Making Space for Meaning

John Macmurray was one of the few philosophers to go against the positivist‐reductionist trend of the 1930‐1960 period. This paper follows up one of his many threads of enquiry. He questioned the popular Cartesian ‘visual’ method of knowing and focused on simpler senses, such as touch. This enabled him to stress how skills and feelings, as well as reason, characterise personal action. Michael Polanyi, who also worked against the current, articulated a view of how scientific discoveries are actually made and built on his own personal knowledge of skill‐acquisition and research. Susanne Langer, in a profound, parallel enquiry, was more concerned with the arts (music especially) and was deeply interested in the occasional sudden dawning of meaning (e.g. Helen Keller's experience). She clarified the dynamic connotations of ‘symbol’ in what I term ‘the Winnicott approach’ to all those meaning‐making things, including words, toys and the probes with which we create and recreate a living culture. Winnicott was able to see, more clearly than Macmurray, the need for conceptual ‘space’, not only between evolving animal and human systems, but also for what he termed ‘potential space’ in the zone of play which mothers create around their infants‐‐areas of limited freedom in which all culturally transmitted skills have their root. These concepts have an important bearing on newly emerging ways for thinking about education, culture and technology.