Deep Epistemology

                We tend to think of epistemology as the production of verifiably true statements about the world.  I want to suggest that we shift our focus to what it means for a person to actually ‘know’ something and the value that such knowing brings to our lives.  It is not enough to say that we know something because we possess information or data about a particular subject.  Knowing implies that we have changed as a function of learning, that my situated place in the world is impacted by what I’ve learned.  Dewey tried to capture this by foregrounding ‘experience’ as the primary focal point of philosophy and learning.  Experiential learning always involves other people, so that knowing something is always a social and linguistic operation.  I think the concept of ‘deep epistemology,’ along the lines of deep ecology that places us in the ecology and not as an arbiter outside it, is a way to develop a more complicated and complex understanding and modeling of what it means to ‘know.’

                To begin with, knowing is never about knowing the world ‘as it is’ because we are always already involved in the process of making that world.  Language, or as Maturana puts it ‘languaging,’ is the act of interacting with others to bring forth a world.  This is an active, which is to say experiential, process and not a passive one or one that can be reduced to abstract representations.  A friend of mine tells a story about his seventh- grade daughter winning a contest by remembering the capitols of all 50 states.  Later that week when they were driving by the capitol located in their city, she had no comprehension of what a capitol was.  Because she could say that Lansing was the capitol of Michigan, she got credit on a test, but what did she really know about capitols?  This example is trivial on one level but profound on another.  She manipulated a short-termed stimulus to her advantage, but she had no connection to the activity or process that makes a capitol meaningful.

                In Cognition in the Wild, Edwin Hutchins explains how cultures construct intelligences to make it possible for them to understand and function in the world.  In that context, ‘knowing’ something is always connected to a cultural action.  Maturana likes to say that at some point all knowledge is verifiable by behavior.  In other words, I can talk about playing violin all day, but at some point I have to actually play the violin to be credible.  Turning epistemology into an analytical and linguistic game blinds us to the deeper implications of knowing.  If knowing is social, then everything I know and learn has an inherent ethical dimension to it.  This is particularly true about what I presume to know about other people.  In the last century, a one- dimensional social science assumed we could reduce people to statistics and data.  When I was teaching, I would have administrators occasionally produce aggregated data about my students.  In the end, the report would always talk about the ‘average’ student.  My point was always that I never met that average student.  She didn’t exist, except in some parallel statistical universe.  The data and trends could be helpful.  They could give me different frames and concepts to work with, but they were not ‘true.’  Reducing any particular student to those averages was to replace knowing and working with them with an authoritative abstraction that gave me power over their experience.

                In some basic sense, all learning is a function of narrative inquiry.  That is not to say that it is necessarily solipsistic, because language is always connecting, to one degree or another, what we know with the larger cultural frameworks we operate within.  But our knowing is deeply our knowing.  We use it to connect with others.  We use it impact the social and material conditions we live in, but part of it is always uniquely our own.  Part of it is about our own quest to understand ourselves as simultaneously connected and isolated.  We have to function in both of those realms at the same time.   How we act in our world, the ethics, intelligence and humanity we express is a function of what we know deeply.

                In the same sense, intelligence can never be ‘artificial.’  Machine intelligence can augment, organize and challenge what we know, but it is not the same as human intelligence.  It is not connected to the social and biological reality of our being, no matter how much it might appear to replicate it.  Knowing is more than intellect.  It is the connections we make in the social, ecological and emotional universe we construct.  It is as much a function of the way we connect to music or read a poem as it is an abstract intellectual property.  Both can make us more ‘experienced,’ both can make us better actors and co-creators of the world we share and shape.  Deep epistemology realizes and honors all of that.