Four Ways of Knowing - A Semiotic Interpretation
Integrating John Vervaeke's Four Ways of Knowing into the semiotic framework.
One of my main tasks is to show how the semiotic framework connects to other models, theories and frameworks.
More precisely, I want to show how the semiotic framework is able to incorporate various other theories and show them in a new light. This is possible because semiotics is more general and comprehensive than other frameworks. It is nothing less than the very logic of reality.
For this reason, semiotics forms a meta-framework, connecting various sciences, disciplines, arts, and ideas. Semiotic framework is the arena where we can have interdisciplinary conversations and share information of all kinds. Semiosis is the very medium in which everything is situated.
I strongly believe that semiotics is the big paradigm shift that is brewing at the moment. If this is true, semiotics should be able to incorporate old paradigms in it. Namely, in a paradigm shift the old theories are not necessarily abandoned, but included as a special case in the new broader framework.
Examples of this are Newtonian mechanics, which became a special case of Einstein’s theory of relativity. Or Euclidean geometry being a special case of non-Euclidean geometry.
John Vervaeke - The Four Ways of Knowing
John Vervaeke is the professor of Psychology and Cognitive Sciences at the University of Toronto. He has studied for instance wisdom, meaning and transformation. Overall his thinking is a fascinating blend of ancient and modern.
He is best known for his Awakening From the Meaning Crisis series, where he brings together philosophy, neuroscience, psychology, anthropology, information processing, linguistics, and studies of religion.
All in all, a very interesting guy.
I really like his framework of Four Ways of Knowing, which is a taxonomy or a categorization of our mind. It is a simple, yet effective, way to analyze our experience. Here are the Four Ways of Knowing from the most fundamental to the most abstract:
Participatory knowing
Perspectival knowing
Procedural knowing
Propositional knowing
All in all, the Four Ways of Knowing seem strangely familiar. Wonder how they would connect with the Four Phases of Semiosis? (If you are not familiar with the Four Phases, you can read my previous posts about it.)
Initial Connections
One of Vervaeke’s initial starting points seems to be embodiment. Vervaeke emphasizes how our experience, and especially our knowledge, is fundamentally embodied and dynamically connected to the environment.
The problem with our culture is we're up here at the abstract [propositional] level (…) and everything below it is left out of the picture. Yet everything below it, especially the deeper you go, is where all the coupling, that makes cognition come into existence, is actually to be found. John Vervaeke
Vervaeke constantly underlines how we are obsessed in what he calls “propositional knowledge”. This means knowing various propositions like sun is a star, Paris is the capital of France or a square has four equal sides. All of these propositions are true, but propositions like these form only the top of the knowledge iceberg. We all understand how knowing a long list of propositions isn’t the path to wisdom.
The whole idea of knowledge as something detached from the practical life is misleading. In reality we are walking, breathing, warm-blooded creatures embedded in some concrete situation. This is the arena where knowledge is born, where the propositions hit the road. All of our social norms, symbolic institutions, linguistic structures, mythologies, ideologies and religions are built on top of this everyday experience.
Pragmatists were big on this point. That is why Peirce, with his famous pragmatic maxim, defined that the meaning of a concept must be connected to its empirically observable practical consequences. The symbolic must be grounded in the practical.
More precisely, the meaning of a concept lies in the habits it would produce. For instance, the meaning of the concept “hot”, is in the habit of refraining from touching hot objects like stoves or fire. If someone tells you that that the stove is hot, you would not touch it. That is the meaning of “hot”.
Notice how we are not defining words with other words, but by practical deliberate conduct. The pragmatic maxim connects words with practice. It seems that Vervaeke has similar ideas:
Philosophy is not primarily about the propositional. It’s not primarily about declarative discourse. Philosophy is a way of life in which you’re training skills, states of mind, perspectives, traits of characters, and those are all the components of virtue. The Tim Ferriss Show
By the way, for this reason, we must contemplate and meditate on these semiotic ideas. We can’t just read them and understand them. We need to discover, experience and cultivate these ideas. That is why the Four Phases requires deliberate practice.
However, now it is time to leave this thought aside and move to the Four Ways of Knowing. We will begin with the most developed one, as that seems to be the way John introduces them. So let’s begin.
Propositional Knowing - Sharing Phase
Propositional knowing is knowing that something is the case, and that is the content of a proposition, which is variously understood as some kind of fact. For
example I know that cats are mammals. John Vervaeke
Propositional knowing is closely tied to language. More generally it is about finding “patterns of patterns” and “general principles” that are “invariant across many different contexts” (Vervaeke & Ferraro, 2013). This would make propositional knowledge at least somewhat context-independent.
[Propositional knowing] isn’t bound up with your particular perspective on a situation or the state of mind you are in. It is this abstracted fact, and that’s what propositions are about. They’re about these abstracted facts. The Tim Ferriss Show
According to Vervaeke, in propositional knowing “the standard of realness” is truth. By being convinced that some proposition is true, we form a belief based on that proposition. In other words, propositional knowledge results in beliefs.
This is interesting. Peirce says how “a belief is a habit; but it is a habit of which we are conscious.” Now, in order to be conscious of some habit, it has to be expressed symbolically, i.e. through language, which makes it a part of the Sharing phase. Furthermore Vervaeke specifies how, “the vehicle of propositional knowing is a proposition”. This vehicle is no other than a symbol, which is a type of sign found only in the Sharing phase.
As you see, we have many points of contact.
Procedural Knowing - Understanding Phase
The content of procedural knowing is (…) an interaction with the world (…). Procedural knowing doesn't result in belief in theory. It results in skills. And when those skills are developed well, so that they have reliable applicability, then what we have is expertise. (…) When I have expertise, I have a sense of power. John Vervaeke
Procedural knowing is knowing how to do something. Knowing how to tie a shoe, swim, perform a surgery, build a house, shake hands etc. It is know-how.
According to Vervaeke, skills are different from beliefs. Your skills are not simply true or false, whereas propositional beliefs are. It makes little sense to ask, is your skill at swimming true or false right now, but the proposition “dogs are mammals” is either true or false, in every possible context.
Instead of propositional truthfulness skills either apply or they don’t. They either work or they don’t. That is why Vervaeke claims that empowerment is the central metric for the evaluation of skills; Does this know-how enable me in this situation?
So it seems that procedural knowing is context-dependent, whereas propositional knowing is context-independent. This is precisely the difference between symbolic and non-symbolic. The difference between the Sharing phase and th Understanding phase. John Vervaeke and Leonardo Ferraro write how:
Some of the patterns we realize are patterns in events. This patterning gives us the ability to intervene in causal processes, i.e., it affords us knowing how to interact with the world. This is our procedural knowledge. (p. 7) [Bolding added.]
In other words, participatory knowing is about finding the relevant patterns (laws, habits, tendencies), which gives the ability to interact and intervene with the world. This is participation with the laws and habits governing the concrete situation. A skillful person understands and embodies these governing regularities. Sounds exactly like the Understanding phase.
Perspectival Knowing - Experience Phase
The next is perspectival knowing. This is knowing what it’s like to be. So, you know what it’s like to be you now in your state of mind in this situation. (…) You got a sense of how you’re fitted to this situation. The Tim Ferriss Show
Perspectival knowing is knowing through embodied experience. It consists in seeing the world from specific and particular point of view, i.e. perspective. One of the main concepts of perspectival knowing is salience:
You're doing salience landscaping. Salience is how things stand out. What's happening is things are constantly shifting and how they're standing out to you. And what's foregrounded and backgrounded. And what you're doing with all of that shifting salience landscaping and sizing up is you're trying to get, what Merleau-Ponty called, an optimal grip on some particular aspect of your environment, so you can interact with it well. John Vervaeke
Isn’t this exactly the process of inquiring some salient object abstracted from the qualitative continuum? Isn’t this exactly the Experience phase?
Perspectival knowing is not about propositional truth (propositional knowing), or about skills and powers (procedural knowing). Its “standard of realness” is presence, that is, how present you feel in some concrete situation.
Example of this is virtual reality. The metric for the success of VR-experience is the feeling of presence. Was the person fully immersed in the VR-world?
So the features of perspectival knowing — embodied perception, the feeling of being present, the recognition of oneself, the attention in something singular and salient, foregrounding/backgrounding — are all aspects of the Experience Phase. Again much overlap.
Participatory Knowing - Perception Phase
[Participatory knowing] is knowing by being. This is knowing by being a particular
kind of agent in a particular kind of arena. John Vervaeke
Participatory knowing is the most fundamental way of knowing. It is the tight coupling between you and your environment. You have been shaped by your environment and, to a certain extent, environment can be shaped by you.
Through this mutual shaping you are fitted to your surroundings, which makes various objects available to you (as they are discerned from the qualitative continuum).
This affords graspability, the water bottle is graspable. That’s an affordance, a real relation of fittedness, so me and the water bottle belong together. It makes itself available for certain interactions and I can shape myself to interact with it powerfully and appropriately. The Tim Ferriss Show
Now affordance is the central concept. It means a perceived possibility of action. It is what the environment offers and provides for the interpreter. A door knob offers the possibility of opening the door, and coffee mug provides a possibility for drinking. Affordances are thus possibilities (1stness).
This mutual co-shaping between you and the environment should not be thought as merely material. The shaping isn’t limited only to relations between your body and the environment (your hand and the graspability of some object). Rather it also includes the cognitive landscape that is specifically human. An octopus or a bat has very different set of affordances compared to you. We are speaking about niche construction.
Through evolution we have gained a distinct set of possibilities available to us to experience. From this set of possibilities some possibility is unconsciously chosen to be realized in perception. This results in an affordance, which is an actualized possibility.
This affordance, in turn, is a precondition for something to become salient. An affordance is needed in order for something to pop out from the qualitative continuum to be further inquired in the Experience Phase/Perspectival knowing.
A good way to understand the meaning of this, is to look at situations where these affordances are lacking. For example, the experience of drastic culture shock is about the inability to recognize relevant objects or the possibilities they present.
Another example would be a state of utter confusion, when something completely unexpected happens. For instance after hearing a sudden strident sound, people stop their action and stand still frantically searching for affordances. Gregg Henriques writes in Psychology Today:
Participatory knowing refers to knowing how to act in the “agent-arena” environment. It is simultaneously one of the most basic and most profound kinds of knowing. One way to think about participatory knowledge is to consider the difference between being in a state of confusion versus a state of flow. Flow is when you are in a groove and feel a natural “dance” between your actions and the environment (…)
If we are not able to perceive affordances in our experience, we find ourselves in a serious state of confusion. We become paralyzed and unable to do anything. Before we can break out of that confusion, we must actualize some possibility for action (affordance) from the qualitative continuum of possible possibilities. This is similar to the Perception phase.
This, in turn, means that only a small fraction of all possible possibilities are actualized. This selection is mostly unconscious and in itself quite a remarkable process. We disregard most of the possibilities. Vervaeke says, how:
You’re intelligent because of your ability to ignore so much information in a way that makes obvious to you the relevant information enough of the time that you’re a very good problem solver in very many, many domains. The Tim Ferriss Show
On the other hand, there are a lot of possibilities that we can’t realize, even if we wanted, as our perception and the set of possible possibilities is limited in many ways. Our vision, our hearing, our sense of smell are all limited in capacity compared to many other animals. But we may also have incapabilities of perceiving other, dare I say more mystical, aspects of reality such as God or spirits for example. We don’t know. How even could we?
The Logic of Dependence
Another more structural point of contact is the logical dependence and relations between the Four Ways of Knowing. They are pretty much identical to the Four Phases. In both models the more developed or higher stages are dependent on the lower more fundamental ones. Vervaeke gives an example of this:
Participatory knowing gives you affordances, and when that goes well, you have a sense of belonging, attunement with your environment. Perspectival knowing selects from those affordances the ones that are particularly relevant within your current projects and brings them into the sensory motor loop and sculpts and shapes so that you know which skills to apply and which skills to acquire, and that gives you your procedural knowing. And then the procedural knowing trains skills that you can take into a particular cultural arena in which you can use language to make proposals, that then can be stored as propositions [propositional knowing]. John Vervaeke
Similar, eh?
Some Important Differences
There are some differences though. Vervaeke seems to have a non-semiotic view on logic:
Logic and math are algorithmic. They work in terms of certainty. Certainty requires that you search sometimes all or at least most of the space, and if you tried to do that, you would’ve committed cognitive suicide. That would be the last thing you do and that can’t be a rational way to behave. The Tim Ferriss Show
Vervaeke is speaking about deductive logic. However semiotics enlarges the notion of logic to include also inductive and abductive logic (as we have already learned previously). Semiotic logic is not certain, but vague. It is not discrete or digital, but continuous and analogical.
So bounded rationality is something more like knowing where, when, how, and to what degree? Using all the non-propositional kinds of knowing to tell you where, when, how, and what degree you should be logical?
You have to cultivate these virtues for when you use logic. So that’s what rationality is and that’s a much harder problem. “When should I be logical?” John Vervaeke
For a person with the Semiotic Mindset, this statement makes absolutely no sense. We are always using logic, from the most fundamental perceptions to the most abstract scientific theories. In order to perceive or experience we must be logical, as these are logical processes. We stop being logical, when we die.
On the other hand, I understand that Vervaeke is talking about deductive logic. In this sense of the term, I can agree with him. Basically Vervaeke is speaking about the trade-off between exploration and exploitation. Should I search for new possibilities, even though it takes time and energy and may fail, or should I apply tried and tested frameworks, even though they may be outdated and far from optimal.
Nevertheless, you see how semiotics enwidens the meaning of logic to encompass all of the ways of knowing which John Vervaeke regards as being outside of logic.
Summary
This post has been only a preliminary and tentative exploration for embedding some of Vervaeke’s work into a semiotic framework. I will return to Vervaeke’s ideas in future posts and continue the work.
The Four Ways of Knowing is intended to explain only the human cognition. The Four Phases can also be used in this context, but in addition it can be used in conceptualizing much more, among other things, the whole universe. Remember, semiotics is a meta-theory, encompassing everything.
For this reason, we can embed the Four Ways of Knowing into the semiotic framework, which shows how the Four Ways of Knowing is actually only a part of a larger model — the logical process of semiosis, which also forms the fundamental structure of reality.
Thank you for reading this post. If you know someone, interested in John Vervaekes ideas, consider sharing this post with him/her.
Sincerely,
Markus
The previous questions and this topic in general bring this quote to mind. I'm not sure if it is at all helpful to you here, but it was useful to me when I was distinguishing between phenomenology and phaneroscopy while analyzing the details between Merleau-Ponty and Heraclitus in the light of Peirce.
..... Quote
..... "It is because of this habit of letting constant factors slip from consciousness that we constantly fall into the error of thinking of the sense-awareness of a particular factor in nature as being a two-termed relation between the mind and the factor. For example, I perceive a green leaf. Language in this statement suppresses all reference to any factors other than the percipient mind and the green leaf and the relation of sense-awareness. It discards the obvious inevitable factors which are essential elements in the perception, I am here, the leaf is there; and the event here and the event which is the life of the leaf there are both embedded in a totality of nature which is now, and within this totality there are other discriminated factors which it is irrelevant to mention. Thus, language habitually sets before the mind a misleading abstract of the indefinite complexity of the fact of sense-awareness.
What I now want to discuss is the special relation of the percipient event which is 'here' to the duration which is ' now.' This relation is a fact in nature, namely the mind is aware of nature as being with these two factors in this relation.
Within the short present duration the ' here ' of the percipient event has a definite meaning of some sort. This meaning of 'here' is the content of the special relation of the percipient event to its associated duration. I will call this relation 'cogredience.' Accordingly, I ask for a description of the character of the relation of cogredience. The present snaps into a past and a present when the 'here' of cogredience loses its single deter- minate meaning. There has been a passage of nature from the ' here ' of perception within the past duration to the different * here ' of perception within the present duration. But the two 'heres' of sense-awareness within neighbouring durations may be indistinguishable. In this case there has been a passage from the past to the present, but a more retentive perceptive force might have retained the passing nature as one complete present instead of letting the earlier duration slip into the past. Namely, the sense of rest helps the integration of dura- tions into a prolonged present, and the sense of motion differentiates nature into a succession of shortened durations. As we look out of a railway carriage in an express train, the present is past before reflexion can seize it. We live in snippits too quick for thought. On the other hand the immediate present is prolonged according as nature presents itself to us in an aspect of unbroken rest. Any change in nature provides ground for a differentiation among durations so as to shorten the present. But there is a great distinction between self-change in nature and change in external nature. Self-change in nature is change in the quality of the standpoint of the percipient event. It is the break up of the 'here' which necessitates the break up of the present duration. Change in external nature is compatible with a prolongation of the present of contemplation rooted in a given standpoint. What I want to bring out is that the preservation of a peculiar relation to a duration is a necessary condition for the function of that duration as a present duration for sense-aware- ness. This peculiar relation is the relation of cogredience between the percipient event and the duration."
End Quote - Alfred North Whitehead, 'The Concept of Nature', pgs 108-109
I'm curious here that it seems the Vervaeke's order: participatory, perspectival, procedural, propositional is not the same order as perception, experience, understanding, sharing. Where the two earlier phases are switched:(i.e., experience, perception). Can you resolve the difference?