Knowing and Not Knowing

Knowledge is commonly spoken of in binary terms: You either know something of you don't. You know the capital of North Dakota or you don't know the capital of North Dakota. For practical everyday purposes, with facts like the one just mentioned, knowing or not knowing can be effectively talked about in these binary terms. At a deeper level, this superficial treatment glosses over some very interesting issues.

Central to these is the fact that the types of knowledge associated with knowing or not knowing any specific fact cannot be neatly divided into two groups, if one has any interest in the epistemological issues involved with knowing. The reason for this is that there are many ways of knowing-and of not knowing.

When we commonly talk about knowing (as in the example above) we are focusing on a very small subset of the epistemological possibilities. Generally, when a person is asked whether they know the capital of a certain state or country, a good deal of knowledge is already assumed to be in place. The person being asked the question is assumed to understand that the world is divided up into individual entities, and that within each of these is a center of power-the capital. Whether or not the person knows what the particular capital of a particular place is is not a matter of understanding these other concepts, but a matter of having understood how these conditions manifest themselves within a particular country or state.

So, while a person who doesn't know that Bismark is the capital of North Dakota doesn't know that Bismark is the capital of North Dakota, they are a radically different case of not knowing this than a cat would be. The cat doesn't simply fail to have this piece of knowledge, rather, the cat doesn't have the prerequisite for this knowledge (conceptual knowledge about capitals and political entities).

On the other end of the spectrum (with positive states of knowing), a similar situation exists. At my job, I teach different skills to people diagnosed with autism. The skills are taught within discrete programs that are run for each person, and one program (which I happen to find flawed) involves teaching the ability to give the correct amount of money for an item of a particular price (e.g., paying for a $6.25 piece of food with a $10 bill). The people that I teach learn to master paying for a certain combination of differently priced items, and it could be said that they "know how to give change for these items." My problem with this program is that the knowledge learned is somewhat trivial and completely restricted to the context of the program. I'm sorry to say that the people I teach are unable to generalize their performance in these programs to real life circumstances-even if they were to have to pay for an item whose price they had learned to pay for in the program. What they seem to learn is an arbitrary response of giving certain combinations of dollar bills after being asked for a certain amount. If the price was changed slightly so that the same combination of money would still be required (changing $6.25 to $6.95), they would not "get it right." Clearly, when most of us talking about being able to give the right change, we are talking about something very different from what happens here.

As much as I've been critical, the motivations for this simplified sense of knowing or not knowing are obvious: they are useful in everyday circumstances. Nevertheless, it is so incredibly interesting to move beyond this everyday sense and think about the difference between (what Heinz Werner called) achievement and performance, as has been done here.

Where this becomes so interesting is in the study of ethology. A few years I read a book by Nikolaas Tinbergen which showed how a certain type of wasp behaves adaptively with respect to its environment. The wasp would follow landmarks as it left its home and returned in search of food, and would build elaborate structures for its young to develop in. Tinbergen showed how disruptions in these behaviors would lead the wasp to behave in ways that indicated a lack of global knowledge about what it appeared to be doing (from a person's perspective). Other research illustrates this particularly well (although I don't remember the authors): It has been found that Geese will, upon seeing an egg roll out of their nest, do the smart thing, and go to the egg and push it back into the nest with their bill. Most people who see this will say "Of course! The goose cares for its children." In reality, the goose does not appear to be thinking about its children because if the egg is removed after the goose has seen it fall out of the nest, it will continue to push nothing back into its nest. That is, the goose will perform the motions of pushing an egg back into its nest even when there is no egg being pushed.

Above we see them performing a task whose logic is clear to us, yet upon disturbance of this behavior, it becomes clear that the goose doesn't grasp this logic, but is just compelled to perform a series of behaviors that normally happens to have the consequence of achieving a certain end. Even if the goose came to disliked its eggs, it is likely that it would still perform these egg saving acts since it is not protection of the eggs per se that drives the behavior (at least at the level of the individual goose).

If we try to imagine about the umwelt of the goose, we can guess that it may not involve thoughts of care for its eggs driving its behaviors, but rather the pleasure of the behaviors themselves (that happen to protect the eggs)-Fascinating.

As humans, we think of ourselves as being above these instinctual drives, as capable of reflection and comprehension of our actions. Yes, it's hard to understate how our actions are flexibly executed in the service of some distant goal. At the same time, we do have an important similarity with the goose.

Just like the goose, humans engage in adaptive behaviors that seem to be carried out in the service of some goal. Just like the goose seems to act to protect her eggs, people seem to be driven by the desire to reproduce, until one looks closer at what's going on. People go to great lengths to engage in behaviors that lead to reproduction, but it's clear that sexual pleasure, not reproduction, is more often than not the end goal of our activities.

Broadly, the point I'm making is that evolution leads to the appearance of purpose driven activities that from an observer's perspective have a logic of their own. Yet, the way evolution works is that from the perspective of an individual acting animal, these acts are not driven by their evolutionary rationale. For this to be the case-for animals to understand their behavior in the evolutionarily objective way that we do-the animal would have to have the cognitive capacity to understand the situation surrounding their behavior as we do.

The circumstances suggest that this is not the fastest path to being adaptive for most animals. The fastest (most easily evolved) path to an adaptive behavior like acting out of regard for one's offspring does not seem to be through simultaneously developing an understanding and an appreciation for the situation (developing an understanding of one's own offspring as well as an appreciation and a desire to protect them), but by modifying the existing biological circuitry to generate particular types of responses-IN TERMS OF THE EXISTING CIRCUITRY.

This post began far from where it has ended up, but I hope that the progression has been informative. The important point is that evolution, like the teaching program at my job, favors performance over achievement. If the environment demands a particular response, the phylogenetic development of the means to make that response must be adaptive from the start-or occur quickly enough to avoid being weeded out.