The Tacit Mode exposes and explores the central insights in Michael Polanyi's major works. It focuses on his epistemological insights concerning tacit knowing, and explores their ramifications for philosophy, science, art, language, political theory, and religion. The notion of tacit knowledge reconstructs the modern concept of objectivity while avoiding the self-stultifying effects of "deconstructivist" postmodernism and puts Polanyi on the cutting edge of contemporary philosophy.

How is it that chimpanzees can learn to "speak" at a higher level than some so-called wolf children? What happened that day in the pumphouse, when Helen Keller suddenly grasped the meaning of words? And picture this: a father and mother who shun the advice of professionals, who doggedly force their way into the closed world of their autistic son, and who reverse his grim prognosis, revealing him to be gifted. How to explain?
In this book, a philosopher combines these famous cases with a lifetime of study to examine the threshold of language--that point "between speech and not...