My dog knows when I come home. She gets excited when my car pulls into the drive, but her excitement appears to be tempered by some caution. She waits for the car door to open, and hesitates while she stares at the newcomer. Then she bolts towards me, tail wagging, and begins pestering me to play ball.
Not being a scientist, I can give no account of complex neurological processes whereby my dog recognizes her owner as a tireless kicker of large soft balls. My description is purely anecdotal. I’m using it to illustrate a rather simple model of knowledge. An external event… an episode of research… a comparison of new information with stored data… and a conclusion.
What interests me, as a human animal, is where my knowing both coincides with and differs from this model.
On one level, I know my dog is my dog the way my dog knows I am me. But there are, I suspect, two distinctions that mark off human knowledge.
First, by all accounts humans have a unique (or uniquely developed) capacity for constructing virtual realities. We can draw on our memories to compose vivid, detailed and animated scenarios — so vivid, indeed, that they can evoke physical responses indistinguishable from those prompted by real events. We break out in a cold sweat at the thought of a tax audit. We’re sexually aroused by our own fantasies. We regret our past or worry about our future, and our entire experience of time is entirely contingent on this fictive space.
The capacity for virtual reality is the basis, or at least the necessary condition, for all human cultural, scientific and technological achievement. It also messes us up. By and large, we know well enough the difference between fantasy and reality. But on a submerged level — the level where physiological responses are equal for imaginary and real events — we may lose track of the distinction. The imaginary leaks into our perceptual field. We both see and invent our world.
This leakage actually allows us to know more than we know. I know it’s morning when sunlight fills my window. I know the earth goes around the sun in a quite different way, because this picture has been installed in the movie-theater of my mind. At dawn, the two knowings get merged, one in confirmation of my direct perception, the other in flat contradiction.
I know the earth goes around the sun because I was told so. And this opens the other distinction from animal knowledge: language. In as much as my knowledge is articulated in words, it is no longer exclusively mine. Nothing is. Language is inherently social. We are born into language, and the language of my thoughts is the language of others. It compromises my autonomy. So there is no strictly “personal knowledge” — all my knowing is infiltrated by the vast history and current evolution of the language I think in.
These two distinctions — imagined realities and language — give me a complex relation to whatever may be out there that exists independent of my knowing, so-called “reality”. No doubt there are many filters in the neurological processes that mediate my dog’s recognition of me. But in addition to those filters, I must always negotiate two more: my unceasing construction of virtual realities, and my dependence on a socially developed language.
The upshot, to my mind, is an inescapable principle of uncertainty in all human knowledge.
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Incidentally, this little sketch corresponds, in a sketchy way, to a triad familiar to readers of the psychoanalyst Jacque Lacan: the symbolic, the imaginary and the real.