Who knows more about the ocean: a fish or a marine biologist?

What know-how and know-what can teach us about ourselves and the world

A few days ago, I saw this note by

The Green Philosopher

:

At first, my instinct was to go with the fish. As a Buddhist, that somehow seemed to be the “wiser” or more profound choice — direct experience and all that. But on the other hand, while it was clear that a fish knows how to swim and be all fishy in the ocean better, it seems doubtful that a fish actually knows what an ocean is. That seems to be a major problem for my first instinct.

This David Foster Wallace quote, which I found through this interesting post on a similar topic, sums up the issue quite nicely:

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”

-David Foster Wallace

A fish has an intuitive understanding of the ocean — it’s its life-world (Lebenswelt) — but the question asked who knows more about the ocean, not who understands the ocean better. And that is a fundamentally different question. It’s possible to know quite a bit about something without really being able to do anything with the thing you know about. You could, for example, know a great deal of facts about bicycles without being able to ride one, make one, or perhaps even recognize one (maybe you never saw a picture of one during your degree in bicycular studies). Broadly speaking, understanding tends to speak to an ability to use the thing you know about: that’s why you can get a math problem right by a fluke, thereby knowing the answer, but then you can still turn to your teacher and say “I don’t understand” — you haven’t developed a facility or ability to consistently use the concept yet.

Frankly, smart as fish are (and they are actually quite smart), I’m not convinced fish can know facts. So on that reading, where “about” is the operative word, I changed my mind and decided that the marine biologist does, in fact, know more about the ocean, but the fish knows “how to ocean” better than the marine biologist does. Or does it? We’ll come back to that.

Now, this divide is nothing new. It goes by several names in philosophy, including know-how vs. know-what, tacit knowledge vs. propositional knowledge, and implicit knowledge vs. explicit knowledge (I’ve written about this distinction in The Negation of Self and What is Mastery? as well). No matter what you call it, it basically shakes out like this: know-what is knowledge that you can express explicitly or propositionally, like “bicycles have two wheels”, and know-how is knowledge that you can’t really express in any specific way — you just know how to ride the bicycle. Sure, you could describe it with facts, like “move your legs and balance”, but that isn’t the actual knowledge you employ when you ride — the know-how is a sort of embodied knowing, inseparable from the doing. So, I replied:

They responded with the following, and I gave them a like, and moved on with my day:

Four hours later, while I was heedlessly pulling the cream off an Oreo with my teeth, I suddenly thought back to their comment and realized this actually made the whole thing much more interesting. The unintentional conflation of know-how and know-what says something truly profound about not just the way we know things, but how we conceive of objects — and consequently, the world and our place in it.

Our knowing is our existing

Let me put it this way. We can only know an object by, well, knowing it. That is to say that we cannot conceive of an object without first having some know-what or know-how in relation to it. Or perhaps we could say that, for us, the object arises simultaneously with our knowledge of it. So there is no empirical existence of an object without knowledge of that existence, and since we don’t posit things without empirical evidence of them, we can broadly say that objects exist through our knowing them.

As we’ve seen, knowing has two modes. One of those modes is an embodied, interrelated form of knowing in which our knowledge is intrinsically combined with the object we know about — that’s know-how. In know-how, we can’t just separate ourselves from the object: to exercise our know-how of riding a bike, we have to get on the bike and ride. If we were to simply pedal in the air, we wouldn’t really be using our know-how of how to ride a bike, we would be using our know-how of pedaling in the air.

The other mode of knowing is what we might consider “objective”: it is a type of knowledge that assumes an object is a standalone, independent entity that we can collect facts about, and those facts stand on their own. This is the type of knowledge that science tends to get after.¹ Whether I am on a bike or on my back on a park bench wildly kicking my legs up in the air, I can still yell out a long list of facts to the concerned onlookers about how the gears connect to the chains, what bikes are typically made of, when the bike was first invented, how silly penny-farthings look and how I would oddly like to try riding one but am too scared to do so for fear of falling off, and so on and so forth.

Here is the interesting part: the fact that we tend to assume know-what as the default — that we unconsciously resort to knowing always being an “about” — says something important. It indicates that our default mode inclines us to consider objects as independently existing things that can be described as pure, standalone information that is true from any perspective (or a view from nowhere, as Nagel would put it) — whether you are a fish, a marine biologist, or an alien, those facts about the object should stay the same. And in a subtle way, this also impinges on our conception of know-how: we tend to implicitly think there is one way to know how to ride a bike, and that will be the same whether you are tall or short, man or woman, Joe or Steve, young or old, prefer Döner or currywurst, or whatever else might make you you.

But this isn’t true, and thinking along these lines made me realize that I had oversimplified things by saying that the fish has more know-how than the marine biologist. Rather, the fish has more know-how about being a fish in the ocean, but that is entirely different than being a marine biologist in the ocean. And being a clown fish in the ocean will be entirely different than being a…different type of fish in the ocean (I am clearly not a marine biologist), and being a marine biologist from Sweden in the ocean will be entirely different than being a marine biologist from Hawaii in the ocean.

I am neither fish nor marine biologist nor artist, but I try!

The key here is that it becomes increasingly clear that we have a tendency to posit independence even when we are trying to think in terms of interdependence — the independence just takes subtler and subtler forms. Ultimately, there is no way to know “about the ocean” or “how to ocean” without an “as” clause attached because the ocean doesn’t exist for us separately from our being in relation to it as someone or something at a certain point in time, and that someone or something will always be unique — not only is each fish unique, but being a fish in the ocean on Wednesday is going to be different than being a fish in the ocean on Thursday.

The same may go for know-what to some extent: all propositional statements take a verbal form, and that means that they must be parsed by the know-how of language processing, which will be different for not only speakers of different languages, but for the different time periods in which those languages are spoken and, consequently, the individuals speaking those languages. Know-what is different than know-how in that it is linguistically expressible, but it is still mediated by knowing-how to use language. In some sense, it’s really just second-order know-how.

It seems that by default we take knowledge — whether it’s know-how or know-what — to be stable, and since we know objects through knowledge, we take objects to be stable as well. As a Buddhist, I can’t help but notice that this seems to be precisely what the Buddha taught about as the wrong views of permanence and self: that things are stable and independently existing.²

Ultimately, that leads to the conclusion that there is no ocean, there is only ocean as — as utilized, experienced, interacted with, related to, and known within time.

And so I responded:

And now I have written that post (🎉).

Just as we can only know the ocean by being in relation to the ocean, we can only know the world by being in relation to it. Any attempt to get beyond the world and view it from the outside will necessarily miss the mark by misconceiving and shrinking the boundaries of that world.

Knowing as a practice

Much of what I’ve written about here has been abstract, but I want to leave off with a practical(ish) takeaway.

In Being and Time, Heidegger begins by saying that philosophers have taken the fundamental question at the heart of philosophy for granted: what is being? Instead of actually investigating what it means to be, we investigate only the various taxonomies of being (is there one thing or two, are those things physical or mental, etc.), all while leaving the actual meaning of being — the meaning of “is” and “are” in those questions — implicit and uninterrogated.

The good news, from Heidegger’s perspective, is that since we already have this implicit understanding of what Being is, we can investigate that as a starting point to develop a more complete understanding of the concept.

One of the conclusions he arrives at in his analysis is that being is always a being-in-the-world: being requires relation to the objects in our world. We are our doings, as doing is always relating. ³

Here is the practical part. We have already seen that our being is very closely related to our knowing, and that how we know-how and know-what is malleable: if I have been at all convincing, then your conception of how we know about oceans, fish, and marine biologists may have slightly shifted throughout this piece. And in that case, that means that our being is also malleable.

In other words, knowing-how to relate to knowing in the standard sense of positing independent objects is one way of being in the world. But knowing-how to relate to knowing in the interdependent sense that I’ve presented here is another. That know-how, like any skill, can be developed and practiced over time.

If we were to practice knowing-how to know — and therefore how to be — in a totally different way, where might that take us?

Might it be worth investigating?

1. I think this is a bit of an oversimplification, as a good scientist also knows how to use the facts that science discovers, but science itself is, I think, a web of facts. Any know-how from science comes not from the “science” itself but from the interaction of a scientist with the science.

2. What strikes me is just how deeply ingrained our view of permanence is, and this is where Buddhist practitioners can often go wrong when they focus their practice around simply making statements like “this is not me” or “this is impermanent”. Those are taken as stable facts, whereas the practice is, in some sense, aimed at coming to understand that stable facts about the world do not exist. It’s not that those statements are wrong, but rather that they are being applied on the wrong level, in the same way that saying “this is pedaling” while sitting on a chair is entirely different from actually pedaling on a bike. Permanence and impermanence are embodied phenomena, and we must embody them to understand them.

3. This isn’t exactly what he says, but I think it follows from his conclusion, and going into why would veer this off track. Maybe in a future post!