At Duke University, where I’ve had the privilege of serving for nearly two decades, our shared aspiration is to foster the intergenerational transmission of knowledge in service of individual, organizational, institutional, and societal flourishing.
But what exactly is knowledge?
4 MODES OF KNOWING
Cognitive scientist John Vervaeke offers a useful framework describing four modes of knowing: Propositional, Procedural, Perspectival, and Participatory.
Propositional knowledge is knowing that something is true. It inhabits the realm of facts and is provable.
Procedural knowledge is knowing how something works. It inhabits the realm of skill and agency.
Together, these two knowledge types form the foundation of scientific education and the backbone of productivity.
However, beyond what we can prove or perform lie two deeper modes of knowing, where the role of education is to comprehend what it means to be human.
Perspectival knowledge is knowing what it’s like. It is contextual and visceral. It’s the difference between reading a poem and being moved to tears by it.
Participatory knowledge is knowing by being and becoming. It’s about how we make meaning and feel connected to something larger than ourselves.
AN EPISTEMOLOGICAL FAULT LINE
Since their inception, universities have straddled an epistemological fault line where science pursues knowledge of what is through quantitative investigation, while the humanities explore what ought to be through qualitative inquiry. Over the past century, the balance has tipped decisively toward science.
Enter artificial intelligence (AI), whose superhuman capacity to process information and execute procedures further tips the epistemological scale decisively toward science.
If all we ask of this “god-like” technology we’ve created is to amplify what we already know and do, we risk sacrificing personhood in the name of progress. The true opportunity of AI is not merely to accelerate knowledge and action but to deepen our reflection on who we are and who we aspire to become. While science can show us how to pursue our goals more efficiently, it cannot tell us whether those goals are the right ones to pursue.
Educational institutions must prepare the next generation to integrate all four ways of knowing, not just the two that prioritize productivity. If we fail in this mission, the very institutions entrusted with igniting human potential instead will be complicit in extinguishing it.
