Abstract

Michael Polanyi’s use of Gestalt as his model for acts of knowing and his ideal of performative consistency are two reasons why his mature theory of language is radical. That theory serves as metaphorical spectacles for viewing the radical meanings Polanyi created and attributed to “science,” “faith,” and “society.” He held that only a person can mean something by a word, and a word can mean nothing by itself. What a person means by a word is always partially indeterminate. Faith is especially important. For a period of time he called his philosophy his “fiduciary programme.” Faith always had a indeterminate religious dimension for Polanyi. There is tension between Polanyi’s mature theory of language and his epistemological and ontological realism. The language he used in writing about moral inversion as a pathology of the “modern mind” was sometimes inconsistent with his theory of language.