Most of us have the basic intuition that, because the truth “always is what it is”—because reality is objective, universal, shared in some important way—then there shouldn’t really be different “kinds” of knowing: we either know, or we don’t know, and that’s that.  Knowledge, like truth, should be objective and invariable.

Yet many of us also have another intuition: sometimes, there really does seem to be “something different” about knowing, or about acquiring knowledge, in different ways.  For example, my knowledge of some bit of particle physics might have come through conducting laboratory experiments for myself, or through “armchair reasoning” from first principles, or through the testimony of some other person… and that other person might be a researcher at CERN, or might be my uncle who read something cool in a magazine over the weekend.

Or again, my knowledge of the challenges of urban poverty might come through reading (or conducting) a careful sociological study, or through engaging with a profound work of literature (think Charles Dickens and Upton Sinclair), or through having lived through it myself.

These differences seem to matter—even if we can’t quite explain why or how they matter.  And they make it hard to reconcile these two intuitions with each other.

Luckily for us, questions about the means, processes, and instruments of knowing have been front and center in the philosophies of India for most of the last two millennia.  And so philosophers from a wide array of Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, and materialist traditions have given us a robust toolkit of terms, concepts, and arguments for exploring precisely these issues.

In this workshop:

• We’ll apply some of those traditional tools, along with our own careful analytic skill, to see what we can salvage from both intuitions. 
• We’ll identify, as best we can, what each intuition gets right, as well as how they fit together in a coherent way. 
• Critically, we’ll learn to appreciate the difference between knowing, as an activity that we do, and knowledge, as a thing that we have.

Following our teachers in the classical Indian traditions, we’ll start simple, to consider the scope, limits, and interconnections of sense perception, testimony, and various forms of reasoning. 

• Do these different ways of knowing all give us access to the same array of objects?
• Or does each of them have a unique domain that’s entirely (or at least partly) its own? 

(Our guides will disagree on this question, in ways that will illuminate the issues much more clearly for us.)

Then, using the basic tools we’ve developed, we’ll move on to consider some trickier problems:

• What about special “expert” testimony, when someone claims epistemic (or even moral!) authority in matters of religion, science, or politics? 
• What about special kinds of experiences, like the ones that can result from profound meditation or magic mushrooms, and the mystical union or insight into emptiness that they might let us perceive?
• And what about ways of knowing that are established in and through the practices and traditions of particular cultures, communities, or families?