MAKING SPACE FOR MEANING

John Macmurray was one of the few philosophers to go against the posit ivist-reductionist trend of the 1930-1960 period. This paper follows u p one of his many threads of enquiry. He questioned the popular Cartes ian '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-ac quisition and research. Susanne Langer, in a profound, parallel enquir y, was more concerned with the arts (music especially) and was deeply interested in the occasional sudden dawning of meaning (e.g. Helen Kel ler's experience). She clarified the dynamic connotations of 'symbol' in what I term 'the Winnicott approach' to all those meaning-making th ings, including words, toys and the probes with which we create and re create 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 the ir root. These concepts have art important bearing on newly emerging w ays for thinking about education, culture and technology.