Knowledge Circles
Knowledge
Circles sensitize
us to different ways of knowing about the world. At the moment in the urban
sustainability field, as in many others, there is tendency to privilege
reflective consciousness — that is, empirical analysis, planning, etc. — rather
than other forms of knowledge. Among the many different ways of knowing, the Circles approach distinguishes four main
forms. Each is important in contributing to an integrated and engaged approach
to remaking our cities. The categories are not mutually exclusive. In any given
situation these forms of knowing overlap and intersect with each other.
·
Sensory experience (feeling)
·
Practical consciousness (pragmatics)
·
Reflective consciousness (reflection)
·
Reflexive knowing (reflexivity)
Move your
cursor over the Circle below to see the four domains, each
with four subdomains.
Pragmatics:
Experiential Knowing
Feeling
The first form of knowing is
sensory experience: feeling things. This is the phenomenal sense that something
exists in relation to us, or has an impact on us. The concept of ‘affect’
attests to this kind of consciousness, as does ‘sense data’. But sensory
experience is less technically conceived than those abstract expressions. It is
embodied experience. It is felt, but not necessarily reflected upon. How we
feel about our cities and homes is critical to how we act upon them.
1. Senate knowing: knowing based on being attuned to one’s senses: sight, hearing,
touch, smell, and taste.
2. Perceptive
knowing: the cognitive apprehension of having experienced a sensation.
3. Emotional
knowing: the somatic feeling of affect, including the feeling for
someone else’s situation; for example, the blush of shame; the clenched fists
of anger.
4. Regulatory knowing: a visceral response to a particular scene or sound
paradoxically experienced as ‘out of body’: for example, the experience of the
sublime or ‘being touched’ by the transcendental.
Pragmatics
The second form is practical
consciousness: knowing practically or pragmatically how to do things; knowing
how to ‘go on’. Practical consciousness is basic to human action in the world.
Writers as different as Wittgenstein and Marx have elaborated upon this theme.
Often we just know how to do things without reading instruction manuals. This
way of knowing comes from long-term practical experience. Such experience is
fundamental to generating good practice and remaking our cities in positive
ways.
1. Experiential
knowing: knowledge based on doing things many times: for example, craft
knowledge.
2. Intuitive
knowing: knowing through projecting possibilities; ‘conscious
embodiment’ before it comes to reflective or articulated understanding;
sometimes called ‘being savvy’.
3. Tacit
knowing: knowledge that cannot be articulated or translated into
written form.
4. Situated
knowing: knowledge that is specific to a particular place or time.
Reflection
The third form is reflective
consciousness. This is the modality in which people reflect upon their felt
experience and practical knowledge. It is the stuff of ordinary philosophy. It
is what thoughtful practitioners often do when they get a chance to step back
from a project — thinking about what has been done, what is to be done, and how
could it be done better. It is the basis of good interpretation. It is
necessary to good urban design and project management.
1. Trained
knowing: knowledge based on learning supported by teachers and/or
curriculum.
2. Contemplative
knowing: knowledge that emerges in the saying or the thinking. For
example, knowing that comes through linguistic consciousness, such as in the
moment of saying ‘I love you’ and realizing in the act that it is true or
otherwise; or knowing that comes through trying out ideas and seeing if they sound
right.
3. Analytical
knowing: knowledge based on breaking things down into their constituent
parts: deductive knowledge.
4. Theoretical
knowing: theoretical work that makes a claim about the determination,
framing or meaning of something.
Reflexive
The fourth
form is reflexive consciousness, or knowledge that comes in interrogating the
nature of knowing while seeking to understand the world. Reflexive requires
reflection upon the constitutive conditions of being here or doing things. In
the Circles approach reflexive goes beyond reflecting upon techniques, processes and practices. It
involves standing back from and reinterpreting those techniques and practices
in the light of the nature of thinking and acting that underlies those
techniques and practices. This process of interrogating the conditions of our
practice is tenuous, recursive, and always partial. But it is necessary to good
practice in a world that is full of both fashionable and commonsense claims
about what should be done — some helpful, some not.
1. Recursive
knowing: knowledge that bears back upon itself and constantly
interrogates the basis of its own knowledge.
2. Epistemological
knowing: knowledge about the different forms of knowledge; that is,
classic epistemology understood in the sense of the study of knowledge.
3. Meta-analytical
knowing: analysis that reflects back on the basis of its analysis. For
example, methodology studies, which work through the way in which we make
claims about things. Another example is psychoanalysis of the kind that entails
its practitioners reflecting on their own effectiveness as they do their work.
In other words, this is a kind knowing in which the subject and the object are
brought into constant dialogue.
4. Meta-theoretical
knowing: theoretical work that seeks to understand the world while
theorizing the possibilities of its own theorizing.
Background to the Knowledge
Circles
Unlike the
usual modern list of forms of knowledge — data, information, knowledge and
wisdom — our Knowledge Circles set up no hierarchy of knowledge
importance. There is nothing to fetishize about one form of experience or
understanding over the other. We do emphasize the critical importance of reflexive learning and assessment, but that is
only because it is the one form that is usually left out of contemporary discussions.
One current fashion is to
emphasize ‘big data’, for example. However, it tends to forget that, without
interpretation, big data is just sets of coded information. There is no doubt
that big data can be extraordinarily useful, but only if it is drawn into a
broader epistemological framework. Similarly, development practitioners
emphasize training and capacity development, but teaching techniques and
processes independently of larger circles of interpretation leaves both the
teaching and learning thin and unsustainable.
Each level of knowledge, as
presented here, is more abstract than the prior level(s). More abstract levels
of knowledge give us different ways of accessing concrete things, events, ideas
and processes in the world, but this more abstract knowledge also loses
something in the process of standing back from the world.
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