Mihály Héder

The two Hungarian authors of Guide to Personal Knowledge are in general agreement with the assessments of their work offered by David Alker and Alessio Tartaro. However, they contend that Jon Fennell’s criticism of their writing style, while sometimes accurate, nevertheless derives from an expected level of precision from non-native speakers of English that is unnecessary when the language is used as a lingua franca. Moreover, they suggest that underlying Fennell’s complaints about language are differences in the interpretation of Polanyi’s philosophy.

In the first part of Contact with Reality, Meek provides a justification for Polanyi’s realism, a justification she suggests Polanyi himself did not fully articulate. In the second part of Contact with Reality, Meek explores her own shift in thinking about realism, one that relieves Polanyi of the burden of justification. I argue Polanyi’s account of the reality of persons and their evolutionary history—what he calls “ultrabiology”—provides the foundation of his epistemology and thus his realism.

Three recent interpreters of tacit knowledge, Harald Grimen, Harry Collins, and John McDowell, either deny it is appropriate to attribute knowledge of any sort to animals or ignore the relevance of the tacit knowledge of animals to human knowledge. In this article, we seek to show that in Michael Polanyi’s understanding, tacit knowledge in animals underlies and supports human explicit knowledge. For Polanyi, tacit knowledge arises in increasingly complex forms in evolutionary history, and explicit knowledge emerges from it. Both forms of knowledge are personal achievements that can be true or false; animal behavior is not simply deterministic. Polanyi’s view on non-human tacit knowledge thus explains features of human knowledge that those denying or ignoring non-human knowledge leave unexplained.

This paper takes stock of all the various factors that cause the design-time opacity of autonomous systems behaviour. The factors include embodiment effects, design-time knowledge gap, human factors, emergent behaviour and tacit knowledge. This situation is contrasted with the usual representation of moral dilemmas that assume perfect information. Since perfect information is not achievable, the traditional moral dilemma representations are not valid and the whole problem of ethical autonomous systems design proves to be way more empirical than previously understood.

The title of Tihamér Margitay’s recent article “From Epistemology to Ontology” refers to a strong interpretation of Polanyi’s correspondence between knowing and being that enables ontological claims on purely epistemic grounds. I accept Margitay’s final conclusion which rejects strong correspondence, although on entirely different grounds. In addition, I point out that his treatment of Polanyi’s ontological claims about machines is based on yet unfounded assumptions about the nature of physics and technical design.

The possibility of interacting with remote services in natural language opens up new opportunities for sharing knowledge and for automating services. Easy-to-use, text-based interfaces might provide more democratic access to legal information, government services, and everyday knowledge as well. However, the methodology of engineering robust natural language interfaces is very diverse, and widely deployed solutions are still yet to come. The main contribution is a detailed problem analysis on the theoretical level, which reveals that a text-based interface is best understood as an artificial agent that represents the interests of the remote party who is separated in time and space from the client. A possible ethical issue about the development of such an agent is also discussed