06 • Four ways of knowing
Propositional tyranny made us lose touch with other kinds of knowing. How can we re-connect to the knowledge we have lost and to our self, our world, and other people?
Thinking that everything we can know is reducible to our beliefs in certain propositions which can be either true or false, has consequences that affect every part of our lives.
For instance, if you believe that it’s all about propositional knowledge, you can assume that you may be able to plan something perfectly, if only you have all the necessary (propositional) knowledge available to you upfront. If something goes wrong and your plan doesn’t work out, it was because you didn’t have all the information you needed. Either it was just plain ignorance of something that turned out to be important, or something unforeseen and unexpected happened. But now that you collected feedback, you saw which parts or facts were missing from your original plan, you’ll be able to do better next time — you learned from a failure and added the missing propositions to your model.
Of course, we know from experience, there will always be unexpected turns and things we miss, even if we are trying as hard as we can to take everything into account.
And what about situations where we are fully aware that we don’t have the answers to a lot of questions, and it’s kind of the point to figure those out? And what about situations where we don’t even know yet which questions to ask? Are we framing the problem in the wrong way?
What if there are other kinds of knowledge, different ways to know something, not in the form of beliefs in propositions, but in other forms you can only get from the experience of being in a situation?
We talk about such knowledge all the time. We hire people based on it. Sometimes we call it experience. Do experienced people just have better beliefs? Did they just collect more propositions that happen to be true?
What if they know differently?
Experience of knowing how to do something, knowing what it’s like to be in a certain situation, and knowing what it’s like to take part in a relationship are different kinds of knowing.
But because we raised propositional knowing — knowing that something is the case — above all other kinds of knowing during the scientific revolution, and because we constructed our common worldview to seemingly operate entirely without them — insufficiently and inefficiently, and with huge and dangerous consequences — we have lost our understanding of these other kinds of knowing, and we have lost sense for their importance.
Spirit of finesse
Pascal makes a distinction between what he calls the spirit of geometry — you have to think of that in Cartesian terms; I would say today, the spirit of math or the spirit of computation — and what he calls the spirit of finesse. His fear, his concern, is that we have lost [spirit of finesse]. And we have come to think of all of knowing and being in terms of the spirit of geometry.
And this is a theme, this Pascalean theme, as you've been seeing it running through this history:
We have slowly lost the importance of procedural knowledge — knowing how to do things.
We've lost perspectival knowing — knowing what it's like.
And we've lost participatory knowing — knowing that is part and parcel of how we are bound up with something else, someone else, in a process of mutual transformation, reciprocal revelation.
Because that's what finesse is! To do something with finesse… If I'm doing a move in Thai chi and I do it with finesse, it's like jazz. There's an element in there that I can't capture in terms of mathematical propositions. It's knowing how, in terms of knowing the right timing, the right placement.
When you're kissing someone else, you have to do it with finesse: the right timing, the right placement, the sensitivity to the contact, knowing what it is like to be you, knowing what it is like to be the other person, and then getting those two perspectives to have a participatory relation, to be in a relation of mutual revelation with each other. That's what's necessary to kissing someone well.
Pascal is pointing out that what has been lost in the scientific revolution is all these other kinds of knowing and being, and these are the kinds of knowing and being that he found present in the transformative experience that he had. It was for him a religious experience, but we've seen that these transformative experiences are not necessarily religious. They are always spiritual, but they're […] not always things that reinforce established religious beliefs or propositions. Sometimes they challenge the beliefs that the person has had. Sometimes they lead to anti-religious or at least non-religious propositions. Nevertheless, Pascal is on to something, to my mind, when he argues that the loss of the spirit of finesse has left us bereft of the capacity for transformative truth, transformative knowing.
And so we're now stuck where Socrates was at the beginning of the Axial Revolution. We have scientific knowledge, but remember Socrates rejected it because — although it was rigorous and even plausibly true — it did not afford transformation, self-transcendence, into wisdom.
But of course, all that self-transcendence is gone, because now I don't believe in self-transcendence because of the Protestant Reformation. And I don't have to go through personal transformation according to Descartes. Look at what Descartes is saying: You do not have to be transformed in order to come into contact with ultimate reality. All you have to do is use the right method, do the right computation.
So all of this [spirit of finesse] part of the Axial Revolution is being lost. That's what Pascal is putting his finger on and he's doing it extremely well.
We still use spirit of finesse; we still use these three other kinds of knowing, intuitively, because they are necessary for our functioning, and our development. However, we no longer reflect on them, they are no longer part of our conscious discussion and explication of how we operate, because we culturally learn to focus purely on spirit of geometry, math, logic, or computation for objective explanations.
Four ways of knowing
Let’s explore this taxonomy of four different kinds of knowing in more detail. In this Rebel Wisdom interview, Vervaeke gives a deeper definition of each:
Let me go through the four. Taxonomies aren't true or false, it's how consistent they are, how good they do at explication and explanation.
The one that we are of course most familiar with, when we talk about knowledge and knowing, is propositional knowing. This is the kind of knowledge that you capture in your beliefs about propositions. Like, I know that the cat is a mammal. We have done a lot of work on that and we have this excellent procedure for trying to improve our propositional knowing. It's called science, or if you want to make it more broadly, science and history.
I don't have too much to say about that except that for various historical reasons, which I won't review right now because I go over them in detail in the series, that model of knowing has come to predominate. And we lost the other kinds of knowing that had a larger place for example in the ancient and medieval worlds and in other cultures too.
Procedural knowing — I stick with knowing because I want to emphasize how much we're talking about the process here and not the product — is knowing how to do something, knowing how to catch a ball, knowing how to ride a bike, things like that. And it's captured not in beliefs, it's captured in skills. That's procedural knowing.
Perspectival knowing comes from the fact that you're not just an intelligent agent, you're a conscious agent. You have consciousness. And so this is the kind of knowing you know by basically being able to inhabit a perspective. This is a way of knowing that is relative to the state of mind you're in. You know what it's like to be drunk and how you and the world seem when you're drunk. You know what it's like to be sober.
And then we can ask more specifically, what is that knowing like, and I try to articulate that what it is is a phenomenon called salience landscaping, where the relevance realization machinery is coming into our online working memory and what we're getting is a dynamic pattern of salience, what's standing out, what's foregrounded and backgrounded, gestalting and featuring, what you're paying attention to, what you're ignoring — that's your salience landscape. It gives you your knowing of your here-now-ness, it gives you your situational awareness. So the procedural skills ultimately sit in and are nested by your perspectival salience landscaping.
But then we have to ask, what coordinates you as an organism in the environment such that a perspective is possible? And so that comes in, and that is where we get really deeply into the embodied cognition. All three of these last three [ways of knowing] are deeply about embodiment. This is a participatory knowing, this is the way in which you identify with and inhabit your mind and body, such that you make identities for the world that are co-relevant. You become an agent in a world that is an arena to you (agent-arena relationship).
For example, your biology puts significant constraints on the logistics of your cognition. It limits how you can move around in the world. That means it puts constraints on the kind of agency you can exercise, and it also puts constraints on what aspects of the world can be disclosed to you.
In the broader context of four different kinds of knowing, what happens to us, individually and culturally, if we single out propositional knowing as the “only true form” of knowing?
Propositional tyranny
In a recent talk about distributed cognition and democracy, Vervaeke explains the problem with propositional tyranny:
The problem is that both science and democracy right now tend to focus on the propositional level. We emphasize only propositional knowing.
Propositional knowing is knowing that something is the case. That gives you beliefs, and it's stored in your semantic memory. Your semantic memory is your knowledge of facts, like cats are mammals. There's no event associated with that, you just remember it.
Now the problem with that is […] that's not your only or primary form of knowledge. Your beliefs are not the primary thing directing your behavior, in that sense, if we mean by belief the capacity to assert a proposition.
A lot of your ability to navigate the world is actually based on knowing how to do things — not knowing that, but knowing how to do things. Knowing how to walk around, knowing how to kiss somebody you love. This is called your procedural knowledge and it gives you skills and it is stored in a different kind of memory called procedural memory.
You have another kind of memory: perspectival memory. It is your memory of episodes. You can't remember where you learned that 2 + 2 = 4, but I bet you might remember your last birthday. You can call up your perspective on a situation, what it was like to be you in that situation there and then. That's perspectival knowing and that's about being present and properly connected.
And it ultimately depends on your participatory knowing. The way physics and evolution has shaped you and the world so you fit together. Culture, evolution, gravity has shaped this floor so I can walk on it with my bipedalism. We fit together. It gives us our primary fittedness.
Now what's the point of all this? Why are you telling me about all these kinds of knowing other than propositional? Our culture is fixated on the propositional, on beliefs. We are in propositional tyranny.
But here is what the research is showing: Most of the sense of meaning and meaning in life comes from the non-propositional kinds of knowing. Because they are the ones that are properly connecting you, giving you that cognitive fittedness. The propositional sits on top like the icing on the cognitive cake. All the non-propositional is where the meaning is to be made.
Think about what happens in an insight. You can't even put into words what is happening in an insight. But in that insight you connect, it's bright to you, you are alive, you are connected to the situation.
Insofar as we have lost touch with the non-propositional knowing — and this is something Plato argued — we have lost touch with the machinery of meaning.
Insofar as democracy also sees itself just within the framing of propositional tyranny, it will be unable to afford people the education of collective intelligence into collective wisdom that enhances our religio. I use that term deliberately. Religio means to bind our connectedness, but of course it is the etymological origin of religion, a sense of importance of values, of realness.
We can see now, how we historically maneuvered ourselves with a problematic worldview into a propositional tyranny that has disconnected us from our self, from our world, and from others. We can see now, how we have lost touch with other ways of knowing that connect us to our self, to the world, and to others. And we can see now, how we have lost touch with the machinery of meaning.
So what exactly is this machinery of meaning?
If you are new to this series, start here: A secular definition of sacredness
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/Stefan