Monthly Archives: December 2019

Knowledge and Interests

Virtually all of the examples I have given before about learning and knowledge show them as goal-oriented, linked to the achievement of specific goals, developed with particular purposes in mind.  I learned how to use chopsticks so I could eat with them; Bian’s knowledge, including its unverbalizable dimensions, is for the express purpose of making wheels; I learn a language in order to communicate; Conklin learned how to discriminate colors as the Hanunoo did so that he could live with them; a student learns how to measure the color of an object scientifically so that she can become a scientist – and before that, several people wanted to measure the color of an object independently of place and time, in a standardized way that is, so that they could coordinate their practices across space and time; and so on.

Knowledge is always linked with the pursuit of specific interests, it is interested.

This aspect of knowledge, that it is associated with the pursuit of interests, is not surprising. I already hinted at this aspect of knowledge when discussing the importance of socialization for the coordination of community life and activities.  And with Science being a social activity, with scientific knowledge being developed by scientific communities, the point holds for scientific knowledge as well.  As I have highlighted before, we learn what we know through our socialization into a community, our knowledge is part and parcel of the way of life in the community, it expresses local aspirations and purposes, solutions to local problems and concerns.  The development of knowledge within a community is guided by the need to coordinate community life and activities, the need to maintain the community.  So, knowledge expresses the interests of the community within which it is developed; knowledge is interested.

But there is another more important reason that knowledge always expresses specific interests, even if we think beyond socialization and the association of knowledge with particular communities.  Knowledge is developed within a reality that is everywhere, always in excess.  Of course it takes effort to know, that is, to develop and establish a stable interaction with the material world; but with the material world being in excess, there are many ways in establishing such stable interactions.  So, the activity toward the development of knowledge has to be guided somehow, has to look for specifics, has to select particular patterns, and this looking and selection is informed by local goals, purposes, interests.  Different selections across cultures result in differences in the development of knowledge.  An example in point are cultural differences in color discrimination, with Hanunoo color categories being a particularly striking one.  Another example would be sound discrimination across languages, and I still remember my difficulty distinguishing between “cut” and “cat” in English, as Greek, with which I grew up, has a single “a” sound.  Greek also has a single tone, making my learning of Mandarin Chinese with its four tones an instructive challenge.  Gestalt pictures offer another way to make the point.

Sometimes the first steps toward developing new knowledge begin with play, with tinkering around with things we are familiar with, arranging them in different ways, seeing what stable patterns might emerge.  But from the stable patterns that emerge even during play, we do eventually settle on particular ones that suddenly appear interesting – say, for pursuing a goal or connecting with our existing knowledge.  So, knowledge is always developed informed by interests.  At the same time, knowledge reflects a stable pattern of interaction with the material world – regardless of its development in association with interests, it works!  Precisely because knowledge reflects a stable interaction with the material world, it can be repurposed, linked with novel interests, be used to pursue different goals from the original ones.  Examples abound: the knowledge that underpins today’s internet for example originated in association with military interests – to network computers for military purposes; it has obviously been repurposed in very many ways.

Although in general we recognize that knowledge may sometimes be developed in accordance with particular interests, we may also feel that it is possible that knowledge can be disinterested.  That somehow knowledge can be developed so that it just reflects a stable interaction with the material world, nothing more.  The notion that Science actually provides the way to develop such interest-free knowledge appears to be fairly widespread, so I will be addressing this issue in detail in the following post.