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Longing to Know: The Philosophy of Knowledge for Ordinary People
We don't often think about the act of knowing, but if we do, the question of what we know and how we know it becomes murky indeed. Longing to Know is a book about knowing how we know things, knowing how we know people, and knowing how we know God.
This book is for those who are considering Christianity for the first time, as well as Christians who are struggling with issues related to truth, certainty, and doubt. As such, it is a wonderful resource for evangelists, pastors, and counselors. This unique look at the questions of knowing is both entertaining and approachable. Questions for reflection make it ideal for students of philosophy and all those wrestling with the questions of knowledge.
This book is for those who are considering Christianity for the first time, as well as Christians who are struggling with issues related to truth, certainty, and doubt. As such, it is a wonderful resource for evangelists, pastors, and counselors. This unique look at the questions of knowing is both entertaining and approachable. Questions for reflection make it ideal for students of philosophy and all those wrestling with the questions of knowledge.
208 pages, Paperback
First published July 1, 2003
74 people are currently reading
444 people want to read
About the author
Esther Lightcap Meek
12 books56 followersEsther Lightcap Meek (BA, Cedarville College; MA, Western Kentucky University; PhD, Temple University) is Professor of Philosophy emeritus at Geneva College. She is a Makoto Fujimura Institute Scholar, a member of The Polanyi Society, and an Associate Fellow with the Kirby Laing Centre for Public Theology.
Esther is the author of four books and several publications which express philosophical insights in every-day language for all of us. She also gives courses, workshops and talks for high schools, colleges and graduate institutions, as well as for businesses, churches, and other organizations.
Esther is the author of four books and several publications which express philosophical insights in every-day language for all of us. She also gives courses, workshops and talks for high schools, colleges and graduate institutions, as well as for businesses, churches, and other organizations.
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January 3, 2025
One of my favorite books of the year, and one whose ideas I see becoming a permanent fixture in my mind.
Why do we need to know how we know? I'm still not sure I can articulate a compelling reason, but I do know that it's an absolutely fascinating study and that this book was inspiring on many levels.
Esther Meek writes about a topic that could seem cold and sterile (I mean, "epistemology" is hardly a cozy word) with such warmth, grace, and kindness. I was not surprised to read that she receives many hugs from her students—the whole book felt like a hug! From a stylistic perspective alone it was instructive: word choice carries even more power than I had previously believed.
I'm always excited to read a philosopher describing, in minute detail, experiences I have had. And so it was delightful to see Meek unfold her definition of knowing and to feel that, point by point, it matched my experience of coming to know, figuring out, or learning (all aspects of knowing). And in coming to understand this theory of knowing, I felt immensely enriched, just as she describes: like the whole world with endless possibilities had opened up to me. And that it is a gift directly from God. And that my proper response is worship.
I spent a lot of time chewing over her discussion of learning: it involves integrating new information or skill in with the old, which can result in a loss of focus (grasping the pattern that makes sense of everything) or a destabilizing of skill...until we master the new. I have experienced this destabilization over and over again as I've been learning to play the piano this fall. When I attempt a new piece or technique, it feels as though I can't play at all, as if all my skill and knowledge has completely deserted me. This insight—that learning new things is scary and makes you feel like you've lost the knowledge you already had—will profoundly affect my teaching. I will look with more compassion on my students. And it will also give me patience with myself as I try to learn new things.
Why do we need to know how we know? I'm still not sure I can articulate a compelling reason, but I do know that it's an absolutely fascinating study and that this book was inspiring on many levels.
Esther Meek writes about a topic that could seem cold and sterile (I mean, "epistemology" is hardly a cozy word) with such warmth, grace, and kindness. I was not surprised to read that she receives many hugs from her students—the whole book felt like a hug! From a stylistic perspective alone it was instructive: word choice carries even more power than I had previously believed.
I'm always excited to read a philosopher describing, in minute detail, experiences I have had. And so it was delightful to see Meek unfold her definition of knowing and to feel that, point by point, it matched my experience of coming to know, figuring out, or learning (all aspects of knowing). And in coming to understand this theory of knowing, I felt immensely enriched, just as she describes: like the whole world with endless possibilities had opened up to me. And that it is a gift directly from God. And that my proper response is worship.
I spent a lot of time chewing over her discussion of learning: it involves integrating new information or skill in with the old, which can result in a loss of focus (grasping the pattern that makes sense of everything) or a destabilizing of skill...until we master the new. I have experienced this destabilization over and over again as I've been learning to play the piano this fall. When I attempt a new piece or technique, it feels as though I can't play at all, as if all my skill and knowledge has completely deserted me. This insight—that learning new things is scary and makes you feel like you've lost the knowledge you already had—will profoundly affect my teaching. I will look with more compassion on my students. And it will also give me patience with myself as I try to learn new things.
June 23, 2023
In college (crazy that that's now past tense!), I’d feel a wave of frustration when people asked me what I was learning. I could usually spit out the thesis of an essay I was working on or summarize a book I’d just read but internally there would be this creeping sense of panic. What was I actually learning? Had I learned anything? Most importantly, and most terrifyingly, did I know anything?
Maybe you've heard of the five stages of learning or competence. Stage one is unconscious incompetence, where you don't know what you don't know. Stage two is conscience incompetence, where you're aware of how much you don't know. It’s quite an uncomfortable place to be but it means learning is happening, as a professor once reassured me when I tried to express the frustration I was feeling.
But my discomfort was more than just increasing awareness of how little I knew and how far I had to go. It was the fact that whatever it was I was learning, I couldn’t articulate. I could sense things taking shape inside of me, bubbling up from some underground cistern. I could feel their pressure and pulse but to begin to describe often felt beyond me. It was like my mind was clay on a potter’s wheel but I could not tell you whether the contours it was taking were smooth or rigid, circular or linear, elongated or squat. All I knew—actually, all I could say—was that the clay was there, and moving, and morphing.
And that was deeply dissatisfying to me. After all, what was the apparent goal of all my assignments but to be able to articulate neat and precise statements of fact and theory? A sharp, succinct thesis buttressed by relevant quotes—that’s the gold standard in academia. Sure, I could pull that together for a discrete assignments but I felt like my overall education was some fog-choked city whose skyline I could never quite make out.
I wish I had read this book then, and I'm very thankful for it now. Esther Meek’s whole premise is that confining knowledge to articulable statements is hurting us. (And yes, that’s an articulable statement! More on that later.) It's driving us to skepticism because, if there's anything postmodernism has taught us, it's that we can't be 100% sure of any argument or proof. Our experiences are always shaping (and often distorting) our understanding of things. The modernist trust in the mind, and the classic foundation of the forms, have been found wanting so what else are we left with but the disheartening idea that we can’t really know anything?
Meek says that we can know things, and we can do so with confidence. She also wants to say that we can know God. Her book is very pastoral in that sense, always bringing back these epistemological ideas to us and God—is it possible to even speak of knowing him? She says yes, and she says that the way we can know him or anything is by revising our model and definition of knowing.
As she puts the problem:
We think of knowledge as statements and proof. But here's another indicator of the misfit of this approach: If scientists had been so limited, no scientific discovery ever would have taken place. If students have been restricted to statements and proof, no learning ever would have taken place. For whatever the discovering and learning processes end up with, with respect to statements and certainty, they cannot possibly begin with statements and certainty. How can you verbalize your cluelessness? How can you verbalize your clues at the point at which you are guided by them? How can you make Justified statements about what you have yet to learn or discover? But learning and discovery occur regularly.
And her solution? Knowing is embodied and sensed, an active, ever-adapting effort. Here’s the definition that shapes the book:
Knowing is the responsible human struggle to rely on clues to focus on a coherent pattern and submit to its reality.
She breaks the book into four parts focused on a phrase in the sentence above. Each chapter is short and bite-sized, very manageable. If her teaching is anything like her writing, she must be amazing to have in the classroom. She's engaging, warm, and clear. She routinely reminds us where we are going, the problems and solutions we’ve already addressed, and how the current topic fits into the whole. At the end of each chapter are discussion questions. Normally I gloss over things like that, but I actually found them to be helpful in putting into practice the ideas of the chapter. I've seen some critiques that the book got a bit repetitive, and I would agree, but I think that’s a positive. It's still not a long book, and when she reiterates topics, she always does it in a slightly new context that helped further cement the idea and its ramifications.
Meek also uses some great analogies to explain what she’s talking about. The two most common (and most helpful to me) are:
1. Jeff, her car mechanic. Ah, Jeff. If you read this book you'll feel like you know him. From the beginning, Meek argues that the way in which we know our car mechanics is the same way—structurally—that we know God. Not because God and a car mechanic have anything in common necessarily but because the way in which we learn about and come to trust a car mechanic is the same way in which we learn about and come to trust God.
2. The Magic Eye. She also talks a lot about the optical illusion known as the Magic Eye, which at first looks like a jumble of repeating but insignificant colors and shapes but which, after looking at it for a while and taking in both the individual elements and the whole pattern, eventually reveals a particular picture, like of a pod of dolphins in the ocean.
When you know come to know anyone, you use a bunch of clues to shape a picture that you then act on. These clues come from a variety of sources but, crucially, they are not just logical premises that come upon us in a burst of mental enlightenment. They’re lived snippets gained by our bodies. For example, Meek brings her car to Jeff because it makes a strange sound when she breaks. After he works on it, it no longer makes the sound. From this and other experiences she begins to construct a picture of Jeff: someone who is skilled, reliable, trustworthy. She is beginning to know Jeff.
A key aspect of Meek’s proposed model of knowing is discarding the ideal of certainty. Such a standard is at odds with lived human experience; it reduces knowledge to a syllogistic code of ones and zeroes, yes or no answers only. As she says:
When we speak of epistemic success, truth claims that engage the real, the notion of an exhaustive certainty or justification is not only impossible, it is unwanted. It doesn't do justice to the rich fabric of human experience, rooted as it is in our bodies and connecting us to a three-dimensional world and all of it emotion through time oriented toward the future.
I suggest that a better term is confidence. And when I say confidence, I picture St Louis Cardinals outfielder J.D. Drew hurtling horizontally over the turf to intercept a line drive. Confidence accredits the effort to know in light not only of the reasons we are able to articulate but also the multitudinous features that we can't put into words, from our felt body sense to our sense of future horizons.
No, Meek can never be 100% sure that Jeff won’t break her car. But she can be highly confident that he will take good care of it—confident enough that she regularly trusts her life to him as she drives a car he’s worked on.
This quote puts her model of knowledge so well: “We can describe our knowing as unlocking the world. Our coherent pattern corresponds to the real as a key does to a door, not as a photograph does to its subject.”
Note that Meek still talks about the existence of—and access to!—“the real.” I think when people hear a lot of talk about knowing being rooted in our personal, embodied experiences, all they hear is subjectivism. But Meek argues that this individual aspect of knowing a) is how we know the external, objective reality and b) also cannot be divorced from community and authority.
A quote on the first point: “We need to reinterpret this personal human effort, not as the barrier that prevents knowing but as the situatedness in the world that is just our strategic access to it. We don't need a beachhead; we already are one. And our situated efforts then get repaid in the telltale dividends of the real.”
And on the second: “[E]ach of us, situated as we are at different vantage points with respect to the real, can contribute unique insights. but we should expect that working together will give us a fuller picture. And that's where articulating and justifying our beliefs together comes into play, relying judiciously on authoritative guides, expanding our horizons, and increasing our grasp on the real.”
To address the seeming contradiction I brought up earlier, how can I be writing statements about how knowledge is more than statements? Because we can articulate some knowledge. It’s not that knowledge is not premises and conclusions—it’s that those things are not all it is and that those things only come after we come to know. We can only articulate what we already know, and we always know more than we can articulate.
There’s so much I could touch on, but I’ll settle for two topics. The first is her chapter on making mistakes and knowing wrongly. As I read, I wondered if she would bring up the possibility of picking out the wrong pattern or trying to force the clues into a pattern but doesn't work. And she does. Of course that happens, she says, but it shouldn't make us doubtful in our ability to know anything or discouraged in the attempt. instead, we have to remember that “knowing is a skill.” Like any skill, the more you work at it, and the better your guides in it, the better you will be at it.
I found this so encouraging: “The fact that I can be wrong about my mechanic’s reliability means I can move toward being right.” It also means that the mistaken impressions I may have had aren't completely wasted. I just have to go back to the clues, to the particulars, and see what other patterns they can make. I just have to keep living, keep letting those as-yet-inarticulable clues percolate and simmer. The pattern is there; life is a journey of discovery.
The second topic I really enjoyed was the idea of submitting to the reality of the pattern once you see it. Just as gleaning and sorting through and looking along the clues is an embodied act, so is what we do with the pattern. It's not just a doctrine we can hold to intellectually or be content to think about. If a thing is true, it should impact how you live. And the more you live according to what it reveals, the more you'll know it—it’s a lived hermeneutical spiral.
I’ve been so afraid of knowledge accumulating in my mind so that I stagger around with this invisible, top-heavy crown that does no one any good but simply weighs down my shoulders with a misplaced sense of significance. But if knowing is as Meek describes it, it both derives from and profoundly impacts my every deed—the neighbors I pass on my way to work, the books I read, the meals I cook. This is weighty but also wondrous:
If knowing is as I have described it here, then knowing just is the stewardship, the responsible care and cultivation of the earth that is our calling and our identity as humans. It is the very thing we were made to do. Knowing is something people do with reality. It grows naturally out of our situatedness in the world, it vectors us toward the world, it shapes the world even as it responds to it. Good, responsible knowing brings blessing, shalom; irresponsible knowing brings curse.
If you’ve ever felt caught between the Scylla and Charybdis of subjectivism and skepticism—if you doubted if you can know anything or you’ve doubted that you can know God—if you want to know him better—if you, like me, wonder if you’ve learned anything because you can’t really describe it—read this book. It packs a punch, and I’ll be chewing on it for a long time to come.
I’ll leave you with some of her ending words:
Actually, I think God is involved not just in our knowing him, but in our knowing anything at all— auto mechanics, copperheads, golf swings, Spanish, and the Pythagorean theorem. When knowing happens in the world is truthfully engaged, God has been at work. The integrative act is very much a human struggle. But we know full well the struggle never guarantees the results. Even for the highly skilled, the knower finds himself or herself humbled by the mystery and blessing of a coherent pattern no antecedents could fully determine. The pattern meets us. This is, profoundly, God's world.
People whom God knows rightly experience terror. But people cauterized by the coals of such an encounter also know the blessing of his steadfast love.
The world is big and deep, wide and long—but so is the love of Christ. The effort and risk involved in real knowing might be paralyzing, and what we discover might be petrifying, but for the character of the ultimate Knower, who made a world that’s knowable and humans to be able to know and learn and grow and discover and delight.
Maybe you've heard of the five stages of learning or competence. Stage one is unconscious incompetence, where you don't know what you don't know. Stage two is conscience incompetence, where you're aware of how much you don't know. It’s quite an uncomfortable place to be but it means learning is happening, as a professor once reassured me when I tried to express the frustration I was feeling.
But my discomfort was more than just increasing awareness of how little I knew and how far I had to go. It was the fact that whatever it was I was learning, I couldn’t articulate. I could sense things taking shape inside of me, bubbling up from some underground cistern. I could feel their pressure and pulse but to begin to describe often felt beyond me. It was like my mind was clay on a potter’s wheel but I could not tell you whether the contours it was taking were smooth or rigid, circular or linear, elongated or squat. All I knew—actually, all I could say—was that the clay was there, and moving, and morphing.
And that was deeply dissatisfying to me. After all, what was the apparent goal of all my assignments but to be able to articulate neat and precise statements of fact and theory? A sharp, succinct thesis buttressed by relevant quotes—that’s the gold standard in academia. Sure, I could pull that together for a discrete assignments but I felt like my overall education was some fog-choked city whose skyline I could never quite make out.
I wish I had read this book then, and I'm very thankful for it now. Esther Meek’s whole premise is that confining knowledge to articulable statements is hurting us. (And yes, that’s an articulable statement! More on that later.) It's driving us to skepticism because, if there's anything postmodernism has taught us, it's that we can't be 100% sure of any argument or proof. Our experiences are always shaping (and often distorting) our understanding of things. The modernist trust in the mind, and the classic foundation of the forms, have been found wanting so what else are we left with but the disheartening idea that we can’t really know anything?
Meek says that we can know things, and we can do so with confidence. She also wants to say that we can know God. Her book is very pastoral in that sense, always bringing back these epistemological ideas to us and God—is it possible to even speak of knowing him? She says yes, and she says that the way we can know him or anything is by revising our model and definition of knowing.
As she puts the problem:
We think of knowledge as statements and proof. But here's another indicator of the misfit of this approach: If scientists had been so limited, no scientific discovery ever would have taken place. If students have been restricted to statements and proof, no learning ever would have taken place. For whatever the discovering and learning processes end up with, with respect to statements and certainty, they cannot possibly begin with statements and certainty. How can you verbalize your cluelessness? How can you verbalize your clues at the point at which you are guided by them? How can you make Justified statements about what you have yet to learn or discover? But learning and discovery occur regularly.
And her solution? Knowing is embodied and sensed, an active, ever-adapting effort. Here’s the definition that shapes the book:
Knowing is the responsible human struggle to rely on clues to focus on a coherent pattern and submit to its reality.
She breaks the book into four parts focused on a phrase in the sentence above. Each chapter is short and bite-sized, very manageable. If her teaching is anything like her writing, she must be amazing to have in the classroom. She's engaging, warm, and clear. She routinely reminds us where we are going, the problems and solutions we’ve already addressed, and how the current topic fits into the whole. At the end of each chapter are discussion questions. Normally I gloss over things like that, but I actually found them to be helpful in putting into practice the ideas of the chapter. I've seen some critiques that the book got a bit repetitive, and I would agree, but I think that’s a positive. It's still not a long book, and when she reiterates topics, she always does it in a slightly new context that helped further cement the idea and its ramifications.
Meek also uses some great analogies to explain what she’s talking about. The two most common (and most helpful to me) are:
1. Jeff, her car mechanic. Ah, Jeff. If you read this book you'll feel like you know him. From the beginning, Meek argues that the way in which we know our car mechanics is the same way—structurally—that we know God. Not because God and a car mechanic have anything in common necessarily but because the way in which we learn about and come to trust a car mechanic is the same way in which we learn about and come to trust God.
2. The Magic Eye. She also talks a lot about the optical illusion known as the Magic Eye, which at first looks like a jumble of repeating but insignificant colors and shapes but which, after looking at it for a while and taking in both the individual elements and the whole pattern, eventually reveals a particular picture, like of a pod of dolphins in the ocean.
When you know come to know anyone, you use a bunch of clues to shape a picture that you then act on. These clues come from a variety of sources but, crucially, they are not just logical premises that come upon us in a burst of mental enlightenment. They’re lived snippets gained by our bodies. For example, Meek brings her car to Jeff because it makes a strange sound when she breaks. After he works on it, it no longer makes the sound. From this and other experiences she begins to construct a picture of Jeff: someone who is skilled, reliable, trustworthy. She is beginning to know Jeff.
A key aspect of Meek’s proposed model of knowing is discarding the ideal of certainty. Such a standard is at odds with lived human experience; it reduces knowledge to a syllogistic code of ones and zeroes, yes or no answers only. As she says:
When we speak of epistemic success, truth claims that engage the real, the notion of an exhaustive certainty or justification is not only impossible, it is unwanted. It doesn't do justice to the rich fabric of human experience, rooted as it is in our bodies and connecting us to a three-dimensional world and all of it emotion through time oriented toward the future.
I suggest that a better term is confidence. And when I say confidence, I picture St Louis Cardinals outfielder J.D. Drew hurtling horizontally over the turf to intercept a line drive. Confidence accredits the effort to know in light not only of the reasons we are able to articulate but also the multitudinous features that we can't put into words, from our felt body sense to our sense of future horizons.
No, Meek can never be 100% sure that Jeff won’t break her car. But she can be highly confident that he will take good care of it—confident enough that she regularly trusts her life to him as she drives a car he’s worked on.
This quote puts her model of knowledge so well: “We can describe our knowing as unlocking the world. Our coherent pattern corresponds to the real as a key does to a door, not as a photograph does to its subject.”
Note that Meek still talks about the existence of—and access to!—“the real.” I think when people hear a lot of talk about knowing being rooted in our personal, embodied experiences, all they hear is subjectivism. But Meek argues that this individual aspect of knowing a) is how we know the external, objective reality and b) also cannot be divorced from community and authority.
A quote on the first point: “We need to reinterpret this personal human effort, not as the barrier that prevents knowing but as the situatedness in the world that is just our strategic access to it. We don't need a beachhead; we already are one. And our situated efforts then get repaid in the telltale dividends of the real.”
And on the second: “[E]ach of us, situated as we are at different vantage points with respect to the real, can contribute unique insights. but we should expect that working together will give us a fuller picture. And that's where articulating and justifying our beliefs together comes into play, relying judiciously on authoritative guides, expanding our horizons, and increasing our grasp on the real.”
To address the seeming contradiction I brought up earlier, how can I be writing statements about how knowledge is more than statements? Because we can articulate some knowledge. It’s not that knowledge is not premises and conclusions—it’s that those things are not all it is and that those things only come after we come to know. We can only articulate what we already know, and we always know more than we can articulate.
There’s so much I could touch on, but I’ll settle for two topics. The first is her chapter on making mistakes and knowing wrongly. As I read, I wondered if she would bring up the possibility of picking out the wrong pattern or trying to force the clues into a pattern but doesn't work. And she does. Of course that happens, she says, but it shouldn't make us doubtful in our ability to know anything or discouraged in the attempt. instead, we have to remember that “knowing is a skill.” Like any skill, the more you work at it, and the better your guides in it, the better you will be at it.
I found this so encouraging: “The fact that I can be wrong about my mechanic’s reliability means I can move toward being right.” It also means that the mistaken impressions I may have had aren't completely wasted. I just have to go back to the clues, to the particulars, and see what other patterns they can make. I just have to keep living, keep letting those as-yet-inarticulable clues percolate and simmer. The pattern is there; life is a journey of discovery.
The second topic I really enjoyed was the idea of submitting to the reality of the pattern once you see it. Just as gleaning and sorting through and looking along the clues is an embodied act, so is what we do with the pattern. It's not just a doctrine we can hold to intellectually or be content to think about. If a thing is true, it should impact how you live. And the more you live according to what it reveals, the more you'll know it—it’s a lived hermeneutical spiral.
I’ve been so afraid of knowledge accumulating in my mind so that I stagger around with this invisible, top-heavy crown that does no one any good but simply weighs down my shoulders with a misplaced sense of significance. But if knowing is as Meek describes it, it both derives from and profoundly impacts my every deed—the neighbors I pass on my way to work, the books I read, the meals I cook. This is weighty but also wondrous:
If knowing is as I have described it here, then knowing just is the stewardship, the responsible care and cultivation of the earth that is our calling and our identity as humans. It is the very thing we were made to do. Knowing is something people do with reality. It grows naturally out of our situatedness in the world, it vectors us toward the world, it shapes the world even as it responds to it. Good, responsible knowing brings blessing, shalom; irresponsible knowing brings curse.
If you’ve ever felt caught between the Scylla and Charybdis of subjectivism and skepticism—if you doubted if you can know anything or you’ve doubted that you can know God—if you want to know him better—if you, like me, wonder if you’ve learned anything because you can’t really describe it—read this book. It packs a punch, and I’ll be chewing on it for a long time to come.
I’ll leave you with some of her ending words:
Actually, I think God is involved not just in our knowing him, but in our knowing anything at all— auto mechanics, copperheads, golf swings, Spanish, and the Pythagorean theorem. When knowing happens in the world is truthfully engaged, God has been at work. The integrative act is very much a human struggle. But we know full well the struggle never guarantees the results. Even for the highly skilled, the knower finds himself or herself humbled by the mystery and blessing of a coherent pattern no antecedents could fully determine. The pattern meets us. This is, profoundly, God's world.
People whom God knows rightly experience terror. But people cauterized by the coals of such an encounter also know the blessing of his steadfast love.
The world is big and deep, wide and long—but so is the love of Christ. The effort and risk involved in real knowing might be paralyzing, and what we discover might be petrifying, but for the character of the ultimate Knower, who made a world that’s knowable and humans to be able to know and learn and grow and discover and delight.
October 22, 2011
The author Esther Lightcap Meek teaches philosophy at Covenant Theological Seminary and has written this work as an introduction to epistemology for ordinary people. Her chief thesis is that knowing God is like knowing about ordinary things in life such as the auto mechanic. In fact, knowing the auto mechanic is a repeated illustration thoughout the book. Early in the book, Meek tackles the issue of Cartesian certainty and yet the nagging problem of skepticism, of how both are inadequate and problematic (I am in agreement with her here). She mentions that knowing and longing to know is a very human act. In her theory of knowledge, Meek is trying to account for learning that is more than just deduction. Operating from the presupposition that learning includes discovering new things, Meek makes the observation that logical deduction from certain premises to bring out a conclusion is not enough: humans do learn totally new sets of propositions, not just derived from propositions one already know. What I really enjoy was the author’s use of the Magic-Eye 3-D analogy as it relates to knowledge. We look at something, and we are trying to find subsidiaries, that is, clues. Focus is the goal of our learning, which she defined as trying to get a unified, coherent pattern. Meek stresses intergration (coherence) in the knowing process. This is also where Meek is able to bring in norms and authority in the equation of knowledge, since one needs “direction” in giving the value and “seeing” the pattern in subsidiaries. Her illustration from daily life in this regard, of her concern as a mother being skeptical of breastfeeding her baby for the first time with the “guidance” of the nurse is a beautiful imagery of how we need authoritative guide in the epistemic acts of every day affairs. Here I wished Meek could have discussed more the recognition of patterns: how do we have this knowledge of “patterns” beforehand? Seeing that the book attempts to bring the question of epistemology to bear on the issue of knowing God, I wished she could have taken a more explicit direction like that of Presuppositional Apologetics, where God is invoked as the one who provides the foundation for even identifying patterns and universals, etc., especially since she has been influenced by Presuppositionalists John Frame and James Grier. Meek’s theory of knowledge disavow correspondence theory of truth but embraces contact instead; certainty is disavowed and replaced with confidence. I wonder how different is “contact” over “correspondence,” and also how different is confidence is from non-Cartesian certainty. Overall, a good book, and readers must remember that the author's intention is not to answer everything about epistemology. The author is certainly taking into account modernism and postmodernism, foundationalism and relativism in her work. One might also have to look pass the repetition about how good her mechanic is—no doubt a good advertisement for Jeff the Mechanic!
April 1, 2022
Esther Lightcap Meek is a professor of philosophy emeritus at Geneva College, having received a PhD in philosophy from Temple University. Her dissertation was on the epistemology of Michael Polanyi, a Hungarian philosopher. Longing to Know: The Philosophy of Knowledge for Ordinary People, is her attempt not so much to explain Polanyi’s ideas of embodied knowing as to apply his insights to our coming to know God. This may sound like a potentially dry and boring read, but Meek is an incredibly gifted writer and teacher who makes complex epistemological ideas quite easy to grasp and follow. Her use of illustrations and metaphors is quite ingenious. She indeed writes for ordinary people.
Every day, we come to know things. We don’t reflect deeply about how this happens, but we are confident that it does. Meek sets out to answer how ordinary “acts of knowing” happen – and how they don’t. She does all of this through the lens of Polanyi, but firmly grounded in the Christian faith: “the Bible is God authoritatively telling us the way things are” (p.22), and “Scripture is God’s authoritatively guiding us to truth about himself, ourselves, and his world” (p.195).
Meek begins by examining -- and criticizing as unworkable -- the modernist model in which knowledge is that which can be expressed in depersonalized bits of information that lead, inferentially, to rationally certain propositions. This type of epistemology has, historically, led through cycles of certainty to despairing skepticism. “If … skepticism isn’t a fit, then something may be wrong with the assumptions that have shaped both it and classical and modern philosophy. Maybe we need to rethink what we man by knowledge” (p.32). The modernist model simply does not match up with our ordinary ways of coming to know things. “The misguided quest for certainty was in the end the very thing that blinded us to the substantial grounds we have for confidence in our efforts to engage the world” (p.181).
At heart, her alternative model of coming to know, focuses on our responsibility to struggle to make sense of what we experience in our lives, drawing coherent patterns from those experiences. This process she calls integration. It is our experience with the facts of the world that lead us to knowledge, not meditating on abstract and abstruse notions until we deduce certain truths. To know is to struggle to make sense of the data we receive (the clues) and find a coherent pattern in it. “It is not deduction. The integrative feat links otherwise unrelated particulars together in a pattern whose coherence far exceeds a logical consistency that we could express entirely in words” (p.75).
To come to know God, then, is like coming to know any friend you have ever had. You experience them, get to know them, learn more about them, and come to trust them. “Choosing an auto mechanic, determining to rely on him, is an act of coming to know. You gradually guild your sense of the auto mechanic’s skills and business practices out of contacts over time. Coming to know God is like this” (p.67).
Thinking and knowing are embodied, incarnated experiences in specific times, places, contexts, not disembodied, universal propositions floating free. The very way Meek makes her point throughout the books incarnates this understanding of coming to know. Her examples are of different ways people come to know things in real life. The illustration of her coming to know her auto mechanic mentioned above, which she uses throughout the book, was of great effect in exemplifying exactly what she is telling us about how we come to know.
Meek’s argument for coming to know God is rather pragmatic: it’s true, so just try it an you will see. She is very confident that a person who seeks to come to know God in the way she delineates will come to know him: “All those who have struggled to understand who he is by piecing together the pattern of their lives and of this world in light of Scripture’s guidance come to acknowledge the existence of a divine person who seriously outranks them” (p.150). Others might claim that his does not always hold true, but that does not negate the fact that it is a valuable to way to enter a growing relationship leading to knowledge.
Perhaps the critical issues posed against Christianity most directly related to Meek’s argument concern the ability to come to know God at all, specifically within a skeptical or postmodernist context. For anyone dealing with these issues in an apologetic conversation, Meek does offer some helpful ways to move the conversation forward using easily grasped and intuitively sensible illustrations.
Every day, we come to know things. We don’t reflect deeply about how this happens, but we are confident that it does. Meek sets out to answer how ordinary “acts of knowing” happen – and how they don’t. She does all of this through the lens of Polanyi, but firmly grounded in the Christian faith: “the Bible is God authoritatively telling us the way things are” (p.22), and “Scripture is God’s authoritatively guiding us to truth about himself, ourselves, and his world” (p.195).
Meek begins by examining -- and criticizing as unworkable -- the modernist model in which knowledge is that which can be expressed in depersonalized bits of information that lead, inferentially, to rationally certain propositions. This type of epistemology has, historically, led through cycles of certainty to despairing skepticism. “If … skepticism isn’t a fit, then something may be wrong with the assumptions that have shaped both it and classical and modern philosophy. Maybe we need to rethink what we man by knowledge” (p.32). The modernist model simply does not match up with our ordinary ways of coming to know things. “The misguided quest for certainty was in the end the very thing that blinded us to the substantial grounds we have for confidence in our efforts to engage the world” (p.181).
At heart, her alternative model of coming to know, focuses on our responsibility to struggle to make sense of what we experience in our lives, drawing coherent patterns from those experiences. This process she calls integration. It is our experience with the facts of the world that lead us to knowledge, not meditating on abstract and abstruse notions until we deduce certain truths. To know is to struggle to make sense of the data we receive (the clues) and find a coherent pattern in it. “It is not deduction. The integrative feat links otherwise unrelated particulars together in a pattern whose coherence far exceeds a logical consistency that we could express entirely in words” (p.75).
To come to know God, then, is like coming to know any friend you have ever had. You experience them, get to know them, learn more about them, and come to trust them. “Choosing an auto mechanic, determining to rely on him, is an act of coming to know. You gradually guild your sense of the auto mechanic’s skills and business practices out of contacts over time. Coming to know God is like this” (p.67).
Thinking and knowing are embodied, incarnated experiences in specific times, places, contexts, not disembodied, universal propositions floating free. The very way Meek makes her point throughout the books incarnates this understanding of coming to know. Her examples are of different ways people come to know things in real life. The illustration of her coming to know her auto mechanic mentioned above, which she uses throughout the book, was of great effect in exemplifying exactly what she is telling us about how we come to know.
Meek’s argument for coming to know God is rather pragmatic: it’s true, so just try it an you will see. She is very confident that a person who seeks to come to know God in the way she delineates will come to know him: “All those who have struggled to understand who he is by piecing together the pattern of their lives and of this world in light of Scripture’s guidance come to acknowledge the existence of a divine person who seriously outranks them” (p.150). Others might claim that his does not always hold true, but that does not negate the fact that it is a valuable to way to enter a growing relationship leading to knowledge.
Perhaps the critical issues posed against Christianity most directly related to Meek’s argument concern the ability to come to know God at all, specifically within a skeptical or postmodernist context. For anyone dealing with these issues in an apologetic conversation, Meek does offer some helpful ways to move the conversation forward using easily grasped and intuitively sensible illustrations.
June 16, 2021
I expected to like this book a lot more than I did.
I'm glad Professor Meek is calling her readers, as she has her students, away from silly, extreme versions of epistemology. She doesn't identify the "bad" epistemology (really, several different epistemologies) she opposes—could be Logical Positivism, could be a naïve empiricism, could be classical foundationalism more broadly—but, yes, it's still important to warn people away from the imperative and lure of certainty, of rationalism, and of dogmatism.
What she offers instead, however, is a curious attempt to relay Michael Polanyi's epistemology to beginners. (Meek wrote on Polanyi in her Temple University dissertation and has since written bigger books about it.) The exposition is at once too much (so many stories!) and too little (strikingly frequent opacities in expression). I imagine readers are encouraged, as I say, by her pounding away at too rigid and too harsh an epistemology, but it's difficult to see how serious scholarship can advance the way she describes knowing, or even a responsible layperson figuring out when she's right and when she's wrong about things that matter.
Strangest of all in a book by a Christian professor is a lack of any mention of the epistemological roles of Scripture as a peculiar and authoritative resource for the Christian (a role assumed, but nowhere detailed, in her book), or of the Holy Spirit, or of the Church. For that matter, the so-called noetic effects of sin surface occasionally, as do the effects of a less-than-optimal social location, but nowhere are they directly named or remedied.
As one who has taught epistemology and ethical reasoning for years, I was hoping this book would be much better than it is, possibly of use in a course. But I would need to be explaining and supplementing and correcting so much of it that I can't use it, and I can't recommend it—despite the glowing reviews others have given it.
I'm glad Professor Meek is calling her readers, as she has her students, away from silly, extreme versions of epistemology. She doesn't identify the "bad" epistemology (really, several different epistemologies) she opposes—could be Logical Positivism, could be a naïve empiricism, could be classical foundationalism more broadly—but, yes, it's still important to warn people away from the imperative and lure of certainty, of rationalism, and of dogmatism.
What she offers instead, however, is a curious attempt to relay Michael Polanyi's epistemology to beginners. (Meek wrote on Polanyi in her Temple University dissertation and has since written bigger books about it.) The exposition is at once too much (so many stories!) and too little (strikingly frequent opacities in expression). I imagine readers are encouraged, as I say, by her pounding away at too rigid and too harsh an epistemology, but it's difficult to see how serious scholarship can advance the way she describes knowing, or even a responsible layperson figuring out when she's right and when she's wrong about things that matter.
Strangest of all in a book by a Christian professor is a lack of any mention of the epistemological roles of Scripture as a peculiar and authoritative resource for the Christian (a role assumed, but nowhere detailed, in her book), or of the Holy Spirit, or of the Church. For that matter, the so-called noetic effects of sin surface occasionally, as do the effects of a less-than-optimal social location, but nowhere are they directly named or remedied.
As one who has taught epistemology and ethical reasoning for years, I was hoping this book would be much better than it is, possibly of use in a course. But I would need to be explaining and supplementing and correcting so much of it that I can't use it, and I can't recommend it—despite the glowing reviews others have given it.
January 29, 2023
- Knowing God requires being known by God.
- Knowing involves commitment, humility, respect, and patience.
- Knowing involves terror: “But don’t run. Seated on the back of a loving lion, as Lucy found, is the best of all possible places to be.”
- Knowing involves commitment, humility, respect, and patience.
- Knowing involves terror: “But don’t run. Seated on the back of a loving lion, as Lucy found, is the best of all possible places to be.”
November 11, 2019
This is an excellent book by Esther Meek on epistemology. But this is epistemology engaged towards a specific end: Can one know God? Yes, Meek answers. She argues that knowing God shares many aspects of what it means to know one's auto mechanic (this is her metaphor of choice in the book). Though that might sound trite, she does an excellent job of delving deep into that concept.
Meek's epistemology is shot through and through with Michael Polanyi's epistemological concepts. What I find refreshing is the way she engages (and shows faulty) many of the "default" epistemological concepts of Western culture. Certainty, she points out, is an illusion. And certainty is not how we actually engage knowing the world around us. A better foundational concept for knowing is confidence.
Of course, she explores this rather thoroughly in her book - I'm just giving highlights. This book was written before her Loving to Know, which is more a thorough presentation of her epistemology. This book is more her working out some of the initial concepts of what she ultimately develops into what she calls Covenantal Epistemology.
This was a great book and an easy read. Most chapters are about 5 pages long, with a few stretching to almost ten pages. I had fun just reading a chapter or so a day and chewing on her thoughts in between. The writing style is very conversational and I think anyone could understand it. I would recommend the book to all believers (and even non-believers), but it could be especially helpful for pastors and teachers.
Meek's epistemology is shot through and through with Michael Polanyi's epistemological concepts. What I find refreshing is the way she engages (and shows faulty) many of the "default" epistemological concepts of Western culture. Certainty, she points out, is an illusion. And certainty is not how we actually engage knowing the world around us. A better foundational concept for knowing is confidence.
Of course, she explores this rather thoroughly in her book - I'm just giving highlights. This book was written before her Loving to Know, which is more a thorough presentation of her epistemology. This book is more her working out some of the initial concepts of what she ultimately develops into what she calls Covenantal Epistemology.
This was a great book and an easy read. Most chapters are about 5 pages long, with a few stretching to almost ten pages. I had fun just reading a chapter or so a day and chewing on her thoughts in between. The writing style is very conversational and I think anyone could understand it. I would recommend the book to all believers (and even non-believers), but it could be especially helpful for pastors and teachers.
July 21, 2024
¿Podemos conocer la realidad? ¿Existe la realidad? ¿Si existe, Podemos conocer a Dios ?
LTK, Es un libro de epistemología (rama de la filosofía que estudia el conocimiento: su naturaleza, posibilidad, alcance y fundamentos) para principiantes, que muestra argumentos de la vida cotidiana para confirmar porque podemos conocer a otra persona, conocer la realidad, y finalmente conocer a Dios, como actos epistemicos de ver patrones, seguir instrucciones, o autoridades, e integrarlo a nuestra realidad son el antídoto para el escepticismo que nos sigue por el postmodernismo, y modernismo.
En especial pensar la profundidad de un patrón, y sus posibilidades, y como podemos tener contacto con unas partes de la realidad, además de confianza en un camino en lugar de certeza absoluta, hizo la parte 4 mi favorita.
"El conocimiento está ENCARNADO".
Mi queja con el libro sería la forma en que está redactado, como no profundiza en el método eje. el método científico.
//
LTK is a good book about how we can know, and how we access reality and finally came to know God, but at the end He is the one knowing Us, an loving Us. Also how knowing everything is and act of worship.
If we can´t know God, we can´t know anything at all. that let us with skepticism.
LTK, Es un libro de epistemología (rama de la filosofía que estudia el conocimiento: su naturaleza, posibilidad, alcance y fundamentos) para principiantes, que muestra argumentos de la vida cotidiana para confirmar porque podemos conocer a otra persona, conocer la realidad, y finalmente conocer a Dios, como actos epistemicos de ver patrones, seguir instrucciones, o autoridades, e integrarlo a nuestra realidad son el antídoto para el escepticismo que nos sigue por el postmodernismo, y modernismo.
En especial pensar la profundidad de un patrón, y sus posibilidades, y como podemos tener contacto con unas partes de la realidad, además de confianza en un camino en lugar de certeza absoluta, hizo la parte 4 mi favorita.
"El conocimiento está ENCARNADO".
Mi queja con el libro sería la forma en que está redactado, como no profundiza en el método eje. el método científico.
//
LTK is a good book about how we can know, and how we access reality and finally came to know God, but at the end He is the one knowing Us, an loving Us. Also how knowing everything is and act of worship.
If we can´t know God, we can´t know anything at all. that let us with skepticism.
July 5, 2019
Some paradigm-shifting stuff here. Basically, Meek argues that all human knowing is inductive, including our knowledge of God—that knowledge is more like a constellation of corresponding clues grounded in human experience than a list of lucid premises leading to an airtight conclusion. This, she says, gets us past epistemic issues wrought by modernists surrounding certainty and rational belief, as well as postmodern relativism or subjectivism.
Very helpful, but awkwardly written (or edited): weirdly casual at some points, and esoteric at others. Meek is an academic trying to reach “ordinary people,” but I found the tone/diction confusing. That said, definitely going to check out her larger, academic treatment on epistemology! I’m intrigued!
Very helpful, but awkwardly written (or edited): weirdly casual at some points, and esoteric at others. Meek is an academic trying to reach “ordinary people,” but I found the tone/diction confusing. That said, definitely going to check out her larger, academic treatment on epistemology! I’m intrigued!
September 4, 2024
I really like the content. But you had to dig a bit to get synthesizing statements. (I listened to the audiobook so maybe that was the problem!)
September 27, 2022
This book is wonderful, but I would not approach it as a philosophical account of knowledge. It is almost like a meditation on the knowing act. It is best seen as asking one to know from a different angle.
Main idea: What is knowledge? Knowledge is the responsible human struggle to rely on clues to focus on a coherent pattern and submit to its reality. With this definition she upholds the traditional view of knowledge as correspondence and justified, true belief. Such views, necessary as they are, are inadequate. Applied strictly, very little of our knowing would count as knowledge, and that would exclude most bodily acts of knowing. On the other hand, coherence models, while purporting to embrace the bodily dimension of knowledge, often fail to provide any knowledge. Esther Lightcap Meek goes beyond both models with her vision of integrating clues into a larger pattern.
We can look at the problem another way. We all know of those “Aha!” moments in our knowing. That is when we make the leap from the unknown to the known (a problem that Plato’s Meno could not solve). For Meek, that seems to be knowledge. My only quibble is that much of our knowing does not have this “Aha!” moment, but the idea itself is sound.
Knowing
Thesis: the act of knowing as traditionally understood implies success. It means I have achieved truth by meeting certain conditions for knowledge and/or certainty.
Week has a colorful way of summarizing Western philosophy: if Western civilization was born in Athens, then skepticism was its cradle. We tend to think of Plato as promoting eternal truths. He certainly did. The way he did so, however, presupposed skepticism. If knowledge is justified, true belief, then in order for someone to know something, he or she has to prove he knows it. As Meek says, “We don’t simply want to be sure, we also demand to be shown.”
As Week has elegantly said in other works, knowing is a “coming-to” reality. It involves the “Aha!” moment. It has a “from-to” structure. This “from-to” is the subsidiary or particulars.. We move from the subsidiary to the focal. She illustrates this by one of those “3-D” pictures where you have to look at it for a while before the image appears.
Meek suggests this form of knowing is “embodied.” That is true for many aspects of knowing, but it is hard to see (no pun intended) how knowing God would be embodied.
Knowledge as Vector
“Knowing vectors us through the world and also vectors us through time. Call it ‘being on the way to knowing.’ Knowing is a longing, a leaning into the world.” Indeed, earlier she says, “If a statement is a dot, the act of knowing is a vector to and throw the dot.” We can also see the dots as subsidiaries. The act of knowing gets us through the subsidiaries and into the focus.
Integration > coherence
Coherence models of truth cohere like flour in a measuring cup. They might fit, but they tell you nothing about knowledge. Integration is like flour as it is in rising yeast. Integration is knowledge transformed.
Doubting the Doubts
Going through doubts is akin to going through a batting slump in baseball. The goal is to get beyond the subsidiaries and back to the focal. Many, but perhaps not all, of our doubts are when we get stuck in the subsidiaries and never see the picture. I do not mean this in a cliched sort of way. For one reason or another, a doubter is not able to focus on the key picture.
As some reviewers noted, Meek’s comments on “certainty” are a bit unguarded. I agree with her that a God’s-eye certainty is neither possible nor desirable. Indeed, as one Reformed author cogently argued, it is also illegitimate. That kind of certainty is not what God promised his children. On the other hand, a finite sort of certainty is certainly commendable. With that aside, this is a wonderful, even healing type of book.
Main idea: What is knowledge? Knowledge is the responsible human struggle to rely on clues to focus on a coherent pattern and submit to its reality. With this definition she upholds the traditional view of knowledge as correspondence and justified, true belief. Such views, necessary as they are, are inadequate. Applied strictly, very little of our knowing would count as knowledge, and that would exclude most bodily acts of knowing. On the other hand, coherence models, while purporting to embrace the bodily dimension of knowledge, often fail to provide any knowledge. Esther Lightcap Meek goes beyond both models with her vision of integrating clues into a larger pattern.
We can look at the problem another way. We all know of those “Aha!” moments in our knowing. That is when we make the leap from the unknown to the known (a problem that Plato’s Meno could not solve). For Meek, that seems to be knowledge. My only quibble is that much of our knowing does not have this “Aha!” moment, but the idea itself is sound.
Knowing
Thesis: the act of knowing as traditionally understood implies success. It means I have achieved truth by meeting certain conditions for knowledge and/or certainty.
Week has a colorful way of summarizing Western philosophy: if Western civilization was born in Athens, then skepticism was its cradle. We tend to think of Plato as promoting eternal truths. He certainly did. The way he did so, however, presupposed skepticism. If knowledge is justified, true belief, then in order for someone to know something, he or she has to prove he knows it. As Meek says, “We don’t simply want to be sure, we also demand to be shown.”
As Week has elegantly said in other works, knowing is a “coming-to” reality. It involves the “Aha!” moment. It has a “from-to” structure. This “from-to” is the subsidiary or particulars.. We move from the subsidiary to the focal. She illustrates this by one of those “3-D” pictures where you have to look at it for a while before the image appears.
Meek suggests this form of knowing is “embodied.” That is true for many aspects of knowing, but it is hard to see (no pun intended) how knowing God would be embodied.
Knowledge as Vector
“Knowing vectors us through the world and also vectors us through time. Call it ‘being on the way to knowing.’ Knowing is a longing, a leaning into the world.” Indeed, earlier she says, “If a statement is a dot, the act of knowing is a vector to and throw the dot.” We can also see the dots as subsidiaries. The act of knowing gets us through the subsidiaries and into the focus.
Integration > coherence
Coherence models of truth cohere like flour in a measuring cup. They might fit, but they tell you nothing about knowledge. Integration is like flour as it is in rising yeast. Integration is knowledge transformed.
Doubting the Doubts
Going through doubts is akin to going through a batting slump in baseball. The goal is to get beyond the subsidiaries and back to the focal. Many, but perhaps not all, of our doubts are when we get stuck in the subsidiaries and never see the picture. I do not mean this in a cliched sort of way. For one reason or another, a doubter is not able to focus on the key picture.
As some reviewers noted, Meek’s comments on “certainty” are a bit unguarded. I agree with her that a God’s-eye certainty is neither possible nor desirable. Indeed, as one Reformed author cogently argued, it is also illegitimate. That kind of certainty is not what God promised his children. On the other hand, a finite sort of certainty is certainly commendable. With that aside, this is a wonderful, even healing type of book.
October 27, 2022
This is a great book about an epistemological framework put forward by Michael Polanyi, Nobel prize winning research scientist. Esther Lightcap Meek is his most lucid proponent today. In this book, she speaks about how it is fully rational to claim to j ow God. In short, she argues that knowing God is much like knowing (and trusting) your auto mechanic.
I cannot emphasize how important this epistemological framework is for our time. Leslie Newbigin’s much read (in the evangelical world) Proper Confidence hints at this model but only makes several suggestions; it is not “codified” and organized. Dr. Lightcap Meek makes Polanyi’s work accessible to a popular audience in this book.
Just speak of my own professional world, speaking with the average psychologist today involved several whiplashes epistemologically. When speaking of science, psychologist reflexively understands that “proof” and certainty are impossible in the scientific venture. We have theories and beliefs which we can hold with increasing confidence. moments later, the psychologist will speak about some professional ideas that are supported by a modest handful of studies (with low effect sizes) as being PROVEN and certain, particularly in areas that touch social matters. The next minute, conversation touching on religious matters is summarily rejected due to there being no “proof” for these beliefs, shunting all religious truth conversations to the realm of private reflection. Moments later, the psychologist will bring up existential ideas and claim these philosophical ideas as being beyond doubt. Moments later, since psychologist will speak about how truth is impossible to know and will share how each person must find their own authentic truth that works for them in this post modern age. As this person speaks, every head in the room nods in agreement.
Dr. Lightcap Meek’s epistemological framework brings corrections to modernism’s need for certainty, also encouraging its desire to seek and carefully test truth claims. Dr Lightcap Meek praises postmodernism’s desire to bring light to duplicity and value diverse people’s take on ideas and situations. Truth is best known in conversation with diverse others. However, Dr. Lightcap Meek also displays how post modern people are tremendously duplicitous with their philosophical theories of knowledge. Nobody lives their life based on these post modern ideas as they go about their day-to-day life! Dr. Lightcap Meek spells out a consistent, realistic theory of knowledge that can help us to value rationality, body experience, the scientific enterprise, relationships, developed skills, our “feel” for areas of mastery, and the various “hints” we test and follow in our daily life.
Read this book and be at greater peace as you passionately pursue truth!
I cannot emphasize how important this epistemological framework is for our time. Leslie Newbigin’s much read (in the evangelical world) Proper Confidence hints at this model but only makes several suggestions; it is not “codified” and organized. Dr. Lightcap Meek makes Polanyi’s work accessible to a popular audience in this book.
Just speak of my own professional world, speaking with the average psychologist today involved several whiplashes epistemologically. When speaking of science, psychologist reflexively understands that “proof” and certainty are impossible in the scientific venture. We have theories and beliefs which we can hold with increasing confidence. moments later, the psychologist will speak about some professional ideas that are supported by a modest handful of studies (with low effect sizes) as being PROVEN and certain, particularly in areas that touch social matters. The next minute, conversation touching on religious matters is summarily rejected due to there being no “proof” for these beliefs, shunting all religious truth conversations to the realm of private reflection. Moments later, the psychologist will bring up existential ideas and claim these philosophical ideas as being beyond doubt. Moments later, since psychologist will speak about how truth is impossible to know and will share how each person must find their own authentic truth that works for them in this post modern age. As this person speaks, every head in the room nods in agreement.
Dr. Lightcap Meek’s epistemological framework brings corrections to modernism’s need for certainty, also encouraging its desire to seek and carefully test truth claims. Dr Lightcap Meek praises postmodernism’s desire to bring light to duplicity and value diverse people’s take on ideas and situations. Truth is best known in conversation with diverse others. However, Dr. Lightcap Meek also displays how post modern people are tremendously duplicitous with their philosophical theories of knowledge. Nobody lives their life based on these post modern ideas as they go about their day-to-day life! Dr. Lightcap Meek spells out a consistent, realistic theory of knowledge that can help us to value rationality, body experience, the scientific enterprise, relationships, developed skills, our “feel” for areas of mastery, and the various “hints” we test and follow in our daily life.
Read this book and be at greater peace as you passionately pursue truth!
September 11, 2024
Eché chisme con doña Esther y de paso discutimos sobre epistemología.
Una hermosa aplicación del caracter personal de Dios expresado en la creación entera, en particular el conocimiento y los "actos de llegar a conocer". Está escrito de manera accesible, ideal para quienes no tenemos un gran trasfondo filosófico pero sí muchas preguntas. Un libro que responde preguntas, pero lanza muchas devuelta. Dotado de mil analogías, cubre el conocimiento en dimensiones bastante abstractas y prácticas en las que se dedica a criticar tajantemente "el mito de la certeza".
Tuve que volver a leer muchos capítulos porque no entendía ni pío de lo que hablaba pero eventualmente le pude coger el hilo lo cual hizo que todo fluyera. Sin embargo he de decir que desafió bastante mi nivel de inglés porque no sabía si estaba contando un dad joke, una anécdota (chisme <3) o definiendo un nuevo concepto en la teoría.
Claramente no es un libro académico y me encantó el formato de meditaciones personales. Aún así, iluminó muchos conceptos teóricos que hacen parte de otras teorías del conocimiento mientras hacía una diagonalzación entre algunas posturas modernas y posmodernas acerca de la naturaleza del conocimiento. Mientras leía el libro pude ver (incluso en contra de mi voluntad jaja) las implicaciones de este fértil modelo en mi mi vida académica y social. Pude constatar que la experiencia de llegar a conocer es profundamente humana y que un modelo ingenuo del conocimiento es simplemente dar coces contra el aguijón.
Muchas cosas más hay para decir y rumiar de este bello libro pero definitivamente hay un antes y un después de él incluso si no estoy de acuerdo con/no entiendo todo de lo que se habla. Puedo ver un gran horizonte en el que me devuelven la mirada. Gracias Cristo.
pd: shoutout a peter por la recomendación jaja
Una hermosa aplicación del caracter personal de Dios expresado en la creación entera, en particular el conocimiento y los "actos de llegar a conocer". Está escrito de manera accesible, ideal para quienes no tenemos un gran trasfondo filosófico pero sí muchas preguntas. Un libro que responde preguntas, pero lanza muchas devuelta. Dotado de mil analogías, cubre el conocimiento en dimensiones bastante abstractas y prácticas en las que se dedica a criticar tajantemente "el mito de la certeza".
Tuve que volver a leer muchos capítulos porque no entendía ni pío de lo que hablaba pero eventualmente le pude coger el hilo lo cual hizo que todo fluyera. Sin embargo he de decir que desafió bastante mi nivel de inglés porque no sabía si estaba contando un dad joke, una anécdota (chisme <3) o definiendo un nuevo concepto en la teoría.
Claramente no es un libro académico y me encantó el formato de meditaciones personales. Aún así, iluminó muchos conceptos teóricos que hacen parte de otras teorías del conocimiento mientras hacía una diagonalzación entre algunas posturas modernas y posmodernas acerca de la naturaleza del conocimiento. Mientras leía el libro pude ver (incluso en contra de mi voluntad jaja) las implicaciones de este fértil modelo en mi mi vida académica y social. Pude constatar que la experiencia de llegar a conocer es profundamente humana y que un modelo ingenuo del conocimiento es simplemente dar coces contra el aguijón.
Muchas cosas más hay para decir y rumiar de este bello libro pero definitivamente hay un antes y un después de él incluso si no estoy de acuerdo con/no entiendo todo de lo que se habla. Puedo ver un gran horizonte en el que me devuelven la mirada. Gracias Cristo.
pd: shoutout a peter por la recomendación jaja
January 30, 2025
If you are not super interested in philosophy or the idea of how we “know” something, you will probably struggle with the first three quarters of this book. That is how it was for me… BUT the last couple sections really drew my attention and made me glad I read this book (although I had to for school haha).
Here are a few nuggets that I particularly enjoyed (and if you want to explore more, this book would benefit you):
“Knowing is a longing, a leaning into the world, with a patient but confident expectation of reward.”
“Certainty is an illusion. Confidence is right. And doubting is not the same as unbelief.”
“Expect that in seeking to know God, you are no longer the one in pursuit. You are the pursued.”
Here are a few nuggets that I particularly enjoyed (and if you want to explore more, this book would benefit you):
“Knowing is a longing, a leaning into the world, with a patient but confident expectation of reward.”
“Certainty is an illusion. Confidence is right. And doubting is not the same as unbelief.”
“Expect that in seeking to know God, you are no longer the one in pursuit. You are the pursued.”
February 5, 2019
Esther Meek's thesis is interesting. Historically, knowledge is deductive, in other words you draw conclusions from premises. As a result, the framework upon which we claim to know God has developed in a similar way. However, in reality, knowing God is inductive, and is a lot like learning to trust an automechanic. It relies on integrating various links and clues that arise together in a pattern that has some cohesion. I found it to be a helpful framework.
I found Meek's writing to oscillate between utterly brilliant utterly rambly. The brilliant sections are 5 stars and the rambly sections are 2 stars.
I found Meek's writing to oscillate between utterly brilliant utterly rambly. The brilliant sections are 5 stars and the rambly sections are 2 stars.
November 9, 2019
The concept of knowing as a confidence in an integrated focus is a needed antidote to the two extremes of, sterile absolute certainty on one hand, and postmodern skepticism/relativism on the other. Our culture seems to be obsessed with the particulars and never looks beyond them. It’s no wonder it has abandoned God as he is what all the particulars are pointing toward. To borrow an analogy from the book: we’re obsessed with analyzing the hammer and never pick it up and swing it.
Most of the book was very helpful, but, at times, it was difficult to follow. I feel it could have been helped by more editing.
Most of the book was very helpful, but, at times, it was difficult to follow. I feel it could have been helped by more editing.
September 11, 2024
This is a hard one for me to rate. Longing to Know was assigned reading for one of my classes and I would have surely DNF’d after a few chapters had it not been required. Philosophy is not my forte and my mind struggles to wrap around the concepts, but I do think these writings are important for many. For the doubting and those grappling with faith, there needs to be a basic means of how to “know”. Meeks provides that here. It was painful for me to get through and I don’t recommend it for those like me who dislike philosophical texts, but I would highly recommend to anyone who does.
April 15, 2025
The West has inherited a misguided framework for knowledge from the enlightenment that doesn’t quite line up with reality. This is generally what Esther argues in this book. She argues for another way of knowing, one that is much more relational. Rather than looking within ourselves for guidance and truth, we must submit to some outside of ourselves (I.e. God). This act of knowing does not promise certainty but confidence in what we are submitting to. I’d recommend this book especially if you struggle with searching for certainty in the world/your faith!
December 28, 2024
I didn't quite connect with Meek's writing style in Longing to Know. I was intrigued by the ideas - a paradigm for how we understand knowing and learning. I think the main points would have been much clearer and the examples less overused in an article or essay. But I did learn lots about philosophy, the history and continuing work of, as well as challenged to ask bigger and better questions.
May 18, 2020
If you can get past the terrible writing you’ll find some gems of philosophy. The core of her argument is thought-provoking and solid - but the books drag on and on trying to turn something that could easily have been a journal article into a book.
April 29, 2024
Refreshingly unpretentious and helpful book. We wrongly posit certainty as a requirement to knowing but cannot. However, certainty, strictly speaking, is unnecessary to meaningful knowing. I am now off to read Meek's follow-up, "Loving to Know."
December 23, 2018
Great book!
January 11, 2019
Phenomenal book. So helpful in clearing the way to confident faith. I will return to this much I expect.
June 3, 2024
Outside of John Frame's Doctrine of the Knowledge of God, this is the best Christian work on epistemology I've read.
June 22, 2024
Excellent reflection on work of Polanyi to create an epistemology that makes sense of knowing God, humans.
February 20, 2025
Two things …
1. I can now use epistemology in a sentence.
2. Learning about learning hurts my brain. But very rewarding.
1. I can now use epistemology in a sentence.
2. Learning about learning hurts my brain. But very rewarding.
April 15, 2021
This fascinating book was one of the most impactful books I read this year, speaking to the complexity of knowing what is real in such a confusing and conspiratorial world.
On my blog, you can mind my more extended reviews of this excellent everyday epistemology:
https://bunaziua3.wixsite.com/website...
https://bunaziua3.wixsite.com/website...
On my blog, you can mind my more extended reviews of this excellent everyday epistemology:
https://bunaziua3.wixsite.com/website...
https://bunaziua3.wixsite.com/website...
November 20, 2013
Meek defines knowledge this way: "Knowing is the responsible human struggle to rely on clues to focus on a coherent pattern and submit to its reality." The major sections of her book are organized according to this definition, unpacking it phrase by phrase.
Knowing is the process of integration, by which we focus on a pattern by and through the means of various clues, called subsidiaries, in the world, our body-sense, and in our standards for thinking. Much of the pattern-making process is inarticulatable, and this more-than-words aspect of epistemic acts cannot be ignored, for it is crucial in our common, everyday process of knowing. Meek contributes to developing a sound Christian apologetic for handling the haunting existential crisis of doubt. She even applies this to the story of John the Baptist when he sends his disciples to ask Jesus if he is the one they were looking for (the Messiah) in Luke 7. She has some very rich pastoral applications.
I would recommend this book to any person interested in delving deeper into the area of epistemology. Reformed theologian and philosopher John Frame, in his review of the book says, “All in all, this is the best book on epistemology (let alone Christian epistemology) to come along in many, many years. It is a must for any serious student of the discipline and, indeed, for ordinary people who are trying to get clear on how to know God.”
Knowing is the process of integration, by which we focus on a pattern by and through the means of various clues, called subsidiaries, in the world, our body-sense, and in our standards for thinking. Much of the pattern-making process is inarticulatable, and this more-than-words aspect of epistemic acts cannot be ignored, for it is crucial in our common, everyday process of knowing. Meek contributes to developing a sound Christian apologetic for handling the haunting existential crisis of doubt. She even applies this to the story of John the Baptist when he sends his disciples to ask Jesus if he is the one they were looking for (the Messiah) in Luke 7. She has some very rich pastoral applications.
I would recommend this book to any person interested in delving deeper into the area of epistemology. Reformed theologian and philosopher John Frame, in his review of the book says, “All in all, this is the best book on epistemology (let alone Christian epistemology) to come along in many, many years. It is a must for any serious student of the discipline and, indeed, for ordinary people who are trying to get clear on how to know God.”
May 24, 2011
We have been reading this book for my philosophy course, and honestly, it was really difficult for me to understand and maybe it had to do with the fact that we had to read it really fast because its only a 3 week summer course, but overall I guess the content was good, just a lot to grasp. I didn't agree with a lot of what she was saying, but she offered a new perspective on this idea of how we know something, if we can truly know anything, and if we can know God. My favorite quote by her which I think you need to know before ever reading this book is "read through your eyelashes" meaning that your not going to have everything she says fully in focus right away. You may not be able to grasp the bigger picture or pattern, but you can look for the little clues along the way that form a pattern leading to the ultimate picture she is painting. iF you like philosophy then this might be a good book to check out for a new, fresh, perspective on things. I do like that it is from a woman philosopher because most of the time, the idea is that only men are philosophers, however there are woman out there who write on philosophical issues. Not alot, but some.
July 16, 2014
This is Esther Lightcap Meek's first book on epistemology. In it she explicates her theory on what it means to know, and especially considers whether God can be known. What does it mean to know? Can we know God? Is knowing God like knowing other things? Meeks comes to the conclusion that yes, we can in fact know God. Even more shockingly she finds that knowing God is just like knowing anyone else. Knowing God, actually, is a lot like knowing your auto-mechanic.
Some key insights:
- knowing anything is having an open and ongoing relationship with it
- knowing is not about certainty, but a confident encounter between us and the real
- knowing is something we can grow in
- knowing requires us to submit to what will be known
- knowing is very much more like a relationship with someone
The book itself could use some refining as far as organization and ease of reading goes, and is a little long. But that was all rectified in Meeks other book, "A Little Manual For Knowing". I really recommend you pick up both.
Some key insights:
- knowing anything is having an open and ongoing relationship with it
- knowing is not about certainty, but a confident encounter between us and the real
- knowing is something we can grow in
- knowing requires us to submit to what will be known
- knowing is very much more like a relationship with someone
The book itself could use some refining as far as organization and ease of reading goes, and is a little long. But that was all rectified in Meeks other book, "A Little Manual For Knowing". I really recommend you pick up both.
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