief are opposed to one another.
The second general option is that knowledge is a form of belief. The
standard alternative here is that knowledge is belief that is true and has an
account—justified true belief. Much effort has been invested in the last cen-
tury to argue for this, especially in the wake of Gettier’s tiny but explosive
counterexample. Indeed, Plantinga’s warrant is that ingredient the presence
of which is both necessary and sufficient to make up the difference between
belief and knowledge. But Grene says, the problem with JTB is not the J; it’s
the T. That, after all, is what we cannot be sure of. Rather, and this fourth is
her own position, knowledge is justified belief in the hope of truth.
If I assert that I know p, or confidently assert p, which comes to the
same thing, I do so correctly only if p is in fact the case. ‘p’ is true if
and only if p. Fair enough. And when, from my limited point of view, I
assert p as an item of knowledge, following as best I can the available
evidence, I do assert it as true—as universally true. And yet I can’t be
logically certain; I might always be mistaken. What I am doing is to
assert a given proposition, as Polanyi put it, with universal intent, in
confidence that anyone with the same evidence and the same standard
of objectivity would make the same assertion—and would be correct
in doing so. But this is always an intent, not a guaranteed fulfillment.55

53. Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, 150.

54. Grene, “Knowledge, Belief and Perception,” chap. 1 in A Philosophical Testament
(Chicago: Open Court, 1995).
55. Grene, Philosophical Testament, 19. See Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, chap. 10.
Esther L. Meek 73

While she does not say this, I would argue that the fact that T is generally
uncontested in JTB discussions tacitly reflects the dominant former alterna-
tive, that knowledge is not belief. It reflects the ideal of knowledge as infal-
lible truth. To assert that knowledge must be true is temporarily to remove
oneself from the professing stance from which we all of necessity carry out
the business of making claims about the world. It is not “on all fours” with
our situation.
Polanyi’s unique proposal that we responsibly and personally hold be-
liefs with universal intent, or something like it, can be a helpful, irenic, stance
in a postmodern ethos. Polanyi rightly saw that it was the only consistent ac-
count of what it is to hold truth. There is no valid impersonal justification
of knowledge. He thought that Martin Luther’s “Here I stand; I cannot do
otherwise” aptly expressed the moral obligation we have to the truth, even as
it is our responsible choice to hold it. Thus, truth, I argue, is profess-ional.56

Epistemic Duty

Polanyian epistemology obviously involves duty, not merely for the

sake of justification, but as the constitutive backbone of any claim to know.
Apart from responsible personal (that is, by a person) profession, no knowl-
edge claim could ever even exist. Responsible profession is not the stopgap
but the sine qua non. If any single component turns belief into knowledge,
it would be this. But it would be better to say that it takes an unclaimed
statement to a claim responsibly professed with universal intent, as Polanyi
says—with the hope of truth, as Grene says.
Glaringly absent from the Polanyi’s work is the very argument strat-
egy that drives the post-Gettier discussion: counterfactual counterexamples.
The oddness of such examples, it appears to me, stems not only from the
supervening ideal of certainty which leads well-intended epistemologists to
embrace a myopic ideal of knowledge. It, like JTB’s T, stems also from a sur-
reptitious ad hoc stepping outside the responsible stance from within which
alone any one of us responsibly holds any claim to be true.
Justification is also fraught with duty, but it is not duty to evidence or
method or mechanism. It is duty to the yet-to-be-known—a reverent, risky,
responsible submission to and self-effacing solidarity with reality. Some-
times this is even in the teeth of what may have been mistakenly taken to be
evidence, and even if the means by which insight is at first “granted” may
conform less than exactly to common expectations. We profess truth in re-
sponsible submission to the real.

56. Meek, Loving to Know, 423.

74 Philosophia Christi

Creative Antirealism

Plantinga argues for a creative antirealism. Creative antirealism, as

Plantinga defines it, is “the claim that truth is not independent of mind.”57
He argues that the way to be a creative antirealist is to be a theist. By this
he means that trust in God undergirds and compensates for our need to be
antirealists.
Polanyi is an impassioned realist. From a Polanyian perspective, the
claim that truth is not independent of the mind should be taken as a refer-
ence to the subsidiary—our lived bodies, and our indwelt frameworks of
language, culture, and theories—the very things that root us in the world
around. Polanyi readily embraces fundamental belief commitments, presup-
positions, worldviews, what have you; and he doesn’t do this in order to
espouse a theistic epistemology. But in contrast to all other exponents, in-
cluding Plantinga, he helps us see that we live these commitments subsidiar-
ily. This is just how they work. This move turns the apology of antirealism
into the victory lap of realism. It also makes profound sense of the Christian
doctrine of creation: our created situatedness—that which is our glory and
strength as humans. It makes sense of the Christian doctrine of Scripture, as
the Word more important than bread.
Our subsidiary indwelling furnishes our perspective on the world. But it
should not be understood to oppose us to the world. Again, to quote the quot-
able Marjorie Grene: “Why can’t we check our beliefs against reality? Not,
as skeptics believe, because we can’t reach out to reality, but because we’re
part of it.”58 A perspective is a vantage point, unless it is a bad vantage point.
Viewing the city of Pittsburgh from the vantage point of Mount Washington
is Pittsburgh at its best.
Further, real is that which is “pregnant with unforeseeable prospects.”59
A discovery often seems to answer our questions by challenging the ques-
tions and questioning us. True objectivity, Polanyi argues, has to do with this
signature feature of the real. The real proves to more profoundly rational
than we had to date conceived it. So while both Polanyi and Plantinga share
the idea that truth is not independent of the mind, Polanyi’s epistemology
shows how this supports, rather than hinders, realism.

57. Plantinga, “How to Be an Anti-Realist,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American

Philosophical Association 56 (1982): 69.
58. Grene, Philosophical Testament, chap. 1.
59. Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, vii–viii, and throughout Polanyi’s writings; Meek,
Contact with Reality, passim.
Esther L. Meek 75

The sensus divinitatis

Finally, a word about the sensus divinitatis. Plantinga taps Calvin’s no-
tion of human awareness of deity to produce an account of belief in God as
properly basic. In certain circumstances, such as a starry night, I find myself
with true beliefs about God.60 We must have a belief-about-God-producing
mechanism that, when functioning according to design, produces knowledge
of God. This allows him to tap the resources of his epistemic account to de-
fend the rationality of Christian belief.
Polanyi never addresses himself to Calvin’s sensus. He does attempt to
make sense of Christian belief, but I do not think his attempt is particularly
Christian in the historic sense, nor successful.61 However, I argued some years
ago that Polanyian epistemology makes good sense of the sensus.62 I suggest
that the universal awareness of God can be construed as a subsidiary aware-
ness of the intimation of a hidden coherence, of a set of particulars which
betoken a presently empty focus. In saying this I am putting the sensus in the
place Polanyi accords to the problem stage in scientific discovery. Human
awareness of God just is a person’s perhaps still-hidden disturbance result-
ing from things about the universe and about him- or herself that signpost a
greater, personal, integrative pattern. The internal awareness of divinity may
be a tacit awareness of creation’s pervasive hints of God’s glory. To the aspir-
ing knower, they are anomalous particulars that ought to suggest a problem,
a possible pattern. The unbeliever would find this terrifying to acknowledge;
the on-the-way believer would find it tantalizing. Plus, the sensus divinitatis
is more reasonably seen to produce, not rational beliefs on our current view
of rationality, but beliefs that redraw our lives on the plain of a profounder
rationality. As Lesslie Newbigin observes, the only plausibility structure that
accommodates Christ is the one of which he is the cornerstone.63
My own covenant epistemology suggests another way that a Polanyian
construal of knowing elucidates the sensus divinitatis. I contend that all acts
of knowing are fraught with hints of the interpersoned, of persons “in the vi-
cinity.” This leads me to argue for the covenantally constituted interpersonal
relationship as paradigm of all knowing.64 In the unfolding trajectory of an
act of coming to know, the knower moves from placidity to conflict, from
60. Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief, 170ff.
61. It seems to many people conversant with Polanyi that Polanyi concluded that God was
not objectively real, so much as a phenomenon of happy indwelling, similar to a mathematical
system or a work of fiction, and that in this conclusion he deserted his own best insights
regarding realism. It seems evident, however, that Polanyi nevertheless considered himself a
Christian believer. See Personal Knowledge, 280.
62. Meek, “A Polanyian Interpretation of Calvin’s Sensus Divinitatis,” Presbyterion 23
(1997): 8–24.
63. Newbigin, Proper Confidence: Faith, Doubt and Certainty in Christian Discipleship
(Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1995), chap. 1.
64. This is the thesis of Loving to Know.
76 Philosophia Christi

conflict to transformative resolution that opens the world in a fresh way. To

move from unknowing to knowing is to move from the threat of the pos-
sibility of not-being to the gracious gift of the other, the possibility of new
being—what James Loder calls the void, and the Holy.65 This can only be
understood as involving the other as person. I follow Loder to argue that this
means that every act of coming to know is a deliverance (not in Plantinga’s
sense!) that prototypes the gracious descent of God. Loder calls ordinary
knowing events the grammar of the Holy Spirit’s convicting presence. All
acts of coming to know, then, are—and here I borrow a wonderful phrase
from Simone Weil—forms of the implicit love of God.66
Thus, where Plantinga speaks of mechanism, tapping the sensus divini-
tatis in an externalist way to the end of an explicit epistemic analysis of
explicit beliefs, following Polanyi’s account we may locate the sensus in the
richer three-dimensionality of knowing the world, and of rationality, which
much analytic epistemology excises.

Conclusion

In setting side-by-side key points of the epistemologies of Plantinga and

Polanyi, we see the depth of their contrast. The exercise reveals significantly
different ways of seeing knowing. We may ask three questions. First, which
is truer both to science and to human experience? I believe that Polanyi’s ac-
count is, but that it has taken the genius of Polanyi’s thought to disclose what
we have been epistemologically nurtured to discredit. Second, which makes
room for the other? I believe Polanyi’s epistemology shows what must un-
dergird the most artificial and precise search for understanding; it also shows
why baptizing exhaustively explicit knowledge as paradigmatic for episte-
mology is both mistaken and damaging. Third, what prospects are there of
collaboration between such contrasting epistemologies? The answer to the
second question pertains here: collaboration would require adaptation in one
direction: from Plantinga to Polanyi. History has demonstrated that analytic
philosophy discredits the Polanyian account.
How is it that Plantingans should be open to moving beyond the walls of
the artificially imposed stricture on knowledge and epistemology to the wid-
er understanding of the knowing event that Polanyi showcases? One reason
is that it is easy to do: The main impediment to collaboration is the explici-
tarian claim that knowledge is propositions exclusively. My experience has
been that it only takes thinking about how we balance on a bike to persuade
people of the palpable reality of subsidiary knowledge and of how it roots
us in a world that opens to us. Second: Plantinga’s own epistemic genius is a

65. Loder, Transforming Moment, chap. 3.

66. Simone Weil, Waiting for God, trans. Emma Craufurd (New York: HarperCollins, 2001).
Esther L. Meek 77

phenomenon that his own epistemology does not even accredit, but that Po-
lanyi’s does. Third: the fact that Plantinga does eschew foundationalism and
propounds the rational legitimacy, apart from proof, of basic beliefs, sug-
gests that he is open to a larger sense of rationality. Fourth, there is a kind of
affinity between two epistemologies open to exploring the sensus divinitatis,
which holds prospect for deeper collaboration. Finally, Plantinga’s innova-
tive move to take into account other parts of our cognitive structure than tra-
ditionally have been included indicates that Plantingans might be willing to
take another step to accrediting the subsidiary—the rational root of creative
insight that is neither explicit nor external per se.67

67. I am grateful to my philosophy assistant, Mary Speckhard, for conversation to crystallize

these last points. Thanks also to my colleague, Dr. Robert Frazier, and to an anonymous reader,
for their helpful comments on the manuscript of this essay.