The Role of Imagination in Integrative Knowledge: A Polanyian View

Key words: imagination, integrative knowledge, the parts and a whole, verified and validated realities, indeterminate implication in technology, science and humanities How do we know the degree of imagination involved in knowing a reality? This is essentially an epistemological question. This essay discusses first the role of imagination in Polanyi's epistemology since it is used here as the basis of integrative reality. The essay then discusses the degree of imagination involved in three types of integrative reality that are found respectively in technology, science, and humanities. It concludes with a discussion on the role of imagination in education. In the preface to his book The Body in the Mind, Mark Johnson writes about the role of imagination as follows: Without imagination, nothing in the world could be meaningful. Without imagination, we could never make sense of our experience. Without imagination, we could never reason toward knowledge of reality. 1 It is clear, according to him, that imagination plays the central role in human experience, understanding, and reasoning. And yet, he says, " It is a shocking fact that none of the theories of meaning and rationality dominant today offer any serious treatment of imagination. " He further states that there is " the total absence of an adequate study of imagination in our most influential theories of meaning and rationality. " 2 Why is this so? The reasons are obvious. During the past two centuries in the Western world, dominant theories of meaning and rationality have been largely derived from reductionistic objectivism in which the role of imagination in human experience, understanding, and reasoning has been denied. In reductionistic objectivism, the world is made up of objects and properties independent of human understanding. According to this view, the human mind, in facing the world, functions passively like a mirror or a camera eye that has no regard for personal belief or the cultural context in which personal belief is shaped. In explaining the world from this perspective, words that we use are merely literal signs that correspond to or represent objects and properties. To reason means to map the rational structures of objective reality, and to reduce them to concepts according to logical rules. Based on this view of reasoning, human psychological experiences are identified with those rational structures found in the objective and natural world. Accounts of human experiences which are distinctively different from the rational structures of the …