56PART ONE
TYPES OF KNOWLEDGE
THE WORD KNOWLEDGE has fifteen dictionary meanings, but for our purposes two or three will do. One of these, however, calls for dis tinctions and classifications. The three chap ters of Part One will be given to conceptual, semantic, and classificatory problems, some of them essential for the understanding of the ar guments in the entire work.
Chapter 2 The Known and the Knowing Chapter 3 Mundane, Scientific, Humanistic,
Artistic, and Other Classes of Knowledge Chapter 4 Alternative Classifications of Knowledge CHAPTER 2
58THE KNOWN AND THE KNOWING
SOME PEOPLE have firm convictions regarding the virtue or vice of beginning a discussion with definitions. Even nationalistic preju dices have been appealed to in this cause. I have heard references to Teutonic authoritarianism and its propensity at the very outset to impose definitions upon the helpless reader; to English pragmatism and its propensity to defer definitions until it has become clear what is called for in the setting of problems and issues; to French orthology and its propensity to proscribe discourse on undefined subjects. I have no convictions on this question. In the present instance, how ever, it would be impossible to begin with a definition, because we shall see that "knowledge" does not have just one meaning, which one can delineate and demarcate with a definition. It has several meanings, and two of them will be needed throughout this book. Al though they are different, they are logically correlated and neither of them is dispensable in our discussion. The one is knowledge as that which is known; the other is knowledge as the state of knowing.
The two essential meanings of the word "knowledge" are usually not kept apart. Many philosophers of science, when they distinguish among different kinds of knowledge, mean different kinds of sub jects, different kinds of things known. Yet, in epistemology different ways of knowing are examined; in order to study the relation be tween the knower and the known, one has to inquire into the ways of knowing, the ways of getting to know, as well as the classes into which to sort that which has been or is becoming known.
THE DOUBLE MEANING OF KNOWLEDGE
In everyday language we use the word "knowledge" just as often in the one as in the other of its meanings. We speak of having acquired "much knowledge," and we also speak of "having knowledge" of this or that. But if "knowledge" means both what we know and our state of knowing it, we might have to say that we "have knowledge of much knowledge." The same kind of equivocation has developed with other words.
59TYPES OF KNOWLEDGE
28
"Possession" means both that which we possess and the state of our possessing it, from which one might conclude that we have posses sion of our possessions. "Property" means both that which belongs to me and my right to it, which would imply that I have property of my property. With the double meaning of "knowledge," we shall find the ter minological proposal made in Chapter 1 even more justified. Knowl edge as a state of knowing is produced by activities such as talking plus listening, writing plus reading, but also by activities such as discovering, inventing, intuiting. In the first group of activities at least two persons are involved, a transmitter and a receiver, and the state of knowledge produced in the consciousness of the recipient refers to things or thoughts already known, at least to the transmit ter. Only one person is engaged in the second group of activities. The state of knowing that he or she produces may be of things or thoughts not known to anybody else. Knowledge in the sense of "that which is known" exists as soon as one single person "has" it and, hence, it is first produced by the kind of processes mentioned above with the second group of activities producing a "state of knowing"—discovering, inventing, etc. Of course, if only one person has a particular piece of knowledge and does not share it with anybody, it may be that no one knows of it. We do not ordinarily take notice of knowledge possessed by only one knower. Only when he discloses what had been a one-man secret and thus does his part in producing in other minds a state of know ing what he alone has known will we speak of "socially new knowl edge." When does such knowledge stop being socially "new"? How much time must have passed since its first acquisition or since its first disclosure? There is no need to answer this question, for little, if anything, depends on how it is answered. But it is important to bear in mind that from several points of view, and particularly from an economic point of view, the transmission of the knowledge from the first knower to at least a few others is essential. This implies that the production of new knowledge—in the sense of that which is known—is not really complete until it has been transmitted to some others, so that it is no longer one person's knowledge only.
In this context we may recall that Bertrand Russell distinguished between "social knowledge" and "individual knowledge," though with reference to rather different aspects. He meant by social knowl edge what "the community knows . . . in its collective capacity, all the contents of the encyclopedia and all the contributions to the pro ceedings of learned bodies," and by individual knowledge, what an individual knows, "through his experience, . . . knowledge not pos-
60THE KNOWN AND T H E K N O W I N G
29
sessed by those whose experience has been different."1 One may as sume that the production of individual knowledge in this narrow sense will rarely ever be a deliberate activity, let alone an economic activity. But this is a question for consideration at a later point.
MEANINGS OF KNOWING
If it is admitted that knowledge in the sense of knowing and knowl edge in the sense of what is known are different things, it will not be surprising if I choose to separate the discussion as far as I can. In this section and the two subsequent ones, I shall focus on the meanings, modes, and degrees of knowing. Yet, despite the attempt to focus on knowing, the vision field will always include some of the things known. Indeed, significant differences in the meanings, modes, and degrees of knowing cannot be explored and explained without illus trative references to the contents of the knowledge.
Knowledge-Of and Knowledge-About Philologists, philosophers, and sociologists have made much fuss about the "poverty" of the English language relative to other civilized languages, which have two words for the one English word "knowing." The French can distinguish between connaitre and savoir, the Germans between kennen and wissen, whereas the users of English are limited to the one "knowing." William James, the American psychologist and philosopher, proposed to distin guish between "knowledge-of" and "knowledge-about," or ("mere dumb") knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by systematic study and reflection.2 Although this distinction may be significant in many contexts, it is not consistently carried out in the French and German use of the pairs of words, either in their verb form or in the equivalent nouns.
1 Bertrand Russell, Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1948), p. 3.
2 William fames, "On the Function of Cognition," Mind, vol. 10 (1885), pp. 27-44,
reprinted in his book The Meaning of Truth: A Sequel to 'Pragmatism' (London:
Longmans, Green, 1910), chap. 1, pp. 1-42. The distinction goes back, as James recog
nized by extensive quotation, to John Grote, Exploratio Philosophica: Rough Notes on
Modem Intellectual Science, part 1 (Cambridge: Deighton, Bell, 1865), p. 60. Grote
distinguished between knowledge as "acquaintance or familiarity with what is
known"—a "phenomenal" matter, a "presentation to the senses," or a "representation
of it in picture . . . or imagination"—and knowledge as what is "embodied in con
cepts," expressed "in judgments or propositions," a "more intellectual notion of
knowledge."
61TYPES OF KNOWLEDGE
30
Many very learned definitions of the French savoir and science and of the German wissen and Wissenschaft run in terms of connaissances and Kenntnisse, respectively; that is, one member of the pair is defined and explained by the other, which thus is either equiva lent or only of different extension. Likewise, many colloquial ex pressions in these two languages are quite inconsistent, using, for example, connaitre and kennen for highly developed systems of thought, and savoir and wissen for matters of casual, personal expe rience. Thus, the idioms do not take advantage of the distinctions which the availability of the linguistic options would permit. In these circumstances, we need not feel cheated if we have to do with one word instead of two. As a matter of fact, we may save a good deal of trouble by being spared some specious hairsplitting. The only re gret that I have is on behalf of any one who has to translate my book, or any of its parts, into another language. It happens that translators into French prefer to render "knowledge" as connaissance, whereas translators into German render it as Wissen, thus making contrary linguistic choices. This simple comment, however, was only a short introduction to a discussion—which can be neither simple nor short—of more search ing questions regarding the meaning of knowing. I must not avoid embarking on an exercise in language analysis, partly because it has an important bearing on the "wide concept of knowing" that I regard as pertinent to an inquiry into the economics of knowledgeproducing activities, partly because the existence of a large literature on the ways of knowing makes it morally intolerable to ignore it. It would be parochial narrow-mindedness if I were to write a long treatise on the creation and distribution of knowledge but were to pay no attention to a discourse on the meaning of knowing that has been going on for at least 2,500 years and has in recent decades be come increasingly excited and exciting.
To Know That versus to KnowHow Classical philosophers were chiefly interested in the meaning of knowing that (something is the case), so-called propositional know ing. A good many philosophers and anthropologists engaged in lan guage analysis have argued against the onesidedness and examined the meaning of knowing how. The philosopher Gilbert Ryle, for example, wrote a long chapter on "Knowing How and Knowing That" and provided many instructive illustrations for these two types of knowing.3 That knowing how has a directly pragmatic con notation does not mean that propositions of the knowing-that type
3 Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (London: Hutchinson, 1949), pp. 25-61. Ryle
62THE KNOWN AND THE KNOWING
31
are without pragmatic significance; indeed, such knowledge may have a clear and strong influence on the knowers' actions. On the other hand, some knowing that may merely satisfy the knowers' curiosity. Many cross-connections exist between knowing that and knowing how, but the difference in essential meaning is categorical. I know that means that I confidently believe that something is so and not otherwise; I know how means that I am capable of doing something. Consider the following examples of knowledge claims or instances of propositional knowing. We know that the square root of 64 is 8; we know that, in French, connaissance was once spelled connoissance; we know that diphtheria is a highly infectious disease; we know that Avogadro's number is 6.02 χ IO23; we know that there have never been long-lasting price inflations without increases in the quantity of money; and we know that Alexander the Great, King of Macedonia from 336 to 323 B.C., extended his realm to include Persia and the Middle East of Asia and also Egypt in North Africa. These are examples of very different kinds of knowledge (formal, empirical, linguistic, historical, etc.), but all in the nature of know ing that, or propositional knowing. Some of the stated propositions may express "basic" knowledge underlying some how-to knowl edge; for example, knowing Avogadro's number may inform practi cal actions in the application of physical chemistry, and knowing the association between monetary expansion and price inflation may inform political decisions regarding the economy. Still, all these propositions are in the nature of the know-that type. Knowledge of the know-how type, though often related to knowledge of the knowthat type, is, or can be, immediately practical, since it is a skill or ability to do something, a capacity to perform.
The difference between knowing that and knowing how is most clearly manifest when exclusively practical capacities to perform are so far removed from conscious mental acts or states that they ap proach semiautomatic muscle movements without the actor's atten tion—subconscious motoric activity. Thus, I know how to swim, but I can swim also without thinking about it: my mind may be on other matters, so much so that I am not aware of my swimming. Not all kinds of knowing how are of this routine character. I shall later find it helpful to differentiate among various types of knowing how by
complained that "theorists have been so preoccupied with the task of investigating
the nature, the source and the credentials of the theories that we adopt that they have
for the most part ignored the question what it is for someone to know how to perform
tasks" (p. 28).
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TYPES OF KNOWLEDGE
the degree of attention they require in their exercise, in their actual performance. We have to guard against a snag in the interpretation of knowing how; some ambiguities seem to have escaped the semanticists' eagle-eyes: (1) We may know how something looks. (2) We may know how something has happened. (3) We may know how some thing (an antecedent, a cause) is generally or universally connected with something else (a subsequent, an effect). (4) We may know how to perform a certain task. All these four kinds of knowing are know ing how, but only the fourth is meant by the philosophers who have expounded on the features and problems of knowing how. The first member of the set is descriptive knowledge; the second, historical knowledge (of a course of events); the third, theoretical knowledge (usually regarded as knowing why). The fourth, know-how in the usual sense, has been called procedural knowledge, but this is a poorly chosen adjective, which can give rise to other confusions.4 The use of the adjective "procedural" has been preempted by methodologists interpreting the use of fundamental hypotheses in scientific theorizing as "procedural rules," which are neither ana lytic nor synthetic, neither true nor false, but only heuristic or not heuristic.5 One may, perhaps, argue that the ability to present and sustain a theoretical argument—to reason from postulates, funda mental hypotheses, and factual assumptions to inferences regard ing lower-level generalizations—is a skill, requiring "procedural know-how." Still, the designation of some hypotheses as procedural rules is not designed to point to the procedural knowing of how to use these rules. The words "practice" and "practical," commonly used in connec tion with knowing how, can easily mislead us. As I have said, know ing that may be no less important for practical application than knowing how. To know a city and its streets, to know that traffic will be heavy between 8 and 9 in the morning, and to know how to drive
4 Procedural knowing as a synonym for "knowing how" and antonym of proposi-
tional knowing was proposed by Israel Scheffler, Conditions of Knowledge (Chicago:
Scott, Foresman11965), p. 14. Scheffler points to important differences between prop-
ositional and what he calls procedural knowledge. For example, in a propositional-
knowledge claim it is meaningful to replace "knowing that" by "believing that,"
whereas in a claim of know-how such a substitution would be meaningless. You can
say "I know how to perform" (swim, calculate, etc.), but you cannot reasonably say "I
believe how to perform" (p. 19).
5 Felix Kaufmann, Methodology of the Social Sciences (New York: Oxford Univer
sity Press, 1944), pp. 77ff, especially pp. 87-88. The expression was used also by
Henry Margenau, The Nature of Physical Reality: A Philosophy of Modern Physics
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1950), p. 13. Sir Karl Popper has also occasionally
employed the term.
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33
an automobile are three different kinds of knowing; all three are practical to one who has to make an appearance at 9 a.m. at a specified building in that city. Yet, only the capacity to drive the car is counted as knowing how. On the other hand, in acquiring that capacity—knowing how to drive—a learner is greatly helped by pre cepts, directives, and other statements of a knowing-that character.
Since the author of this book happens to be a professional economist, readers not close to that discipline may suspect that an economist's concern will be chiefly with practical knowledge. Hav ing been told that knowing that need not be any less practical than knowing how, these readers may still suspect that practical knowl edge (in the wider sense) would be in the center of the statistical, descriptive, and analytical inquiries in these volumes. One might think that business firms, households, and governments would be averse to spending money for any but practical knowledge; such a preconception, however, would be mistaken. Consumers spend large sums for information, or flows of knowledge, that merely satisfy their curiosity, their desire for entertainment, their cultural aspirations. Businessmen pay for television programs which add nothing to the practical know-how of anybody, viewers, customers, or insiders. Governments spend huge sums for the production and distribution of knowledge of all sorts, including, of course, a fair portion for teaching immediately practical knowledge, the basic skills. This does not mean that the economic role of how-to knowledge is small. "Economic role" is an ambiguous phrase. How much of all knowledge-producing activity in the nation is designed to generate or disseminate knowledge for use in practical action? How much does the generation and dissemination of practical knowledge con tribute to the growth of productivity and national income? These are, clearly, two entirely different questions. What portion of na tional income is spent for obtaining practical knowledge is some thing else than what portion of an increase in national income is at tributable to the generation, dissemination, and use of practical knowledge. The first fraction may be small, the second large. Both, however, are worth investigating. We shall return to the notion of "practicality" of knowledge. But there is much to do—or rather to talk about—before we get there for a more definitive analysis.
To Know What, to Know That, and to Know How I find it necessary to add a third kind of knowing, namely, knowing what. At first blush it looks as if knowing what and knowing that are
65TYPES OF KNOWLEDGE
34
the same; it can be shown, however, that knowing what is much wider, in that it may contain many knowing thats and may have more cross-connections with knowing how. As a matter of fact, there is more than one kind of knowing what, but I shall talk first about the one which is densely populated with knowing thats, or propositional knowing.6 If I claim to know a city, a language, a literature, a work of art, a discipline or field of study, or any other complex of knowable things, I cannot possibly formulate what I know about these subjects in a single proposition. Each of these complex subjects may contain thousands or millions of things knowable, many, perhaps all, stata ble in propositions in the form of "I know that. . . ." Yet, nobody, or hardly anybody, will claim knowledge of almost all of them; most people who claim to know a complex subject will in fact know only a fraction of the propositional knowledge that makes up the total. Knowing what means knowing an undetermined portion of all pos sible knowing-that claims about the subject.
Do you know Paris? Yes, I have been there, but what do I know about it? According to a guidebook, Paris has approximately 5,500 streets, 75 theaters (not counting cabarets and cinemas), 175 churches, over 50 university buildings, over 50 hospitals, 57 museums, 14 parks, some 120 bus lines, 23 cemeteries. How many streets do I have to know, to know Paris? As many as a taxi driver? or perhaps only the major boulevards and a few streets around my hotel? How many churches should I have visited and in what detail should I have studied them? All the stained-glass windows and the gargoyles? Howwell do I have to know the Louvre, the Tuileries, the Eiffel Tower, the Pantheon; how well the railroad stations, the lines of the Metro? Do I have to know that the rue de la Paix runs from the Boulevard des Capucines to the Place de l'Opera? (Only the last of all these potential knowings was here formulated in the form of a know-that proposition, but all the others could equally well be ex pressed in such a form.) The connection between knowing what and knowing how is rather simple in this case: I know how to get by the shortest route (or in the shortest time) from the Etoile to the Sorbonne. (If I drive a car, I have to know that this or that is a one-way street.) As a second example of knowing what, I propose a foreign lan guage, French. To say honestly "I know French," how many of the many thousands of French words do I have to know? How much of
6 My concept of knowing what is not the same as Broudy's. See Harry S. Broudy1
"Mastery," chap. 5 in B. Othaniel Smith and Robert H. Ennis, eds., Language and
Concepts in Education (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1961), p. 77.
66THE KNOWN AND THE KNOWING
35
its grammar and syntax, how many idioms and colloquialisms? I suppose that most of the things knowable about the French language can be stated in the form of appropriate propositions, though this may be difficult for matters of pronunciation and intonation. In any case, hundreds of thousands of items of knowing that may add up to complete knowledge of French, but a fraction of the total will com monly be accepted in support of the claim that "I know French." The connection between knowing French as a subject and knowing how to read French, how to speak French, how to write French, and how to understand spoken French is too evident to require elaboration. There will hardly be a dispute about the fact that the degrees of knowing may be different, and that the degrees may be measured in different ways: regarding knowing French as a subject, perhaps by the ratio of individual items of knowing that to the total complex of knowing what, and regarding knowing how to converse in French, perhaps by the fluency, accuracy, intelligibility, and elegance of ex pression in speaking, and by the ease and correctness in the under standing of the partners' utterances. For my last example of knowing what, I choose economics, a com plex of thousands of definitions, assumptions, facts, observed reg ularities, and models. How many of the special fields, apart from micro- and macroeconomics, does one have to "know" to justify a claim of knowing economics? The classifiers have distinguished welfare economics, doctrinal history, economic history, comparative systems, economic growth and development, economic fluctuations and stabilization, economic statistics, econometrics, nationalincome accounting, monetary and fiscal theory, public finance, international economics, business finance and management, indus trial organization, industry studies, agricultural and natural re sources, manpower and labor economics, demographic economics, consumer economics, urban economics, regional economics—to mention only the major headings. Would familiarity with or mastery of three or four of these fields be sufficient to legitimize the claim "I know economics"? What minimum number of single items of know ing that would be required for a warranted claim to know even one of the special fields? This may be the proper place to point to the difference between knowing and demonstrating that one knows.7 What you demonstrate that you know is at best a portion of what you know. And the ability to demonstrate your knowing is a know-how not necessarily proportional to the amount of your propositional
7 I want to acknowledge my indebtedness to Donna H. Kerr, whose pointed ques
tions and blunt comments in discussion were immensely helpful to me in developing
this section.
67TYPES OF KNOWLEDGE
36
knowing. The knowing how that is related to the knowledge of eco nomics, or any other field of study, manifests itself in the knower's ability to convince, to advise, to teach, and to pass examinations. Summarizing my exposition of this meaning of knowing what, I may emphasize again that it relates to large complexes of propositional knowing—and knowing what can be resolved (decomposed, broken down) into large numbers of single knowing-that proposi tions. Perhaps I may refer to this concept of knowing what as the par ticle theory of knowing, where the whole complex consists of masses of single propositions in the form of knowing that. The latter can be judged as true or false—or undecided, if one is prepared to admit this into one's scheme of logic. The former, however, the knowing what, can be judged only in terms of the relative numbers of relevant knowing-that propositions which the knower can affirm.
As a transition to a second kind of knowing what, I may return for a moment to my knowing Paris. Does it consist only of thousands of particles of propositional knowing, or does it perhaps include also some sentimental, emotional "knowing"? I can well imagine a lover of Paris saying that no one knows Paris who has not felt the elation and awe inspired by seeing the architectural grandeur of the cathe dral of Notre Dame, or the loveliness and enchantment of seeing and smelling the blooming chestnut trees on the banks of the Seine in early spring. If these are parts of knowing what, they cannot be properly expressed in propositional knowing.
This statement captures the second meaning of knowing what: feelings which can be known only by experience, not described in words of prose. I might call it ineffable knowledge were it not for the poets who sometimes can convey in words of poetry what cannot be expressed in declarative propositions. Feelings of pleasure and of pain, of love and of hate, of awe, sympathy, fear, pity, envy, guilt, remorse, and many others, can be known by personal experience. They are included in the category of knowing what, since they are nonpropositional contents or components of what is known.
The Special Status of Knowing That I have mentioned the differences among knowing what, knowing that, and knowing how, as if these were all there is. There are some more, for example, knowing whom, knowing who, and knowing why. Before I introduce the newcomers and tell about their roles, I want to talk about the special status accorded to knowing that. This status is not the result of everyday discourse among ordinary people but, instead, a philosopher's convention that began with Plato. Per sons seeking, claiming, and achieving "superior knowledge" don't
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THE KNOWN AND THE KNOWING
just talk as common folk; instead, they make declarative statements, formulate propositions, categorical assertions, hypothetical syl logisms, and all the rest. To many learned people, or scientists, knowledge seems to be almost exclusively propositional knowing. (I may feel compelled several times in these volumes to repeat this ref erence to one-sided interpretations of the meaning of knowledge.)
The school of analytic or linguistic philosophers has made the analysis of the meaning of knowing one of its major tasks—not from the point of view of traditional epistemology, not from a psychologi cal point of view, not from an anthropological point of view, not from points of view of historical semantics, but from their special procedures of language analysis: words must mean what they ought to mean in the most logical of all logical discourses. The linguistic philosophers on the ultra-fussy wing, insisting on the "strong" meaning of knowing, have stipulated conditions for the right use of the word so strict that few can ever meet them; moreover, the condi tions are stricter for the third person ("he or she knows") than for the first person ("I know"). The analysts want "I know" to mean, first, that what I claim to know is really true, second, that I am sure of it, and, third, that I have a right to be sure of it.8 Two further conditions are imposed on the meaning of "He knows," namely, that I am sure that he knows that what he claims to know is really true, and that I am sure that he has a right to be sure of it.9
If I, speaking for myself, were to claim to be sure and to have a right to be sure of the truth of my propositions, I would betray a lack of scientific modesty and of the proper attitude of always conceding the possibility that I may be wrong. If I were to claim that a third
8 Alfred J. Ayer, The Problem of Knowledge (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books,
1956), p. 35.
9 Some expositors, for example, Israel Scheffler, try to simplify this statement of
conditions by reducing it to three steps also for "He knows"; this works, however,
only if the third person's acceptance of the adequacy of the evidence is the same as
that of the first person. See Scheffler, Conditions of Knowledge, pp. 16 and 21. "The
point is that when we assert that a person X knows that Q, we are not only (in effect)
affirming the truth of our whole assertion, but we are committing ourselves also to the
truth of the embedded substantive statement 'Q' " (p. 22).—My point, that there may
be five conditions imposed on the strong meaning of knowing, rests on the possibility
that I do not accept the same evidence that satisfies the third person as giving him the
right to be sure about the truth of the proposition he averts. Disagreement on the ade
quacy of evidence is not rare. Michael Polanyi wrote on the "personal" judgment in
volved; "Things are not labelled 'evidence' in nature, but are evidence only to the ex
tent to which they are accepted as such by us as observers.... Indeed, no scientist can
forego selecting his evidence in the light of heuristic expectations." Michael Polanyi,
Personal Knowledge, 2d ed. (London; Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962 [1st ed.,
1958]), p. 30.
69TYPES OF KNOWLEDGE
38
person had such unquestionable assuredness of the truth, I would appear to be rather prejudiced. If we took this rigmarole (of several surenesses piled on one another) at its face value, the word "know ing," or at least the expression "propositional knowing," would have to be banished from our vocabulary. Having undertaken to write about knowledge, I am not joining the fussy JTB fanatics—"Justified True Belief" zealots.10 I incline more towards historical semantics, trying to find out what people mean (or meant) when they say (or said) something, not what they ought to mean (or ought to have meant). I shall not dodge further discussion of the relationship between knowledge and truth, but I shall defer it to the first chapter of Part Two. For the moment, I want to look into a whole string of meanings of knowing, as people of all kinds, classes, and professions use the word in less formal, less artful speech.
An Assortment of Knowns and Knowings The variety of meanings reasonably attached to the word "knowing" is far greater than most of us realize before looking into this busi ness. I have formulated many questions beginning with "Do you know . . . ?" and have tried to give an honest answer beginning with "Yes, . . . ." and proceeding either to some reservations and limitations or to justifications of my affirmative reply. (It was not vanity that made me omit questions about my knowledge which I would have to answer in the negative, but just the thought that I wanted to examine the meanings of knowing, not the meanings of not know ing. As a matter of fact, the "conditions" imposed on "significant propositions" are the same for affirmative and negative sentences.)
After I had experimented with many questions and answers, I found it helpful to arrange the questions according to a set of inter rogative pronouns or particles such as what, who, whom, when, where, and how. This would not lead to an omission of knowing that, partly because most of the questions allow for answers in the form of that clauses. Thus, there are many questions which I would place into combined categories because "I know that. ..." would an swer questions about what, who, whom, when, and where.
For some of the categories I formulated several questions, because I wanted a variety of subjects to be represented, ranging from the most mundane personal matters to sophisticated scientific problems. I shall have questions and answers appear in juxtaposition, num-
10 Again I want to say how much I owe to the stimulating discussions with Donna
H. Kerr. She gave me courage as well as advice.
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39
bered from 1 to 33, in order to facilitate references to them in the subsequent discussion.
ANSWERS
QUESTIONS
Yes, enough for my present 1. Do you know European needs in research, but not economic history? enough to teach it on a grad uate level. Yes, it was the (now rejected) 2. Do you know the Phlogis theory of an invisible substance ton theory? contained in combustible bodies and disengaged in the process of combustion. Yes, I have been there many 3. Do you know Paris? times, but never for very long. I could not draw you a map from memory. Yes, the Pastoral; I've heard it 4. Do you know the Sixth often and might be able to hum Symphony by Beethoven? a few themes. Yes, I saw it in Amsterdam, and 5. Do you know Rembrandt's of course in reproductions. Nightwatch ? Yes, I have read it, but the book 6. Do you know Thomas is so long, and I read it so long Mann's Buddenbrooks? ago, that I cannot remember it very well. Yes, I've suffered from them for 7 . Do you know migraine many years, though lately less headaches? frequently. Yes, but I do not accept this 8. Do you know that you pedantic restriction on ordi ought not to say that you nary speech. know unless you are sure of your evidence? Yes, but such figures mean lit 9. Do you know that the un tle; there are different ways to employment rate increased define the term, to get the data, in June from 5.6 to 5.7 per to treat them, and to obtain a cent? measurement. Yes, but the question is who 10. Do you know that the an expects, and on the basis of nual rate of price inflation
71TYPES OF KNOWLEDGE
40
is expected to be much what assumptions regarding lower in 1980 than in unknown future policies does 1979? he expect? 11. Do you know that your Yes, someone else has told me, trousers are torn in the but I don't know how I tore back? them. 12. Do you know that this is Yes, but only now that you your wife's birthday? have reminded me of it: I might not have thought of it. 13. Doyouknowthatitislong Yes, you have just made me past dinnertime? aware of it. Yes, [I know that it is] Sac 14. Do you know the capital of California? ramento. 15. Do you know the second Yes, it is the law of entropy. [I law of thermodynamics? know that] in irreversible proc esses, such as the mixing of hot and cold gases or the change of a solid to a liquid, disorder will increase. I ought to learn more about this law to be sure that I comprehend all that is implied. 16. Do you know the program Yes, [I know], if I was told cor rectly, that they would play for the concert tonight? Mozart, Debussy, and Bartok. 17. Do you know what the Yes, I have heard it: [I know weather forecast is? there is] a 40 per cent chance of showers in the afternoon. Yes, if my watch is correct, [I 18. Do you know what time it is? know that it is] ten minutes past twelve. 19. Do you know the meaning Yes, to me it means [or I know of knowledge ? that it comprises] all the things that can be connected with the verb to know. 20. Do you know the years Yes, [I know that they were] when the Thirty Years War 1618 to 1648. was fought? 21. Do you know where my Yes, [I know that it is] on my briefcase is? secretary's desk; I saw it there this morning.
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22. Do you know who killed Yes, [I know that it was] Lee J. F. Kennedy? Harvey Oswald, if the Warren Commission was right, which seems to be the case. 23. Do you know who is Presi Yes, [I know that it is] Dr. Kirchschlager; I have actually dent of Austria? met him a few times. 24. Do you know your neigh Yes, but not socially; it is only a bor? nodding acquaintance. 25. Do you know calculus? Yes, both differential and integral, but I have forgotten how to do differential equa tions. 26. Do you know French? Yes, I read it fluently, but my speaking knowledge is only fair. Yes, I have heard many, but can 27. Do you know any nursery recite only one or two by heart. rhymes? Yes, I had to tell it sometimes to 28. Do you know the fairy tale my grandchildren. of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs? 29. Do you know regression Yes, but only in principle; I use analysis? my assistants for such work. 30. Do you know the back Yes, it is my favorite stroke in stroke? swimming. 31. Do you know how to ski? Yes, I have been a downhill skier for sixty years and can still do it well. 32. Do you know how to play Yes, I was not bad at it as a chess? young man but have not played in years. Yes, but only superficially; I am 33. Do you know how to dis not a connoisseur and cannot tinguish different tastes identify them. and aromas of imported wines?
Arrangement by Interrogative Pronoun We may arrange the 33 examples of knowing into nine groups ac cording to the interrogative pronouns to which the answers reply.
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Items 1 to 7 refer to questions about knowing what (that is, knowing countless relevant items of knowing that); items 8 to 13 are of the more traditional and respectable type of knowing that; items 14 to 19 combine the preceding two categories and thus are in the nature of knowing what and that; item 20 represents knowing when and that; item 21, where and that; items 22 and 23, who and that; item 24 an swers the question whom; items 25 to 29 combine what and how; and items 30 to 33 are typical instances of knowing how.
Trying to justify these distinctions, I will occasionally have to strain my vision and discernment of subtle nuances. Perhaps I should begin with the distinctions between knowing what, knowing what and how, and knowing how. All my examples of knowing what (items 1 to 7) refer to definite subjects ranging from an area of study to a specific obsolete theory, to a large city, to several works of art, and to a feeling of pain. Although I called them instances of know ing what, I tried to indicate that there could usually be connections with knowing how, as, for example, when I said that I might be able to hum themes from the Pastoral Symphony. Likewise I mentioned, in the very first item, that my knowledge of the subject was not adequate to enable me to teach it on a graduate level. Again, when I spoke about my knowing Paris, I mentioned the potential of know ing how to draw a map. Still, I left these implied references to know ing how at the side and was satisfied to characterize all seven as il lustrations of knowing what. I have regarded the last four items, 30 to 33, as illustrations of knowing how. Two of them were physical abilities, where perhaps a fair amount of knowing that was involved in the process of learning, but little, if any, was involved in the actual exercise of the skill.11 Incidentally, I might use this occasion to distinguish the extent to which mental alertness and attention is needed in swimming, on the one hand, and downhill skiing, on the other. Swimming may be semiautomatic movements, whereas downhill skiing requires con stant attention to stationary and moving obstacles. Chess playing (item 32) is an exercise of know-how acquired after a learning proc ess that involves the understanding of rules in the nature of knowing that. The actual playing of chess involves a continuing mental strain requiring abilities—know-how—of various sorts. The know-how of the winetaster (item 33) is of a particular type in that its acquisition is hardly based on any kind of knowing that. This know-how is ac-
II Ryle, The Concept of Mind, p. 41. "We learn how by practice, schooled indeed by
criticism and example, but often quite unaided by any lessons in the theory."
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quired only by practice and it is not clear whether its development is reserved to people with special talents. Both knowing what and knowing how are needed in items 25 to 29. The point is that the abilities calling for the know-how in ques tion may be kept in reserve, so to speak. All five illustrations may be cases of latent knowing what—calculus, regression analysis, French, nursery rhymes, and fairy tales. In all these instances the knowledge may be partial or complete, superficial or profound, unconsciously remembered or actually recalled, potentially usable or actually exer cised. Some of these differences were pointed out in my answers. Knowing French may be a knowledge to understand, to read, to speak, and to write, and the levels of achievement may be very different. The combination of knowing what and knowing how was also clearly indicated in my claimed knowledge of regression analysis. Since I understand it, it is a case of knowing what, but since I let my assistants do the actual work, it is a knowing how for them but not for me. Taking up the six examples of knowing-that statements, items 8 to 13,1 confess that I have indulged in being sarcastic by choosing ex clusively such knowledge claims as could never pass the JTB test prescribed by the fussy wing of the analytic philosophers. Indeed, a critical referee may call a foul on the first of my knowledge claims, item 8, where I in effect state merely my knowledge of, or acquaint ance with, the categorical imperative of the language analysts (tell ing us what we ought to do or not to do) and proceed to a statement rejecting their commandment. The referee may also point out that imperatives are not propositions and, therefore, not subject to a truth test. I concede that I was mischievous, but I do not repent, because I think the problems involved are worth thinking about.
In order to exhibit the knowing-that character of the six claims, I made sure that the that was already contained in the question: I said not just "do you know" but "do you know that. . . ." None of the knowledge claims in my answers, however, allow any claims of being sure of the truth of, or even a firm belief in, the "known" prop osition. In the examples about the past rate of unemployment (item 9) and the future rate of price increase (item 10), I went out of my way to show that these are at the same time examples of knowing that and examples of knowing that we can never be sure of knowing that. Two others of my examples of knowing that lack the supposedly essential condition of certification: I had no evidence to justify my knowing that my trousers were really torn (item 11), I simply, perhaps naively, believed the two friends who told me so (perhaps
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as a practical joke); and whether it was really past dinnertime (item 13) is just a matter of custom and convention. Having reviewed seven examples of knowing what (items 1-7) and six examples of knowing that (items 8-13), it should not be too dif ficult to comprehend the combined category of statements about knowing what and that, illustrated by items 14 to 19 of my list of questions and answers. The what refers to the general subject known, the that to the proposition stated about it. The questions name the subject about which knowledge may be claimed, the an swers are in the form of propositions, preceded by the claim "I know that ..." placed within brackets. The examples seem ill-chosen in that they do not bring out the major difference, discussed earlier, be tween knowing what and knowing that, in which the what refers to a complex entity or collective of many parts, decomposable into many single propositions, and the that refers to a single proposition. It should not really surprise us that this difference vanishes if the two contraries are combined in hybrid forms, simply because the what is reduced to a single entity, stripped from the context of a larger sub ject. Similar combinations of the questions when, where, who, and whom with the propositional knowing that, as shown in items 20 to 24, require no commentaries. All these questions could be answered in the form of knowing that.
Further Comments on Knowing That and Knowing How Some additional comments on the contrast between knowing that and knowing how may be helpful in view of differences in the in terpretations by different philosophers. One question that has oc cupied a good many writers relates to the definition of knowing how: is it an art, an ability, a disposition, a state of mind, a set of rules, observance of rules or canons, the application of criteria, a se quence of actions, a practice, a performance, a skill? I shall not join this argument; if we know what we are talking about, we need not spend time trying to formulate the most appropriate definition. The illustrations furnished above—knowing how to swim, knowing how to ski, knowing how to play chess, knowing how to identify vintages of wines, knowing how to draw a map of Paris, knowing how to solve differential equations, knowing how to converse in French, knowing how to recite nursery rhymes, knowing how to do regres sion analysis, knowing how to demonstrate one's understanding of difficult arguments—should be ample exemplification, pinpointing the essentials of what is meant. The common denominator of all the
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know-hows enumerated is the ability to perform a certain kind of ac tivity or task. Gilbert Ryle proposed a sharp distinction: "We build up habits by drill, but we build up intelligent capacities by training." He con cluded that "drill dispenses with intelligence, training develops it."12 Although the distinction is valid in principle, it may be difficult, I submit, to draw a clear line in a spectrum of learning ac tivities which may begin as conscious training and gradually sub merge into more mechanical drill. Michael Polanyi emphasized a similar, yet sufficiently different, distinction, not related to the acquisition but rather to the exercise of know-how, or, as he calls it, "subsidiary or instrumental knowledge." The distinction is between "connoisseurship" as the art of knowing and "skills" as the art of doing.13 Accepting this dichotomy, I would say that the winetaster applies his connoisseurship, and the down hill skier his skill. Polanyi also stresses the fact that the performer may have either a merely "subsidiary awareness" of using his know-how or a "focal awareness"; and he finds them "mutually ex clusive." Thus, if a pianist in performance were to give his attention to his fingerwork—of which he ought to be only "subsidiarily aware"—his focal attention to the music would thereby be ar rested.14 In Ryle's view, "Understanding is a part of knowing how." He jus tifies this dictum by arguing that "the knowledge that is acquired for understanding intelligent performance of a specific kind is some degree of competence in performances of that kind."15 This is un doubtedly true for some kinds of knowing how, for example, for understanding a speech in a foreign language, and perhaps an ar gument presented with mathematical derivations. It will hardly be accepted, however, that the understanding of new scientific theories is "a part of knowing how" and that understanding of a musical or artistic performance requires "competence in performances of that kind."16 A music critic (and musicologist) need not be a composer or musician, an art critic (and art historian) need not be a painter or sculptor, and a medical doctor may understand surgery even if he is not a surgeon. There is a strange difference between Ryle and Polanyi regarding
12Ibid.,pp. 42-43.
13 Polanyi,Personal Knowledge, p. 88.
14 Ibid., pp. 55-56.
ls Ryle, The Concept of Mind, p. 54.
16For Ryle, "Roughly, execution and understanding are merely different exercises
of knowledge of the tricks of the same trade." Ibid., p. 55.1 submit that understanding
may require a comprehension of underlying theories.
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the time it takes to acquire basic theoretical knowledge, on the one hand, and know-how in performance, on the other. Says Ryle, "Learning how or improving in ability is not like learning that or ac quiring information. Truths can be imparted, procedures can only be inculcated, and, whereas inculcation is a gradual process, imparting is relatively sudden."17 Says Polanyi: "Years of study may not suffice to master the theory [of relativity] and see the facts [ac counted for by relativity] in its context."18 The contradiction, or conflict of opinions, is easily resolved if we understand the human propensity to generalize. In this instance, both authors have overgeneralized. Some propositional knowing is easily imparted, with a sudden flash of light, whereas other pieces or complexes of knowing may take years to acquire or may remain entirely inaccessible to many students; similarly, some performing know-how may be learned by the gifted in no time at all, whereas other abilities to per form can be acquired only in years of hard training or perhaps never. The time it takes to learn, to acquire knowledge, is not among the characteristics either of knowing that or of knowing how.
ELEMENTS AND MODES OF KNOWING
A substantial carry-over from the previous section can be drawn upon for an analysis of the elements and modes of knowing. One fundamental dichotomy in meaning can be seen also as a difference in the mode of knowing: knowing that versus knowing how. Another distinction, less fundamental but still significant, calls for further examination: knowing of and knowing about. It will soon become clear, however, that binary divisions will not suffice in an examination of the elements of knowing; a considerable number of such elements are differentiated only by subtle nuances, shading gradually into one another, like the colors in a spectrum. A spectrum cannot meaningfully be divided into just two kinds or categories.
The Examples Surveyed for Different Modes of Knowing I went again through the list of 33 examples that I had compiled for use in the previous section; this time, however, my concern was not with the type of question answered by the knowledge claims, but rather with the type of mental state or activity that was involved in the various examples of knowing. Although I learned a great deal from this analysis, and although I am convinced that many readers
17 Ibid., p. 59.
18Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, p. 16.
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would profit if I shared with them my detailed findings or conclu sions regarding each of the 33 items, I am afraid that other readers might be bored if they were invited to go through such a lengthy exercise. The Germans have a somewhat ungracious expression to register impatience with overly detailed and tedious reporting: "I did not really want to know it all with such exactitude." ("So genau wollt' ich's gar nicht wissen.") I am anxious not to bore and, hence, I will forego presenting my tabulation. A brief summary of my con clusions may do. I found that between two and seven elements may be present in any one instance of knowing, and I identified a total of thirteen ele ments in the whole lot of 33 examples. Two or more instances of knowing will be said to represent the same mode of knowing if they contain the same set of elements. Needless to say, my attempt to break down the mental states or activities was influenced by similar work done by philosophers, psychologists, and language analysts.
The Elements of Knowing The following thirteen elements may possibly be present, though not all in the same instance, in the state or act of knowing: (1] being acquainted, (2) being familiar, (3) being aware, (4) remembering, (5) recollecting, (6) recognizing, (7) distinguishing, (8) understanding, (9) interpreting, (10) being able to explain, (11) being able to demon strate, (12) being able to talk about, and (13) being able to perform.
Some of these elements of knowing are mutually exclusive in the same instance of knowing, because they are alternatives, either in kind or in degree. The first two, acquaintance and familiarity, repre sent differences in degree, though it will be quite arbitrary to draw a hard and fast line between the two. It should be clear, however, that I am either "merely acquainted" or "quite familiar" with something (or someone) knowable. Of course, the alternative becomes really disjunctive by the terms being modified by "merely" and "quite," respectively. Otherwise one might reasonably say "I am not only ac quainted but even familiar with it (or him or her);" in this case ac quaintance would be the wider concept and include familiarity.
Being acquainted or being familiar with, as elements of knowing, were probably suggested by William James' distinction between "knowledge of" and "knowledge about," which he described as "knowledge by acquaintance" and "knowledge by systematic study and reflection." The two pairs of opposites are not equivalent or anal ogous, since James referred to the origin of the knowledge acquired, whereas being acquainted or being familiar refer to qualities of
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knowing or, from another point of view, to elements of knowing.19 One may, of course, hold that familiarity can be only the result of study and reflection, but this is too rigid a definition.
Being aware of is an element of knowing incompatible with either being acquainted or being familiar with. I can be aware of a certain situation, say, that it is long past dinnertime, that the weatherman has predicted rain, or that this is my wife's birthday, but in none of these instances can I reasonably say that I am acquainted or familiar with the facts in question. Obversely, I can be acquainted with Rem brandt's Nightwatch and familiar with Beethoven's Pastoral Sym phony, but I cannot be aware of them. I conclude that only one of the first three elements can be present in any one instance of knowing (unless familiarity is treated as a high degree of acquaintance).
Elements 4 and 5 both have to do with memory: remembering is used here to refer to stored knowledge, recollecting, to retrieved knowledge.20 Remembering (in this narrow sense) is not a conscious state of mind: the thing known has been stored away in the knower's inactive memory files. This has been called latent knowledge; perhaps "dormant" knowledge would be the most telling metaphor. Recollecting stands for bringing what has been latently known from the inactive memory to active consciousness: it is thus being reacti vated. Remembering and recollecting are of course closely interre lated: only what is remembered, or has been retained, can be recol lected. We might have spoken, instead, of dormant and active re membering; needless to say, what has been recollected for a brief moment, or for a short period of time, can again be sent back to the inactive files. Thus, although dormant and active remembering can not happen at the same time, all dormant knowledge can with the right stimulus become active. Remembering, therefore, implies po tential recollecting. Remembering and potential recollecting are elements of knowing in all but five or six of the instances described on my list; they seem inconsistent only with being aware. If I am aware of this or that situ ation or presence, it usually would make no sense to say that I re member or recollect it. All instances of knowing possibly charac terized as being either acquainted or familiar with the thing known also include remembering and potential recollecting.
19 John Grote, from whom James derived his distinction, had contrasted "acquaint
ance or familiarity" with knowledge expressed in "judgments or propositions." (See
above, footnote 2 of this chapter.)
20 This distinction is Ryle's, who used remembering for not having forgotten, and
recalling or recollecting for an occurrence at a moment, "sometimes deliberately and
sometimes involuntarily." The Concept of Mind, pp. 272ff.
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The next two elements possibly present in instances of knowing are recognizing and distinguishing. They are not nearly as ubiquit ous as being acquainted or familiar with the thing known, or as re membering and potentially recollecting it. A difference between recognizing and distinguishing should be mentioned: almost any thing that can be recognized by the knower can also be distin guished by him from similar things, people, or ideas; that is, he will not confuse it with them. On the other hand, certain things, people, or ideas can be distinguished in theory, in mental models or con structs, although the knower may not be able to recognize them on sight or hearing. For example, I may be able to distinguish a major from a minor scale or chord in theory but not on hearing them pro duced on a piano or by an orchestra. In order to bring out this differ ence, I say "distinguishing" when I want to include or emphasize the intellectual or prepositional knowing of knowables and "recog nizing" when 1 want to emphasize sense perceptions—seeing, hear ing, touching, smelling, and tasting—as the basis for recognizing.
It may go without saying but, nevertheless, we should not fail to note that there is an element of knowing how involved in recogniz ing anything. Recognizing is a performance which presupposes knowing, but it is not clear whether and how the ability to recognize a thing, a person, an idea, a musical theme, or what not, depends on a talent, on a skill acquired by training, or entirely on the degree of knowing. It happens that I personally have always had great difficul ties recognizing the faces of acquaintances, friends, even close rela tives. Many people are able to recognize men and women whom they have met only once and for only the shortest time, whereas I am embarrassed by my failure to recognize colleagues and associates I have known for years and have met almost a hundred times. When I finally figure out who they are, or when they kindly reveal their identity, I can recollect so much about our joint experiences and of their past achievements that no one can doubt my knowing them, or my knowing of them and about them. Although the ability to recognize is undoubtedly an element of knowing, it is probably neither a measure nor a sure test of knowing. As a mountain climber, I have found some who would recognize all the mountains in all the ranges visible from a peak, whereas some of their fellow climbers, who had been there far more often, were un able to match or even approach their feats of recognition. Similar differences can be observed when photographs of mountains and mountain ranges are shown to mountaineers who had been equally well acquainted with the regions in question. Analogous observa tions can be made in recognition tests of quotations from well-
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known literary works and of musical themes. I have witnessed such tests administered to musicians—instrumentalists and conductors —who failed to recognize passages of symphonies, chamber music, or operas which they, by their own admission, "knew" perfectly well. They would say, "oh sure, I know this well, but right now I cannot place it." Recognizing is regularly combined with being acquainted or familiar with, but not with being aware of; it goes well with knowing what, but not with knowing that. Although it is itself a kind of knowing how, it is often combined with observing the execution of other performing skills. For example, recognizing a good chess player or expert skier, and distinguishing them from mediocre per formers, presupposes some knowledge of the same arts, though perhaps long ago and more in theory than in action. A former singer, now without voice, may be a good judge of singing; also, a conduc tor or piano accompanist, who never could sing, may recognize a good singer. Let us proceed to the next two elements of knowing: "understand ing" and "interpreting." These are ambiguous words, and it may be a mistake to allow without warning the confounding of different meanings of each. To understand a symphony, to understand a novel, to understand economics, to understand the second law of thermodynamics, to understand French, to understand regression analysis, and to understand the game of chess, are rather different cognitive, or in some instances affective, processes. (I have deliber ately omitted the most complex concept of understanding: the Verstehen of other persons' thoughts and actions, so fundamental for all social sciences and humanities.) There are surely different levels of understanding even where this word applies to different objects or subjects. As I have said before, understanding French may be limited to understanding spoken or written French, but may extend to understanding French grammar and philological peculiarities. In some contexts, understanding may be almost congruent with knowing, but, in this case, one clearly would have to distinguish several levels of knowing. In other in stances, one may have to keep understanding down to its role as an element of knowing. Many people, for example, who know regres sion analysis may know very well how to perform it and, yet, have poor understanding of its meaning and, especially, of the meanings and the limits to the conclusiveness of the results obtained. With re gard to some types of knowing how, understanding or interpreting do not come in at all. Knowing how to swim or ski requires no un derstanding of the performances in question.
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I proceed to what I have called the tenth and eleventh elements of knowing: being able to explain and being able to demonstrate. Both these come definitely under the rubric of knowing how. Both per formances are often regarded as the best possible tests of the claimed abilities. It should be obvious that the ability to explain is strongly correlated with the element of understanding, but I would deny that conceptually the two are the same. I admit that operationally it would be hard to test understanding independently of the ability to explain. My personal experience emboldens me to say that some times I am convinced that I understand although I feel unable to ex plain; and in other instances my attempt to explain, in spoken or written words, often increases or reinforces my understanding. These observations refer chiefly to cognitive knowing, but they may well have a bearing also on emotional and affective knowing.
Demonstrating may often consist of explaining, but in many in stances it does not; for example, where it requires merely placing check marks in the right boxes on a form, or where demonstrating refers to the know-how of doing something physically. I repeat an earlier remark to the effect that what you demonstrate that you know is at best a portion of what you know. This applies much more to cognitive knowing than to abilities to perform.
Being able to talk about what you know was listed as the twelfth element of knowing. It overlaps with explaining and demonstrating but will be different in many instances. The knower may often be able to talk about what he knows, that he knows, and his knowing how, without being able either to explain or to demonstrate. Being able to talk about is probably the most ubiquitous of all elements of knowing. Talking about what one knows is surely the most frequent way of making one's knowledge explicit. The last element on my list was being able to perform, by which I meant to refer to specific kinds of doing, going beyond the various abilities inherent in previously discussed elements. The ability to perform was exemplified in items 25 to 33 of the long list. It does not take much analysis to conclude that this element of knowing is al ways combined with such other elements as remembering, recollect ing, recognizing, and talking about, and is often combined with being acquainted or familiar with. It is never combined with being aware of. A distinction ought to be made between activities described in in transitive verbs and others described in verbs that may have an ob ject. He who knows how to sing may not be able to sing everything, not only because he may be unfamiliar with certain songs or arias, but because his ability to sing may be limited to music of a specific TYPES OF KNOWLEDGE
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type. One who knows how to play the piano may possibly be able to play "Chopsticks" or simple tunes but may not be able to play Mozart or Brahms. Similar qualifications may have to be made re garding dancing, painting, and so on. There is much less need for similar qualifications in instances of knowing how to exercise phys ical skills. Modes as Combinations of Elements My enumeration of thirteen elements of knowing is of no great im portance: I could have compressed my list or could have expanded it. Other analysts may find that some of the elements should be bro ken down further, or they may wish to have some fused into one; again others may wish to eliminate some of my elements as supererogatory or may wish to add one or two that I have disre garded. My intention has been merely to aid in the comprehension of the modes of knowing. This brings me back to my statement that different combinations of elements make for different modes of knowing. I have not, how ever, bothered to discuss these combinations in detail. Although I have indicated which of the elements are frequently combined with one another and which of them resist combination in the same mode of knowing, my conception is not sufficiently thought out to justify a more elaborate discussion of details. What I have said is more than enough to show the complexity of the modes of knowing and quite enough for us to proceed with an exposition of what I believe to be involved in the state or process of knowing.
DEGREES OF KNOWING
In the preceding section I have probably several times crossed the border between analysis of modes of knowing and a discussion of degrees of knowing—provided such a border exists. If so, is it a clear and undisputed frontier? I submit, and propose to show, that differ ences in degrees of knowing of any type (what, that, how, etc.) are not correlated with the modes of knowing; hence, modes and de grees are different things, and there is a border between inquiries into each. This does not imply that the border is clear, firm, and un disputed, but for our purposes it does not matter. I have a few obser vations to make about the degrees of knowing.
The reader who remembers and recollects that this book is chiefly concerned with the creation and dissemination of knowledge and its economic significance may wonder whether an examination of the degrees of knowing is really necessary for our purposes. Necessary?
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surely not. Illuminating? probably. Indeed, few questions are more important in the economics of knowledge than those concerning the incremental benefits and incremental costs of achieving higher de grees of knowing. Having said this, I shall promptly try to forget it. In scholarly work one should not always be confined by pragmatic considerations.
Elements, Modes, and Degrees There is no way of avoiding an overlap in examining elements, modes, and degrees of knowing. This has become manifest in the previous discussions of understanding, explaining, and demonstrat ing. I spoke of levels of understanding, but I would be hard put to "explain" the difference between levels and degrees—though I feel strongly that there may be discernible degrees of knowing on each of the different levels. To speak of degrees is to suggest quantification, at least relative ordering where cardinal measuring is not feasible. The developers of tests of cognitive achievements have come forth with scores ex pressed in numbers with three digits. This apparent exactness does not imply a measurement of well-defined quantities of knowledge demonstrated in the test; it may still constitute relative ordering even if it is based on counting the numbers of correct and incorrect answers to questions assigned equal weights by the testers. (A chap ter in Volume III will be devoted to educational testing.) Tests of this type can never establish the degree of knowing particular thats, whats, and hows; at best they establish the degree to which the knower has demonstrated this knowledge. To say this is not to downgrade the validity of test scores for various purposes. (For many purposes one may not be interested in the degree of the tacit knowledge possessed by the knowers but only in the degree to which they can express it or demonstrate it through some other type of performance.) One of the difficulties of establishing and defining degrees of knowing in any internally consistent fashion is that different ele ments combined in any one of the modes of knowing may be "gradable" independently from one another, and there is no unique way to combine (aggregate, average) the separate grades or degrees. As sume that a particular mode of knowing includes being familiar with, remembering and recollecting, recognizing, understanding, and being able to talk about. An example of this mode would be the knowing of a novel, say, Buddenbrooks. With how many details of its plot am I familiar? How accurately do I remember them and how easily (readily) can I recollect them? If I am shown selected para-
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graphs of this and other novels, how well can I recognize and cor rectly identify the ones selected from Buddenbrooks ? How well do I understand the plot, the characters and their actions, the relations with German culture in general and with business ethics and com mercial practices of the period? How well, in talking about the book, can I hit its highlights and convey to others some of the essential things that are worth singling out? Assume we could assign a nu merical rating to each of these elements of knowing, how can we ar rive at a degree of my knowing the book? I might get a poor rating in recollecting, a high rating in recognizing, and a mixed rating in the various aspects of understanding, but these ratings could be aggre gated or averaged only in arbitrary fashion.
In the next chapter, in my discussion of artistic knowledge, I dis tinguish degrees of knowing a tune, a musical theme. Six degrees are arranged in a plausible way, giving the appearance of an ascending order of the degree of knowing, each degree clearly higher than the preceding and lower than the subsequent. Yet, the selection of the elements of knowing is purely arbitrary, and it can be shown that a different combination of elements may well lead to a different rank ing. For example, I may recognize a melody just in the sense that it sounds familiar and I conclude I must have heard it before. I may, and this is clearly a higher degree of knowing, recollect when and where I have heard it. I may recollect, and this is even better, of what composition it is a part. But now come three elements of knowing which are not comparable on any rating schedule: I may know, rec ollect, and state details about the entire composition, its form, struc ture, key, etc., and also about its relationship to other compositions by the same and other composers. Alternatively, I may be able to hum the melody, either approximately or perfectly accurately. Or I may be able to reproduce it on the piano, with or without the accom panying voices of the score. Which of these three achievements should get highest rating? I must conclude that degrees of knowing cannot be determined, except in arbitrary ways, when various ele ments of knowing can be judged separately.
In many competitions, especially where artistic skills are being compared, performance is judged on the basis of averaging of the subjective ratings by selected referees, and of aggregation of the av erage ratings on different parts of the test, or of altogether different tests. I have often wondered about the judging of national and inter national competitions in figure skating and ice dancing; and I have concluded that the final ranking of the competitors cannot help being highly subjective. I am afraid that the determination of degrees
86THE KNOWN AND THE KNOWING
55
of knowing, even of entirely cognitive matters, involves large doses of subjective value judgments.
More Details, More Accuracy, More Confidence Since the previous examples in this section were of artistic knowl edge and of cognitive knowledge of the arts, I want to conclude the discussion of degrees of knowing with examples concerning cogni tive knowing of things from the world of public, objectively observa ble facts. In order to eliminate one of the largest obstacles on the way towards determining degrees of knowing, I propose to exclude in stances involving various levels and degrees of understanding. The list of 33 items does not offer a good example of purely factual knowledge, free from ingredients of personal experience, from the exercise of skills, and from the requirement of understanding on var ious levels. Good examples may be taken from the areas of military and political intelligence, business management information, and other factual reports serving governmental, commercial, or financial decision-makers. For knowledge of this sort, can one determine de grees of knowing without running into problems of arbitrary weight ing of different elements of knowing? At least three attributes may be significant in appraising the de gree of knowing matters of this sort: knowledge of details, accuracy, and confidence in the reliability of the knowledge. No report can be perfect on all these scores. Assume a certain appropriation of funds is available for the improvement of the present state of knowing. One may choose to allocate these funds to obtaining knowledge (1) in greater detail, (2) of greater accuracy, or (3) of greater reliability. In concrete instances and under specified conditions, a decision-maker may be able to optimize his search by going after what would help him most; but, in general, it is not possible to say whether the degree of knowing would be increased more decisively by more details, more accuracy, or more confidence in the reliability of one's knowl edge. The third attribute, confidence in the reliability of one's knowing, has objective as well as subjective aspects. The objective aspects re late to the experts' consensus about the adequacy of evidence; the subjective aspects relate to the knower's and decision-maker's own confidence in whatever evidence may support the specific knowl edge claims in question. Many economists and some other social scientists prefer to speak of "uncertainty of information" when they discuss what I call confidence in its reliability. I distinguish esti mates of the probabilities of specified occurrences (and of the prob- TYPES OF KNOWLEDGE
8756
abilities of confirmation of propositions regarding these occur rences) from my confidence in the reliability of these estimates. That all knowledge is uncertain and, at best, probable is one thing; that I am uncertain about whether the probability estimates available to me are sufficiently reliable is another thing. This second type of un certainty is more clearly expressed by the word confidence, which also has the advantage that it reminds us of its subjective aspects.
This is not the only insertion of subjectivity into the notion of degrees of knowing. The assignment of weights to the three attri butes—knowledge of details, and accuracy, besides confidence—is also a subjective matter. We shall have to live with this realization, whether we like it or not. I am not disturbed by it.
INFORMATION AND KNOWLEDGE
In Chapter 1, I touched on the meaning of "information" and de cided to prefer the word "knowledge" whenever possible in lieu of the word "information." It may not be out of place, however, to add here a few words concerning the relation between the two terms as they are used in everyday speech and in professional parlance.
To Know and to Inform Linguistically, the difference between "knowledge" and "informa tion" lies chiefly in the verb form: to inform is an activity by which knowledge is conveyed; to know may be the result of having been informed. "Information" as the act of informing is designed to pro duce a state of knowing in someone's mind. "Information" as that which is being communicated becomes identical with "knowledge" in the sense of that which is known. Thus, strictly speaking, the dif ference lies not in the nouns when they refer to what one knows or is informed about; it lies in the nouns only when they are to refer to the act of informing and the state of knowing, respectively.
The semantic relationships expressed so bluntly merit a reformu lation with greater care and some qualifications. We must first dis tinguish between mental acts and states, on the one hand, and the contents to which these acts or states apply, on the other. With re gard to the former—the acts and states—there is a clear and signifi cant difference between information and knowledge. Information is the activity or process of informing and getting informed; knowl edge is the state of knowing. The act or process of informing may create (produce) a state of knowing. This connection, however, is not true by definition. A process of information is neither necessary nor
88THE KNOWN AND THE KNOWING
57
sufficient to produce a state of knowing. It is not necessary, since it is possible for a state of knowing to emerge from creative thinking, ob serving, experimenting, intuiting, speculating, theorizing, invent ing, discovering, etc. Nor is it sufficient, since it is possible for in formation to be abortive in several respects; for example, it may not penetrate the recipient's mind or consciousness, it may not be un derstood, it may not be retained for even the shortest time span, etc.
Now we turn to the contents. By getting informed about some thing, the recipient may reach a state of knowing the contents of the information. The contents of the information received may be the same as the contents of what is known as a result, but not necessarily so, because the merging of the new inflow with the preexisting stock of knowledge may result in a reordering, restructuring, or revised understanding of the latter. It may not be possible to compare the "changed" and the "added" knowledge, because it is not the addi tion that counts: that which I know after the reception of the new information may be different from what I had known before, not in quantity but in kind or structure. As a matter of fact, the contents of the new information may have negated, disconfirmed, refuted some of what I had known before; thus the stock of knowledge in my mind may not be larger than it was; it may not even be better than the pre vious one, since the new information may eventually prove to have been false, inaccurate, misleading, deceptive; the new knowledge may simply be different from the old, and the difference need not be the same as the contents of the new information received.
Apart from such instances, where the contents of the received in formation changes the contents of the knowledge previously in the recipient's mind, there will be many instances where the contents of the information and the contents of the knowledge transmitted and received by the process of information are the same. In these in stances, information and transmitted knowledge are the same as far as their contents are concerned. Yet, some people prefer to use these two nouns in a discriminating fashion even when they refer to con tents: they call some pieces of knowledge "knowledge," others "in formation." Is there any tradition or any philosophically sound rea son for such a linguistic discrimination?
Enduring Knowledge and Timely Information There are indeed different usages. In denying that there is a differ ence between knowledge and information when both refer to what one knows or is informed about, I may have offended against com mon usage in some respects. If our stock of knowledge includes the multiplication table, one may object to calling it "information." If
89TYPES OF KNOWLEDGE
58
we know the law of supply and demand and also know that certain prices have just gone down, it may be preferable to speak of the ac tual price change as a piece of information, and of the usual conse quences of a price change as a piece of knowledge. One may object to referring to the law of supply and demand as a piece of information, but there should be no serious difficulty in referring to the report of the price change as having become part of our knowledge.
In compound nouns such as "information science," "information system," or "information services" the first member of the pair, mod ifying the second, refers to information as a process, or sequence of actions. When the word "information" is used for the contents of the transmitted messages, such contents will regularly be secondary, never original, knowledge: a disseminator conveys what he knows to a recipient, who thereby learns what the former had known.
The fact that information, in the sense of contents conveyed, refers to secondary (not original) and concrete (not abstract, general or universal) pieces of intelligence has suggested to many a hierarchi cal ranking, giving knowledge a superior status and information an inferior one. We may recall the nostalgic questions asked by T. S. Eliot: "Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"21 In the inquiries on which I embark in this book I shall not indulge in prejudgments, however high-minded. And, although I have to accept linguistic usage in referring to certain subjects of communication as informa tion, I shall not deny it the status of knowledge. All information, in the sense of the contents conveyed, is knowledge, although not all knowledge may properly be called information.
21 T[homas] S[teams] Eliot, The flock: A Pageant Play (New York: Harcourt, Brace,
1934), p. 7. (Emphasis supplied.)
90CHAPTER 3
MUNDANE, SCIENTIFIC, HUMANISTIC, ARTISTIC, AND OTHER CLASSES OF KNOWLEDGE
ATTEMPTS to classify knowledge (in the sense of that which is known) are often more enlightening than attempts to define it. Clas sifications are said to make little sense unless it is stated what pur poses they are to serve. Sometimes, however, the purpose may be merely to give an impression of the range and variety of things that are there to think about. An exhaustive classification may suggest a definition; a merely illustrative classification would leave the defini tion open but may still suggest most of what is meant by the term in question.
MUNDANE KNOWLEDGE Just because so may writers on knowledge have such very lofty views about its meaning and want us to think immediately of sci ence and truth and higher learning, I want to begin at the low end of the pole, the everyday knowledge of the common people.
Persuasive Dejinitions I have seen a good many "persuasive definitions" of knowledge— with the defining scholar trying by his definition to restrict the des ignation "knowledge" to what he considers worth knowing. Now, if he wants to show his respect or contempt for one kind of knowledge or another, he has every right to do so. But what he needs for this purpose is a set of distinctions of different types of knowledge, not a definition; he need not exclude some of the things some people know (or believe they know) from the concept of "knowledge." It may well be less important to know baseball scores than symphony scores; less important to know all makes of cars than to know how an engine works; less important to know the plots of Hollywood movies than the works of Shakespeare. But these value judgments do not suggest any dividing lines between knowledge and nonknowledge;
91TYPES OF KNOWLEDGE
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at best they suggest distinctions and classifications of types of knowledge. There are those who seem to identify knowledge with the things taught in schools, colleges, and universities, so that their classifica tions often cover not much more than academic learning. Their cus tomary division of academic learning into natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities, plus various professional disciplines such as medicine, law, and engineering, helps to perpetuate a tradition in organizing the faculties of institutions of higher education. Since this tradition is strong—and is reflected in all sorts of governmental activities, acts of legislatures, and charters of learned societies—we shall not disregard the classes of knowledge (or rather branches of learning and research) which it distinguishes. But we shall have to bear in mind that "higher learning" and knowledge acquired by sys tematic research must not be granted a monopoly right to the desig nation "knowledge." If knowledge is what people know, it encom passes far more than what professors teach or what can be read in the encyclopaedias, old and new.
Mundane Knowledge, Intentional Learning, and Erudition If we overcome the persuasive definitions of knowledge by which some philosophers of science have tried to appropriate the term for the purposes of their own preoccupations, and if we thus understand that knowledge may refer to millions of thought objects that have nothing to do with research, scholarship, higher learning, and pro fessional qualification, our conception of knowledge is radically changed. Perhaps, in the simplest possible dichotomy, one may divide the total stock of knowledge into (1) plain, everyday, mundane knowl edge and (2) school learning. In a more structured division of the stock of knowledge present in the people's memories, one may perhaps distinguish (a) what people have unintentionally absorbed and distilled from their private, personal experiences; (b) what people have "picked up," without much effort, through exposure to talk and chatter of other persons in their surroundings, or through reading newspapers and magazines, listening to the radio, watching television, etc.; (c) what people have learned in school or at home, paying attention to what teachers, parents, siblings, and friends have tried to teach them in a process of consciously developing funda mental learning and basic skills; and (d) what people have learned in painstaking study from teachers in higher education, from books and journals, and in systematic research.
92CLASSES OF KNOWLEDGE
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Most of the "private" knowledge and the "picked up" knowledge may be what I have called mundane, everyday knowledge; and much of the knowledge acquired through intentional learning, study, and research may be what I have called school learning. We should not expect, however, that the α and b categories of the second partition will be equivalent to mundane knowledge and that the c and d categories will completely overlap with school and book learning. One learns at school many more things than "academic subjects"; and it is by no means clear how to characterize the basic skills that one acquires in elementary education. Are the language skills—reading and writing—to be included in one's acquired "knowledge"? To come back to an earlier distinction, if these skills are accepted as coming under the designation of knowledge, they are surely of the know-how type, not of the know-that type. The knowledge of reading and the knowledge of writing in our own lan guage are hardly items stored in and retrieved from our memories; acquired and retained by practice, these basic skills are more analo gous to knowing how to jump, to dance, to ride a bicycle.1
The Proportions among Types of Knowledge It is tempting to speculate about the inventory of knowledge in human memories. To be sure, its composition would depend on the state of the intellectual development in the society in question. The proportions between knowledge acquired in everyday experiences and knowledge acquired through intentional learning experiences surely depend on the society's (or community's) educational system. Unfortunately, such speculations about the relative quantities of different kinds of knowledge in our memories are moot: we have not (yet) discovered how to take inventory of the cognitive contents of our brains. I shall later in this volume suggest that certain estimates, which are impossible regarding stocks of knowledge, are not en tirely out of the question regarding flows of knowledge received. But let us not jump ahead in our argument; let us, instead, proceed methodically with our discussion of the classes of knowledge which have been distinguished in the literature. These distinctions, as I
11 have just come across a very similar formulation by the philosopher Walter
Kaufmann in his What is Man (New York: Reader's Digest Press—McGraw-Hill, 1978)
p. 56: "We think of 'know-how' as a skill or aptitude that is acquired by doing some
thing , and not by the kind of study associated with the humanities. This is true
enough of swimming or riding a bicycle. But the knowledge of how to compose a
quartet or a symphony is acquired by studying music written by one's predecessors;
and the way to learn to write poems, plays, novels, or philosophy, οτ to paint or sculpt
is to study the works of past masters."
93TYPES OF KNOWLEDGE
62
have said, have largely disregarded mundane knowledge and con fined themselves to the "higher" levels of learning. Top-level stand ing is usually accorded to so-called scientific knowledge.
SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE
I regard it as unhelpful to single out a class of knowledge under the heading "scientific knowledge" or "science." This nonconformist view may strike most readers as exotic, to put it mildly, and I must beg them to have the patience to consider the reasons for my posi tion. The reasons are basically semantic and linguistic, but in effect pragmatic. The point is that the meaning of the word "science" has changed over time and is different today in different disciplines, in different countries, and in different languages. Some of the changes seem bewildering, and some of the differences are utterly confusing. If "science" means one thing to a physicist, another thing to a phi losopher of science, a third thing to an historian, a fourth to an economist, a fifth to a Frenchman, a German, or a Russian, the word is an obstacle to successful communication, an instance of semantic noise. In addition, the artificial methodological restrictions that have been built into some of the concepts of science have given rise, and continue to give rise, to pseudo problems and pseudo conflicts wast ing the valuable time of writers, teachers, and students, time that could fruitfully be spent on substantive research and less obscuran tist teaching. It is a fair conclusion that a brief survey of historical semantics and of linguistic and geographic inconsistencies of "sci ence" should be well worth while.
Science Excluding Empirical Knowledge Let us begin with the semantic changes over the centuries. From the philosophers of antiquity to those of the eighteenth century, science stood for knowledge of things that "cannot be otherwise," because they relate to "the necessary and the eternal." For Aristotle, science was concerned with absolute certainties, logically demonstrable truths. Aristotle's position was thus described by William David Ross: In his logic Aristotle lays it down that science should start
with axioms, definitions, and hypotheses of the existence of
the fundamental objects of the science. There is, I suppose,
no science but mathematics in which this will take us very
far. It was certainly not by this method that he reached the
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CLASSES OF KNOWLEDGE
success he did in biology. But probably he did not think of
biology as a science. By a science he meant just a body of
research in which this method does work, i.e., a mathe
matical science, and he never, I think, applies the name sci
ence quite deliberately to anything else. Biology, psycholo
gy, ethics, politics, were rather inquiries than sciences.2
Even for Francis Bacon, the champion of empiricism, science was—at least at one point—"the image of the essentials" (essentiae imago). Descartes held that "any knowledge that can be questioned ought not to be called science"; and Christian Wolff, German philos opher in the eighteenth century, defined science as absolutely cer tain knowledge, logically deduced from unchanging principles.3 Ephraim Chambers' Cyclopaedia confirms that "Science, in philoso phy, [is] a clear and certain knowledge of any thing, founded on self-evident principles, or demonstration."4
The English logician William Duncan proposed a set of distinc tions according to the type of mental operations employed in dis covering and ordering knowledge, especially regarding the kind of judgment and the method of reasoning: for "scientific knowledge," judgment rests on "intuition," and the manner of reasoning is syl logistic "demonstration"; for "natural knowledge," judgment rests on "experience," and reasoning is by "induction and analogy"; and for "historical knowledge," judgment rests on "testimony," and rea soning is by "criticism and probable conjecture."5 This restrictive use of "science" to mean only "perfect knowledge which permits no doubt" was in evidence as late as the first half of the nineteenth century. For example, Sir John Herschel, the eminent British as tronomer, defined scientific knowledge as abstract knowledge or knowledge "demonstrable" with mathematical certainty.6
2 William David Ross, ed., Aristotle Selections (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons,
1927), p. xiii.
3 These quotations and paraphrases of Bacon, Descartes, and Wolff are from the ar
ticle "Science" in Andre Lalande, Vocabulaire technique et critique de la
philosophie, 5th ed. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1947), pp. 933-937.
4 Ephraim Chambers, Cyclopaedia or Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, 2d
ed. (London, 1738). However, a broader definition also is offered in the same article:
"Science, is more particularly used for a formed system of any branch of knowledge;
comprehending the doctrine, reason and theory of a thing, without any immediate
application thereof to any uses or offices of life." (Emphasis supplied.)
5 William Duncan, Elements o/Logick, 4th ed. (London: R. and J. Dodley, 1759), pp.
145-155. (I am indebted to Professor Wilbur Samuel Howell for this reference.) For
Duncan, mathematics was the paradigm of purely scientific knowledge.
6 Sir John Herschel, Preliminary Discourse to Natural Philosophy (London:
Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green, 1831), quoted from Joseph Agassi, "Imper-
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TYPES OF KNOWLEDGE
From the point of view of present-day semantics, the refusal to recognize empirical knowledge of nature as "scientific" seems quite stubborn and unreasonable. Yet, it was nothing but a terminological convention:7 "science" was a system of definitions, axioms, and syl logistic deductions, whereas systems of knowledge based on obser vation of and generalizations about natural phenomena were re garded as "natural philosophy." Astronomers and physicists did not feel degraded by being called natural philosophers rather than scien tists; nor did historians, political economists and other students of human society take offense at being called moral philosophers. This was the way language had developed in the universe of academic discourse over almost 2,500 years.
Admitting Empirical Sciences Language did change, however. Francis Bacon, Denis Diderot, and Immanuel Kant had much to do with the expansion of the concept of science. Kant's concept still included "science proper," which dealt with propositions of apodictic certainty,8 that is, with purely ana lytic propositions; but his definition was more general and com prised any well-ordered body of knowledge systematized according to specified principles.9 On this definition, the three classes of
feet Knowledge," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, vol. 32 (June 1972), p.
467.
7 ". . . what is to be called a 'science' and who is to be called a 'scientist' must al
ways remain a matter of convention. ..." Karl R. Popper, The Logic of Scientific Dis
covery (London: Hutchinson, 1959), p. 52.—The question, however, is how general
the agreement among different "scientists" and "philosophers" has to be before one
may reasonably regard it as a convention.
8 The notion of apodictic certainty received a severe shock with the announcement,
in 1931, of Godel's "undecidability theorem." Kurt Godel, Viennese mathematical
logician, proved that all axiomatic systems, except very simple ones, must contain
assertions that can be neither demonstrated nor refuted by logical deduction from the
given axioms. There are whole classes of mathematical claims that will remain unde-
monstrable.
9Immanuel Kant, Critick of Pure Reason (London: William Pickering, 1848), pp.
574-587. This is the section on "The Architectonics of Pure Reason" of the "Tran
scendental Methodology." German 2d ed. (Riga: Hartknoch, 1787), pp. 860-879.—In
conformance with this wide concept of science, Kant defined metaphysics as "the sci
ence of the first principles of human cognition" (1848, p. 581). With this definition
Kant did not depart from earlier views; for example, d'Alembert, the French encyclo
paedist, said about the position taken by John Locke in his Essay Concerning Human
Understanding that Locke "reduced metaphysics to what as a matter of fact it must be,
the experimental science of the soul. . . ." Jean LeRond d'Alembert, "Discours pre-
liminaire des editeurs," in Encyclopedie, ou Dictionnaire Raisonne des Sciences, des
Arts, et des Metiers (Paris: Briasson, David, Le Breton, and Durand, 1751), vol. 1, p.
xxvii.—The mental experiments alluded to in d'Alembert's statement do not, of
course, make metaphysics an empirical science.
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CLASSES OF KNOWLEDGE
higher learning which earlier logicians and philosophers had dis tinguished—mathematics and formal logic, natural philosophy, and moral philosophy—became three divisions of science or, alterna tively, different sciences.
Expelling All but the National Sciences After this expansion of "scientific" knowledge to include empirical as well as analytic systems, a new exclusion from the concept of sci ence was proposed in mid-nineteenth century England. The mean ing of science and scientific knowledge was narrowed to what pre viously had been natural philosophy, whereas the previous domain of science (knowledge α priori) and the previous domain of moral philosophy were to be refused the designation of "scientific" knowl edge. In other words, a new definition of science was to restrict it to the study of natural phenomena. Historians of science do not agree on precisely when and how this change in the meaning of the word came about.10 The semantic change was not accepted anywhere but in English-speaking coun tries, and even there, not without protest. Understandably, social scientists and historians were protesting more vigorously, but even some natural scientists resisted.11 They saw no reason for a concept of science that excluded studies of man and human society.
10 The Oxford English Dictionary gives 1867 as the earliest use of the term in this
restrictive meaning; Murray's New English Dictionary gives 1864. John Theodore
Merz, History of European Thought in the Nineteenth Century (London: W.
Blackwood, 1896), vol. 1, p. 89, assumes that the use of "science" for "natural sci
ence" goes back to the establishment of the British Association for the Advancement
of Science in 1831. My own research leads me to believe that the French reorganiza
tion of the Institut de France in 1803 set a precedent by having an Academie des Sci
ences (without specifying "Naturelles") and a separate Academie des Sciences
Morales et Politiques. As far as the United States is concerned, it is not easy to pin
point any dates for the transition to the restrictive meaning of science. One source has
this to say: "In the United States shortly after the middle of the nineteenth century,
the meaning of the word 'science' began significantly to change. Before, any well-
organized body of knowledge or speculation had been called a science. Science con
noted orderliness and system, in ethics no less than in geology." Lawrence R. Veysey,
The Emergence of the American University (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1965), p. 133.—WhentheNationalAcademyof Science (singular) was setup in 1863,
it had a section for Ethnology; and a later plan for reorganization, in 1892, proposed a
section for "Anthropology, including Sociology, Economic Science, etc." This seems
to indicate that the semantic restriction of science to refer only to natural and mathe
matical sciences came in the United States much later than in England.
11 "Science is not wrapped up with any particular body of facts; it is characterized
as an intellectual attitude. It is not tied down to any peculiar methods of inquiry; it is
simply sincere critical thought, which admits conclusions only when these are based
on evidence." John Arthur Thomson, Introduction to Science (New York: Holt, 1911),
p. 57.—"There is a slang usage, like that for which 'hall' means a music hall or 'pic-
97TYPES OF KNOWLEDGE
66
Philosophers had little or no use for the restrictive definition. Con tinental European philosophers hardly took notice of it. Some even stuck to the classical primacy of formal over empirical sciences.12 But, in general, they continued to distinguish between formal and empirical sciences and to include among the latter the social and the cultural sciences along with the natural sciences.13 Some philoso phers proposed other kinds of exclusion—for example, of all propo sitions not deducible from fundamental hypotheses.14 Most cus tomary have been the exclusions of normative, evaluative, or other nonfalsifiable propositions or systems of knowledge. This issue has
tures' moving pictures, according to which 'science' means natural science. Whether
history is a science in that sense of the word, however, need not be asked; for in the
tradition of European speech, going back to the time when Latin speakers translated
the Greekepisteme by their own word scientia, and continuing unbroken down to the
present day, 'science' means any organized body of knowledge." Robin G. Col-
lingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946), p. 249.—"... the 'nat
ural' has been dropped, and only the 'science' retained, partly by mere abbreviation
(just as 'omnibus' has been changed into 'bus'), and partly because students of science
were by no means averse from hearing their study called 'science' without any qual
ification; . .. the implication ... flattered their vanity." Norman R. Campbell, What is
Science?, reprinted (New York: Dover Publications, 1952 [1st ed., London: Methuen,
1921]), p. 9.
12 Benedetto Croce is an example of a protagonist of this view: "But we cannot rest
satisfied with asserting the right of Logic to be recognized as a science; we must make
the further demand that Philosophy alone—and not the empirical sciences—be admit
ted as science in the strict sense of the word." Benedetto Croce, "The Task of Logic,"
in Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, vol. 1, Logic (London: Macmillan,
1913), p. 201.
13 Camap took science to comprise "all theoretical knowledge, no matter whether
in the field of natural sciences or in the field of the social sciences and the so-called
humanities, and no matter whether it is knowledge found by the application of spe
cial scientific procedures, or knowledge based on common sense in everyday life."
Rudolf Carnap, "Logical Foundations of the Unity of Science," in Otto Neurath,
Rudolf Carnap, and Charles Morris, eds., Foundations of the Unity of Science: Toward
an International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, bound ed. (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1969 [1st ed., 1939]), vol. 1, p. 45.—"We cannot refuse the name sci
ence to logic or to the non-quantitative branches of mathematics such as analysis
situs, projective geometry, etc. Nor is there good reason for refusing the adjective sci
entific to such works as Aristotle's Politics or Spinoza's Ethics and applying it to
statistical 'investigations' or 'researches' that do not advance the understanding of
anything." Morris R. Cohen, Reason and Nature: An Essay on the Meaning of Scien
tific Method (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1931), p. 89.
14 "We reserve the term 'science' for knowledge which is general and systematic,
that is, in which specific propositions are all deduced from a few general principles."
Morris R. Cohen and Ernest Nagel, An Introduction to Logic and Scientific Method
(New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1934), p. 191. This definition excludes history and thus
does not accommodate the historical sciences, which in all other languages are un
questioned members of the universe of scientific knowledge.
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CLASSES OF KNOWLEDGE
remained controversial; expressions like "normative science" are frequently encountered. The meaning of "scientific method" is also in dispute,15 and, incidentally, not translatable into foreign lan guages.
Science in Other Languages The restrictive meanings of "science," limiting the term to empiri cal, positive (nonnormative), operational, falsifiable propositions, or even to systematic study of natural (nonsocietal, noncultural) phe nomena, are confined to Anglo-American parlance. In French, Ger man, Italian, Russian, Japanese, and most other languages, the words for "science" stand for systems of knowledge acquired by sustained study.16 If one wishes to refer to natural sciences, the word "science" will not do; one has to use a qualifying adjective or compound noun. There is no difference in these languages between scientists and scholars; the French savant and the German Gelehrte or Wissenschaftler may be a natural scientist, social scientist, historian, ar chaeologist, philosopher, literary critic, or writer on jurisprudence or on any learned discipline.17 This is reflected in the organization of
15 "... the attempt to define scientific method or to analyze science is a search for a
persuasive definition. I hold this to be true because I believe that the term 'science'
has no definite and unambiguous application." Max Black, "The Definition of Scien
tific Method," in Robert C. Stauffer, ed., Science and Civilization (Madison: Univer
sity of Wisconsin Press, 1949), p. 69.—Black supports this statement as follows:
"Neither observation, nor generalization, nor the hypothetic-deductive use of as
sumptions, nor measurement, nor the use of instruments, nor mathematical construc
tion—nor all of them together—can be regarded as essential to science. For branches
of science can easily be found where any of these criteria is either absent or has so
little influence as to be negligible.. . . I propose that we treat 'scientific method' as a
historical expression meaning, among other things, 'those procedures which, as a
matter of historical fact, have proved most fruitful in the acquisition of systematic and
comprehensive knowledge' " (pp. 80-81).
16Economists may be interested in Schumpeter's definitions of science. He
supplied several, which he regards as largely equivalent: (1) "A science is any kind of
knowledge that has been the object of conscious efforts to improve it." (2) "A science
is any field of knowledge that has developed specialized techniques of fact-finding
and of interpretation or inference (analysis)." (3) "A science is any field of knowledge
in which there are people, so-called research workers or scientists or scholars, who
engage in the task of improving upon the existing stock of facts and methods and
who, in the process of doing so, acquire a command of both that differentiates them
from the 'layman' and eventually also from the mere 'practitioner'." Joseph A.
Schumpeter, Histoiy of Economic Analysis (New York: Oxford University Press,
1959), p. 7.
17 In French, science is defined as "knowledge in depth" [connaissonce approfon-
die] and as "the totality of well-organized knowledge pertaining to certain categories
of facts and phenomena,. . . such as the moral sciences, the historical sciences, the
physical sciences, the mathematical sciences," etc. Also as the "ensemble of objective
99TYPES OF KNOWLEDGE
68
the academies of sciences in many countries: they are divided into classes, categories, and sections, but even the names of these divi sions reflect the comprehensive meaning of the word "science." For example, the oldest of the existing academies, the Italian Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei has a class of "Moral, Historical, and Philo sophical Sciences" divided into seven categories, including "philo sophical sciences," "juridical sciences," and "social and political sciences."
Λ Definition Reflecting a Polyglot Consensus Taking account of the characteristics of science specified in the most authoritative dictionaries, encyclopaedias, and philosophic treatises
(exact or approximate) knowledge [eonnaissanees objectives (justes ou approchees)]
of nature, society, man and his thoughts." Grand Larousse encyciopedique (Paris:
Larousse, 1964), vol. 9, p. 680.
In German, Wissenscha/t is defined as "the totality of knowledge [Erkenntnisse] in
all fields (natural sciences, legal sciences, historical sciences, philological sciences
and many others) or ... also their systematic extension (research), exposition and ex
planation." Dergrosse Brockhaus, 16th ed. (Wiesbaden: Brockhaus, 1957), vol. 12, p.
556.
In Italian, scienza "in a broad sense" is defined as "knowledge, in a special concep
tion of knowing," analyzed and systematically treated "in various disciplines (phi
losophy, gnoseology, logic, etc.). In a narrower and more modern sense, however, sci
ence is distinguished from philosophy . .. , although the differentiation is extremely
complex and controversial." One may "distinguish three kinds of knowledge: popu
lar [volgare] or not unified; scientific or partially unified; and philosophical or totally
unified." Enciclopedia Italiana (Rome: Istituto delle Enciclopedia Italiana, 1936), vol.
31, p. 154.
In Russian, naiika is defined as "the sphere of human activity the function of which
is the elaboration and theoretical systematization of objective knowledge of reality;
one of the forms of social consciousness. . . ." Bolshaia Sovetskaia EntsikIopedeia
[Great Soviet Encyclopaedia], vol. 17, p. 323.—The Russian-English Dictionary
(edited by Smirnitsky) gives "science, study, knowledge" as the English equivalents
of nauka, but the comprehensive meaning of the word is clear from composite terms
such as lyudi naiiki [men of science, scholars], tochniye nauki [exact sciences] and
gumanitarniye naiiki [humanities, though the literal translation would be "humanis
tic sciences"].
In Japanese, the basic character of all words relating to science is gaku, which
stands for "learning," "study," though gakumon is more often used when "studies"
are referred to, and ka gaku as the equivalent of "science." The entire family of terms
refers to schooling; for example, gakko means school; gakusei, student; gakusha,
learned man, scholar. A Japanese vocabulary for some of the disciplines may be of
interest: shizen ka gaku, natural science; shakai ka gaku, social science; keizai gaku,
economic science; jin bun ka gaku, cultural science; bun gaku, literature; butsuri
gaku, physical science. It is clear that gaku and ka gaku are meant to refer to all
branches of learning, that is, to all "sciences" in the most comprehensive sense—as in
all languages except present-day English and American English. Kenkyusha,
Japanese-English Dictionary (Tokyo: Kenkyusha, 1976); Sanseido, English-Japanese
Dictionary (Tokyo: Sanseido, 1975).
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CLASSES OF KNOWLEDGE
in languages other than English, I have formulated a definition of science that reflects the broadest international consensus: science is a body of coherent, systematic knowledge of any subject, formal or empirical, natural or cultural, arrived at by any method whatever, provided it (1) is based on hard, honest and serious study and re search and reaches insights not available to laymen or superficial observers and (2) is designed for either intellectual or generalpragmatic purposes, but not for immediate practical application in a concrete case or situation. This cosmopolitan definition of science stresses the status of the scientist's systematic knowledge by contrasting it with the naive or unsystematic knowledge of the layman and the applied knowledge of the practitioner. It is presented here to inform or remind the English-American teacher-scientist-scholar of the disparity between the meaning of "science" to which he has become accustomed and the international meaning of the word or its foreign "equivalents." No one, to be sure, can reasonably expect English or American edu cators and writers to become cosmopolitan and renounce their ac customed word usage. But it would be desirable if they at least ap preciated that the restrictive sense in which they use "science" and "scientific" is not translatable into foreign languages except by awkward circumlocution.18 What conclusions should I draw for myself from these linguistic differences over time and among nations? The most sensible conclu sion would be that the phrase "scientific knowledge" should be ruled out from this study, because its meaning would not be clear (it would, as we have seen, convey different ideas to members of differ ent disciplines) and because it would not be translatable into foreign languages. In some contexts, however, the phrase will be unavoid able. For example, when we classify subjects taught in academic in-
18 A few examples may illustrate the awkward situation. A Swedish writer on the
theory of science, in an article published in English, cautiously supplies a footnote at
the beginning of his paper, warning his readers that "Science is here taken in the
broad sense of 'Wissenschaft,' 'scienza,' 'naiika,' etc." Gerard Radnitzky, "Ways of
Looking at Science,"Scientia (Rivista di Scienza, Milan), vol. 104 (1969), p. 49. Other
authors are less specific and simply speak of "science in the broad sense of the word"
or "science in the wide sense." One way to get around the difficulty is to avoid using
the word as a singular without article—"science"—and use it instead with the in
definite article, "a science" or "a particular science," or in the plural, "the sciences."
Still, how should one translate the title of a paper delivered in 1975 at the Colloquium
on Semiotics in Berlin on "Semiotik in der Kunstwissenschaft" (semiotics in the sci
ence of the fine arts)? Max Weber's famous essay "Wissenschaft als Beruf" has been
rendered as "Science as a Vocation," which misleads readers unaccustomed to the
wide meaning of science. For them the title should have referred to "Research and
Higher Learning" or to "Science and Scholarship."
101TYPES OF KNOWLEDGE
70
stitutions or research projects supported by federal agencies (such as the National Science Foundation or the National Endowment for the Humanities), we may not always be able to avoid references to "sci entific" subjects as contrasted with "humanistic" ones.
HUMANISTIC KNOWLEDGE
In conformance with the cosmopolitan definition of science, I should not talk of humanistic knowledge but, instead, of the cultural sciences.191 could try to define the cultural sciences, or (waiving the linguistic reservation) the humanities, as the systems of integrated knowledge that concern themselves with human culture, studying artifacts and historical materials and using them as foundation and framework for the presentation of the languages, literatures, philos ophies, religions, values, arts, and customs of the civilizations which have contributed to the shaping of the contemporary outlook in life. By direct contact with the creations of philosophers, poets, and artists, those professing humanistic disciplines make an effort to stimulate the senses, emotions, and imaginations of the student while developing his critical judgment and refining his taste.20 That I use cultural sciences and humanistic studies as synonyms will be, I hope, pardoned by most humanists, especially if I add that my em phasis on human culture does not imply a denial of the existence of animal cultures. It may be pretentious, however, to begin by suggest ing new terms and definitions; it is more appropriate to examine tra ditional ones.
19The English term "humanities," standing, according to the Oxford English Dic
tionary, for "learning or literature concerned with human culture, as grammar,
rhetoric, poetry, and especially the ancient Latin and Greek classics," has no single-
word equivalent in other languages. In French, Ies humanites are strictly delimited as
study of Latin and Greek in secondary schools; the term is derived from the Latin hu-
maniora, a word used also by German educators for study of the classical languages in
the humanistischen Gymnasium, one of three or four types of secondary school. Les
humanites are not even mentioned in Andre Lalande's Vocabulaire technique et
critique de la philosophie. In German, the nearest equivalent to the English-American
humanities is Geisteswissenschaften (intellectual sciences), a term coined as a trans
lation of moral sciences, but sometimes replaced by Kulturwissenschaften, with liter
ature and history as chief constituents. In Russian, Gumanitarniye naiiki (humanistic
sciences) comes closest to the English, but requires the noun "sciences."
20 In formulating this statement I have greatly profited from the descriptions in An
nouncement of the University of Chicago. The College Number for the Sessions
1932-33, May 25,1932, p. 21.
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CLASSES OF KNOWLEDGE
Traditional Meanings Most of us who have become used to seeing the humanities as a clus ter of academic disciplines often united as one of three (or some times four) major divisions of American colleges and universities will be surprised to learn that this use of the term is of rather recent origin. The eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, pub lished in 1910-11, had no separate entry "humanities," but only one on "humanism." This was defined as "any system of thought or ac tion which assigns a predominant interest to the affairs of men as compared [i.e., contrasted] with the supernatural or the abstract." Thus, humanism was interpreted as a break with "the medieval tra ditions of scholastic theology and philosophy," as a dedication to "the rediscovery and direct study of the ancient classics," and "es sentially a revolt against . . . ecclesiastical authority." The article mentioned also that Oxford University had a curriculum "Litterae Humaniores," consisting of "Latin and Greek literature and philos ophy"; that at Scottish universities the professor of Latin held the title Professor of Humanity; and finally, that "the plural 'humanities' is a generic term for the classics."21 The 1960 edition of the Britannica at last offered an entry on the humanities as a term applied "in the 20th century . .. in universities and colleges to a group of disciplines distinguished in content and method from the physical and biological sciences and, if less deci sively, from the social sciences... . "21 The qualification "in the 20th century" is quite accurate, for this meaning of the humanities did not yet exist in the nineteenth century, at least not in the organiza tion charts of academic institutions. Here are a few examples: The University of California (Berkeley) in 1868 was organized into two major divisions, the College of Arts and the College of Letters. The College of Arts was split in 1893 into a College of Social Sciences and a College of Natural Sciences. In 1915 these two were recombined with the College of Letters into a single College of Letters and Science. There was no reference to
21 Encyclopaedia Britannica, Ilth ed., vol. 13, p. 872. Two major suits of the "hu
manists" from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century were to replace the crude Latin
texts chosen and prescribed by the Christian divines with the elegant classical writ
ings of pagan authors (such as Terence, Virgil, Horace, Cicero, Caesar, and Sallust)
and to add the study of Greek grammar and literature (Aristotle in the original rather
than in Latin translation, and also Hippocrates, and the Greek version of the New Tes
tament). See Martin L. Clarke, Classical Education in Britain: 1500-1900 (Cambridge:
at the University Press, 1959), pp. 3-22.
22 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1960 ed., vol. 11, p. 876.
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TYPES OF KNOWLEDGE
"humanities." At present, the Berkeley catalogue mentions the hu manities only in connection with undergraduates' breadth re quirements and with representation of the faculties on their legisla tive bodies.—The Johns Hopkins University had from its inception in 1876 a Faculty of Philosophy, which comprised all nonprofes sional academic departments. College courses were divided into seven groups, of which the first was "Classical" and the seventh "Modern Languages." Later, there were schools, colleges, and divi sions, but none bore the name "humanities." It was only in the 1950s that a program in the humanities was proposed.—In the first third of this century, Yale University had a division of Language, Literature, and the Arts. The first reference to humanities in the Yale catalogue was in 1946-47, when they were mentioned as one of four groups for purposes of distribution requirements; in 1948-49 the humanities became one of five faculties of the University, apart from its profes sional schools.—The timing was very similar at Harvard. The first reference to humanities in its annual catalogues was in 1946-47, when it appeared as one of the triad of subject groups in the General Education course. As one of the "three areas" of distribution re quirements, the humanities replaced "Arts, Letters, and Philoso phy" in 1955-56.—Princeton University, at the beginning of the twentieth century, had departments of Philosophy and of Language and Literature, which were later called divisions. By 1921 it had a Division of Philosophy, Literature, and Art. In the catalogue of 1941 a "Divisional Program in the Humanities" was listed, and it still exists. A "Council of the Humanities" was established in 1953.— The institution that had started this taxonomic trend was, it seems, the University of Chicago, which in an academic reorganization in 1930 established, in place of what had been the Faculties of Arts and Literature, a Division of the Humanities. If my perfunctory survey is correct, 1930 is the beginning of the humanities as a recognized aca demic division under this nowadays generally used designation.
Not only is the term "humanities" a recent addition to the official language of academe, it seems to be used far more in the United States than in British universities. Thus, in the debate about the "wide gulf" between the Two Cultures, started in 1959 by Sir Charles Snow, of Cambridge University, it was not the "humanist" who was pictured as the "scientist's" foe but rather the "literary in tellectual." Perhaps we can assume that a humanistic scholar in the United States would be a literary intellectual if he resided in Eng land. I shall return to the Two-Culture controversy after some explora tion of just what branches of learning are supposed to make up the
104CLASSES OF KNOWLEDGE
73
humanities. Even those few who agree that there are essential char acteristics which distinguish the humanities from other disciplines have found it difficult to obtain a consensus on just which areas of inquiry should be included under the headihg of humanistic studies.
The Humanists' Identity Crisis Absence of consensus would be too mild an expression to describe the failure of academic humanists to agree on the question of the de limitation of the humanities—at least if we go back some twenty years, before the U.S. Congress took it upon itself to decide the ques tion. In the view of many highly respected humanists, the arts— "music, the fine arts, the decorative arts, the arts of the theatre," in the listing by Howard Mumford Jones—were not only admitted to the humanities but were regarded as paradigmatic of them. In the view of some, certain branches of philosophy—logic and analytic philosophy—were considered alien to the humanistic spirit. The sociologist George Caspar Homans held that "between the social sci ences and many of the so-called humanities no intellectual line can be drawn: all are social sciences (or, if you like, all are humanities)." To those who emphasized the humanities' basic concern with human values, Homans replied with a rhetoric question: "In what sense is the study of Romance philology a study of human values rather than a study of the way men have behaved?" With regard to the place of history, the classicist Paul L. MacKendrick suggested that Gibbons' Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was "a hu manistic work, because it was written with a profound sense of indi viduation," but the Cambridge Ancient History, "because it was written by a team, is not: it is social science." The historian Hugh R. Trevor-Roper found the distinguishing criterion of "humane sub jects" in the fact that they have "no direct scientific use; they owe their title to existence to the interest and comprehension of the laity; they exist primarily not for the training of professionals but for the education of laymen." Carl J. Friedrich, the political scientist, held that "the focus of the humanities is upon critical examination and evaluation of the products of man in cultural affairs . .. , whereas the focus of the social sciences is upon the way men live together, in cluding their creative activities." All these quotations are taken from a report of the American Council of Learned Societies on a symposium on "The Relationship between the Humanities and the Social Sciences" (ACLS Newsletter, March 1961). One of the participants of the session contributed a
105TYPES OF KNOWLEDGE
74
"frivolous story," a statement attributed to Erwin Panofsky, the great art historian: "Those who think and get somewhere are mathema ticians. Those who think and don't get anywhere are philosophers. Those who don't think and get somewhere are the natural scientists. Those who don't think and don't get anywhere are the humanists." Neither this witty statement nor any of the others would have en abled me to provide appropriately labeled boxes into which to sort various branches of intellectual knowledge, let alone to attempt statistical estimates of the costs incurred by society in the produc tion and distribution of the particular kinds of knowledge.
Legal and Institutional Definitions In matters of science and scholarship, no vote, no ballotting process can decide questions on which the scientists and scholars differ. But where nothing more than a classification for purposes of financial support is concerned, a vote of the legislators can settle an argument. Thus, in the United States, the Act that established in 1965 the Na tional Endowment for the Humanities should, in listing the con stituent disciplines (and creating separate National Foundations for the Arts and the Humanities), enable us to make separate boxes or columns for scientific, artistic, and humanistic knowledge. (This does not assure a solution to the problem of compiling statistical data for the cost of creating and disseminating these categories of knowledge, because the primary sources may have used breakdowns different from those written into the acts of Congress.)
An earlier description of the constituency of the humanities was given by the American Council of Learned Societies. It continues to describe itself as "a federation of national organizations concerned with the humanities—the languages and literatures, philosophies and religions, history and the arts, and the associated techniques— and with the humanistic elements in the social sciences."23 This program includes the arts among the humanities—although the lawmakers want them separated—and it includes history—although many historians see themselves as social scientists. But it also di vides the social sciences into humanistic and "nonhumanistic" ele ments, leaving us in doubt whether the latter are "scientific" in some mysterious sense. For a continental European—or, as a matter of fact, for anyone who did not go to school in an English-speaking country—this makes no sense, since all humanistic disciplines are sciences, though of course not natural sciences. In practice, the na tional and private foundations in the United States have tried to
23 This statement appears on the inside cover of the ACLS Newsletter.
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CLASSES OF KNOWLEDGE
draw a line by looking at the printed or typed pages: algebraic equa tions and statistical tables suggest something "scientific" whereas a purely narrative exposition, especially of a philosophical or histori cal nature, gives the impression of a "humanistic" study.24
The Antiscientistic Humanist Many statements in recent years reveal an antagonism on the part of representatives of humanistic disciplines towards the natural sci ences, or rather towards the "scientific" departments of the univer sities and certain claims of superiority frequently heard from those professing the "hard sciences." Sometimes the antagonism degener ates into downright hostility. Whereas the traditional "enemy" of the classical humanists had been the theologian—the divine, en gaged in "divine" studies, to be countered by humane or humanistic studies—in recent times Enemy No. 1 has been the "scientist." In the words of a respected scholar, "humanistic studies have been faced with a much more formidable rival in the form of the scientific method."25 And another eminent humanistic scholar complained that the word "scientific" sometimes "degenerates into a vague hon orific, synonymous with the advertiser's 'reliable' or 'guaranteed.' "26
Many plausible explanations can be found for the widespread antiscientism among representatives of the humanities. Foremost, one may suspect, has been the resentment of being on the losing side in a battle for money, prestige, and good students; but I shall discuss also
241 wonder where this distinction leaves me and my work? Up to this point, I have
been philosophizing to such an extent that I ought to qualify as a humanist writing a
thoroughly humanistic study. This is apt to change, however, when, beginning in
Volume III, I shall present scores of statistical tables, showing dollar expenditures,
inviting numerical comparisons, and pointing to all sorts of quantitative relation
ships. The humanistic elements of my work will on many a page be pushed aside by
the "nonhumanist" ones, even where my statistical efforts will be directed to the task
of showing how much has been spent for the production and distribution of humanis
tic knowledge.
The answer, perhaps, is simply that this study, with all its interdisciplinary ambi
tions, is patently "social science," and the difficulties in labeling it are due only to an
odd legal situation: the legislature, the U.S. Congress, has created agencies to sponsor
education, research, and other activities in "science," "technology," "medicine," "education," "humanities," and "the arts," but not in the social sciences. As a result,
funds for social sciences have to come out of the budgetary appropriations of the other
agencies, and this forces staff and reviewing panels to look for "humanistic" and
"scientific" elements in social-science projects.
25 Lord [Alan] Bullock, "The Future of Humanistic Studies," Lecture presented at
the Aspen Institute, Summer 1978. (Lord Bullock was Vice Chancellor of Oxford Uni
versity from 1969 to 1973.)
26 Jacques Barzun, Science, the Glorious Entertainment (New York: Harper and
Row, 1964), p. 14.
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TYPES OF KNOWLEDGE
other, intellectually more respectable reasons. The jealousy of liberal financial support for natural sciences and technology, while only small alms are being given for research in the humanities, should not be mistaken for sheer greed for money; several perquisites go with research grants: research assistants, secretaries, typists, release from teaching duties, and often extra summer salaries for re search—benefits rarely available to humanistic scholars. Closely re lated are the gains in the prestige that come to the recipients of large outside grants. To the extent that this prestige impresses the ad ministrative officers of the universities as well as the members of committees on appointments and promotion, it translates again into pecuniary advantages. But even as a nonpecuniary benefit, public or professional recognition of the grantees' standing in the academic world is much coveted. Competition for good students is also effec tive; it is a fact, if one may assume test scores to be valid, that physics and mathematics have been attracting the best students. Professors in the humanities have resented being left with the less talented or less ambitious students. A strong reason for the humanists' resentment of the natural sci ences lies in the loss of dominance over the curriculum. In the sev enteenth and eighteenth centuries the classicists had virtually a monopoly of the students' time. Originally it had been a duopoly, a sharing of the curriculum with theology, but it developed into a monopoly. In Volume Π, in the chapter on Universities, I shall show how in Europe, as later also in the American colonies, the cur riculum had been based almost entirely on classical languages and classical literature. Change came only slowly, partly with the ascen dency of the natural sciences, partly with the defection of modern from classical "liberal culture." In the United States the change was accelerated, at the end of the nineteenth century, when the elective system allowed students to devote more time to the natural sci ences.27 Professors in the classical humanities fought a defensive bat tle, and lost it at most institutions. The old arguments employed in the eternal battle over the curriculum are still being repeated in many academic committees and in the writings of dedicated humanists.
The antiscientism of the humanists, incidentally, is rather differ ent from the occasional attacks on scientism made in the writings on the methodology of the social sciences. What social scientists mean
27 "The elective system, which, following the decline of general education is once
more resurgent, came increasingly to serve the interest of the professional entrepre
neur rather than the student for whom it was intended. In short, educational policy...
simply disappeared." Henry David Aiken, Predicament of the University (Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press, 1971), p. 115.
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CLASSES OF KNOWLEDGE
by scientism is the "slavish imitation of the method and language" of the natural sciences for research in the social sciences, and the "very prejudiced approach which, before it has considered its sub ject, claims to know what is the most appropriate way of investigat ing it."28 The adjective "scientistic," in contradistinction to "scien tific," was coined to characterize this unfortunate methodological prejudice. Such criticisms were properly raised by social scientists protesting against attempts to impose on them and their fellow re searchers in the social sciences methods which may have been pro ductive in physical research but are not appropriate to studies of man and society. Natural scientists have never prescribed their methods, research techniques, or technical language for use in hu manistic studies; after all, they denied the term "scientific" to all studies in the humanities. Thus, humanists have had no occasion to protest against prescriptions or impositions from natural scientists.
On the other hand, humanistic scholars have had a good reason for their antiscientism if they meant by scientism the presumption of natural scientists in excluding the humanities from the category of scientific knowledge and scientific research. As I showed in the sec tion on Scientific Knowledge, the takeover of the term "science" by natural scientists in English-speaking countries was an appropria tion of a designation previously shared by students of culture.29 Humanists could, not unreasonably, feel dispossessed, especially when the natural scientists began to claim superiority of scientific over "nonscientific" knowledge. Since this arrogation of superiority followed the appropriation of the term only after some time and only gradually, the humanists did not immediately protest against the semantic conversion. When they finally noticed the degradation in volved, they resented their having become second-class or thirdclass academic citizens but did nothing to restore their right to the designation as (cultural) scientists. Instead, they began attacking "science" and "scientists" for all sorts of misdeeds, actual or pre sumed. Thus, Lord Bullock complains that "the superiority of scientific
28Friedrich A. Hayek, "Scientism and the Study of Society," Economica, Part 1,
n.s., vol. 9 (1942), p. 269. Reprinted in Hayek, The Counter-Revolution of Science
(Glencoe, 111.: Free Press, 1952), pp. 15-16.
29 "It is an interesting reflex of the British situation that the Royal Society, early this
century, deliberately excluded from its scope the social sciences and other fields of
learning which, in other countries, would be regarded as part of 'science' in its uni
versal sense." C[harles] P. Snow, The Two Cultures: And α Second Look (Cambridge:
at the University Press, 1964), p. 105, note 37. (The story of the decision of the Royal
Society and the subsequent establishment of the British Academy will be told in the
chapter on Academies of Sciences in Volume II.)
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TYPES OF KNOWLEDGE
over humanistic studies was . . . asserted" on the basis of two cri teria, namely, "the understanding of nature .. . and the practical ap plication of scientific knowledge in the transformation of human life by technology." Of course, natural sciences deal only with natural, not with cultural phenomena; and knowledge of physics and chemistry is useful in technological development. This can hardly be a criticism of the natural sciences; it would be a criticism of sci ence for its disregard of man, society, culture, values, and of any knowledge useful chiefly through the pleasure it gives to those who appreciate it.30 Jacques Barzun blames "scientists" for their "searching for the 're ally real' . . . ," an ambition which he regards as responsible for the loss of the "balance of mind" achieved, according to Alfred North Whitehead, through the union of "passionate interest in the detailed facts with equal devotion to abstract generalization."31 Barzun is probably correct in stating that many natural scientists have lost this precious balance of mind. Yet, his attacks on "science" cannot help striking us as somewhat pointless if they are based on the singlemindedness and often rather narrow interests of devotees of labora tory sciences. At some places in his tract Barzun seems to be a sin cere admirer of the "glory" of the achievements in some of the natural sciences, but most of the time he is quite sarcastic in his characterization of the entertainment of the experimentalist, the playful man (homo ]udens) with his toys, ranging "from the ludic to the ludicrous."32 Barzun is especially acerbic regarding the bless ings of modern technology. To reproach natural scientists for play ing with gadgets and machinery is no more reasonable than it would be for a natural scientist to reproach a humanistic scholar for playing with words and abstract ideas. One more antiscientistic argument of humanists deserves to be mentioned: natural scientists have, as a rule, regarded "reductivism" as one of their guiding precepts, though their opinions differ as to just what their theoretical propositions should be reduced—to "the familiar," to physical phenomena, physicalist explanations, physicalist language, reproduceable physical sense perceptions, or what not. Humanistic scholars object to demands that any of these
30Cardinal Newman's statement is often quoted with approval by humanists:
"Knowiedge is capabie of being its own end. Such is the constitution of the human
mind that any kind of knowledge, if it really be such, is its own reward." Quoted from
Aiken, Predicament of the University, p. 119.
31 This statement from Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World is
quoted in Barzun, Science, p. 5.
32 Barzun, Science, pp. Ill, 113.
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CLASSES OF KNOWLEDGE
"reductions" be performed regarding inner experiences or emo tions—human experiences of their own or other minds. This divergence in procedural rules led a philosopher to the statement (not easy to understand for an uninitiated and very difficult to trans late into any foreign language) that a "theme in the humanistic critique of science is the reductive tendency of science."33 Inciden tally, reductivism is now rejected and discredited by the newest generation of philosophers of science;34 but it is true that most natu ral scientists trained in old-fashioned "scientific method" still be lieve in it religiously. The main source of the humanists' antiscientism is their own feel ing of being under attack from the scientific establishment. "We should be deceiving ourselves if we underestimated the antihumanistic thrust of so much recent writing."35 This was said in 1968. Sixty years earlier the warning had been: "The humanities need to be defended today against the encroachment of physical science, as they once needed to be against the encroachments of theology."36
The Two Cultures The antiscientism of many writers on the humanities is, I submit, best explained as a reaction to the disrespect many natural scientists express for the humanists' work. The superiority complex of many representatives of the natural sciences manifests itself in their philo sophical-position statements. They look down on any type of knowledge other than that generated by what they call their scien tific method. It is understandable if those who are said to be seekers and disseminators of an "inferior" type of knowledge resent this at titude and become hostile to the scientific supermen.
In his Rede lecture of 1959 on "The Two Cultures and the Scien tific Revolution" and its sequel in 1963 on "The Two Cultures: A Second Look," C. P. Snow, now Lord Snow, examined the mutual incomprehension and dislike of the representatives of natural sci ence and literary scholarship: "Literary intellectuals at one pole—at
33 John Compton, "Science, Anti-Science and Human Values," The Key Reporter,
vol. 44 (Winter, 1978-1979), p. 2.
34 For example, Rudolf Carnap, Herbert Feigl, Richard Braithwaite, Sir Karl Popper,
Carl Hempel, to mention only a few. Brief references to their writings can be found in
the chapter on "What is Meant by Methodology?" in my Methodology of Economics
and Other Social Sciences (New York: Academic Press, 1978).
35 Harry Levin, "The Modern Humanities in Historical Perspective," in J. C. Laid-
law, ed., The Future of the Modern Humanities (Cambridge: The Modern Humanities
Research Association, 1969), p. 16.
36 Irving Babbitt, Literature and the American College: Essays in Defense of the
Humanities (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1908), p. 31.
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the other scientists, and as the most representative, the physical sci entists. Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension— sometimes (particularly among the young) hostility and dislike, but most of all lack of understanding."37 Snow regards the two groups as two cultures "in an intellectual but also in an anthropological sense," in that the members of each culture share "common at titudes, common standards and patterns of behaviour, common ap proaches and assumptions."38 Snow's sympathies seem to be more on the side of the natural sci entists, whose arguments he finds "usually much more rigorous, and almost always at a higher conceptual level, than literary persons' ar guments."39 His main point, however, is the lack of intercommuni cation and mutual understanding, a result of overspecialized educa tion at all levels of schooling and research. Those trained in literary scholarship "couldn't cope with the simplest concepts of pure sci ence; . . . [and] would be even less happy with applied science,"40 On the other side, the natural scientists, though often interested in music or color photography, think little or nothing of books: "of the books which to most literary persons are bread and butter, novels, history, poetry, plays, almost nothing at all."41 These blank spots in the vision fields of the people in the two camps may be deplorable and may well explain some of the mutual contempt or derision. If I may satirize the conflict, I propose these pronouncements: The hu manistic scholars say "we are thinkers, they are tinkers; we read great books, they play with gadgets." And the physical scientists say "we are rigorous, objective, and exact in measurement and argu ment, they speculate about subjective impressions; we test all hypotheses in our laboratories, they bury themselves in dusty books." I submit that Lord Snow gets two things mixed up: mutual com prehension and mutual appreciation. As far as comprehension is concerned, the gulf between the "two cultures" is not any wider than the many gulfs are between the different disciplines within each culture. The mutual incomprehension between an entomolo gist and a nuclear physicist is not less than that between either of the two and a structural linguist, a social historian, or an analytic phi losopher. (Snow does consider this point; he even discusses the pos sibility of "two thousand and two cultures," but he decides in favor of the "dialectic.") I have found that my own specialty, economics,
37C[harles] P. Snow, The Two Cultures: And α Second Look (Cambridge: at the
University Press, 1964], p. 4
38Ibid., p. 9.
39 Ibid., p. 12.
40Ibid., p. 30.
41 Ibid., p. 13.
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is equally far removed from the ready grasp of most molecular biolo gists as it is from the ready grasp of most Romance philologists. Lord Snow emphasizes the shocking ignorance of literary intellectuals of such things as the second law of thermodynamics or the struc ture of DNA. I know of no comprehension tests on these pieces of knowledge administered to random samples of geologists or meteorologists, on the one hand, and of musicologists or historians, on the other, but I wonder whether their test scores would be sig nificantly different. To be sure, it would be nice if more people were better educated and if their interests were broader. And, perhaps, broader education could lead to greater appreciation of what the other fellow is doing. But the mutual antipathy between the mem bers of the "two cultures" is not due to mutual incomprehension but to a cultivation of snobbish snubbing. The antagonism described and deplored by Lord Snow is, as I like to put it, between "literary intellectuals" who consider themselves as the only intellectuals, and "natural scientists" who consider themselves as the only scientists. There is no good reason why stu dents of nature and students of human culture should disrespect or dislike each other. However, if the former call the research of the lat ter nonscientific, and the latter call the work of the former nonintellectual, one cannot expect much mutual appreciation.
Lord Snow had an afterthought: there was still another "body of intellectual opinion," consisting of students of "social history, sociology, demography, political science, economics, . . . psychol ogy .. . , all of them concerned with how human beings are living or have lived. . . ." This he recognizes as "becoming something like a third culture."42 Snow found that "such a culture has . . . to be on speaking terms with the scientific one." Yet he never commented on the fact that his two or three cultures together comprise only a small minority of society, perhaps less than 10 per cent. He took no ac count of the semieducated counterculture and none of the over whelming majority of people who are entirely uninterested in scien tific or intellectual knowledge of any sort.
The Characteristics of the Humanities I still have to examine what criteria or features have been found to serve as unifying characteristics of the disciplines corralled under the term "humanities." I may begin with a very negative pro nouncement on this task, expressed on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Modern Humanities Research Association. The
42 Ibid., p. 70.
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pronouncement holds that "modern humanities" is no more than a slogan, invented partly for purposes of propaganda after "the classi cal humanities . . . [had] lost their basic characteristics and their prestige . .. ," and that the term "somehow survived as a convenient one in curricular classification." We have lived .. . with its paradoxes and ambiguities, try
ing in vain to give it connotative definition and meaningful
reality. . . . As a term, . . . it has done far more harm than
good, and should be abandoned. The truth . .. is that there is no combination of from three
to (as the Congress of the United States was recently led to
believe) nine or more academic disciplines with common
subject matters, methods, attitudes, objectives, and results
that set them apart from the sciences and social sciences.
This notion is sheer nonsense. . . ."43 We might just as well give up our search for common charac teristics; or we might follow one of Parker's suggestions and use the term "humanities" as a substitute for some category such as miscel laneous subjects not elsewhere classified. Let other academic divi sions collect the disciplines which they think qualify as mathe matical, physical, biological, or social sciences and assign any that do not fit, but are worth being taught and researched, to the miscel laneous category, euphoniously called "the humanities." This may be the honest way out of the conceptual dilemma, but I doubt that it will appeal to dedicated humanists, or to students of the sciences of human culture. Thus, we continue to search for common charac teristics of the miscellaneous disciplines.
A study of the Report of the Commission on the Humanities, which provided the rationale for the establishment of the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1965, does not contribute much to our search.44 It enumerates the subjects that should be included and it indulges in purple prose to plead the cause. If learned men wish to persuade legislators that financial support to the humanities will be an urgent task of government, eminently in the national interest, they will find the right line and the right words for the task—but we should not expect a piece of closely reasoned analysis. We learn that
43 William Riley Parker, "The Future of the 'Modern Humanities'," in Laidlaw, The
Future of the Modem Humanities, p. 107. Parker had compiled over forty statements
attempting to define humanities (apart from dictionary definitions) and found all of
them unenlightening (p. 114).
44Report of the Commission on the Humanities (New York: American Council of
Learned Societies, 1964).
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"the humanities may be regarded as a body of knowledge and in sight, as modes of expression, as a program for education, as an un derlying attitude toward life." The sales pitch is that the humanities are capable of "humanizing" technology; of instilling individuals with "intellectual humility, sensitivity to beauty, and emotional dis cipline"; and of helping society sustain a healthy "social, moral, and aesthetic development."45 A few years after the establishment of the National Endowment for the Humanities, its chairman found it ap propriate to explain why the humanities had so little influence on the nation's "practical affairs." He suggested that one of the reasons may be that the humanities lacked a "conceptual framework that brings together the great bag of subjects, from art to linguistics, that are" included.46 Lord Bullock, in an attempt to show that humanistic studies are "capable of offering something distinctive," lists "five charac teristics ... to identify humanistic studies": (1) Humanistic studies, contrary to the social and behavioral sciences, "move . . . from gen eralization towards the particular, from abstraction towards the con crete," because "human experience . . . is always experienced in a particular context." (2) "A central concern . . . is the discussion of values, historical judgments, questions of purpose and . . . meaning. .. ." (3) Essential for humanistic studies are the "possibility and the necessity to look at human actions, beliefs and creations . . . from within . . . seen and felt from the inside." (4) Although "exacting in their standards of scholarship," the humanists' evidence does not "exclude . . . constructive interpretation . . ." and may combine "elements of fact, speculation and judgment, the objective and the subjective." (5) Humanistic studies refuse "to repudiate the past as irrelevant"; in fact, "on all questions of value, purpose and meaning . . . —whether moral, political, religious, aesthetic, or philo sophical—the argument is never concluded . . . because such ques tions are not settled by the accumulation of new knowledge, only debated in a different context."47 Lord Bullock's list of characteristics is lucidly formulated and is in conformance with the best thinking on the problem. The trouble is that, as with all ideal types, there is no perfect fit between "the real thing" and the mental construct. None of the disciplines commonly counted among the humanities has all five characteristics, and some
45 Ibid., pp. 2, 3.
46Barnaby C. Keeney, "Foreword," in National Endowment for the Humanities,
Third Annual Report (Washington: National Endowment for the Humanities, 1969),
p. 1.
47 Bullock, "The Future of Humanistic Studies."
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have at best one or two of them. Try them out, for example, on lin guistics, and you find that most of them are quite out of place.
One of the finest statements on programs for humanistic education was made in 1957 in a report on the humanities to the president of The Johns Hopkins University by a team of four scholars.48 The summary of the purposes of humanistic education stresses his tory—knowledge of the past, with emphasis on the particular, the unique; value—with emphasis on the categorical imperative; and taste joined with imagination—a rare quality to be cultivated and protected. All three are strongly tied to tradition and refer to human action and judgment. But although the programmatic role of this conception is of great significance—understand the past! act respon sibly! cultivate good taste!—it is by no means certain that the three precepts would do as criteria in a definition of humanistic disci plines. It is probably no coincidence that most statements by scholars dedicated to the humanities have a strongly lyrical quality: they are formulated in a flowery style and are laden with emotion. Charles Frankel, for example, observes that "the humanities are a curious combination of involvement and detachment; of the search for scien tific objectivity and irrepressible personal idiosyncrasy; of piety to wards the past and the critique of the past; of private passion and public commitment. Some humanistic disciplines display one or another of these tensions more conspiciously than others, but the tensions are characteristic of all humanistic enterprises".49
SOCIAL-SCIENCE KNOWLEDGE
Adjectives were available to specify the types of knowledge dis cussed in the preceding sections: mundane, scientific, humanistic. If we proceed to the social sciences, we are forced to press a noun into service as an adjective: "social-scientific knowledge" sounds awk ward (just as "natural-scientific knowledge" would jar our ears); the expression "social knowledge" has a different connotation; and "societal knowledge" does not seem right either. Thus, we arrive at "social-science knowledge."
48 Don Cameron Allen (English Literature), Clifton Cherpack (Romance Languages),
Henry Rowell (Classics), and C. Vann Woodward (American History), Report on the
Humanities to President Milton S. Eisenhower, Johns Hopkins University, February
1957 (mimeographed). Excerpts in Johns Hopkins Magazine, April 1979, pp. 4-5.
49 Charles Frankel, "Why the Humanities?" Ideas (A Publication of the National
Humanities Center), vol. 1, no. 1 (Winter 1979), pp. 2-3 and 13-14.
116CLASSES OF KNOWLEDGE
85
Historical Development We are spared, with regard to the social sciences, the lengthy explo rations in historical semantics of the kind required for scientific knowledge and humanistic knowledge. The only essential piece of terminological information is that in the eighteenth and early nine teenth centuries the designation "moral philosophy" was generally used for what now is called social sciences. Moral need not have the connotation of ethical, but may refer to the mores, the customs, of society; and philosophy was simply a synonym for science in the present (international) sense, namely, systematic inquiry, as con trasted with the layman's or practitioner's knowledge. Moral philos ophy was juxtaposed to natural philosophy; it became social sci ences at about the same time natural philosophy became natural sciences.50 The historical development was not quite so smooth as the preced ing paragraph makes it appear: there have been occasional devia tions and aberrations in terms and concepts. For example, Comte in his Positive Philosophy proposed "social physics" as a synonym for "social philosophy" or "social science." Ampere preferred "political sciences" in lieu of "social sciences." Cournot spread the various so cial sciences among the columns and rows of a matrix of sciences, in cluding theoretical sciences, historical sciences, and technical sci ences; anthropology and ethnology were regarded as biological sci ences, history was among the political sciences, and chrematology (the theory of wealth, or economics) was an entirely theoretical sci ence. For Pearson, most of the social sciences belonged in the divi sion of biological sciences. For details on these and other taxonomic peculiarities, and for full documentation, the reader may be referred to Part One, "The Branches of Learning," in Volume II of this work. The deviations fortunately did not give rise to the chains of confu sions and controversies that have been so notorious in the discus sions of "scientific" and "humanistic" knowledge.
Methodological Controversies Things have been different, and far less peaceful, with regard to the discussions of the "proper methods" for the study of society. There has been plenty of methodological controversy about a variety of questions. Are the social sciences fundamentally different from the natural sciences? If so, just what is the essential difference in method of inquiry? What are the similarities and differences be-
50 Francis Bacon, in the early seventeenth century, used the terms "science," "phi
losophy," and "doctrine" as equivalents.
117TYPES OF KNOWLEDGE
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tween studies of human action—man in society—and humanistic studies? Are the same methods of inquiry helpful in all the different social sciences, or are different methods appropriate to different areas or types of problems? These questions are stated here to indi cate the scope of methodological conflict, not to promise any an swers. Perhaps a few particularly important points of view, taken and defended by influential methodologists, may be worth describ ing, chiefly to give an idea of how knowledge of social sciences may differ from the types of knowledge treated in the preceding sections.
John Stuart Mill saw a striking "contradistinction" between phys ical science and moral (or psychological) science. The difference be tween "these two departments of our knowledge does not reside in the subject-matter with which they are conversant," because "every thing which can possibly happen in which man and external things are jointly concerned, results from the joint operation of a law or laws of matter, and a law or laws of the human mind .... Any com pound effect or phenomenon which depends both on the properties of matter and on those of mind, may thus become the subject of two completely distinct sciences, or branches of science." Mill pro ceeded to show that "there are no phenomena which depend exclu sively upon the laws of mind," and that most social sciences, there fore, "presuppose all the physical sciences." (This should not be confused with reductivism.) He also distinguished among different social sciences, some concerned with "man as a mere individual," others with man's feelings towards, and relations with, "other indi vidual human or intelligent beings," and again others with man "living in a state of society,... union or aggregation of human beings for a common purpose or purposes." He pointed to important differ ences between studies that are based on fictitious hypotheses of iso lated, idealized motives, abstracting from all other motives, and studies that "embrace every part of man's nature, insofar as influenc ing the conduct or condition of man in society."51
I have offered these few snatches from an essay first published al most 150 years ago—in 1836, to be exact—because they, and the rest of that essay, provide more insights into the foundations of social sciences than can be gained from most writings of our day. They are silent only on the relationships between social sciences and hu manities, and understandably so since, as we have seen, the agglom eration of cultural studies under the heading "humanities" is an
51 John Stuart Mill, "On the Definition of Political Economy; and on the Method of
Investigation Proper to It," London and Westminster Review, October 1836; reprinted
in Essays on Some Unsettled Questions of Political Economy (London: John W.
Parker, 1844), pp. 129-137.
118CLASSES OF KNOWLEDGE
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idea of this century and has gained academic recognition only over the last fifty years. The social sciences share with the cultural sciences (humanities) the concern with human action, and with the artifacts and other con sequences of human conduct. The most significant differences relate to the relative roles of the universal and the unique, the cognitive and the affective, the categorical and the symbolic, but these differ ences are not equally significant in the various disciplines, and, where they matter little, it is hard to decide whether the area in ques tion is a social science or belongs to the humanities. Such conflicts of jurisdiction have arisen most frequently in historical studies. In tellectual history has regularly been assigned to the humanities, economic history to the social sciences. The assignment of social and political history, however, has remained controversial, and in some academies and universities a compromise has been made to the effect that history before the year 1400 or 1500 has been given to the humanists, and modern history to the social scientists.
One of the perennial bones of contention has been the billetting of psychology. It has sometimes been seen as a part of philosophy, as signed to what are now the humanities; sometimes it has been re garded as a natural science, especially in its physiological and ex perimental aspects; and it is, of course, a mental science par excel lence—and thus, by virtue of at least one definition, a social science. The shuffling back and forth of psychology from one subject group to another may have been rather unsettling for the methodologists of this ancient field of study. In the process, it has had to undergo a sequence of name changes, including such outlandish names as pneumatics, pneumatology, phenomenology, aplopathoscopic pneumatology, and other aliases. Again I refer the reader to things to come in Volume II.
An Academic Subject Group Courses in particular social sciences appeared relatively early in the offerings of American colleges and universities. A professorship in Moral Philosophy and Political Economy was established in 1819 at Columbia College. The combination of subjects professed by the same teacher was sometimes less congruous, as, for example, the professorship in Chemistry and Political Economy at South Carolina College in 1826, and the chair in Political Economy, History, and Metaphysics at William and Mary in 1827. Only in the 1870s were separate professorships in Political Economy created at Harvard, Yale, and Johns Hopkins. Courses in anthropology came in during the 1880s, but this subject was often linked with philosophy, psy-
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chology, sociology, and (probably stressing physical anthropology) with geology and zoology. Yale had in the 1880s a Department of Political and Social Sciences. One of the earliest recognitions of the social sciences as a univer sity division was—as I mentioned in my discussion of humanistic knowledge—at Berkeley, when the College of Arts was split, in 1893, into a College of Social Sciences and a College of Natural Sciences. Between 1893 and 1915 the College of Social Sciences contained de partments of Jurisprudence, History and Political Science, Engineer ing Design (Architecture), and Economics. The division, since 1915 a part of the College of Letters and Science, has expanded over the years; by 1967 it included ten departments (Anthropology, Demog raphy, Economics, Geography, History, Journalism, Philosophy, Political Science, Psychology, and Sociology) and three schools (Criminology, Public Affairs, and Social Welfare).—The develop ment at Harvard was different. In 1890 there were many small divi sions; among these was a Division of History and Political Science with two departments (History and Roman Law; and Political Econ omy) and a Division of American Archaeology and Ethnology. By 1940, seven departments may be considered parts of the area of so cial sciences (Philosophy, Psychology, Sociology, Anthropology, History, Government, and Economics). The inclusion of Philosophy may be inaccurate, since it first had stood alone as a separate divi sion; later, however, (in 1919) it comprised Philosophy and Psy chology, and Social Ethics.—Princeton has held the social sciences to a small scale. In 1919 it had a Division of History, Politics, Eco nomics and Social Institutions, consisting of only three depart ments. The same three departments (History, Politics, Economics and Social Institutions) made up the social sciences in 1949, though there was now also a School of Public Affairs. Later, in 1960 and 1970, respectively, Sociology and Anthropology became independ ent departments. Philosophy was counted among the humanities, Psychology among the natural sciences. Some institutions have solved the problem of questionable alloca tions of "mixed" disciplines to particular groups or divisions by making double or multiple assignments. The University of Chicago used this device from the beginning of its academic reorganization in 1930. Five departments were listed exclusively as members of the Division of the Social Sciences (Anthropology, Economics, Educa tion, Political Science, and Sociology), and two with double al legiance (Geography, "also in the Physical Sciences"; and History, "also in the Humanities"). In addition, two departments in the Divi sion of the Biological Sciences (Home Economics and Psychology)
120CLASSES OF KNOWLEDGE
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were listed as "represented in the Social Sciences." If one wonders why Home Economics is considered a biological science, one may have to realize that cooking, especially in its dietary aspects, has a strong tie to physiology.—The most sensible arrangement seems to be the one now in effect at Swarthmore College, where six of the nine departments in the Division of Social Sciences have double or triple allegiance. Two departments (History and Linguistics) are also in the Division of Humanities; one (Engineering) is also in the Divi sion of Natural Sciences and Engineering; and three (Mathematics, Philosophy, and Psychology) are in all three divisions. Only three departments (Economics, Political Science, and Sociology and An thropology) have exclusive allegiance to the Division of Social Sci ences.
The Sense of It All Enough has been said to justify the conclusion that it would not be helpful to use the organization charts of academic institutions, the breadth requirements for undergraduates, or the voting regulations for faculty members as guides to the classification of higher learning. Nor would it be helpful to use the arbitrary criteria chosen by com mittees of professors to sort the disciplines into prefabricated boxes of subject groups. None of the conventional or unconventional taxonomies, no matter how interesting they are from historical or philosophical points of view, can provide useful arrangements of scientific, scholarly, or intellectual knowledge.
Classification schemes where the actual filing
or cataloguing raises puzzling questions in 10 or 15 per cent of all entries have to be tolerated; but, when the ratio of doubtful cases reaches one third, or even more, of the total, the effort ought to be abandoned. Govern ments, of course, will not give up; undaunted by philosophical con tradictions, they can legislate any distinctions and differentiations they like to make. As a result, specialized knowledge which the trained expert cannot consistently "order" into fixed classes can be sorted by a skillful administrator into the "appropriate" category, especially if the decision is related to the allocation or denial of funds for teaching and research. In subsequent volumes of the present work where, especially in the analyses of education and research, statistical disaggregations of funds for the creation and dissemination of knowledge of various types will be required, I shall prefer a finer breakdown than into the broad classes discussed in the present chapter. To inquire into course enrollments or research activities in psychology or in history may be of interest, but aggregated data for broader, inconsistently TYPES OF KNOWLEDGE
12190
defined classes of knowledge, say, natural sciences, biological sci ences, social sciences, and humanities, would tell us little.
ARTISTIC KNOWLEDGE
Are "the arts" branches of knowledge? This question has no definite meaning as long as one is not clear on what is meant by "the arts"— and this has changed in the course of history and, moreover, it changes even today with the context in which the word is used.
Liberal, Professional, Mechanical, and FineArts Unquestionably, the "liberal arts" in the curriculum of the medieval university were branches of learning: the trivium—grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic (logic)—as well as the quadrivium—music, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. The liberal arts were jux taposed to the "professional arts," which were taught in other facul ties of the university, chiefly, medicine and law. There were, of course, also the faculties of theology, but this branch of learning es caped being called an "art." The "mechanical arts" referred some times to technology, surely an important branch of knowledge, sometimes, however, to techniques in practicing various crafts. The reference to practice or action was not intended to deny that any kind of doing presupposes a knowledge of "how to." (Jeremy Bentham told us—as I shall show in the next volume, in Part One, Chapter 5—that science was "knowledge" whereas art was "prac tice," but he also stressed the fact that every branch of learning was both art and science and that each needed the other.) The "fine arts" are rather different things; they surely involve not only "how-to" knowledge on the part of the performer, but they also convey to the beholder impressions which I include in the wide concept of knowl edge. Incidentally, our language distinguishes between performers of mechanical arts and fine arts by designating them, respectively, as artisans and artists. To look to academic institutions for an authoritative meaning of the arts is hopeless, because word usages differ widely. If some in nocents believe that "arts and sciences" are meant to express a dichotomy, they will be quickly disabused of this error if they recall the organization of the University of California (Berkeley) from 1868 to 1893, where the College of Arts was composed of the College of Social Sciences and the College of Natural Sciences. Other institu tions used the expression "liberal arts" in conformance with the an cient model, which included arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy and was enriched by substantial doses of natural sciences. And, to
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complete the round, several colleges and universities have a divi sion of art to serve mainly the visual and performing arts.
Performance versus Precepts for Performance Some writers wanted to distinguish between art and science by hav ing the former consist of "instrumental" propositions, the latter, of positive propositions, but they did not deny the designation "knowledge" to either.52 Does this make the cookbook a work of art? Or is it the practice of cooking that constitutes art? Those who speak of cooking as an art do not mean to say that it is an art to read a cook book and carry out its instructions, or to cook without instruction the simple dishes commonly eaten by most of us. They refer, instead, only to the work of those rare cooks who prepare very special meals, using unusual imagination and a fine sense of taste, form, and color. The "art" in this activity lies precisely in the deviation from com mon practice and from common precepts. This meaning of art as a performance superior to that of most prac titioners is, however, contrary to the meaning of art as a body of pre cepts for practice; the latter happens to be one of the dictionary definitions and has been widely used as an antonym of science. Art in this sense is, like science, systematic knowledge but arranged in a different way, suitable for more immediate practical application. As John Stuart Mill has proposed, science is a body of knowledge clas sified according to causes, art a body of knowledge classified accord ing to effects, the causes of which are often the subject of several different sciences.53 Clearly, not all knowledge is science and not all practice is art. Perhaps one may say that highly qualified knowledge (rather than common, everyday knowledge) is science, whereas highly qualified practice (rather than common, everyday practice) is art. But, since virtually all practice, and certainly all qualified practice, presup poses knowledge, it is not unreasonable, as some writers have pro posed, to use art and applied science as synonymous terms.
Those who have defined art as practical knowledge have usually
52 This and the next four paragraphs repeat an earlier discussion of the same topic
in my essay "Positive and Normative Economics" in Robert L. Heilbroner, Economic
Means and Social Ends (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1969), pp. 106-107; re
printed in Machlup, Methodology of Economics and Other Social Sciences, pp. 432-
433.
53 In a similar vein, Mill said about science and art that "the one deals in facts, the
other in precepts. Science is a collection of truths; art, a body of rules, or directions for
conduct," John Stuart Mill, in Essays, p. 124. As to the chronological order in which
art and science develop, Mill said "In every department of human affairs, Practice
long precedes Science." Principles of Political Economy with Some of Their Applica
tions to Social Philosophy (London: John W. Parker, 1848), p. 1.
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failed to differentiate various degrees of practicality and various de grees of practice. There are important differences between, say, a handbook of technology, technological advice in a concrete situa tion, actual instructions given for immediate action, and the final, perhaps manual, execution of the instructions. Yet all four phases of practical knowledge or practical application of knowledge have indis criminately been called art.54 An important idea in designating certain kinds of practical activ ity as art is, I submit, the recognition that these activities presuppose a combination of human qualities that cannot be obtained solely from books or lectures. These activities are "art" in that they call for judgment, intuition, inventiveness, and imagination; they call for skill in making the correct diagnoses and prognoses required for successful prescriptions and good performance. Here lies a real dis tinction from science or scientific knowledge, and even from technology and general practical precepts.
Creation and Communication The most important distinction for the purposes of this study is be tween art as application, or use, of knowledge and art as communi cation, or conveyance of knowledge. In the former aspect, knowl edge is an input, in the latter, it is an output. That the artist uses knowledge in his performance—as a writer, composer, painter, sculptor, actor, musician, singer, dancer—is not of great importance from the point of view of an inquiry into the production of knowl edge. That the artist creates knowledge in the minds of his readers, viewers, listeners, and spectators is what matters in the context of this book. It presupposes a very wide concept of knowledge, as in fact I use when I define knowledge production as any human (or human-induced) activity effectively designed to create, alter, or confirm in a human mind a meaningful apperception, awareness, cognizance, or consciousness of anything whatsoever.
KNOWLEDGE WITHOUT WORDS
My wide concept of knowledge permits me to recognize the exist ence and importance of knowledge without words. Nonverbal knowledge may be of many different kinds: we see shapes, colors,
54 The German word for art is Kunst, but the German language offers the compound
nouns Kunstiehre (for art as a body of general precepts, technology), Kunstregel (for
art as a precept or rule for practical application), and Kunst/ertigkeit (for art as techni
cal skill).
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and pictures; we hear noises, melodies, harmonies, and rhythms; we touch surfaces, rough and smooth; we smell odors; we taste flavors; and all these impressions we can reproduce or reconstruct in our minds. The deliberate production of sense impressions of these sorts and of consequent cognitive or affective processes in human minds is a part of the total production of knowledge.
Verbal and Nonverbal Arts The literary arts communicate knowledge expressed in words, but the feelings and affections they produce in the reader or listener are integral parts of the effects in the recipients' minds. The knowledge conveyed through a work of literary art is both cognitive and affec tive. It is a characteristic of all works of art that the beholder's expe rience is only partly cognitive, inducing a process of conceptualiza tion and verbalizable reasoning; it is chiefly emotional, inducing nonverbal reactions. Art addresses the soul more than the mind, if I may indulge in using this romantic metaphor.55 The playwright and the novelist often speak chiefly to the intelligence of their public, but the poet is more likely to arouse in his audience a mixture of reac tions in which feelings may outweigh thoughts.56
55 On a less metaphorical and more physiological level, one may perhaps replace
the reference to the mind and the soul with a reference to the left and right hemi
spheres of the human brain—provided one accepts the contention, advanced on the
basis of experimental research, that the one half is responsible for verbal skills, the
other for nonverbal artistic skills.
561 may present two poets, Wordsworth and Shelley, as witnesses supporting my
statement. "... poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impas
sioned expression which is in the countenance of all science." William Wordsworth,
Lyrical Ballads, vol. 1, 3rd ed. (London: Τ. N. Longman and 0. Rees, 1802), p.
xxxvii.—"Poetry . . . is at once the center and circumference of knowledge; it is that
which comprehends all science, and that to which all science must be referred." Percy
Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry (published posthumously, first in Mrs. Shelley's
edition of Shelley's Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments [1840];
the passage here is quoted from a reprint of the 1845 edition of Essays and is entitled
A Defence of Poetry [Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1904], p. 76).—The philosopher
John Dewey attempted to reduce these poetic declarations on poetry to the statement
that "in both production and enjoyed perception of works of arts, knowledge is trans
formed; it becomes something more than knowledge because it is merged with non-
intellectual elements to form an experience worth while as an experience." fohn
Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Minton, Balch, 1932),p. 290.—Another witness
testifying in support of my statement about knowledge may be Hermann Broch with
his pronouncement that "scientific and artistic cognition are branches of a single
trunk—which is, simply, cognition [Erkenntnis]." Hermann Broch, "Einheit wis-
senschaftlicher und dichterischer Erkenntnis [Unity of Scientific and Poetic Cog
nition]," first published in 1933, reprinted in Hermann Broch, Erkennen und Han-
deln, Essays, vol. 2 (Zurich; Rhein-Verlag, 1955), pp. 83-89.—For earlier views on
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Visual Arts The visual arts—drawing, painting, modeling, sculpturing, etc.— produce primarily pictures and shapes, not words. This does not mean that these art objects do not address the mind and do not in duce thought; but not all thinking is words and sentences, it may just as well be images of things viewed or only suggested by the drawings, paintings, plastics, and sculptures.
The effects on the viewer are probably different in the case of realistic and in the case of abstract art. A realistic painting lends itself more easily to verbal reasoning in that the objects represented in the picture may produce associations with the viewer's earlier experi ences of the same or similar objects and with the designations which his language has provided for them. An abstract painting, however, with its lines, shapes, colors, and shades may impress the viewer chiefly as beautiful, comical, strange—or puzzling if he is used to seeking definite meanings in what he sees. The thought processes induced by the painting may be in images or in words, but the feelings it arouses in him may depend on his previous acquaintance with abstract art. In looking at a sculpture, imagining how it might feel to touch the object—how smooth and pleasant to the palm—may be part of he viewer's reaction. He may verbalize his impressions in his own thoughts and, of course, in expressing them to others, but his im mediate response is in images, shapes, and surfaces, appealing to his senses rather than his intelligence. Knowledge comprises the non verbal feelings and the nonverbal thoughts, along with the ver balized thoughts in the recipient's mind.57
Performing Arts Much of what has been said about the visual arts applies also to in strumental music, just as some of the observations about poetry apply to vocal music. Vocal music communicates verbal knowledge, but its appeal may be chiefly affective, not cognitive, particularly so if the singer's diction is such that his words cannotbe comprehended.
poetry and other art forms as branches of human knowledge, see Part One, Volume II
of the present work, especially the sections on Francis Bacon and the French ency
clopaedists.
57 "Knowledge which is verbally expressed is superior to that which is satisfied
with having something before its eyes; but the latter, too, is a kind of knowledge. Let
the reader try to describe in words what he is seeing at any moment, and he will be
surprised at how little he can 'say' about what he so clearly sees in front of him." Jose
Ortega y Gasset, On Love: Aspects of a Single Theme (New York: New American Li
brary, 1957), p. 111.
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Instrumental music impresses just through the sounds produced, through the succession of notes that makes a melody, the simul taneity or instantaneity of sounds that make for harmony, the varia tions of time intervals that make for rhythm, and so forth. The lis tener's responses may be entirely noncognitive, except for the recognition of musical shapes (melodies, etc.) previously heard and remembered, vaguely or accurately. On the other hand, the listener with musical training may have cognitive responses as he discerns the difference between major and minor keys (if the music is not atonal), identifies the beats and measures (say, two-four, three-four, four-four, six-four), recognizes themes and variations, notices the exposition and development of principal and subordinate themes, their returns in the same or in different keys or different tempi, the beginning of the coda, and so forth. The impressions produced by repeated hearings of the same piece (say, a concerto or a symphony) may be quite different. Some music "grows on you" the more often you hear it, whereas other music, though pleasing at first or second hearing, may prove shallow and increasingly tedious if heard repeatedly. As different listeners ex change their views of particular compositions or particular per formances, one may wonder about the differences in their reactions. These may be due to differences in their background, training, expe rience, or familiarity with the work, but some may be due to differ ences in the ways they listen to the music. Some listen with analyti cal and critical attention to technical details, but some of us just "let the sounds of music creep in our ears." Either way, the listener re ceives knowledge, largely of the nonverbal kind. He learns to know the piece—the concerto, the symphony, the string quartet, the sonata, etc.—and knows it better after several hearings.58
Two other performing arts, pantomime and dance, convey non verbal knowledge to the audience. Pantomime and some kinds of dance with expressive gestures may be regarded as quasi-verbal in that they communicate knowledge to the spectator by means of a sign language, with facial and bodily movements replacing the spo-
58 In this context I may quote from an address by an eminent physicist on certain
aspects of human experience, in particular, the "expression" of music: "A Beethoven
sonata is a natural phenomenon which can be analyzed physically by studying the
vibrations in the air, as well as chemically, physiologically and psychologically by
studying the processes at work in the brain of the listener. However, even if these
processes are completely understood in scientific terms, this kind of analysis does not
touch what we consider relevant and essential in a Beethoven sonata—the immediate
and direct expression of the music." Victor F. Weisskopf, "The Frontiers and Limits of
Science," Bulletin, The American Academy of Arts and Sciences, vol. 27 (March
1975), p. 23.
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ken word. Classical ballet, with its explicitly designed plots, is sup posed to tell a story. It is sometimes a very elaborate story, as in Giselle, The Sleeping Beauty, Swan Lake, or Romeo and Juliet. These danced dramatic plays, with music but without words, create verbalized thought along with nonverbal thought and deeply felt af fections. Abstract ballet, on the other hand, is not designed to suggest a plot or story but only to appeal to the viewer through the beauty—and technical difficulty—of bodily movements in harmoni ous conjunction with the music. Yet, neither the choreographer nor the performers will object if an imaginative spectator reads a story into the movements and gestures of the dancers and into the sounds of the music. If some in the audience indulge in such imagery and quasi-verbal interpretation of a nonverbal artistic performance, one may affirm that nonverbal art may, without the artists' intentions, create verbalized knowledge in the spectator's mind. No survey exists to tell us what percentage of the audience would actually re ceive verbalizable knowledge from viewing strictly nonverbal, abso lutely plotless, abstract dance. But even if the percentage be small, the impressions received by the audience may still be placed in the category of knowledge: nonverbal knowledge in the form of images and sounds.59
Mundane Experiences The production of knowledge without words is of course not con fined to artistic creations. The most mundane experiences, in every one's everyday life may create in one's mind impressions—aware ness, consciousness—which ought not be denied the designation of knowledge. Just as we know what we have been told or what we have read, we also know a person we have met, a bird or a tree we have seen, an animal's cry or a thunderbolt we have heard, a rose's or a skunk's scent we have smelled, a thistle or nettle we have touched, a lemon or pepper we have tasted. Thus, all sense perceptions may be known by experience, whether they are visual, auditory, olfac tory, tactile, or gustatory. We know images and shapes, sounds, scents, touches, and tastes even if we do not know the names lan guage has assigned to them. Though our nonverbal memories may be better or worse than those of other people, most of us know and recognize our friends by their faces, by the shapes of their heads and, even from great dis-
59The program of the Colloquium on Semiotics (Berlin, October 1975) included
sessions on "linguistic, paralinguistic, and nonlinguistic systems of signs" and on
"complementarity in multi-media communication." Papers in the latter session were
on "complementarity of language, image, and music" in film and in advertising.
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tances, by their gait and way of moving. We know and recognize them by their voices and, some of them, by the fragrance of their per fumes or the natural odor of their bodies. And a very few—our spouses, mates, and lovers—we know by the touch of their skin. However, knowledge by nonverbal sense experiences is not confined to persons, animals, or tangible objects in general. We perceive and conceptualize in nonverbal form events and happenings we witness. We know what "goes on" when we witness a tree falling, cars collid ing, or the sun setting, even if we may not know the theories that explain such events. Explanations are predominantly in the form of verbal propositions. But the actual occurrences can be observed and remembered, and reoccurrences can be recognized as such and placed into abstract classes of events even by those who have never learned the meaning of class and of abstraction.60
Most philosophers confine their discourses on knowledge to ver bal propositions; pragmatists, to true knowledge as a guide for ac tion; linguistic analysts, to a variety of statements which the knower supposedly has a right to be sure of knowing are true. In this book I use the word knowledge in a much wider sense, because a narrow (or "strong") sense of knowing would restrict its meaning unnecessarily. If Tom, Dick, and Harry say that they know somebody or something, we admit that it is reasonable, and indeed philosophi cally necessary, to ask what kind of knowledge they claim; but it is not reasonable to insist on so restrictive a definition of knowledge that 90 per cent of all that Tom, Dick, and Harry claim to know is "re ally" not knowledge. I am making this declaration in defense of my wide concept of knowledge, and I shall have to repeat it on several occasions, because, for the purposes of my study of economic ac tivities designed to produce (disseminate) knowledge, the "strong" sense of knowing is largely irrelevant.61
60 That animals, likewise, may have the capacity of nonverbal cognition is stated by
Oonald R. Griffin, The Question of Animal Awareness (New York: Rockefeller Uni
versity Press, 1976). Griffin holds, and makes fully plausible, that animals have "men
tal experiences" and are conscious of having them; that they have "awareness" of the
"whole set of interrelated mental images of the flow of events .. . close at hand in time
and space, like a toothache, or enormously remote" (p. 5). Griffin does not use the
term "knowledge," but my own concept of knowledge comprises his terms "mental
experience," "awareness" and "consciousness." However, I am concerned solely
with human knowledge and need not extend my discussion to "cognitive ethology."
61 The notions of nonverbal knowledge and nonverbal "communication" have been
gaining recognition among psychologists. A team of researchers has looked "into how
people vary in the accuracy of their judgments of other people's feelings as conveyed
through a variety of nonverbal channels, such as facial expression, tone and rhythm of
voice, body gestures and posture." And some of these studies "suggest that when
people have a choice between attending to verbal messages and nonverbal messages,
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With this pronouncement I may return to the question of knowl edge without words, of both the mundane and artistic type.
Knowing α Tune and Knowing a Feeling What can it mean if Jane tells me: "I know this tune"? Let us list some of the possible meanings. 1. "I know this tune—I have heard it before." (We cannot verify this statement. Even if Jane proves to me that she was present at an earlier performance of the piece in which the tune appears, this is no evidence for her knowing it.) 2. "I know this tune—I remember and recognize it." (Although we cannot prove that she actually remembered the tune at the time she made the statement, we might test her capacity to recognize it again in a "line-up" of ten or twenty tunes that are played for her with the instruction that she identify it. A recognition test, however, is exces sively rigorous. To remember a tune does not imply the capacity of identifying it if the line-up contains several tunes one has heard be fore.) 3. "I know this tune—I can sing it or pick it out on the keyboard of a piano. (This is a testable proposition.)
4. "I know this tune—it is from a string quartet, but I have heard it in an orchestral version in a concert conducted by Toscanini." (Parts of this statement can be verified, though Jane may not be able to pro duce evidence of her having heard the concert conducted by Tosca nini.) 5. "I know this tune—it is the introductory theme of the third movement in Beethoven's String Quartet opus 132." (This statement is readily testable from the score.) 6. "I know this tune—it is an adagio in C major in the Lydian mode." (Again a statement which a good musician can verify.)
In the parenthetical comments to each of these statements I ap pear to have accepted the insistence of logical empiricists on using a truth test for what, by their standards, may be admitted to the status of knowledge. I made these comments, however, only to help distin guish the various claims to knowledge, for I would not fail, dismiss, or disallow any of them and, indeed, would accept as knowledge all of the mental processes described even if they were not expressed by the knower. If Jane had not said a word, if she had merely thought
they frequently weigh the nonverbal information more heavily. This is done outside
of conscious awareness—people seem to have a gut sense that there is truth in non
verbal channels." These quotations are from a report on the research of Dr. Judith Hall
in "Feminine Intuition: Is There a Scientific Basis for It?" Johns Hopkins Journal
(Winter 1977), p. 3.
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these things silently, I would be satisfied calling these types of men tal cognition her "knowledge." And, in my book, the playing of the tune in question is unquestionably production of knowledge, partly of the reinforcing type. Analogous reflections regarding nonverbal knowledge of mun dane experiences would come to the same conclusions. All retained experience and all retrievable, reconstructable experience of a non verbal character qualifies as knowledge in the sense relevant to this inquiry. Knowledge of feelings and mental states deserves special men tion. The meaning of statements of the type "I know toothache" has been analyzed in many treatises on epistemology, as have claims by individuals to know pain, fear, anger, anguish, happiness, and other emotional and mental states. Many writers on the philosophy of knowledge deny the status of knowledge to "first-person reports" on "direct knowledge."62 One of their misgivings lies in the different meanings of three closely related statements: (1) I have a toothache, (2) I know that I have toothache, and (3) I know toothache, that is, I know how it feels to have toothache. Analysts fuss about the differ ence between the first two statements; in particular, they ask the per son who tells about his present pain "how do you know it? what evidence do you have for it?" In general, they distrust all direct knowledge if it cannot be "objectively" verified by others. The third statement, too, is vulnerable on this ground. There are (fortunately, I would say) other epistemologists who admit that our memories con tain plenty of nonverifiable, nontestable, and nonfalsifiable knowl edge, for which we have no better name than knowledge and that it is an arbitrary restriction to limit the use of this word to facts that meet standards of evidence dictated by a set of fastidious norms.63
For the purposes of our inquiry we shall not need the tests which epistemologists prescribe for knowledge in the strong sense; we shall not need to establish whether anybody "really" knows, and knows that he knows, and whether we really know that he knows
62 "For rather than constituting a sort of knowledge which the man who asserts
them is either best or uniquely qualified to claim—since they refer to states of himself
. . .—the recent view is that there is no speaking of knowledge here at all." Arthur C.
D an to, Analytical Philosophy of Knowledge (Cambridge: at the University Press,
1968), p. 32.
63The fastidious philosophers of knowledge assume "that there is something, for
which we need to have a name, for which 'know' is the name that our language in fact
provides. But we [they] want to discover exactly what that something is. This we
[they] can do (it is alleged or assumed) by considering how we use the word 'know'
when we speak carefully." A[kept secret], M. Maclver, "Knowledge," Proceedings of
the Aristotelian Society, supplement, vol. 32 (1958), p. 5.
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that he knows. Our "loose" concept of knowing will do for verbal communication (through spoken, written, or printed words), quasiverbal communication (through gestures, silent sign language), and entirely nonverbal communication.
Knowledge as a Mere Euphemism My leniency in admitting to the status of knowledge all sorts of mental processes which most philosophers of knowledge disqualify as not meeting their standards may cause many raised eyebrows among critical readers. They may object to my accepting at its face value almost anything that anybody claims to know, even if, more appro priately expressed, he merely believes, guesses, or feels it, or was exposed to it. My indulgence, however, has its limits. Where the word "knowledge" is used as a mere euphemism for a physical act customarily designated by very different words, such acts will not be placed under the heading of knowledge or knowledge production. I refer to the biblical use of "knowing" in Genesis 4:1.
Camal knowledge is only a euphemism for sexual intercourse. It is, of course, associated with mental processes and with sensations, and indeed these sensations may be the most immediate and most eagerly expected and intended effects (in contrast with the female partner's "conception"); but this does not make sexual activities knowledge-producing activities. Eating, drinking, smoking, the use of drugs, and many other things are also associated with sensations felt pleasurable by many individuals, yet these sensations will not be included in the category of knowledge produced by said activities. Knowledge about these activities and their effects is again a very different thing; books or articles on food, drink, smoking, and sex qualify fully as media disseminating knowledge.
132CHAPTER 4
ALTERNATIVE CLASSIFICATIONS OF KNOWLEDGE
So MANY TYPES of knowledge have been discussed and so many dis tinctions made in the previous chapter that it may appear exces sively pedantic to present another collection of distinctions and classifications. Yet, philosophers and administrators of knowledge have proposed sets of distinctions which must not be overlooked in a discourse of this sort. A review of customarily distinguished as pects of knowledge is in order before we can come up with classifi cations most appropriate for the purposes of this book.
VARIOUS ASPECTS AND DISTINCTIONS
Without going into details and without engaging in an "in-depth" analysis of the differences, I shall place the following distinctions on the agenda: basic versus applied knowledge; theoretical versus his torical knowledge; general-abstract versus particular-concrete knowledge; analytical versus empirical knowledge; knowledge of enduring interest versus knowledge of transitory or ephemeral in terest; knowledge for many versus knowledge for only a few; and in strumental versus intellectual versus spiritual knowledge.
Basic and Applied Knowledge The dichotomy, used by administrators of funds for the support of research and by compilers of statistical reports, of "basic" and "applied" knowledge is not easy to carry through when it comes to sorting out the things researched, found, and disseminated. But it does make sense and serves some good purposes. There are, in the first place, certain functional relations between basic knowledge and applied knowledge: the former may permit us to derive practical knowledge from it, which explains the name "applied" knowledge; but sometimes it is the other way around—that is, the discovery of some pieces of practical knowledge may suggest the need for new basic knowledge and may provide clues for finding it. Second, there is the perennial question of the right division of emphasis in our
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teaching: the liberal arts versus the vocational curriculum, the former stressing basic and general knowledge, the latter stressing the applied and practical. The most distinguished scientists, scholars, and educators try to sell the former, whereas the majority of parents and students buy the latter. Third, there is the question of the right allocation of funds between basic and applied research: the former oriented towards general knowledge of wide and indirect or of unknown applicability, the latter oriented towards specific knowledge of practical use in particular activities. The scientists cry for more liberal money allocations to basic research, while the dis pensers of funds devote ten times as much for applied research and development. All these issues will be examined later in this book.
It should be noted that knowledge regarded as "basic" because of its wide and indirect applicability—"indirect" by way of knowledge deduced from it—is not confined to the natural sciences. There is much practical knowledge based on the theoretical social sci ences—just think of tax legislation, monetary policy, labor rela tions—and on the humanities—think of the practical use of foreign languages or of the teachings of history applied in international rela tions. Moreover, a great deal of practical knowledge is not based on anything that can be attributed to science or scholarship of any sort: for example, where I can shop at lowest prices, which is the fastest route from my home to my office, how I can tie my shoelaces if they are too short, at what time the last train for Princeton leaves Penn sylvania Station, New York. That is to say, not all practical knowl edge needs a particular "base." On the other hand, one may be im pressed by the large amounts of resources society allocates to the production of practical knowledge in the form of technology in the narrow sense of the word, and for these efforts surely a stock of knowledge of the natural sciences is basic.
Theoretical and Historical; General-Abstract and Particular-Concrete; Analytical and Empirical Some philosophers of science used to distinguish between "theoret ical" ("scientific") and "historical" knowledge. The former would be concerned with generalizations (regularities, tendencies, rules, laws) regarded as relevant to the explanation or prediction of recur ring phenomena. The latter would be concerned with individual facts and unique events, regarded as significant for the understand ing of past developments of importance to states or nations.
This division again focuses largely on school learning and leaves out most of the knowledge, general and particular, that is not taught in schools, and even a good part of what is taught. A lot of knowl-
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edge, some of which is taught at school and most of which is not, is neither theoretical nor historical. Not that the distinction is inap propriate; it simply fails to cover enough ground.
More helpful in this respect is the distinction between "generalsystematic" and "particular-concrete" knowledge. By not confining "general-systematic" (or "general-abstract") to "theoretical," or "particular-concrete" knowledge to "historical" knowledge, the proposed classification embraces a much larger universe. Used chiefly for logical and epistemological analyses, it has been regarded by many as insufficiently discriminating. One of the proposed amendments distinguishes three kinds of knowledge: (1) of logically necessary universals, (2) of empirically probable universals, and (3) of particulars (chiefly events in the past, including the immediate past). Others want to stress chiefly the difference between analytical and synthetic propositions but have some difficulty in deciding the logical nature of theories using abstract constructs designed to be useful in the interpretation of the empirical world. Distinctions of this sort, though indispensable in an introduction to methodology, are not serviceable in studies of the social arid economic significance of different types of knowledge. In order to build bridges between classifications serving logical analysis and classifications designed for other purposes, it is some times helpful to make cross-references. They may be utterly "ir relevant" to almost anything and yet aid in orientation: students of one discipline may feel more at home in another if they can see how the categories of the alien field relate to the categories of their own.
Knowledge of Enduring and of Transitory Interest One of the distinctions which may serve as a helpful bridge-builder between different disciplines is that between knowledge of enduring interest and knowledge of only transitory or ephemeral interest. Schools supposedly teach only what is considered to be of enduring interest; but undoubtedly the mass of things known but only of ephemeral interest bulks large in the total of knowledge.
Knowledge of the battle of Waterloo may be of enduring interest, whereas knowledge of a fight in a tavern on Main Street may be of transient interest, though there are probably more Americans who know of a recent tavern brawl than who know of the battle of Water loo. The death of Marat may be more lastingly important than the death of a retired salesman who left his fortune to his widow and his brain to Johns Hopkins, but this does not mean that the one piece of information is "knowledge" and the other is not.
These examples refer to "particular-concrete" facts, to "historical"
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events. But knowledge of merely transitory interest is by no means always knowledge of particular events. Many generalizations, likewise, are not of enduring, but only of transitory and spatially limited, interest. Take, for instance, the proposition, true in 1962, that "in dialing telephone numbers the first three letters of the ex change are dialed in London, but only the first two letters in New York." A few years later this piece of knowledge was out of date and uninteresting. The knowledge of the present train schedule from New York to Washington will remain of interest to several thousand people until next October or April, when it is changed.
Some of the mass of knowledge, general-systematic or particularconcrete, which is of only transitory relevance has nevertheless great economic value. Certain services of specialists in particular kinds of transitory knowledge have a market value, not because it takes espe cially scarce qualifications to acquire this knowledge, but because the "division of knowledge" is a great time-saver and thus a highly productive arrangement in the economy.1 For example, the freight forwarder knows which lines operate between particular places, when their vehicles depart and arrive, what the rates are, etc. The importer knows where to find certain materials, what they cost, to whom to apply for an import license, how to declare the goods in order to get the lowest import duty, how to procure the foreign ex change, etc. Most of this knowledge is picked up by the individual practitioner in the course of his business operations. Some transitory knowledge, however, is acquired through organized research. For example, many millions of dollars are spent every year in market re search by business firms exploring the outlets for their products, the preferences of the consumers, the acceptability of alternative quality improvements, the sensitivity to price changes, etc.
This kind of knowledge, of great social and economic importance, finds no place in any of the classes of knowledge distinguished by some philosophers. This remark is not intended as a criticism; few of these thinkers have been concerned with knowledge of transitory value. But we cannot help being concerned with it since society de votes large amounts of resources to the production of such knowl edge. The distinction between enduring and ephemeral knowledge is not entirely a question of the length of time during which it remains relevant; there is also the question of how long all kinds of knowl edge not incorporated in a durable and easily accessible physical re-
1 Friedrich A. Hayek, "The Use of Knowledge in Society," American Economic Re
view, vol. 35 (1945), pp. 519-530. Reprinted in Hayek, Individualism and Economic
Order (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), pp. 79-91.
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105
cord will be retained in the recipients' memories. Thus, both ob solescence and forgetfulness may make knowledge perishable. The second of these limits to the durability of knowledge relates less fre quently to the nonexistence of physical records than to the people's unwillingness to go back to existing records and refresh their mem ory. Much of the knowledge acquired in school and in compulsory or voluntary study from teachers, magazines, and books is forgotten sooner or later. The memories of most people are not capable of re taining all that they have received; this holds for practical knowl edge no less than for academic (intellectual) knowledge. In effect, the durability of knowledge is almost the same as the duration of people's interest in it.
Knowledge for Many and Knowledge for Only a Few Knowledge may also be classified by the number of persons who find it interesting or relevant. Some messages may concern only a single recipient; other bits of knowledge may concern a small group of per sons; some kinds of knowledge may be of interest to large groups, and some to masses of people. Such differences in the number of persons interested may exist regarding all kinds of knowledge: transitory and enduring, particular and general, practical and aca demic, historical and theoretical, and so forth. It is not difficult to give examples of every kind of knowledge of interest either to only a few or to very many persons. The time schedule of an airline conveys transitory knowledge, as it may stay in effect for only three or four months; and it is practical, though only for a limited group, namely, for the ticket officers, the travel agents, and the traveling public, including potential travelers. The multiplication table is enduring knowledge, intellectual as well as practical, and relevant for virtually all but the most primitive people. The knowledge of the infinitesimal calculus, on the other hand, though equally enduring, is limited to a very small group of well-schooled persons. The history of ancient Rome is potentially enduring knowledge, but it interests only a relatively small part of the population in developed countries; if knowledge is what people know—what they have in their heads, not just in their books—then this knowledge may be transitory even for those who were forced to acquire it at school. The knowledge conveyed by a bird book may be more or less enduring, though chiefly for naturalists and amateur bird watchers, usually residing in suburbs and rural districts, rarely in big cities. On the other hand, knowledge of Mozart's /upiter Sym phony , a highly enduring work of art, may be limited to a very small number of people, chiefly city dwellers and suburbanites with re-
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fined taste. In contrast, the knowledge found in cookbooks, more or less enduring and highly practical, may be of very wide interest.
Both the durability of knowledge and the number of the knowl edgeable persons were referred to in these examples. As a matter of fact, the two questions—knowledge for how many and for how long—are positively correlated if the groups of people to whom knowledge of a particular subject is interesting or relevant are not limited to our contemporaries but include future generations. Thus, although knowledge of matrix algebra, nuclear physics, molecular biology, Shakespeare's plays, and Beethoven's quartets is limited to a small elite of persons now living, the elites of future centuries will still be interested in this esoteric knowledge. Indeed, with a wider time horizon, one may find that the number of persons who regard this enduring knowledge as relevant to themselves is as large as the number of persons interested in knowledge as ephemeral as today's price of beef or yesterday's scores in college football.
In any case, a classification of knowledge according to the number of persons likely to be interested seems to be as significant as any of the classifications by other criteria.
Instrumental, Intellectual, and Spiritual Knowledge To the extent that ephemeral knowledge helps people do certain things, it would fit into the scheme proposed by Max Scheler: it would be what he called ''Herrschaftswissen." Scheler distin guished three classes of knowledge, Herrschaftswissen, BiIdungswissen, and Erlosungswissen2—that is, knowledge for the sake of action or control, knowledge for the sake of nonmaterial culture, and knowledge for the sake of salvation; let me call them instrumen tal knowledge, intellectual knowledge, and spiritual knowledge.
One might be inclined to characterize intellectual knowledge as knowledge for its own sake, but Scheler rejected this explicitly. "There is no such thing as knowledge just for the sake of knowing," he insisted; intellectual knowledge has a purpose too, namely, "the free self-fulfillment of all mental capacities of the individual and the continual growth of his mind."3 There is no place in this scheme for knowledge of merely transi tory value that is neither instrumental to action nor regarded as in tellectual. The scheme is, nevertheless, vastly superior to such sim ple divisions as that between "basic" and "applied" knowledge. If
1 Max Scheler, Die Wissensformen und die Gesellschaft (Leipzig: Der Neue-Geist
Verlag, 1926), p. 250.
3 Ibid., p. 251.
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107
anybody wishes to regard all intellectual knowledge as "basic," I would not quarrel with him, though I believe it can be basic only in the sense in which Darwin regarded poetry and music as required exercises because "the loss of these tastes ... may possibly be injuri ous to the intellect and more probably to the moral character.. . ." I doubt that Darwin would have included most of our films and tele vision plays or our books and magazines in this category of valuable taste-builders, or that Scheler's scheme would accommodate them in any of his categories since so few of them convey instrumental, intel lectual, or spiritual knowledge. To be sure, some films, TV plays, books, or magazines do qualify for one of these three groups. But we need a class of knowledge for what is neither instrumental nor intel lectual nor spiritual. It would be too arbitrary to say that a cookbook conveys instrumental knowledge, a Shakespeare play intellectual knowledge, the Bible spiritual knowledge, and most other books no knowledge at all. They do convey a type of knowledge, however low-brow, and we need a name for it.4 I shall presently propose one, together with a more comprehensive classification.
THE CHOSEN CLASSES
With regard to all schemes of classification of knowledge, I believe that an objective interpretation according to what is known will be less satisfactory than a subjective interpretation according to the meaning which the knower attaches to the known, that is, who knows and why and what for. For example, to stay for the moment with Scheler's classification, what is spiritual knowledge for the re ligious man may be intellectual knowledge for the man of learning and instrumental knowledge for the cleric and the therapist. What is instrumental knowledge for the professional man is intellectual knowledge for the man outside the field. Thus, economics is instru mental knowledge for an economic consultant, but purely intellec tual knowledge for a physicist; contrariwise, physics is instrumental
4 A classification proposed by Anthony Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy
(New York: Harper and Row, 1957), p. 215, would put it under "entertainment knowl
edge," which would include both intellectual and low-brow entertainment. Downs,
who is chiefly interested in political information, distinguishes two main classes, (1)
information "procured solely for the edification it provides" and (2} information used
for decision-making. The former he calls "entertainment information," the latter he
subdivides into "production information," "consumption information," and "politi
cal information." Whether he would class religious knowledge as entertainment, pro
duction, consumption, or politics is not clear; he probably has not thought about it.
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108
for the physicist and the engineer, but purely intellectual for me, an economist. Incidentally, I would prefer to use the words "training" for learn ing what is needed for one's job and "education" for learning what is not needed for it. Thus, no amount of knowledge of economics could make me an educated man; I am educated only to the extent that I know Latin, music, literature, physics, geography, etc. In this book, however, I shall not, or shall only occasionally, use the word "edu cation" in this restricted sense.
Five Classes of Knowledge Using then the subjective meaning of the known to theknower as the criterion, I propose to distinguish five types of knowledge:
(1) Practical knowledge: useful in the knower's work, his deci sions, and actions; can be subdivided, according to his activities, into a) Professional knowledge b) Business knowledge c) Workman's knowledge d) Political knowledge e) Household knowledge f) Other practical knowledge (2) Intellectual knowledge: satisfying his intellectual curiosity, regarded as part of liberal education, humanistic and scientific learning, general culture; acquired, as a rule, in active concentration with an appreciation of the existence of open problems and cultural values. (3) Small-talk and pastime knowledge: satisfying the nonintellectual curiosity or his desire for light entertainment and emotional stimulation, including local gossip, news of crimes and accidents, light novels, stories, jokes, games, etc.; acquired, as a rule, in passive relaxation from "serious" pursuits; apt to dull his sensitiveness.
(4) Spiritual knowledge: related to his religious knowledge of God and of the ways to the salvation of the soul.
(5) Unwanted knowledge: outside his interests, usually acciden tally acquired, aimlessly retained.
Subjective Sorting and Operational Criteria The adequacy of a classification cannot be judged before one knows what is done with it. And, with its subjective point of view, the pro posed classification may look as if it could not be used for anything. I submit, however, that many, perhaps most, "meaningful" classifica tions in the social sciences begin with subjective-sense interpreta-
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ALTERNATIVE CLASSIFICATIONS
tions, for only then are they truly adequate for explanatory pur poses.5 Many of the subjectively meaningful concepts, however, have objectively discernible (operational) counterparts. As to the types of knowledge, we shall of course not ask each knower for his personal evaluation of every piece or bit of information that he has obtained, but there are ways for the social scientist to judge the typi cal status of various classes of knowledge in the value systems of their typical recipients. How do the various classifications that have earlier been men tioned or discussed in this chapter fit in with the proposed quinquesection? The dichotomy scientific and humanistic knowledge or the trichotomy scientific, humanistic, and artistic knowledge can peacefully coexist with the five-class scheme: these types of knowl edge (distinguished in a traditional though not very logical fashion) are either intellectual or practical. Nonverbal knowledge may have intellectual, practical, or pastime character. Basic knowledge will with few exceptions be intellectual, whereas applied knowledge may be practical as well as intellectual. Of the pairs—generalized versus historical, general-abstract versus particular-concrete, theo retical versus empirical, analytical versus synthetic, etc.—each member can be intellectual or practical knowledge, or even pastime knowledge in some instances, depending on the use which the knower makes of it. This holds also for the dichotomy enduring ver sus ephemeral, or rather for the spectrum from the one to the other, though ephemeral knowledge will mostly be either practical or pastime knowledge. More will have to be said about the five classes proposed here, but I should like to deal first with a few important problems which I may subsume under the heading "quality of knowledge."
51 am referring to Max Weber's postulates of Simiadaquanz and Kausaladaquanz.
See Fritz Machlup, Methodology of Economics and Other Social Sciences (New York:
Academic Press, 1978), pp. 221, 237, and 246-247.