Of those who do study knowledge
there has been a trend toward naturalism as seeing it as something that
cognitive scientists in their success might be able to explain. That
is, it is probably something biological done in conjunction with its
environment. At least some theorists treat knowledge as a kind of
behavior. If a sea gull behaves in a certain way toward a twig and a
nest, then it should be said to know twigs and nests. Other
theorists have shown knowledge and reason to be embodied extensions.
Oddly though, none of these insights
have made any difference or waves. Slowly it seems as if cognitive
scientists are exploring relations outside the brain or between robots and
their environment, but there has been neither a new general theory nor a
connection of these insights to other cultural institutions and social
problems.
It is for these reasons that the
attempt is made here to state a theory of knowledge as something actual,
in a dramatic fashion, in a manner that frames usage in every knowledge
act including the I-know-you radical perspective and in connection with
the social issues which it touches.
The claim about knowledge then is
that it is, down to the smallest association, an alliance or an attempt at an
alliance made between an organism and features of its environment.
It is the connections between societies.
Quotes
“How,
then, can we make that connection between adaptation and knowledge?
We do so through a two-track argument.
The first is that the human capacity to gain and impart knowledge
is itself an adaptation, or a set of adaptations.
To the scientifically literate this may not seem to be a startling
claim. But it does have
specific and interesting implications. We simply will not understand human rationality and
intelligence, or human communication and culture, until we understand how
these seemingly unnatural attributes are deeply rooted in human biology.
They are, I will argue, the special adaptations that make us
special. What is unarguable
is that they are the products of human evolution, whether adaptations or
not. There really are no
substantive alternative ways of understanding our extraordinary capacity
for knowledge....”
“The
second track of the argument is the one that many find strange and
difficult, and one which has already been partially given in the Preface.
It is that adaptations are themselves knowledge, themselves forms
of ‘incorporation’ of the world into the structure and organization of
living things. Because this
seems to misappropriate a word, ‘knowledge’, with a widely accepted
meaning - knowledge usually just being something that only humans have
somewhere in their heads - it makes the argument easier if the statement
reads ‘adaptations are biological knowledge, and knowledge as we
commonly understand the word is a special case of biological
knowledge’.”
Plotkin, Henry. Darwin Machines and the Nature of Knowledge. Harvard University
Press. 1994. pps. xiv-xv.
"Why then is it so easily assumed that sociological reflexivity undermines
the truth of whatever socially produced knowledge it focuses upon?"
"The widespread assumption is that truth is determined by reality; a
statement is true because it meets the criteria of truth, not because of
any other reason. If truth is socially determined, then it cannot be
determined by truth itself. This is like saying that one sees things
accurately only if one sees without eyeballs, as if knowing must take
place without any human apparatus for knowing."
...
"If a brain flickers and brightens with statements which are true, this
happens only because that brain is pulsing in connection with the past and
anticipated future of a social network. Truth arises in social networks;
it could not possibly arise anywhere else." The Sociology of Philosophies:
A Global Theory of Intellectual Change," Randall Collins, The Belknap
Press of Harvard University Press, 1998, p. 877.
"... sociology of knowledge is closely linked to the philosophical
tradition of pragmatism identified with such figures as the philosophers
James, Peirce, Dewey, and Mead. What these thinkers share with sociology
of knowledge is a view of mental life as a facet of human action. The
human mind is conceived as an activity; mental attitudes and knowledge are
always linked with action. Forms of knowledge are not inherent in the
human mind but represent one of the many ways of being and thinking, one
of the ways human beings carve out a reality. Knowing is interested
activity. No knowledge of reality is possible or even conceivable that is
determined by things in themselves. Pragmatists borrowed from the
idealists the metaphor of knowing as 'carving': out of a world brimming
with indeterminacy, human actors carve determinate objects, thus enabling
action to proceed." McCarthy, E. Doyle. Knowledge as Culture:
The New Sociology of Knowledge. Routledge. 1996. p. 2.
“In another series of experiments
focused on the motor side of consciousness, Libet showed that the
conscious intention to act appears only after a delay of about 350 msec
from the onset of specific cerebral activity that precedes a voluntary
act.” Edelman, Gerald and Tononi, Giulio. A Universe of Consciousness: How
Matter becomes Imagination. Basic Books. 2000. p. 69.
"This shows the whole epistemological construal of knowledge to be
mistaken. It doesn’t just consist of inner pictures of outer reality, but
grounds in something quite other. And in this ‘foundation,’ the crucial
move of the epistemological construal–distinguishing states of the subject
(our ‘ideas’) from features of the external world–can’t be effected. We
can draw a neat line between my picture of an object and that object, but
not between my dealing with the object and that object. It may make sense
to ask us to focus on what we believe about something, say a football,
even in the absence of that thing; but when it comes to playing football,
the corresponding suggestion would be absurd. The actions involved in the
game can’t be done without the object; they include the object. Take it
away and we have something quite different–people miming a game on the
stage, perhaps.” Taylor, Charles. Philosophical Arguments. Harvard
University Press. 1995. p. 12.
"'We [scientists] believe that the world is knowable, that there are
simple rules governing the behavior of matter and the evolution of the
universe. We affirm that there are eternal, objective, extrahistorical,
socially neutral, external and universal truths, and that the assemblage
of these truths is what we call physical science. Natural laws can be
discovered that are universal, invariable, inviolate, genderless and
verifiable .... This statement I cannot prove. This statement I cannot
justify. This is my faith' [Glashow] ...
"The paradox in Glashow's position is this: he clearly does not think
anything goes in the realm of intellectual commitments. Yet he is locked
into a view that does not give him the intellectual space within which he
can defend that view....
"The view of evidence I am alluding to is very different from Glashow's
(and from any theory that places similar demands on 'knowledge') in at
least three ways. First, it construes evidence as communal; second, it
accepts coherence (and with it explanatory power) as a measure of
reasonableness; and third, it holds that communities, not individuals, are
the primary loci of knowledge." Nelson, Lynn. Feminist Epistemologies, Linda Alcoff & Elizabeth Potter, Routledge, 1993, p. 130-1.
"...knowledge is best conceived and studied as culture, and the various
types of social knowledges communicate and signal social meanings--such as
meanings about power and pleasure, beauty and death, goodness and danger."
McCarthy, E. Doyle. Knowledge as Culture: The New Sociology of
Knowledge. Routledge. 1996. p. 1.
"A further problem presented by the
affections of soul is this: are they all affections of the complex of body
and soul, or is there any one among them peculiar to the soul by itself?
To determine this is indispensable but difficult. If we consider the
majority of them, there seems to be no case in which the soul can act or
be acted upon without involving the body, e.g., anger, courage, appetite,
and sensation generally. Thinking seems the most probable exception; but
if this too proves to be a form of imagination or to be impossible without
imagination, it too requires a body as a condition of its existence."
Aristotle. Psychology, c. 350 B.C., translated by J.A. Smith, from
Book I, The Pocket Aristotle, Washington Square Press. 1958. p. 52.
"But what, at the end of this
story, is knowledge? Any search for a univocal answer must yield,
now, to a Wittgensteinian appeal to a 'family of meanings,' of which
propositional information is one--perhaps junior--member. Knowing
becomes a way of engaging with the world, where 'world' is conceived as
much circumstantially and socially as physically, materially. It is
about how people find their way about, understand, and intervene in
events; how they make commitments and engage in cooperative projects; how
they confer epistemic authority and expertise. Its effectiveness is
pragmatic (where pragmatic does not reduce to instrumentality) in the
living situations and personal relations it fosters and prevents.
Yet that effectiveness has also to be assessed in collaborative, critical
stories that expose the impact of apparent 'successes' on the lives that
are directly and indirectly affected. Being knowledgeable requires
an ecological sensitivity to the interconnections of which the world is
made, and hence to the accountability issues that are implicated in
practices and the knowledge that informs them. Code, Lorraine.
Rhetorical Spaces: Essays on Gendered Locations. Routledge.
1995. p. 184.
Examples
Statement of Point
Knowledge is understood here
naturalistically as a behavior or a probable behavior with another (an
adaptation to another or a regular alliance with another) as an action
with another that is only partially initiated and left as potential.
Meaning is the complete set of such relationships even where the
relationship is subconscious, only microscopic such as respiration or
delusional by any standard. Knowledge thus constellates a portion of
meaning awarely available for us to rearrange. Knowing anchors the
important growing tips of societies in their alliances. Knowing is a
constant creation and rearranging of relationships with other societies
that is characterized by relevance to knower, cooperative potentials of
known and strength of connection.
Bibliography
Further
Considerations