The Master's Proposition

Modern cultures neglect the role of non-propositional knowledge in our search for connection and meaning

In the last half-century, as societies grew richer and more decadent, we encountered a serious problem. The scientific mode, the ways of thinking and learning that unlocked the secrets to industrialization and prospering and new understanding of the universe, had limits. These limits included a neglect of the implicit ways we have of attending to world and ourselves. This ongoing neglect has resulted in the meaning crisis many experience in modern times. Environmental collapse, unfulfilling work, disconnectedness - these are symptoms of societies historically over-reliant on explicit ways of knowing and valuing. People are out of touch with their world.

Author and psychiatrist / philosopher Ian McGilchrist crystallised this problem for me a few years ago with his metaphor of the Master and the Emissary. The Emissary - the scientific fact-finder, the details, the grappler - is the left hemisphere mode of thinking, the realm of explicit knowledge. The Master is all the other ways of attending to the world - our contextualising, intuitive, creative, right-brain modes of thinking. McGilchrist’s great insight is that Western culture overemphasizes the role of the Emissary over that of the Master.

This is not to bash scientific advance, but rather to allow a wider framework to explain why most definitions of “progress” seem hollow and material to us. Our collective left brains have made fantastic strides. In medicine, in material science, in physics and biology and sociology - we can manipulate and understand the world in transformative new ways. But this left brain cannot serve us adequately in other important ways.

In philosophies of living, in tending the embers of connection, we need wiser and more holistic modes of attention - non-verbal, bodily, social, expressive. The way we create meaning, the ways we connect to the world, the way we intuit and percieve - these are right-brain modes and we under-invest in their development.

The Ways of Knowing

University of Toronto psychologist, John Vervaeke, describes four categories of knowing:

1. Propositional - left-hemisphere attention: facts, belief, rules - explicit knowledge

2. Perspectival - how we orient to the world, prioritise, pay attention, order

3. Procedural - skills, know-how, intuition, embodied knowledge

4. Participatory - memory of cultural and biological interconnectedness, implicit knowledge of how to act in certain environments, and inplicit maps of the relationship between things

The first category: propositional knowledge, is where we are most comfortable. This is the world of explicit statements, theories, and such. Propositional knowledge contains logic, science, mathematics, and the so-called facts of history. Propositional knowledge contains scientific and social truths. Most of us think only of propositional knowledge when we’re asked what we know.

But there is so much more than the propositional. Non-propositional knowledge is the rest. It is the ice-berg under the tip of the propositional. Our brains are heavily stacked with the non-propositional, the non-explicit that comes with experience and our inherent genetic endowments. How we perceive, proceduralise, and participate with the world is the bulk of our cognition.

Think of the comedian on stage. He’d never be able to make the crowd laugh without the non-propositional. His brain is loaded with cues, reactions, and a sense of timing. Only his written jokes are the propositional knowledge, but in some ways this is the least important part of his act. I could take these words and flounder on that stage. Non-propositional ways of knowing homes narrative, embodied knowledge, intuition earned from experience, and implicit ways of operating in and attending to the world. From the non-propositional comes our creativity, our curiosity, and most of the ways we perceive and make sense of the world. Yet because we cannot describe the non-propositional well in this hyper-literate world, we relegate its importance.

We can describe non-propositional knowing, or have a theory thereof; but the causal mechanisms of non-propositional are inherently different to the propositional.

I reconcile Ian McGilchrist’s hemispheric model of attention to John Vervaeke’s four categories of knowing. The Emissary is propositional knowledge, the Master is the right-brained rest.

John Vervaeke calls for more ecologies of practice. We need more room to explore our non-propositional faculties for exploring the world. We need to legitimise things outside the current remit of education - and I say this as someone who greatly benefitted from the current systems of formal education.

I have come to acknowledge that filling heads with facts is insufficient. We need to open minds, to the many ways of attending, and to the value of our many hard-to-describe faculties for thriving in increasingly complex times.