I've been meaning to ask this Thirsty for a while, and the recent discussion of religious students wanting to opt out of evolution (er... I mean opt out of studying it) brought it back to mind: Does anyone know what these "other ways of knowing" that I keep hearing about are? How do they work?Why I ask: About every month or so, I wind up reading one of those articles, where some commentator, often a proffie, frets that rational analysis of empirical evidence is such a narrow view of the universe. Gosh, Darn it - it can't answer all the questions. Now the author is always quick to point out that they are totally down with science and way grateful for all the neat stuff it provides. But gee, isn't it obvious that there are other equally valid ways of knowing? Unfortunately, instead of explaining how these other methods actually generate knowledge, they usually drift off into a heartfelt personal anecdote about, say, charismatic megafauna. Or a near death experience perhaps.
My preconception: As you can perhaps guess, I tend to think that appeals to 'other ways of knowing' are just a gussied up version of 'my mind is made up, so don't bother me with facts.' As a scientist, I find
knowledge by testing my thoughts against independently verifiable external reality (and when they conflict, it is my ideas that get revised). But as someone who is very keen on knowledge, if there are other way of finding it, I'd be very eager to learn about it. They seem to hold out the promise of being less work.But first, can I dispense with a few red herrings that tend to crop up in discussions like these.
Red Herring #1. This is not a fight between science and the humanities - at least I don't think it is. It strikes me that knowledge of the humanities comes from rational analysis of evidence. Historians, sociologists, linguists, and I think most of the humanities base their knowledge in external reality. But if I'm wrong about that, how is knowledge in the humanities created?
Red Herring #2. Seeking knowledge in facts is not to dismiss values. We may very well value art, courage, friendship, regularity, and so forth. We may even value charismatic megafauna. But a statement like "life would be impoverished without art" is a value judgement which (while I agree with it), strikes me as different from knowledge. A statement like "art allows us to feel more compassion towards others" could be knowledge if empirical verification showed us that it really does.
Red Herring #3. Let me stipulate at the outset that I recognize that technology is often misused or unwisely used. This does not invalidate scientific knowledge, nor does it turn a deep personal experience into knowledge. Rather I submit that this is a problem of either incomplete knowledge (not fully grasping the consequences of the technology) or misplaced values (say, overvaluing production and undervaluing nature for example).
Red Herring #4. Can we forego the traditional navel gazing about what is reality? The post modernist onanism ("Po-Mo-Ono"?) about everyone having "their own 'truth'" and the pseudo-quantum wankery about observers affecting reality just by observing it? Just this once? Please? Bottom line: If you go home at night and expect your house to still be where you left it in the morning, then on a practical level, you believe in external reality. Nuff Sed.
So the Thirsty is:
If the scientific way of knowing is to refer to observable reality, are there really other ways of knowing and how do they work?
How do they distinguish between knowing and not-knowing?
Between knowledge and error/opinion/wishful thinking/ideology?
Between knowing and being-full-of-crap?
Completely a propos of very little having to do with your argument, but perhaps something you'll want to tweak so as not to distract from it: aren't historians, sociologists, and linguists all social scientists, not humanities scholars? At my university, at least, the humanities departments are all involved with analyzing literature or doing cultural studies or suchlike.
ReplyDeleteThese come to mind:
ReplyDeleteinsight, inspiration, revelation, intuition...
R and/or G - I am totally on your page on this issue. If the revelationists, mystics, meditators etc. come to dog this thread, I'll fight the good fight.
ReplyDeleteThis "other ways of knowing" is just a way to sneak in stuff that can't be demonstrated, but they'd like to believe and have taken seriously anyway. It is a form of "my mind's made up," as you say. It is founded on the mushy base of terminology that Lessun lists. I would take "insight" off that list, however. And intuition is often based on experience, of course.
Well, gosh, if you're going to take out the possibility of mystics, fortune-tellers, and supernatural werewolf powers, then it's not going to be a real conversation is it, Science?
ReplyDeleteGeez.
Walt: insight, inspiration and intuition are ways fo generating ideas, not knowledge. Good ideas can indeed lead to knowledge, but they aren't in of themselves.
ReplyDeleteI agree with AjunctSlave that sometimes "ways of knowing" is code for "we don't want to have a fight about religion in this science class".
But not always. Whenever I say things like this to my father in the Humanities, he gets upset that I'm trying to build a cult of Science. Although I agree with the original post, I think for some "ways of knowing" simply refers to disciplinary points of view.
That's why it's such a well-used phrase: it's completely undefined.
A way of knowing seems to me to be the same as a means of acquiring knowledge. And knowledge and belief are *not* the same thing. Because I teach evolution (specifically human evolution), I run into this issue every semester. I make it clear to my students that while religion is a wonderful and beautiful thing, that a. we will not be discussing it, and b. it is not the same as science. One cannot be used to prove/disprove the other (although we can use science to study religion, but that's another discussion entirely). What I explain to them is this: belief is having faith in something or considering something to be true without any proof, whereas knowledge is information that has been provided by some form of empirical proof. So are there other ways of "knowing" - as in gaining information-based knowledge without proof from some external reality? I would have to say no. However, if people choose to believe in something that provides them with comfort and sense of purpose, that's fine - as long as they don't confuse belief with knowledge.
ReplyDeleteThere are cults in Science, sort of. CSICOP* is a skeptics group that rails about the paranormal, yet they do no lab research and their field investigator seems to only swing at the easy targets. The people over at Magonia magazine have made a good case that CSICOP really wasn't founded to debunk paranomal things, it was created to fight the large growth of interest in Eastern religions, Astrology, and other arcane topics in the post-Vietnam 1970s.
ReplyDelete_____________________
* Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal; this mouthful was hacked down to CSI, the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry right around the time that show hit the air.
I don't know about the "knowing" part, and I certainly don't want to start an argument about the philosophy of knowledge in here, but I'd suggest that your formulation is too narrow. That is to say, not every discipline can limit itself to empirical evidence. A certain amount of creative speculation (or extrapolation, if you prefer) is called for in many fields:
ReplyDeleteIn the words of the late, great historian of medicine Roy Porter: "The historical record is like the night sky: we see a few stars and group them into mythic constellations. But what is chiefly visible is the darkness."
And that's not even getting into fields such as analytic philosophy in which empiricism is, in some sense, beside the point.
That's different from saying that evolution is just one way of knowing, which is patently bullshit. But it recognizes that empirical evidence has limits in terms of what we might plausibly know. Not all strong arguments are constructed using empirical data.
PHIL240- Philosophy of Science
ReplyDeleteFall 2011
Final Exam
Essay Question 1: Define and establish the relationship between the following terms, employing only quantifiable magnitudes of matter and/or energy as evidence verifying your claims:
* "Knowledge"
* "Truth"
* "Falsity"
* "Value"
* "Good"
I second Anthro Girl's comment and pretty much do the same thing in my own classes. Sometimes students will say things like, "I believe that..." or, "I feel that..." and I jokingly will cut them off, pointing out that science isn't about beliefs or feelings. I've not had any arguments for "other ways of knowing," from students but if it came up I would tell them that for our purposes science is the only way of knowing. I really like DrDoctorDr's question.
ReplyDeleteThese are the other ways of knowing often discussed when introducing science as a means to acquire knowledge:
ReplyDeleteFaith– Authoritative pronouncements, Democratic judgments
Reason– see logical fallacies
Feeling– motivation and emotion
Sensory Information and experiences-- anecdotal
Legal methods-- guilt, responsibility
Empirical and experimental methods-- science
I'm with Angry Archie but also with, well, everyone else. I think academics, no matter their discipline, are pretty much on the same page as regards what we do, which is, reason from reliable data with a view to constructing a theory that goes some way towards explaining that data. What constitutes "reliable data" is the biggest difference between us and a lot of fundamentalists, but even a lot of fundamentalists will reason from, oh, what it says in the Bible, which they construe as reliable data.
ReplyDeleteThis isn't 'another way of knowing'; the question here is just what we consider reliable data, and what tests we perform to see if it is reliable or not. Humanities and sciences are broadly speaking in the same camp here; which is, that we all in academe privilege reason and reproducible results. Even that guy who dreamed the structure of the benzene ring then presumably constructed experiments to verify his insight. He may have "known" it in his gut when he woke up; but he won't have published "I had a dream." He published once he'd verified it experimentally and with reason.
That doesn't mean there aren't other ways of knowing. We all know that. We've all had those moments of insight when, oh, you were sitting in a café across from your boyfriend and he picks up the newspaper and begins to flick through it and suddenly you KNOW, without any need for more data, that he doesn't love you anymore, that he's done. And sure you will soldier on from that point for awhile and there's still going to be the flailing and crying and protestations and stuff, but the fact is, you know it. Likely you'll construct further experiments to verify your insight. But you don't need to.
However; and this is my real point: those other ways of knowing - dreams and revelation and sudden insight and stuff - are not what we're doing at a university. Those are at best grist for the mill of inquiry, experiment and reason. That's what we do and what we teach. And our students are welcome to have extra-rational insights; but they better show us rational verification, with evidence and argument, or what they're doing is not what we're here to teach.
Oh - in my institution history, linguistics, languages and literature (which are very different things btw) are all in "Humanities". Archaeology is split between Humanities & Social Sciences. Different institutions define Humanities differently.
ReplyDeleteMatt Cartmill pretty well summed up my take on this "alternative ways of knowing" idea, particularly as applied to the realms of science. See this excerpt at http://evgenymorozov.tumblr.com/post/13532572795/this-is-how-you-start-a-takedown
ReplyDeleteI suppose I would ask: knowing what? Because there are those who would say that knowing Christ comes about from imitating him, or from doing selfless work, or some such thing. But as people have pointed out, that's not what we're doing at a university.
ReplyDeleteMy discipline is constantly changing its mind about what counts as evidence, though we tend to use a very small number of protocols. Is that different outside the Humanities, or just what it means to do scholarship?
Roberto, thanks very much for posting that link. The link to the full review (which is not behind a paywall anymore) is posted below. It was excellent, and pretty much covers our discussion so far plus a lot we hadn't got to yet. I particularly liked this bit:
ReplyDelete"Readers of this journal will recognize in this test the essence of the scientific method: trying to figure out how meaningful a conjunction is by seeing whether it recurs regularly in similar circumstances. I think this is an important difference, maybe the most im- portant single difference, between science and story-telling. Stories say, "Once upon a time"; science says, "Whenever x, then y." Narration is dec- larative; science is subjunctive."
So, I'd like to take back every silly thing I said above. Obviously there are other ways of knowing; story-telling is one, and it's an unavoidable one, though in a university we like to back up our stories with some kind of evidence. As F&T points out, there is also knowing by imitating; knowing by doing; knowing by memorizing the hell out of something; and none of those are the same as knowing by precept and argument. And some of them are appropriate in an academic context.
Here's the link to the full review: http://resources.metapress.com/pdf-preview.axd?code=993887380658p195&size=largest
Touche DrDoctorDr! Since it's cold out here in Tuktoyaktuk this morning and the only indoor activities are grading or cleaning, I thought I'd give the exam question a try, just for kicks. This is offered with tongue firmly in cheek - no smackdown is intended or implied.
ReplyDeletePHIL240- Philosophy of Science
Fall 2011
Final Exam
Student: Rosencrantz and/or Guildenstern ID# 8675309
Question 1:
Distinctions among these terms can be observed in data on their actual patterns of usage among humans (Homo sapiens) occupying the British Isles during the late 20th and early 21st centuries. This usage is evident in the explicit patterns of pigments which exhibit light reflective qualities that contrast with their backgrounds (known as texts) in quantifiable patterns of air vibration produced by passage over their vocal chords (referred to as speach), and (recently) in specific patterns of electrons in silicon based information storage devices. They reflect measurable (at least in principle) patterns of neuronal connection and neurotransmitter deployment within the crania of this group of Homo sapiens. Further evidence on the use of these terms among H. sapiens is available from responses to questions very much like this one. These data are typically compiled in 'dictionaries'
The term 'knowledge' is most commonly used to refer to the condition of being aware of some facet of reality or the accumulated body of such awareness. Such awareness typically derives from the application of reason to empirical experience of the facet of reality in question.
'Truth' typically denotes accurate statements about or perceptions of some facet of reality when those statements/perceptions that is in accordance with reality. Because of this usage (accordance with reality) the term is often deployed to connote reliability and trustworthiness (as in the idiom 'a true friend')
'Reality' (not on the list, but can I get extra credit?) is a necessary corollary of truth and knowledge, and refers to those entities or phenomena that exist or occur independently of the perceptions of H. sapiens. The recent discovery by Heisenberg that the sensors used to 'observe' elementary particles de facto influence those particles does not present an exception, since this phenomenon occurred long before Heisenberg came along an perceived it.
Falsity is a term that denotes the opposite of truth. False perceptions are at odds with reality, although the perceiver may not be aware of this discord, and thus falsity includes the aggregate of both errors and lies. Because of this discordance, falsity often denotes unreliability - precisely because awareness of the contrast with reality eventually comes (often at some cost) to the individual holding the erroneous perception.
Value and Good are closely related, in that 'good' is an adjective used to describe phenomena that H. sapiens (individually or as a group) hold to have value. This attribution of value can be observed in human desire and striving for certain phenomena, as expressed through their actions (as opposed to their deployment of terms, which are frequently at odds with the reality of their actions), and the assiduous avoidance of others.
There is nothing necessary a priori about the association of these particular terms with their meanings, the words being essentially symbols that stand for the larger concept. One could just as easily use the terms groucho, harpo, gummo, chico and zeppo in place of knowledge truth falsity value and good, provided only that a suitable group of H. sapiens agreed upon what the symbols stand for. Similarly, the terms can (and have) been associated with other concepts: 'Good' to denote items of mercantile exchange, and knowledge to denote archaic sexual intercourse. (Wait! I mean that archaic use of 'knowledge' denotes sexual intercourse - perfectly ordinarly sexual intercourse after turning off the news on a Tuesday night. Phew!)
Do I pass?
Oops. Did I kill my own thread with verbiage?
ReplyDeleteI'm afraid the usual suspects have been named - faith, intuition, story-telling - but again without explanation of how they work. This seems to me to be central to accepting them as ways of knowing. Take storytelling for example. How does one figure out what is an accurate knowledge to take from a story? To give a facetious example, I can see the story of Humpty Dumpty as a metaphorical expression of irreversibility (though I prefer the Rubaiyat's 'moving finger writes"). But if the story went differently (if instead of falling, Humpty Dumpty dropped trou and mooned the king's men, say), would we know something different? Would the knowledge be valid? and by what criteria would be tell?
When the girl sitting across from her boyfriend just KNOWs that he's going to leave her (sorry Merely, I don't mean to pick on your examples), by what criteria does she distinguish this from mere worry? Is it a strong probabilistic statement based on past experience (or the experiences of others) that established a correlation between subtle cues and eventual breakup? If we learn about Jesus (historical or biblical, take your pick) by imitating him, how do we tell knowledge from erroneous impression? It is true that acting charitably tells us what it's like to be charitable, but this, like the correlation seems almost bedrock empiricism.
Reading Archie's comment, I think I left rational argument out of my post. So I fully accept that reasoning well about facts can parse out the shinola. And that a reasoned argument can be solid without empirical evidence, though here it seems to be a matter of consistency in definitions (and this is what I was riffing on in my answer to DrDoctorDr's exam question). Four is defined in such a way that it cannot help be two plus two. Still, when even the best defined argument clashes up against reality, it is the argument that must give way. If I put two rabbits in a pen, and then add two more, and then come back to find seventeen rabbits, I don't say it must be four, I look for how my reasoning failed to match the reality.
One early mentor of mine said "it doesn't matter how you generate your hypotheses - I get mine by drinking - it matters how you test them." Would that make a reasonable take away from all this? That externally observed reality is trumps?
That and this line from Cartmill's review is going to stick with me:
"This is a book that clatters around in a dark closet of irrelevancies for 450 pages before it bumps accidentally into its index and stops."
That there, is some virtuoso smackdown, to which we humble miserians can but aspire.
@MA: Does this count as one of the "silly things" you take back? "I think academics, no matter their discipline, are pretty much on the same page as regards what we do, which is, reason from reliable data with a view to constructing a theory that goes some way towards explaining that data."
ReplyDeleteThat's not the case with some Women's Studies academics I know.
At my previous university, I joined a cross-disciplinary Women's College because of my interest in prehistoric gender. They welcomed me and asked me to present something at their next mini-conference. To my horror, the day began with a speech about "validating women's ways of knowing," to a lot of nods and affirming noises. (Say Amen, Sister!)
So I got up and presented the scientific bases for understanding gender in prehistory: based on actual artifacts, and specific to different cultures and times. There's a lot we don't know yet, of course, but one thing we DO know is that it's unlikely that an artifact from one place and time is directly related to a culture 10,000 years later, in a different region, and with a different subsistence pattern. In other words, there's no empirical support for a Mother Goddess cult spanning from Upper Paleolithic Germany to Neolithic Turkey. On a more positive note, I gave a couple of examples where a focus on the women's roles significantly enriched our fundamental understanding of an ancient site or culture.
There were no questions. The atmosphere was decidedly chilly at the refreshment break. And when I left that university a few years later, the Women's Institute director sent me a nice farewell note that finished with, "Maybe someday you'll realize that there was a Goddess-based matriarchy at the beginning."
Sure sounded like faith to me, rather than anything grounded in data.
R&/or G: I agree with you, including that "knowing by doing" is based on empiricism.
ReplyDeleteBut I'll concede that there may be different experiences of knowing, for example, through different senses.
A gymastics judge may claim to "know" what a perfect vault looks like (if the judges share a clear definition with interobserver reliability -- fat chance, but let's pretend). Meanwhile, the gymnast may "know" what a perfect vault feels like (after years of experience and reviews of videos).
So there could be a visual "way of knowing" and a kinaesthetic "way of knowing", but if both are based on the same standards, the results should be congruent.
But I don't think that's what post-modernists and my Women's College colleagues were considering.
@R&G: Sure, but you're still defining your terms too narrowly. I think the problem here, and in some of the other comments, is that knowledge is being defined in a number of sometimes contradictory ways. You take knowledge to mean certainty about empirically verifiable facts. This is one definition of scientific knowledge, but it doesn't cover all possible forms or definitions of knowledge.
ReplyDeleteIn moral philosophy, for example, there is no external reality against which to test one's strong claims. And yet, I would hope that you would not discount the value of moral philosophy, or of good arguments in moral philosophy. Likewise, as I was trying to suggest with the Roy Porter quote, historians try to interpret the meaning of some set of facts that are dwarfed by the number of facts that are lost to the historical record. You and I may disagree about the quality of my arguments and interpretations, but we can hardly disagree about the facts, few as they are relative to the whole. Even with a time machine we still wouldn't possess all the facts, and we would ultimately resort to interpretation of one kind or another. Does this mean that history is not knowledge? It is not empirical knowledge of the sort you allude to in your definition, but interpreting the past has value, produces knowledge, and is (when done well) the product of a rigorous and difficult process of research and writing.
What everyone here does agree on, as far as I can tell, is that disciplined, trained thinkers are better than those who go by their gut, or their intuition, or whatever they call it, and cannot explain their conclusions by reference to rigorous argument, whether that argument refers to external reality or not.
Thanks, Archie, I think we are on pretty much common ground. I see what you mean with the Porter quote now, and it's not so far different from many of the sciences where we have to take samples and extrapolate from them. We can never observe everything - certainly not in minute detail. And I do think that history is empirical knowledge if we are inferring say King John's motivation to sign the Magna Carta from analysis of the texts and artefacts that illuminate the political forces in play at the time.
ReplyDeleteI appreciate the value of rigorous argument and I agree that it does separate wheat from chaff. I'm more willing than some of my colleagues (and most grad students) to resort to mathematical formulation because it is a useful way to rigorously define my thinking. It sorts through the muddle of 'well wouldn't you expect that...?' (But I hasten to add that I don't expect every field to define itself mathematically.)
So yeah, rigorous reasoning married to empirical observation does seem a fairly common denominator in good scholarship, and I haven't seen anything yet to take its place.
And if you'll forgive a parting potshot - even in moral philosophy the consequentialists seem to make reference to what will actually happen - and could presumably be checked by observation.