The Online Library of Liberty

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• Editorial Staff
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• Editorial
• Bibliographical Essay: Contemporary Currents In Libertarian Political Philosophy By David Gordon
• I: Social Science Methodology
• Social Science Paradigms
• Sociology, Theory, & the Welfare State
• Durkheim, Ideology, and Method
• Polanyi, Hierarchy & Reductionism
• Historicism: Individuality Or Pattern?
• Social Science: Game, Drama, and Text
• Alfred Schutz and Phenomenology
• Moral Honesty In Social Science
• II: Economic Analysis
• Austrian Vs. Neoclassical Economics: Equilibrium
• Frank Fetter & the Austrian School
• Subjective Vs. Objective Costs
• The Significance of Subjective Costs
• Socialist Economic Calculation
• The Welfare State: Business & Labor
• Child Labor and Capitalism
• Economics Vs. Minimum Wage Politics
• Adam Smith Vs. Neo-mercantilism
• Laissez Faire and Moral Revolution
• III: Human Rights and Ethics
• Recent Scholarship On Rights
• Two Concepts of Rights
• Establishing Human Rights
• Misunderstanding Human Rights
• Is Privacy an Absolute Right?
• Animal Rights
• Nature and the Tao
• Self-knowledge: Nietzsche, Heidegger & Buber
• The Prospects of Objective Morality
• Measuring Ethical Ideologies
• Individualism and “locus of Control”
• Should We License Parents?
• IV: The Heritage of Freedom
• How Conservatives Differ From Liberals
• English Radicalism: Rights Vs. War & Taxes.
• Liberalism: the Seedbed of American Culture
• Republican Liberty & Military Policy
• Thomas Burke: Whig Radical
• Liberal Republicans During Reconstruction
• Adam Smith & the Liberal Tradition
• Human Individuality and Autonomy

Polanyi, Hierarchy & Reductionism

A. Olding

• Macquarie University (Australia)

“Polanyi's Notion of Hierarchy.” Religious Studies 16(March 1980):97–102.

Michael Polanyi is associated with the view that, through “tacit knowledge” of lower levels of reality, we can come to know something of higher levels—even, possibly, of God, the highest level of all. In Prof. Olding's view, Polanyi's argument for such a hierarchy of being is confused and illicitly mixes ontological and methodological claims.

Against the reductionists Polanyi has argued that biology is not reducible to biochemistry. While reductionists assert that growth and heredity are determined by the sequence of DNA molecules, Polanyi holds that what allows DNA to do its work is not its chemistry but the order of bases along the DNA chain. Since the laws of physics and chemistry hold universally, they would be entirely unaffected by the particular linear sequence that characterizes the triplet code. Any order is possible physico-chemically; therefore physics and chemistry cannot specify which order will in fact succeed in functioning as a DNA code.

Prof. Olding finds this argument fallacious. The laws of nature allow for any linera sequence only when a set of initial conditions is not specified. Once these have been identified, the order of molecules is no longer arranged randomly.

The notion of hierarchy in Polanyi's conception of nature stems from his view that the DNA molecule functions both as a blueprint and as an engineer which somehow constructs the living organism. Polanyi has likened organisms to machines and has argued that, even dealing with ordinary machines such as clocks, we cannot give a reductive account of mechanical activity. This is because a machine “works under two distinct principles. The higher one is the principle of the machine's design, and this ‘harnesses' the lower one, which consists in the physical-chemical processes on which the machine relies.”

At most, this is a misleading metaphor. Polanyi himself admits that “this harness is not unbreakable; the structure of the machine, and thus its working, can break down. But this,” he says, “will not affect the forces of inanimate nature on which the operation of the machine relied.” If one thinks of the machine in this way, then its structure clearly does not harness its matter as a rider harnesses a horse. There is no question here of higher and lower “principles” and, therefore, no threat to the reductionist position.

To assert the existence of different levels of principles is to invite a criticism dubbed the “two-worlds argument” by John Passmore. The argument states that once two ontological levels and two distinct kinds of being are distinguished, then there is no way that they can interact once two ontological levels and two distinct kinds of beings are distinguished, then there is no way that they can interact once again without contradiction. Polanyi, seemingly aware of this objection asserts that lower order principles are “open” to the higher or that higher powers may “emerge” from the lower. Such statements merely reduce to the notion that the matter of machines has both the character of X and non-X. Entitles and hierarchies, claims Olding, must exist on one ontological level.