What do we mean by knowledge? The term is sometimes used as a synonym for information. In the United States, this book is one of a number of books on the “history of information,” implying a pragmatic approach, but in Britain a more common phrase is the “history of knowledge,” implying a concern with philosophical debates about the question How do we know? In similar fashion to the British, the French write the history of savoirs, and the Germans, that of Wissenschaft (referring to organized knowledge and not simply to natural science). Scholars who read Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, and other non-Western languages will be able to add to these examples. The studies themselves, though, often distinguish between information, which is relatively “raw,” and knowledge, which has been woven or “cooked”: in other words, transformed into a relatively finished product. Sometimes a third term is added, raw “data,” implying that information is half-cooked while knowledge is fully cooked. In any case, what is believed to be knowledge varies a great deal between places, periods, and social groups. In sixteenth-century Europe, for instance, it was virtually taken for granted that witches existed. As the Hungarian sociologist Karl Mannheim (1893–1947) argued, everyone’s knowledge is socially situated, shaped not only by personal experience but also by the surrounding culture.
Different kinds of knowledge are often distinguished—implicit and explicit, for instance, or knowing how and knowing that. The phrase “implicit knowledge,” sometimes known as “implicit memory,” refers to knowledge that has become habitual and so unconscious, to skills such as driving a car or making a pot, for example. Much practical knowledge or “know-how” takes this form, in contrast to knowledge that is explicit, academic, and often theoretical. Academic knowledge has often been described as “learning”; in German, Gelehrtheit, and in Latin, litterae, a term that was not confined to what we call “literature.” The *early modern phrase Respublica Litterarum is best translated not as the *“Republic of Letters” but as the “Commonwealth of Learning.”
Historians have long concerned themselves with explicit knowledge. Histories of philosophy go back to the seventeenth century, and histories of science to the nineteenth. What is new is the turn from concentrating on the history of academic knowledge (in German, Wissenschaftsgeschichte) to including all kinds of knowledge (Wissensgeschichte), thinking of knowledges in the plural rather than knowledge in the singular. Some scholars now concern themselves with the history of what they variously call “orders,” “regimes,” or “cultures” of knowledge, in short with the relation between different kinds of knowledge in a given place and time, including their hierarchies. In late medieval universities, for instance, theology was regarded (at least officially) as the queen of the sciences, in other words the highest form of knowledge, while the academic disciplines, known as the *liberal arts, were considered to be superior to “mechanical arts” such as weaving, cooking, or trade. Again, from the eighteenth century onward, some individuals and groups distinguished between what they called useful knowledge, which they regarded as superior, and knowledge for its own sake, which they rejected. The debate continues.
This expansion of interest in the varieties of knowledge has brought problems in its train. How, for example, can one write the history of implicit knowledges? Individuals acquire these knowledges by following the example of the already skilled, punctuated by a few words of advice, a process of learning that leaves no traces for historians to study. They have to work at one remove, reading how-to books on good manners, cookery, calligraphy, medicine, diplomacy, building, and so on; examining artifacts, the deposits of past skills, like archaeologists; or observing skills in the present, like anthropologists, and then trying to adjust what has been observed to the technologies and mentalities current in earlier centuries.
The example of skills vividly reveals how knowledges are created, transmitted, and refined. Other kinds of knowledge can also be studied in this way. In what follows I shall concentrate on the processes that have transformed relatively raw data or information into knowledge. These processes, which vary according to the kind of knowledge that is sought, may be summarized, roughly, as gathering, storing, verifying, and analyzing.
Gathering the data that will be turned into knowledge is already a form of processing, since it involves selection as well as accumulation. It has taken many forms, including the literal gathering of plants for study, alongside catching butterflies, obtaining specimens of rock, excavating the remains of former cities, and so on. Collecting is a form of gathering objects, whether natural or the work of human hands, displayed in what were known as private *cabinets of curiosities in the seventeenth century or in public museums from the nineteenth century onward. Metaphorical gathering includes observation (of the stars, for instance, the symptoms of illness, or the behavior of animals and humans). Fieldwork is a convenient term to describe old practices that have become formal methods in a number of academic disciplines: archaeology, anthropology, botany, ethology, folklore, geography, geology, sociology. Gathering includes the interrogation of witnesses by inquisitors, detectives, colonial administrators, and anthropologists. Experiments may be viewed as a form of interrogation, famously described by Francis Bacon (1561–1626) as “putting Nature to the question,” in other words, torturing her in order to reveal her secrets.
The gathering of knowledge has become more and more systematic since the end of the Middle Ages. Offering a questionnaire to travelers or fieldworkers, a practice that became increasingly common from the seventeenth century onward, encouraged a focus on what was relevant for a particular purpose. Scientific expeditions, rare in the sixteenth century, multiplied from the later eighteenth century onward, the age of Captain Cook’s voyage to the South Seas (1768–71) and that of Alessandro Malaspina to the Americas, from the Falklands to Alaska (1789–94). In the nineteenth century, expeditions were launched to study the depths of the oceans, and in the late twentieth century, into space. These expeditions, often funded by governments, illustrate both the cooperation and the competition between nations in discovering the secrets of nature and the resources of the earth. They returned with many specimens—animal, vegetable, and mineral—many of them still to be seen in museums. Scientists also became increasingly concerned to measure what they observed. On his expedition to Spanish America (1799–1804) Alexander von Humboldt took over forty varieties of measuring instrument, among them an altimeter to measure altitude, a hygrometer to measure rainfall, a magnetometer to measure the earth’s magnetic forces, and even a cyanometer to measure the blueness of the sky.
Selection continues in the later stages of processing knowledge. Indeed, different cultures may be regarded as so many systems of selection, sieves or filters that exclude some information because it is viewed as irrelevant or because it challenges the assumptions or the values of the culture. A second stage in the processing of knowledge is storing it in some retrievable form, from learning by rote or the use of mnemonics such as the khipus (clusters of colored and knotted strings) used in Peru before the Spanish conquest to different forms of writing, drawing, or photography. Putting knowledge in writing (textualization) facilitates retrieval, allowing the creation of major storehouses such as archives and libraries: the archive of Simancas, for instance, the Vatican Library in Rome, the Imperial Library in Vienna, and so on. It also facilitates classification. The process of textualization often goes through several stages, from the rough notes that journalists, doctors, detectives, diplomats, or anthropologists jot down on the spot to increasingly elaborate dispatches and reports. The translation into words of what is observed—like other forms of translation—involves a certain loss of knowledge, but this loss has been compensated, at least in part, by making sketches, plans, and maps and later by taking photographs.
Writing, especially after cheap paper became available in the West in early modern times, transformed the practice of government, making possible the early modern paper state in which written orders replaced oral ones. In similar fashion, writing transformed the practice of business. In both business and government, written messages that could travel long distances encouraged the gradual centralization of decision making at the expense of the autonomy of local agents, a process that became still more rapid in the age of the telephone. The proliferation of printed handbooks transformed many practices, from painting to cookery. In architecture, for instance, *Renaissance patrons studied treatises by the ancient Roman Vitruvius or the Renaissance Italian Sebastiano Serlio before giving instructions to their masons and carpenters.
A third stage in the production of knowledge is the evaluation of what has been discovered. Evaluation includes verification. The observations of an astronomer or the experiments of a chemist are repeated by others in order to ensure their reliability. Detectives and attorneys try to turn clues into evidence of guilt or innocence. Historians return to the sources in order to test one another’s assertions. For a time, individual anthropologists such as Bronisław Malinowski (1884–1942) in the Trobriand Islands were the only witnesses of what they observed who were also in a position to communicate it to the world of Western scholarship, but later on, other anthropologists entered the same field, while literate Trobrianders read and criticized their publications. At a more general level, philosophers from ancient Greece onward have concerned themselves with *epistemology (in other words, knowledge about knowledge). Some, the skeptics, or as they were known in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Pyrrhonists, believed reliable knowledge to be impossible, while others, like René Descartes (1596–1650), placed it on what they believed to be secure foundations.
A fourth stage in the making of knowledge is analysis. For example, anthropologists do not think that their task is finished when they have described the society in which they carried out their fieldwork; they also want to move from description (ethnography) to theory, or at least to test general theories by means of description. Quantitative analysis is also important, as in the case of social surveys such as the census, breaking down the data into categories of different sizes and importance that allow comparisons to be made with similar surveys made in other places or at other moments in time. “Statistics” owe their name to the fact that from the eighteenth century onward, Western governments have increasingly relied on figures in order to orient their policies.
A major form of analysis is classification, viewing separate items as parts of a greater whole. A major contrast between orders of knowledge, such as the traditional Chinese system and the Western one, consists in their systems of classification. Some scholars, like the Swiss humanist Conrad Gessner (1516–65), classified books, contributing in the process to the rise of a new discipline, bibliography. Others, more ambitious, tried to classify nature itself, like the Swede Carl Linnaeus (1707–78), best known for his contribution to botany. The German Franz Bopp (1791–1867) divided languages into families, while the Russian Dmitri Mendeleev (1834–1907) classified the elements. Even clouds were classified. So was knowledge itself, most famously by the Frenchman Auguste Comte (1798–1857), following in the footsteps of earlier classifiers such as Bacon but revising their systems. In his turn, Comte inspired the work of the American librarian Melvil Dewey (1851–1931), whose system, the Dewey Decimal Classification, is still used in many libraries, and the Belgian Paul Otlet (1868–1944), an enthusiast for Dewey’s work who attempted to extend it to classifying the world, liberating the organization of knowledge from dependence on books.
Practices such as verifying or classifying knowledge are generally associated with particular places, sometimes described as centers of calculation. These sites of knowledge have often been located in major Western cities such as Rome, Amsterdam, and London, centers in which scholars and scientists process information gathered from the periphery and turn it into knowledge. Rome, for instance, was the headquarters to which Catholic missionaries returned to give accounts of their experiences, as well as the center of presses producing religious books in a variety of non-European languages. The German *Jesuit *polymath Athanasius Kircher (1602–80) was able to publish an important book about China (China Illustrata, China illuminated, printed in Amsterdam in 1667) without leaving Rome thanks to his conversations with Jesuit colleagues on their return from that mission field. Amsterdam was the headquarters of the Dutch East India and West India Companies, where statistics concerning the price of spices and other commodities for import and export were carefully analyzed.
After knowledge has been fully processed, it is ready to be communicated or disseminated. Some of it may be classified as secret, but that term really means that dissemination is supposed to be confined to a particular group. These groups include not only secret services such as the CIA, MI5, or KGB but also early modern communities of alchemists, members of persecuted religious groups, or the Venetian Senate, to whom returning ambassadors read their reports or relazioni about the strengths and weaknesses of the state in which they had resided. In any case, secrets are difficult to keep. *Leaks have often occurred, not only in our own age of WikiLeaks but long before. Some of the Venetian relazioni had already found their way into print in the sixteenth century.
Other knowledges are public, available to everyone, at least in principle, and spreading more and more widely thanks to printing (block printing in China and Japan, printing with movable type in Korea and the West). The handpress associated with Johannes Gutenberg (ca. 1400–1468) was replaced in the nineteenth century by the steam press, which produced a flood of cheap print, available to the increasing number of western Europeans who were able to read (the *literacy rate was much lower in Europe east of the Elbe). The nineteenth century was a time of the popularization of science, thanks to organizations such as the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (founded in Britain in 1826) to popular *encyclopedias, public lectures, exhibitions, and periodicals such as the Scientific American (1845). Authors and *publishers became increasingly concerned with their intellectual property, protected by *copyright laws that have had to be rewritten in the age of the *internet.
The process of communicating knowledge has often been described as diffusion, in other words as a kind of flow. This metaphor has the disadvantage of implying that the flow was one way, and today it is often replaced by the term circulation, referring to movement in more than one direction. All these terms have another disadvantage, that of implying that the knowledge that is received in a new place is the same as the knowledge that was sent. The metaphor dissemination has the advantage of suggesting that seeds that are sown grow into something different. As theorists of cultural reception remind us, knowledge is often transformed during the process of communication, whether the medium is oral, written, visual, printed, or *digital. Translation between languages is often necessary; misunderstanding often occurs while both individuals and groups consciously adapt what they learn to their own purposes.
Take the case of missionaries, who travel to foreign parts in order to convert their inhabitants, in other words to persuade them to replace their form of religious knowledge with a new one. A recurrent dilemma faced by Christian missionaries emerged from the need to speak about God in the local language. To employ a local term such as the Chinese “Lord of Heaven” (Tianzhu) might encourage listeners to think of Christianity as an extension of their own beliefs rather than an alternative to them. On the other hand, to use a foreign word such as Deus (God) might discourage potential converts. Jesuit missionaries, ready to adapt or, as they used to say, to “accommodate” Christianity to the local order of knowledge, were sometimes described by other Catholics as having been converted by the Chinese instead of converting them.
Missionaries traveled in order to teach, but other Westerners traveled to Asia, Africa, or the Americas in order to learn. They have sometimes been viewed as working by themselves and as bringing back raw information, but it has become increasingly apparent that the visitors learned from local experts and that the knowledge that they brought back was embedded in local classification systems. For example, the twelve-volume herbal Indian Garden of Malabar (1678–1703), associated with Hendrik van Rheede, the Dutch governor of that region of southwest India, was the result of collaboration between Western physicians and botanists and local healers in the Ayurvedic tradition. Like Kircher’s China Illustrata, Rheede’s Garden vividly illustrates a general trend, the increasing globalization of knowledge. So does the work of Linnaeus, who stayed in Sweden, at the University of Uppsala, but received regular reports from his so-called apostles, former students who studied botany in the field in Egypt, China, Japan, South Africa, Surinam, and elsewhere.
In every successive century since the late Middle Ages, more knowledge has become available, especially in the West. The invention of the telescope and the microscope, like the discovery of the Americas by Europeans and their increasing contacts with Asia and Africa, led to awareness of new worlds of knowledge. In order to contain this knowledge, encyclopedias had to become larger and larger: the seven volumes of the Encyclopaedia (1630) compiled by Johann Heinrich Alsted were followed by the seventeen volumes of the famous French Encyclopédie (1751–65) (with an additional eleven volumes of plates) and the thirty-two volumes of the fifteenth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (2010 version), dwarfed by Wikipedia (2001–) and its online rivals.
The awareness of new knowledges also had a downside, the anxiety that there was too much to know. The problem of overload is not a new one, even if it has become more acute in the last generation and a more frequent topic of debate. Some knowledge considered out-of-date has been discarded, as an inspection of successive editions of an encyclopedia will reveal, but this does little to reduce the load, not only *information overload (the raw data arriving too fast to be processed into knowledge), but also what might be called knowledge overload, too much for individuals to digest. Complaints about the proliferation of publications have multiplied from the sixteenth century onward. Recurrent metaphors include the flood of books in which readers feared drowning and the forest in which they felt themselves to be lost.
Various means were devised to cope with the problem. Guides through the forest included printed bibliographies of books on law, theology, history, politics, and so on, some of them labeled as “select” rather than complete. Note taking by readers became more systematic. The traditional *commonplace books, in which excerpts from books read were collected under a few main headings such as “friendship” or “war,” were replaced by paper slips ranged in alphabetical order. The slips were followed in their turn by record cards of a standard size, popularized by Melvil Dewey for use in library catalogs but soon taken up by scholars to organize their notes. Books designed to be consulted rather than read (reference books) proliferated. Reading itself became more rapid and less intensive. The skimming of books that was preached and practiced by Samuel Johnson (1709–84) is not so different from the online “scanning” of today.
The most important of the responses to overload was specialization. Until the seventeenth century, it was not unusual for some scholars, known as polyhistors or *polymaths, to study a variety of disciplines and even to make original contributions to several of them, like Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), whose interests included history, theology, linguistics, and Sinology as well as the philosophy and the mathematics for which he is best known. All the same, scholars such as the Czech Jan Amos Comenius (1592–1670) were already lamenting the fragmentation of knowledge, and the trend has been accelerating ever since. The line between the *humanities and the natural sciences gradually became a gap, recognized by the coining of the term scientist in Britain in the 1830s. Between what became known as the “two cultures” (a term coined in 1959), a third culture, that of the social sciences, became established. At university level, in the second half of the nineteenth century, a general education was gradually replaced by the study of a single discipline. The age of the polymath was followed by the age of the “expert” (a term coined in the 1820s) and the “specialist” (coined in a medical context in French in the 1840s and in English in the 1850s, but soon spreading more widely).
Although the knowledge of most scholars became less general, polymaths did not disappear altogether, as a few remarkable examples may suggest. The Russian Pavel Florensky (1882–1937) studied mathematics, philosophy, and theology before turning to art history, electrical engineering, and chemistry. The Englishman Gregory Bateson (1904–80) moved between anthropology, biology, psychology, and what was known in his day as cybernetics. The French Jesuit Michel de Certeau (1925–86) was trained in philosophy, theology, and history but moved into psychoanalysis, anthropology, and sociology. The American Jared Diamond (b. 1937) was a physiologist before his curiosity led him to ornithology, anthropology, and finally comparative history. Polymaths may have become an endangered species, but they are not yet extinct.
Peter Burke
See also archivists; art of memory; bibliography; cybernetics/feedback; data; excerpting/commonplacing; globalization; indexing; intellectual property; khipus; learning; libraries and catalogs; manuals; observing; quantification; reference books