March 16th, 2008 Fred McVittie
When we want to introduce or discuss some item of knowledge; a perception, theory, or some expression of personal experience or belief, we use either this word ‘knowledge’, or we use the verb form ‘knowing’. This difference is significant and draws attention to different aspect of the overall metaphorical schema that structures our understanding.
As noted elsewhere, the organisational logic for our understanding of different forms of knowledge is drawn from our embodied experience as spatially-located entities, and the differences in knowledge types is mapped from the differences in spatial and sensory awareness produced by that embodiment. The use of these terms ‘knowledge’ and ‘knowing’ can be identified with reference to this organisational schema.
When we use the word ‘knowledge’ we are implicitly conferring upon the ‘object’ of knowledge some of the properties associated with objects in the physical world of our embodiment. Objects tend to be clearly bounded, be (visually) available to more than one individual at once, to persist over time and, crucially, to continue to exist in our absence. This last property is particularly interesting as the notion that objects exist even when we are not looking at them, an apparently trivial observation, is problematic when applied metaphorically to knowledge. It is clear that the tree that I look at (and photograph) each day when I walk my dogs does not disappear when I walk past it, (at least to the extent that it continues to be visible from the satellites accessed by Google Earth), however my active knowledge of the tree, as present in my visual perception of it, undoubtedly does. As the physicist Percy Bridgman, put it:
Since an object never occurs naked but always in conjunction with an instrument of measurement or the means whereby we obtain knowledge of it, the concept of ‘object’ as something in and of itself, is an illegitimate one.
This is also a question which exercised Albert Einstein, particularly in relation to status of the moon as ontological/epistemological object of realist knowledge. For a good discussion of this see http://www.eequalsmcsquared.auckland.ac.nz/sites/emc2/tl/philosophy/moon.cfm
This use of the term ‘knowledge’ places our attention on the apparently naked object, and distracts us from the presence of the instument of our own processes of knowledge production. The body is rendered absent and ecstatic in this flight away from the source of such ‘measurement’ toward its destination in the perceived/conceived, and theoretically ‘possessed’ object.
The term ‘knowing’ has a very different function within the overall schema, and it is revealing that certain writers, Mark Johnson for example, make explicit and insistant use of ‘knowing’ as a preferential term. Knowing, as a verb, demands the acknowledgement of a subject engaged in the act indicated; there is no escape or flight from the body of the knower as seems to be implied by ‘knowledge’. In using the term ‘knowing’ the focus is shifted away from the destination of the knowledge production process and widened to include something of the source and the path. There is also a sense, in this use of the verb, that the object of such knowing is not complete and permanent, existing like a rock on the riverbed, but rather is open to the pressings of engagement. There is something of the disposition of the knower present in this knowing, what Perkins might refer to as the dispositional quality of ‘pro-active’ knowledge, and also, critically, the hands-on immediacy of the performative.
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