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4 Ways of Knowing

Home 2023 › Forums › Spirituality & Philosophy › 4 Ways of Knowing

Viewing 8 posts - 1 through 8 (of 8 total)
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  • #13537
    Faeruss
    Participant
    • Type: FeNi
    • Development: llll
    • Attitude: Directive

    The ancient Greeks had at least four different ways of talking about truth and knowledge: techne, episteme, noesis, and gnosis. Episteme is the closest to us, roughly corresponding to our idea of truth, truth in the propositional sense, statements of fact (The capital of France is Paris), and so on. Techne is more the kind of pragmatic truth some philosophers (see pragmatism) discuss, where here knowing happens through competence and mastery, through skill-acquisition. There is a truth the expert basesball pitcher knows that is functional and embodied in a way that is hard (indeed, impossible the Greeks would have us say) to put into a list of propositions. One can't learn how to be an expert pitcher by reading textbooks on baseball. Now, there is a truth, noesis, which has to do with awareness and perception, a type of truth that is perspectival in nature, which is embodied and a context-specific, like the kind of knowing involved in knowing what it is like to be a human living in the post-World War Two Germany. Finally, there is gnosis, which is knowing by sharing a fundamental identity with something, almost like a knowing by isomorphism, a knowing by becoming, which also comes with a certain degree of imitation and internalisation. Here we know what it is like to be a parent, not by mastering any skill, nor by knowing propositions, nor even by having the embodied perspective of a parent, but by being a parent, we come to know what a parent is (know the Being of a Parent) by participating in the idea/essence of a Parent, if you allow me a modicum of Platonism, or more modernly, by participating in parenthood.
    Summarising: we have techne, episteme, noesis, and gnosis. Propositional, procedural, perspectival, and participatory knowing.
     
    Now, coming back to CT, @teatime, has said previously that

    The main difference seems to stem from two opposing core epistemological assumptions:
    A – To know a thing, you must step outside of it and observe it
    G – To know a thing, you must embody it

    Episteme vs gnosis: Alpha vs Gamma. It would be very interesting if we could show that different CT types gravitate towards different kinds of knowing, perhaps by quadra, as suggested above. Not to say any type/quadra has lordship over any form of truth, of course. Following the quadra suggestions, Deltas as focused on Procedural/techne knowing makes sense, and ties in nicely with their being referred to as technocrats. Betas as focused on Perspectival/noesis knowing makes vague sense, but I haven't thought through all of the implications of this one yet.
    Please let me know your thoughts.

    #13725
    Tea
    Participant
    • Type: NeFi
    • Development: l--l
    • Attitude: Seelie

    @faeruss, I like this. It's so clean and lines up so beautifully (a tear little falls). I work from the assumption that if we are seeing something real, that we wouldn't be the first to see it, and the categories (quadras, EQs, J/P dichotomies) would recur worldwide. This is the first time I've seen kinds of knowledge linked to quadras, but I like it a lot. It's possible we have access to all ways of knowing but view some as being more certain. Both quadra and EQ may correlate to these four kinds of knowing.
     

    #13728
    Faex
    Participant
    • Type: NeFi
    • Development: ll--
    • Attitude: Seelie

    It’s possible we have access to all ways of knowing but view some as being more certain. Both quadra and EQ may correlate to these four kinds of knowing.

    I agree and would suggest that maybe even the 8 CFs themselves, rather than whole quadras may be closer or further from each kind; which would make certain combinations of them or whole quadras more inclined or less so from each kind than others.

    #13799
    Tea
    Participant
    • Type: NeFi
    • Development: l--l
    • Attitude: Seelie

    I think so, too, Fae. I was originally going to toss an idea out there, but I thought maybe I should learn more about the types of knowledge first. Roughly, however, we could say:
     
    Je - Techne
    Ji - Gnosis
    Pi - (Epistime? Works in tandem with techne, it seems.)
    The idea of noesis is a bit trickier. It seems to have to do with attention and awareness, but I wouldn't say in a sole-Pe fashion, though "awareness" and "intuition" both fit Pe (Wikipedia).

    @faeruss
    , do have a good source? Wikipedia doesn't explain the concepts very thoroughly. I'm also curios to see what other ways of knowing the Greeks had. This seems like the right direction. I bet if we dig through the literature, we'll see idioms that describe physical characteristics associated with these ("good head on her shoulders"). I really like the recent Psalm quote you posted.
    (P.S My post above - the idea that core truths and pieces of reality will be seen again and again in many cultures - illustrates the Ne "many eyes" we speak of and Si "veracity through history.")

    #13800
    Faeruss
    Participant
    • Type: FeNi
    • Development: llll
    • Attitude: Directive

    @teatime, I am afraid I don't have a good source. I am standing on the shoulders of giants, one of whom is Vervaeke's work on neuroscience. Techne typically is translated as "art/craft", noesis as "intellection" or "intuition", gnosis as  (personal) "knowledge" and episteme as (theoretical) "knowledge". This is a shameful and massive reduction of the richness of the ancient Greek worldview, but one must be embedded in their works to start to see how they saw the world, where one can start seeing these categories in their true glory, and not just as shadows in our language. For instance another word that comes to mind is "Cosmos", which for us is just the universe, but for the Greeks was the patterned and ordered whole of existence, including physical but also psychological dimensions, and even spiritual dimensions. They inhabited a different world. We live in a barren dessert; we have lost gnosis and noesis, the universe is no longer alive to us, it is inert, dead.

    #13801
    Animal
    Participant
    • Type: SeFi
    • Development: lll-
    • Attitude: Seelie

    I would have thought Delta was "Scientism" thus focused on facts - like "The capital of France is Paris" - due to SiTe being mixed together - and the historical component of Si - whereas Gamma was more focused on "learning by doing" because this is what you get with Se and Te.  Gamma is not so much about 'this fact and that fact,' but more about 'if you haven't actually done the thing, then you can't know it.' Se is experiential.
    If Alpha is the kind of knowing where you "step outside of it," then Delta would be one step away if it was the kind of knowing where you "learn the factual information." The direct opposite of stepping outside and looking at it from outside, is experiencing it and doing it yourself, being viscerally and physically involved in the action of it. So this would be Gamma which has Se, and most distant from Alpha.  Whereas knowledge of 'facts' is still closer to stepping outside of something. And I see this kind of fact-oriented approach with Delta in general.  (And me phrasing it that way is me saying "I've experienced it this way, so I know.")
    To me, Beta would be associated with Noesis indeed, because it's a kind of 'societal' truth, Fe-Se... whereas Gamma would be associated with Techne because it's an 'I learned it by doing it' truth which is more Te-Se. Those are also closely related. Whereas Delta and Beta, in this model, would be direct opposites, because one is focused on science and information while one is focused on the experience of society, which is the difference between Te-Si and Fe-Ni.  Ne would be about discovering NEW information and setting up scientific methods to discover NEW facts, so it's less static than just 'memorizing them.'

    #13815
    Tea
    Participant
    • Type: NeFi
    • Development: l--l
    • Attitude: Seelie

    @animal, that sounds accurate about Ne. I used to have a great memory, but overall, I avoid memorizing things and instead of focus on methods that will yield the correction solution. It's exactly as Einstein described it, and it is scientism. So while I don't always know an answer (even more before going into a test), I know a way to get the answer. I have found, however, that can lead to intellectual laziness. It's expedient upfront, but I think in the long run, it become costly time wise.Because it's not just the information but the process of getting the information that must be retrieved (and run in real time).
    -----------------
    Warning: I couldn't find the quote I was looking for that illustrates the ne predicts things, but I found the following quotes here (http://wisdomquotes.com/albert-einstein-quotes/), which may or may not be bogus but seem representative of Ne/Si:
    "Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school."
    "Imagination is more important than knowledge."
    "Imagination is the highest form of research."
    "I always get by best with my naivety, which is 20 percent deliberate."
    "Don’t listen to the person who has the answers; listen to the person who has the questions."
    I feel a little guilty not fact checking, but I think the essence is correct. Having a collection of epistemological quotes from known types would be cool.

    #13818
    Rua
    Moderator
    • Type: NeTi
    • Development: ll-l
    • Attitude: Adaptive

    To learn, we must not allow ideas to remain exterior to us, but fuse with them until they become part of our existence. When this is done and our dispositions correspond, the soul is able to formulate and make use of them. It comprehends now what it merely contained before.

    Plotinus -- The Enneads

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