This is a recently discovered 1954 Polanyi lecture that was part of a lost eight-part series in Chicago. It develops Polanyi’s interest in unformalized personal participation in knowledge. The lecture discusses how normative “rules of rightness” work and Polanyi expands these ideas later in PK.

This short essay provides some historical notes helpful for understanding what Polanyi first called “rules of rightness” in his 1954 University of Chicago series of lecturess

Michael Polanyi’s essay “Rules of Rightness” argues that for living beings, both machine-like embodied processes and informal purposeful operations are guided by standards of proper func­tioning. This article traces the origins of rules of rightness back to the concomitant rise of life and purpose in the universe. Thereby the deterministic control of all things by the laws of physics and chemistry is broken. Powered by an independent active principle and guided by three inarticu­late modes of learning, life takes on increasingly complex expressions of purpose in evolutionary history. Along the way, purposeful informal operations make use of and often create contrivances that further the explosive telic growth of life.

This brief commentary treats Polanyi’s newly found lecture, “Rules of Rightness,” as an occasion to revisit some earlier claims I made about the use of rating scales in social science research. It serves as something of an interim report on an ongoing inquiry into what an effective response to social science would look like from a Polanyian perspective.

Polanyi is widely known for his development of personal knowledge, but he was also keenly inter­ested in what can be called, personal existence. The historical backdrop of reviving, the once dead language of, Egyptian Hieroglyphics provides valuable insights into Polanyi’s critique of objectiv­ism and deciphering a human ontology. From applying physiognostic to telegnostic information to understanding static and dynamic meaning, Polanyi’s philosophy of language and machines provides a wealth of vantage points from which to study who and what we are.

In this interview, C. P. Goodman invites British Polanyi scholar Richard T. Allen to reflect on his interest in Polanyi’s philosophical ideas and share what he believes is valuable in his thought.