Ways of Knowing
Typology
Alexander Beiner:
"I spoke to Vervaeke to understand a cognitive science approach to our history and perception can help us understand the different ways in which we know. He laid out four distinct ways of knowing.
The first is ‘Propositional knowing’, or ‘knowing that’. Gold is a mineral, the sky is blue. Vervaeke argues that while it’s an essential part of our cognition, it has also come to dominate our thinking. The result is that we have lost contact with other ways of knowing that our ancestors, and other cultures, have used to tap into deeper wisdom. There are echoes here of McGilchrist’s analysis of the left hemisphere. And in the same way that the left brain can narrow our focus so much we can’t see the wood for the trees, Vervaeke argues that propositional knowing can ‘freeze frame’ our perspective.
The next of the four is procedural knowing. It is knowing ‘how to’ do something: how to ride a bike, how to catch a ball. To develop our propositional knowing, we keep honing our logic so that we can make accurate truth statements, but we don’t do this with our procedural knowing. We train it. The sense of ‘realness’ we reach through procedural knowing isn’t the conviction of truth we might feel from a fact we’re certain of. It’s the sense that your interaction with the world is making a difference, that you’re altering the course of events.
The next ways of knowing are closer to what we feel when we close our eyes in the woods. When we take a risk and stop trying to run, but instead listen to what’s around us. The voices, the growls, the creak of wood and leaf.
When we do this, we’re tapping into our perspectival knowing. It is your situation awareness, your sense of being ‘here and now’. This way of knowing knowing is relative to the state of mind you’re in. It doesn’t feel the same to be lost in the woods when you’re drunk or tired or in love. Your cognition in this state is geared toward what is relevant, or salient, in your world right now. Vervaeke points out that this perspectival knowing happens when your relevance realisation machinery is coming into our online working memory. The result is a ‘dynamic pattern of salience’ — a whole map of perception mediated by what you’re paying attention to.
As we listen deeply, we might notice something else. The world can hear us, too. Owls watch us from the trees. Beast smell us as they prowl the mist. We are embedded within these woods. Coming deeply into this awareness brings us into a participatory knowing. It is the hardest to define, because it straddles our subjective experience and objective reality — leading to an experiential back and forth that Vervaeke calls the transjective. When we are engaged in participatory knowing, we make identities for the world that are ‘co-relevant’ to us. To the shaman, the owl may not be an owl, but a living embodiment of a spirit that has something to teach her. This way of knowing is related to our full sense of being connected and in a dialogue with reality.
It is the fundamental attunement between you and the world, and it is this very attunement that makes your perspectival knowing possible, which in turn makes your procedural knowing possible, which in turn informs your propositional knowing.
Our most meaningful ways of knowing do not spring from ‘knowing that’. Rather, the propositional knowing we use to build our maps springs from the embodied experience of being an active agent in the world, from a deep sense of attunement with our environment. Vervaeke points out that it’s by its absence that realise we need this way of knowing; often it is when we lose our freedom, or when our agency in the world is disrupted that we feel a sense of being disconnected. “Often we don’t notice it until we’re lonely,” Vervaeke says, “or far from home.” Or, perhaps, lost in the woods. Flowing through the world
Vervaeke argues we’ve become existentially ‘unhomed from the world’ as we’ve lost touch with the last three ways of knowing, while fetishizing and over-prioritising propositional knowing. So how do we ‘rehome’ ourselves? During our conversation, it struck me that some of the other people I’d interviewed for this piece had talked about states in which all these different ways of knowing seem to happen at once. And when that happens, it feels like we see the world completely anew. This is known as a flow state, something Vervaeke has researched and explained in his series." (https://medium.com/rebel-wisdom/lost-ways-of-knowing-2180a80987d8)