Article 10: Knowledge and the Knower

Framing

There is a persistent idea that true knowledge is objective—that it exists independent of who knows it. A fact is a fact regardless of who discovers it. A truth is true whether or not anyone believes it.

Yet knowledge is always known by someone. It is always situated in a particular mind, at a particular time, in particular circumstances. This particularity seems to introduce bias, distortion, subjectivity—all the things that supposedly prevent objective knowledge.

How can knowledge be both objective and situated? How can something be true independent of the knower and yet be known only from a particular perspective? How can we claim to know something when our knowledge is always filtered through our particular standpoint?

The question is not merely epistemological. It is existential. It concerns who we are as knowers. What kind of being is capable of knowing? What does it mean for consciousness to relate to knowledge?

I. The Knower as Part of What Is Known

In the natural sciences, there is an ideal of the observer who does not disturb what is observed. In physics, we try to measure things without changing them. In biology, we try to study organisms in their natural state. The observer is supposed to be outside the system being studied.

But this ideal cannot be fully realized. In quantum mechanics, the act of observation changes what is observed. The electron does not have a definite position until it is measured. Measurement brings it into a particular state.

More broadly, the act of knowing is an act. It involves the knower. It involves the knower's attention, the knower's methods, the knower's frameworks. These are not separate from what is known. They shape what can be known.

A doctor examining a patient is not merely observing a pre-existing patient. The examination changes the patient. It produces new information. It creates new possibilities. The patient is different after being examined than they were before.

A historian studying the past is not merely recording what happened. The historian's questions shape what can be found. The historian's frameworks determine what counts as evidence. The historian's interpretation shapes what the past means.

This does not mean that the patient is illusory or that the past is fictional. It means that knowing is not a passive reception of information. Knowing is an active engagement. The knower is part of what is known.

II. The Limits of Introspection

We have direct access to our own minds. We can observe our own thoughts, feelings, and perceptions. We might expect this privileged access to provide special knowledge—knowledge that is not mediated, not filtered, not distorted.

But introspection has severe limits. Much of our mental life is not accessible to introspection. We cannot directly observe the processes by which our brains form perceptions. We cannot directly observe many of our beliefs and desires. We cannot directly observe the mechanisms that produce our thoughts.

Moreover, introspection is not transparent. When you introspect, you are not passively observing your mind. You are actively constructing a narrative about your mind. You are interpreting your experiences in light of frameworks you have learned. You are telling a story about what you are observing.

This means that introspection can be deeply misleading. You can be wrong about your own motives. You can misunderstand your own emotions. You can construct false narratives about your experiences that feel true from the inside.

So even the knowledge that is supposedly most direct and most certain—knowledge of our own minds—is mediated and constructed. It is not a transparent window into reality. It is an interpretation.

This reveals something important: that the knower cannot step outside their own perspective to verify their knowledge. There is no view from outside the self that can check whether introspection is accurate. The knower is trapped within their own perspective.

III. The Role of Ignorance

We tend to think of knowledge as the opposite of ignorance—as if knowledge is a space of light and ignorance is a space of darkness. But ignorance is not merely the absence of knowledge. Ignorance is often actively created.

We are all ignorant of things we could know but choose not to investigate. We ignore information that conflicts with our beliefs. We avoid asking questions whose answers might disturb us. We construct blind spots where knowledge would be uncomfortable.

Moreover, there are things we cannot know. The contents of other minds. The precise details of the distant past. The future. The thing-in-itself, independent of any perspective. These are not merely unknown; they are unknowable.

And then there are things that are unknown because we have not yet developed the concepts to think them. Before the word "privacy" existed, people could not easily think about privacy as a distinct phenomenon. Before the concept of "evolution" was developed, certain patterns in nature were not visible. Before quantum mechanics was developed, the structure of atoms was mysterious.

These unknown things are not merely waiting to be discovered. They are waiting to be created—conceptually created through the development of new frameworks, new vocabularies, new ways of thinking.

So ignorance is not simply the absence of knowledge. Ignorance is a presence. It is something we are embedded in. It is something we are constantly recreating through what we choose not to know, what we cannot know, what we have not yet created the concepts to know.

IV. The Social Nature of Knowledge

Knowledge is not created by isolated individuals. Knowledge is created through communities of inquirers. A scientist does not simply observe nature and record what they see. They participate in a scientific community with shared methods, shared standards, shared frameworks.

Moreover, knowledge is maintained through social institutions. Universities preserve and transmit knowledge. Libraries store knowledge. Scientific journals publish knowledge. These institutions shape what counts as knowledge and how knowledge is organized.

But these institutions can also exclude. They can prevent certain perspectives from being heard. They can dismiss certain knowledge as invalid. They can create hierarchies in which some kinds of knowledge are valued and others are marginalized.

A person who has lived experience of a phenomenon may have deep knowledge of that phenomenon. But if their knowledge is not expressed in the language and frameworks that institutions recognize, it may not be acknowledged as knowledge. It may be dismissed as "anecdotal" or "subjective."

This creates a politics of knowledge. Control over institutions is control over what counts as knowledge. Whose perspectives are heard? Whose frameworks are used to organize knowledge? Whose standards of evidence and proof are applied?

Yet knowledge is not determined by power. The world pushes back. The truth has a way of emerging despite institutional suppression. Alternative frameworks can prove more fruitful. Excluded perspectives can offer insights that dominant perspectives miss.

V. The Revision of Knowledge

Knowledge is not fixed. It evolves. What we know now is different from what we knew a hundred years ago. What we will know a hundred years from now will be different from what we know now.

This constant revision might seem to undermine the claim that knowledge is true. If what we believed to be true is later shown to be false, in what sense was it true?

But the revision of knowledge does not mean that all previous knowledge was illusory. It means that knowledge is approximate. It is the best understanding available given the current frameworks and evidence. As new evidence emerges, as new frameworks are developed, understanding deepens and shifts.

Moreover, the revision of knowledge is not random. It is constrained by reality. Some revisions make us better able to predict and manipulate the world. Some revisions make us better able to understand and communicate with others. Some revisions prove more fruitful than others.

This suggests that even though knowledge changes, there is something that constrains how it changes. The world constrains knowledge. Reality pushes back against our attempts to interpret it. Some interpretations work better than others.

So knowledge is not arbitrary. But it is also not fixed. It is a process. It is an ongoing dialogue between the knower and the known. It is the continuous revision of understanding in light of new experience.

VI. The Paradox of Self-Knowledge

You have special knowledge of your own mind. But you can also systematically deceive yourself. You can have beliefs about yourself that are false. You can be opaque to yourself in ways that others might not be.

This creates a paradox. The person who has the most direct access to your mind is yourself. But the person who is most likely to distort that knowledge is also yourself. You have incentives to misunderstand yourself. You have motivation to see yourself in certain ways and not others.

A friend might understand you better than you understand yourself. They can observe your behavior from outside. They can see patterns you cannot see. They can correct your misconceptions. Yet they lack your direct access. They can only infer what your mind is like from your behavior and words.

This suggests that self-knowledge is not primarily a matter of introspection. It is a matter of dialogue. It requires listening to how others perceive you, how others experience you, how others understand you. Self-knowledge comes through the mirrors that others provide.

Yet complete self-transparency is impossible. There will always be aspects of yourself that you do not fully understand. There will always be blind spots. There will always be things that others understand about you better than you do.

VII. The Unknowable

At the limits of knowledge, we encounter things that seem impossible to know. The experience of consciousness itself—what philosophers call "qualia," the subjective quality of experience. Why does red look the way it looks? What is it like to taste chocolate?

These seem to be knowable only from the inside. You cannot really know what red looks like unless you see it yourself. You cannot really know what chocolate tastes like unless you taste it yourself. No amount of description can substitute for direct experience.

But even direct experience has limits. You cannot know what red looks like to someone with a different kind of color vision. You cannot know what a particular taste means to someone from a different culture. You cannot step outside your own embodied perspective to see what these things are like to others.

And beyond the subjective quality of experience, there are questions that seem impossible to answer. Why is there something rather than nothing? What is consciousness? What happens at the boundaries of space and time? These questions may be unanswerable not because we lack knowledge, but because they exceed the capacity of knowledge.

Closing: The Knower and the Known

Knowledge is not a relationship between a subject who knows and an object that is known, where the two are separate. Knowledge is a relationship in which the knower and the known are entangled.

The knower is part of what is known. The act of knowing shapes what is known. The frameworks the knower brings to knowledge shape what can be known.

Yet the known also shapes the knower. Reality resists the knower's interpretations. The world pushes back. Some interpretations work better than others. Some ways of knowing reveal truths that other ways of knowing miss.

So knowledge is not objective in the sense of being independent of the knower. But it is objective in the sense that it is constrained by reality. Some claims are true and others are false. Some frameworks are more fruitful than others. Some ways of knowing are more reliable than others.

The task is not to escape the perspective of the knower. That is impossible. The task is to understand the perspective of the knower. To recognize what the knower brings to knowledge. To remain open to other perspectives that might reveal what this perspective conceals.

Whether genuine understanding across different perspectives is possible, whether different knowers can come to agreement about what is true—these are questions that knowledge itself cannot answer. They are questions that knowledge must grapple with as it unfolds.