Four Kinds of Knowing
Knowing that, knowing how, knowing what it is like, and knowing by belonging
John Vervaeke
A man stands on a high rock with his back to us. Below him, fog fills the valleys, and the tops of other rocks rise through it like islands. Further off, mountains. We never see his face.
Caspar David Friedrich painted it around 1818. It is also the picture on the first episode of Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, the lecture series by the cognitive scientist John Vervaeke, and this page's idea comes from that series. We know things in more than one way. At least four. In English, all four names begin with P, and only the first fits into a sentence.
- Propositionalknowing thatsemantic memory
- Proceduralknowing howprocedural memory
- Perspectivalknowing what it is likeepisodic memory
- Participatoryknowing by belongingmemory: yourself
Agency ended on a question: if agency begins with what we care about, how do we come to know what that is? Facts alone will not tell us. And in Different Minds, you knew "hot" from a burn, and the model knew it from every sentence about one, and we asked whether that was the same kind of knowing. This page answers both.
Knowing That
Here is what can be said about the painting. Oil on canvas, 94.8 by 74.8 centimetres. It hangs in Hamburg. The view does not exist anywhere: Friedrich sketched rocks and ridges in the Elbe Sandstone Mountains, then assembled them in his studio.
All true, and you could check every word. This is propositional knowing: knowing that something is the case. The word is pro-position, from the Latin for something put forward, set out in front of you: a fact you can lay on the table, where anyone can pick it up, check it, and pass it on. It is held in sentences, it is true or false, and it lives in what psychologists call semantic memory.
"This is what we are most familiar with. In fact it almost has a tyrannical status." John Vervaeke, on the Lex Fridman Podcast
It is also the kind that travels best. You just learned those facts from a page, somewhere else entirely, and nothing about them needed you to be there. That is its strength, and it is what it leaves out. None of those sentences is the fog.
Knowing How
The painting does not show how he got up there. But he did not arrive by being told. He climbed: boots on loose stone, where to put the stick, when to stop for breath. This is procedural knowing, knowing how. A sentence can point at it but cannot hand it over. You can read everything ever written about climbing and still not be able to climb.
"Skills are not theories. They're not beliefs. They're not true or false. They engage the world or they don't." John Vervaeke, on the Lex Fridman Podcast
A skill is kept in a different memory, and Vervaeke's favourite proof is a familiar story. Someone with Alzheimer's loses the year, the street, the names at the table, and can still sit at the piano and play. The disease reaches the memory of facts and leaves the memory of skills alone. Friedrich had his own climb, too: years of walking those hills with a sketchbook, then the ruler and the canvas divided into careful thirds. What looks like a single feeling took a craft to make.
Knowing What It Is Like
Now notice where Friedrich puts you. Your eye is level with the man's head. You are not below him, looking up at a hero; you are just behind his shoulder, seeing what he sees. A figure painted from behind like this is called a Rückenfigur, and this is the most famous one in art. You are looking with him, not at him.
That is perspectival knowing. In Vervaeke's words, it is knowing "what it's like to be you, here, now, in this situation, in this state of mind." It is not a fact about the view but the way the view arrives: what comes forward and what falls away, which he calls your salience landscape. Its memory is episodic, not the fact that you were there but the being there. It is the light cone from Agency, seen from inside. What stands out to you is what you care about.
Painters of Friedrich's time had a word for the feeling in this picture: the sublime, something too large to take in that you want to keep looking at anyway. Vervaeke draws the line between it and curiosity:
"Awe and wonder are different from curiosity. Notice how you want curiosity alleviated, but you would like to perpetuate [them] … Wonder is about qualitative, it's about opening up and putting your world and yourself into question." John Vervaeke, The View from Above (The Stoa)
The man on the rock is doing what the Stoics called the view from above: rising, in the imagination, until your own worries take their true size. Vervaeke calls it rational "even though it doesn't involve inference, proposition or argumentation." It changes what stands out, and who you take yourself to be.
Knowing by Belonging
Twenty-four years later, in England, J. M. W. Turner painted the sublime from the other side. There is no rock to stand on and no back to stand behind. There is barely a horizon. Sea, snow and smoke turn into one vortex, and somewhere in the middle is a small dark boat. You do not look down on this storm. You are in it.
Turner later claimed: "I got the sailors to lash me to the mast to observe it; I was lashed for four hours." Historians doubt it happened. But notice what he was claiming. Not that he had seen a storm. That for four hours, he had been part of one.
That is the fourth kind, and the deepest. Vervaeke calls it participatory knowing: "the idea that you and the world are co-participating in things." It is not a fact about the world, not a skill in it, not even a view of it, but the fit between you and it.
"This floor affords walking. The walking isn't in the floor. It's not in me. It is a real, agent-arena relationship resulting from co-shaping, it is between us." John Vervaeke, Lost Ways of Knowing
You notice it most when it is missing. "You know when that's missing," he says, "when you're really lonely, or you're homesick, or you're suffering culture shock." Your first week in a strange city, nothing fits; then one morning you walk to the bakery without thinking, and the city has made a little room for you. Agency said that when the map knows the way, you never learn the city, and its streets never become yours. This is the knowing the map takes away.
And the fitting runs through other people. "Your cognition is very much participatory," Vervaeke says. "Way before the internet networked computers together, culture networked brains together." Much of what we know, we know by thinking with each other.
"There's a really weird form of memory you have for this kind of knowing. It's called yourself." John Vervaeke, on the Lex Fridman Podcast
What Grok First Meant
In The Mystery, a small network trained on clock arithmetic memorized its examples, sat on a long plateau, and then suddenly found the rule. Researchers called that grokking, and we promised to come back to what the word first meant.
It comes from Robert Heinlein's 1961 novel Stranger in a Strange Land, about a man raised by Martians. Grok is their word. It means to understand, and the novel's expert on Martians explains that it also means "to drink." Its fullest sense the book gives in one line:
"Grok means to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the observed." Robert Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land
So the network grokked in one sense: it found the rule, and what it could do changed. Heinlein's grok is the other sense: who is doing the knowing changes. That is Turner at the mast, if the story were true. It is participatory knowing in a Martian word, and it is stranger than it sounds because it is so ordinary. It is how anyone comes to belong anywhere.
Under the Fog
Go back to the Wanderer once more. The peaks that rise out of the fog are what can be named. Under the fog is the land that holds them all up. You cannot see it, but every peak is part of it.
In Vervaeke's account, knowing is built the same way. Belonging sits at the bottom and decides what stands out. What stands out decides which skills you reach for. Only at the very top, last, comes the sentence. We tend to live upside down, treating the peaks as if they were the ground.
What the Model Knows
A language model has read more about this painting than anyone ever will: every essay on the sublime, every caption under every copy, every person who tried to say what standing on a mountain was like. From all of it, it learned real patterns. Vervaeke himself grants that networks like these pick up complex patterns much as our intuition does. So set the four kinds beside it carefully, one at a time.
Knowing that: more than any person has ever held. Knowing how: something that looks like it. A model writes code that runs, and code is a fair test of Vervaeke's line, since it engages the world or it doesn't. Whether that is a skill in his sense is our reading, not his. Knowing what it is like: nobody knows. That was the question of Nagel's bat in Different Minds, and it is still open.
Knowing by belonging is where the difference is clearest. Everything the model has came from the peaks: sentences left behind by people who climbed, and looked, and belonged. Its memory is not a self the knowing has changed; a model is finished when its training ends, and nothing in a conversation changes it. And nothing is at stake for it. Vervaeke puts that difference plainly:
"Nothing literally matters to it, but lots matters to me … I am something that is making itself." John Vervaeke, on why his computer cannot do what he does (Brain We Are podcast)
There is another way to ask it, from Vervaeke's own corner of cognitive science. In 1998 the philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers described Otto, who has Alzheimer's. He carries a notebook everywhere, and when he wants to visit the Museum of Modern Art, he looks it up: 53rd Street. For Otto, they argued, the notebook does the job memory does for anyone else, so it is part of his mind. They called this the extended mind.
But look at what is in the notebook: the museum is on 53rd Street. A fact. Otto's notebook extends what he knows. The climber's legs hold what they can do. Belonging is when what you think with has changed who you are.
So when you think with a model, it is fair to ask which of these is happening. Is it extending what you know, or changing who you are? A notebook can do the first. The fourth kind of knowing is the second. The contrast is our reading; Clark and Chalmers were asking where a mind ends, not what it becomes.
The sharper question is about us. Vervaeke says modern life already leans so hard on the first kind that it starves the others, and he names the cost:
"We live in a propositional tyranny … People experience it as a kind of domicide, a loss of home, even though they have shelter." John Vervaeke, talking with Iain McGilchrist
Andy Clark /people/andy-clark Co-wrote The Extended Mind with David Chalmers: Otto and his notebook Where You Stand
Maybe that is why Friedrich never shows us the man's face. A face would tell us what he feels. Instead, the painting leaves the place empty, so that you can stand in it.
That is the answer to the question Agency left. You do not come to know what you care about mostly by being told. You come to know it by climbing, by looking, by standing somewhere long enough to belong to it. The sentences come last, at the top, like peaks above the fog.
And before anyone said a word about it, the rock was already offering him a place to stand. What the world offers a body is where this series goes next.
Key Takeaways
- Vervaeke counts four kinds of knowing, each with its own memory: that (semantic), how (procedural), what it is like (episodic), and by belonging (yourself)
- Knowing that travels best and needs no one to be there; it has an almost tyrannical status
- Skills are neither true nor false: they engage the world or they don't
- Friedrich's Wanderer has you look with him, not at him: perspectival knowing, and the sublime
- Turner's storm puts you inside: participatory knowing is the fit between you and the world, felt most when homesick
- Heinlein's grok means the observer becomes part of the observed; the network's grokking found a rule
- A model learned from the peaks; nothing is at stake for it, and an answer is still only the first kind
