Learner’s Mind is a set of dispositions, but it is also a journey. The journey can transform your life. Deep and durable learning is not a mere trophy to put on the shelf or a badge to wear; it is the quiet confidence that “this is my Father’s world . . . and round me rings the music of the spheres.” Such confidence fuels persistence and persistence is frequently “surprised by joy”—the joy of discovering God’s creative genius manifest in yet another luminous pattern.

Patterns don’t simply emerge on their own. They are the fruit of “creative scrabbling” through Subsidiary-Focal Integration (SFI). SFI is the model of knowing proposed and developed by physical chemist Michael Polanyi as a corrective to the positivism that pervades science. For Polanyi knowledge is a personal journey to reality, not an encounter with impersonal brute facts.

Following is an approximate transcript of the podcast Learner’s Mind: The Whole Enchilada.

“Inquiring minds want to know.” What do they want to know? Not inert facts. They want to understand. They want to see particulars in a context. They want to see the pattern that the particulars contribute to. Your inquiring mind at this final episode in this season of podcasts on Learner’s Mind wants to know how to put the dispositions of mind together effectively to reach insight more reliably. Join me today as we consider Learner’s Mind: The Whole Enchilada.

Learner’s Mind is based on Beginner’s Mind—the inquiring minds we were born with. Beginner’s Mind asked non-stop questions and explored incessantly. Learner’s Mind seeks to recover those dispositions while tempering their exercise. Next season we’ll delve into how asking good questions figures into deep and durable learning.

This season I’ve encouraged you to recover your atrophied capacity for exploration. Give yourself permission to explore. Exploration begins with giving attention to items, events, and people. When you encounter something of potential interest you need to stop and really pay the kind of attention that leads to perception. Perception is first a general awareness of the nature of something. But, having perceived the basic nature of persons, places, or things, we endeavor to be perceptive—to find patterns that include them.

We are hard-wired to find patterns once we give our brains permission to stop and smell the roses. Pattern perceiving employs inductive logic which proceeds from specifics to a generalization. Generalizations are of two types. The first is a concept. We formulate categories that include groups of related particulars. Simple examples would be fruits and vegetables. Concepts include behaviors like road rage or honor. They also include explanatory models like supply-side economics. Concepts are what we think with. A concept is an idea and not just a bare fact.

The second type of generalization is connection. Concepts do not float in the brain. Every concept must be logically linked to at least one other concept, and most are linked to dozens or even hundreds of others. Pairs of linked concepts create propositions. Propositions can be very powerful, but it is the process of forming them that gives them their power and durability.

In this episode I want to make you comfortable with the process of induction through which you formulate concepts and link them. Induction involves a leap from specifics to a generalization that covers more than the specifics you’ve collected. Initially the leap doesn’t feel entirely justified. Someone else may look at the same specifics and see nothing. Given our finiteness we will never have a complete collection of specifics that absolutely justifies our generalizations. Generalizations, however, allow us to make predictions as we await further examples. Those additional specifics may end up challenging our generalization. In that case a revision or an entirely new generalization may be in order.

It is the process of moving from specifics to a generalization that I want to operationalize today. Epistemologist Esther Meek calls this “creative scrabbling.” It is not linear. There is no checklist of steps to move through. Creative scrabbling involves fits and starts. The path to a pattern isn’t clear initially. This is where the willingness to explore will serve you well. Your bent as an adult who farms your existing knowledge doesn’t like this situation. But remember that you have an impressive track record of inductive success that goes back to your preschool years. You do know how to do this. You just need to give yourself permission to explore clues and connections.

When my wife and I were in Scotland for a month this past summer, we used public transportation exclusively. When we were in cities, we used buses dozens of times. Tour books encourage even visitors who do drive to park their cars and use the extensive bus system. Figuring out how to mesh what Google Maps was telling us with reality was initially a challenge. When we arrived by train in Edinburgh, we missed the first bus Google pointed us to because we were on the wrong side of a busy 4-lane street. Gradually we learned specifics that would help us to avoid this scenario. These included things like knowing which direction the bus would be going even though it was on the wrong side of the road from the states. Later still we found that downtown bus stops had identification numbers that should correlate with information in the Google Maps app. After four or five days we could move around the city on foot and jump on a bus with reasonable confidence that it would take us where we wanted to go. Moving from confusion to confidence required inductive logic. Specifics led to generalizations. Generalizations were tested when we boarded a bus and asked the driver whether the route included our desired destination.

Inductive learning proceeds by means of creative scrabbling back and forth between clues and patterns. This model is called subsidiary-focal integration (SFI) and was particularly developed in the thirty years from 1946-1976 by Michael Polanyi a physical chemist turned epistemologist. Esther Meek who I’ve quoted many times has produced a series of books and articles explaining and developing Polanyi’s model beginning in 2003 until the present. I owe a great deal to her work, and I’ll link to her books in my blog on this podcast.

SFI starts with subsidiaries. This isn’t just a business category like Google is a subsidiary of Alphabet and Facebook is a subsidiary of Meta. A subsidiary is subordinate. The OED further says that a subsidiary is “something which provides additional support or assistance; an auxiliary, an aid.” Subsidiaries are the particulars, the specifics that we are trying to use to discern a pattern. Put another way, subsidiaries are clues.

Conventional education is fixated on information collecting. In that conventional mode the subsidiaries are pieces of information that just are—they don’t point anywhere. In SFI the subsidiaries point beyond themselves to ideas big enough to integrate them into a coherent pattern with other specifics. The potential for convergence between seemingly disparate particulars is the focal in SFI. The creative leap that sees a potential pattern in a group of subsidiaries attempts to integrate the S and the F—the subsidiaries and the focal. The subsidiaries point to the focal and the focal makes sense of the subsidiaries.

The process of SFI involves three main actions:

1.     Collecting specifics that have a potential relationship. These are subsidiaries.

2.     Embedding yourself in a particular subsidiary to look for relationships with other specifics in the set.

3.     Trying out potential relationships that might explain the set of specifics. These are attempts at finding a focal point that integrates all the subsidiaries.

Esther Meek calls #2, the process of indwelling the specifics. Indwelling is temporary; a means to the end of seeking a pattern. Indwelling is like changing perspectives to determine if you can see anything different from there—that is from a particular specific. Probably you have been outdoors, and someone has directed your attention to an animal, say a bird in a tree. Initially you don’t see it. You concentrate to try to filter out competing sensory information from the vicinity. If that doesn’t work, you may shift your physical position closer to the location of the other person—maybe you can see it from where they are. This is part of the creative scrabbling I’ve referenced previously. You can’t know at the outset which subsidiary or subset of subsidiaries will yield the integrative insight you are seeking.

Let me illustrate. All my five children were required to take piano lessons until they graduated from high school. In the 1990’s one of my sons while in high school was assigned a classical recital piece that he felt was far beyond his ability. His teacher felt he needed to be stretched, but he insisted he didn’t have the physical dexterity to play the piece and made only half-hearted attempts to practice. Mostly his practice was designed to show how far beyond him the piece was. I had recently acquired a copy of the music composition software, Finale, so I showed my son what it could do. He was intrigued. We worked out a deal whereby he could manually key in his recital piece in place of practicing. In the process of doing so he found that he made typos that sounded horrible when played back. Chord by chord he grappled with the specifics of the piece so they would sound right. By the end of inputting the score the logic of the piece was apparent to him and the net result was that he was able to quickly master playing the piece on the piano. By grappling repeatedly with the subsidiaries of the composition, he was able to find the pattern, the logic, the focal point that integrated the piece.

Subsidiaries are clues that may add up to something much bigger and more important. Charles Spurgeon advised the use of subsidiaries in pursuit of spiritual insight. He didn’t call them subsidiaries, but note how he uses the Lord’s Supper:

“Never mind that bread and wine, unless you can use them as folks often use their spectacles. What do they use them for? To look at? No, to look through them. So, use the bread and wine as a pair of spectacles. Look through them, and do not be satisfied until you can say, ‘Yes, yes, I can see the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world.’”  

The relationship between subsidiaries and an emerging integrated whole is like the relationship between the part and the whole. The late critical thinking authority Richard Paul liked to talk about learning as a regular back and forth: whole—part—whole. Initially the whole may be opaque; something others have seen before you, but you have not yet really seen. It’s a big idea, but not one you can personally justify. It is through the process of grappling with the contributing parts, the subsidiaries, that you work to achieve ownership of the insight. That ownership, in turn, will allow you to make inferences and predictions. It may ripple through your current conceptual framework and challenge some of your constructs.

Sleuthing has always been attractive to me; at one point in my life, I thought of joining the FBI. Sleuthing classically involves the unremarkable gumshoe detective who wears out shoe leather seeking clues. No detail is too trivial to record. Through dogged persistence he or she accumulates an expansive set of clues. When our detective is not out gathering clues, he or she is trying out hypotheses that might logically tie the clues together. This is SFI in action.

SFI culminates in integration. Here’s the way epistemologist Esther Meek puts it:

 “Integration is the way humans know. Humans hold subsidiary and focal together in the act of integration. We may say that the ‘glue’ that is integration is a responsible human reach outward toward the world.

Integration is both active and passive. We actively shape clues into a pattern; and we passively submit to the pattern. A human knower actively, responsibly relies on clues to shape a transformative pattern. …The knower riskily, creatively scrabbles to indwell clues to achieve a focal pattern.” Little Manual for Knowing, p. 52

Here's a case study to show the power of SFI:

In 2013 the Internal Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT) working with the University of West Virginia tested diesel vehicles for their emissions under real world conditions and not just in the testing laboratory.  A 2012 VW Jetta, a 2013 VW Passat, and a 2013 BMW X5 all with diesel engines were tested. The testing was not done out of suspicion of wrongdoing. Rather the ICCT was impressed with the potential of diesel-powered vehicles to combat air pollution.

After several thousand miles of driving of all three vehicles the BMW met all standards under real world conditions and the two VW models failed spectacularly. The VW models in laboratory testing met all emissions standards. The discrepancies were reported to the California Air Resources Board and the EPA which then asked for a response from Volkswagen in 2014. VW disputed the results but said they could be explained by technical issues. In December of 2014 they voluntarily recalled half a million cars to have a software patch applied that they said would fix the issue.

Now in the crosshairs of the EPA, VW continued to maintain its innocence. Finally, September 3, 2015, VW admitted that their engineers had created software to game the system. The software in the vehicle’s electronic control module measured various parameters including steering wheel position and vehicle speed to determine if the vehicle was being tested in a laboratory. Only under lab conditions did the module regulate the engine in such a way that it would pass the emissions test. On the road power and fuel mileage were optimized with emissions on the road grossly exceeding standards. Later in September 2015 VW decided to come entirely clean (in all senses of the word!) and admitted that 11 million vehicles were affected. As you can imagine, heads did roll at the highest levels of VW.

Test specifics on VW diesels by U of WV (notice the initials) produced a collection of specific subsidiaries that didn’t add up. The expected pattern of compliance under real world driving conditions didn’t materialize. VW at that point appears to have felt they could call into question the technical expertise of the U of WV. It would soften that assertion with the cosmetic gesture of a software patch on half a million vehicles. The EPA now had warrant to be suspicious and to implement its own real-world testing. At that point VW was cooked. The only question was how VW fabricated their deceit. Taking the accumulating subsidiaries and integrating them focally through postulating corrupt software (which VW called “the switch”) would be quite an inductive leap, but VW seeing the handwriting on the wall fessed up.

A good bit of the effort of SFI is in learning how to use the subsidiaries creatively.

C.S. Lewis in 1945 published in a newspaper a short piece called “Meditation in a Toolshed” which can help us.

[Originally published in The Coventry Evening Telegraph (July 17, 1945); reprinted in God in the Dock (Eerdmans, 1970; 212-15).]

Here is a pertinent excerpt:

“I was standing today in the dark toolshed. The sun was shining outside and through the crack at the top of the door there came a sunbeam. From where I stood that beam of light, with the specks of dust floating in it, was the most striking thing in the place. Everything else was almost pitch-black. I was seeing the beam, not seeing things by it.

Then I moved, so that the beam fell on my eyes. Instantly the whole previous picture vanished. I saw no toolshed, and (above all) no beam. Instead I saw, framed in the irregular cranny at the top of the door, green leaves moving on the branches of a tree outside and beyond that, 90 odd million miles away, the sun. Looking along the beam, and looking at the beam are very different experiences. …

We must… deny from the very outset the idea that looking at is, by its own nature, intrinsically truer or better than looking along. One must look both along and at everything.”

And that both-and my friends is the essence of SFI. We may seek focal integration of subsidiaries in confidence that the journey will be fruitful. The invisible things of God are clearly seen being understood through the physical realm that He has made. The universe is crammed with patterns and seeing them is transformative!

I am indebted to the works of epistemologist Esther Meek. The most accessible is the short summation, A Little Manual for Knowing (2014). Meek’s intellectual journey to what she calls “Covenant Epistemology” is developed sequentially first in Longing to Know (2003) and later in Loving to Know (2011). Her most recent work is Contact With Reality: Michael Polanyi’s Realism and Why It Matters (2017).