Emergence

Abstract

Michael Polanyi's concepts of tacit knowing and emergence are foundational to complexity thinking. The purpose of this essay is to question Polanyi's ways of theorizing the concepts in order to develop lines of inquiry that warrant contemporary examination. One contribution is to look at several types of tacit in Polanyi's work so that they might be compared in future investigations. This contribution centers on the occurrences of transcendental and moral reasoning in what is purported to otherwise be a pragmatist view of the world. A second contribution is to question hierarchical-ordering in emergence theory in order to move from systems to complexity formulations. I shall argue that both tacit knowing and emergence are mired in systems thinking views of hierarchic order of reality.