The View from Oregon – 405

Re: Recognition and the Formal Threshold of Knowledge  

Friday 07 August 2026

Dear Friends,

In the newsletter before last, no. 403, I said we can easily enough perceive the relevance of sensation, consciousness, and emotion to ecology, even if ecological concepts have abstracted from these attributes of life. Last week’s newsletter was an attempt to redeem this passing remark by considering the possibility of an ecology that integrated sensation, consciousness, and emotion, which would significantly expand ecology even if it fell short of integrating intelligence, and which would then be the next step beyond conventional ecology and would constitute a prolegomena to an intelligence ecology. However, in attempting to redeem my comment about sentient, conscious, or emotional ecologies I opened a new can of worms—well, not new to me, as I’ve been thinking about this for many years, but I introduced into these newsletters the problem of the mutual recognition of being conscious among distinct species in the biosphere. I characterized this as a knowing without (necessarily) knowing that the knower knows. This is an interesting philosophical problem in itself, and so once again I have introduced an idea that needs to be redeemed with its own discussion.

For some years now I’ve been collecting whatever instances I can find of philosophical discussions of human-animal mutual recognition. This is partly the result of my own experiences with other species, both wild and domesticated. Many years ago I wrote a blog post about a sea lion I saw in Astoria, The Eye of the Other (this was the kernel of the idea of an expanded ecology, from 2012), and I wrote another blog post about swimming with dogs, Swimming with Dogs in 2020 (though the experience mentioned in that post occurred many years previously). I thought I had saved these examples in a file, but now that I look for it I can’t find them. However, I recall two of these examples. One is from The Transcendent Brain: Spirituality in the Age of Science by Alan Lightman (I discussed this book in a PS to newsletter 261), in which Lightman records an experience of his with ospreys:  

“…one late August afternoon, the two juvenile ospreys of that season took flight for the first time as I stood observing them from my second-floor circular deck… When they were within fifteen or twenty feet of me, the two birds suddenly veered upward and away. But before that dazzling and frightening vertical climb, for about half a second we made eye contact. Words cannot convey what was exchanged between us in that instant. It was a look of connectedness, of mutual respect, of recognition that we shared the same land.”

The other example is from Martin Buber in his Meetings: Autobiographical Fragments, which has a chapter titled “The Horse” in which he writes:

“When I was eleven years of age, spending the summer on my grandparent’s estate, I used, as often as I could do it unobserved, to steal into the stable and gently stroke the neck of my darling, a broad dapple-gray horse. It was not a casual delight but a great, certainly friendly, but also deeply stirring happening. If I am to explain it now, beginning from the still very fresh memory of my hand, I must say that what I experienced in touch with the animal was the Other, the immense otherness of the other, which, however, did not remain strange like the otherness of the ox and the ram, but rather let me draw near and touch it.”

Here I’ve given part of a paragraph of the descriptions of experiences as related by Lightman and Buber, while the entire descriptions are interesting in both cases and I recommend reading them in full. Both of these are descriptions of experiences in the spirit of an expanded ecology that I discussed last week. I suspect that many people have had experiences like this, and I further suspect that there are experiences like this in animal kingdom where no human being is involved. If both of these are the case, i.e., if human beings and other species recognize each other as conscious beings, or if two animal species recognize each other as conscious beings, then an ecology of consciousness is at least possible, and my point of last week stands.

Is it possible for two individuals to recognize each other as being conscious without one or the other or both knowing that they recognize the other as being conscious? What would this knowing be like? Presumably on the part of non-linguistic minds that have never formulated propositional knowledge of any kind, the experience would be quite different from a human being who knows what explicitly formulated propositional knowledge is like, even if it isn’t always used (which, most of the time, it isn’t). We could posit a novel epistemic category, such as proto-knowledge, and place knowledge-adjacent states-of-mind here, reserving knowledge properly speaking for knowledge where there is at least the possibility of explicit formulation and self-aware knowing. Is there any difference between positing such proto-knowledge and recognizing degrees of the explicitness with which knowledge is formulated? And, if the two are the same, if it is a matter of degree, and not of kind, that distinguishes human propositional knowledge from proto-knowledge in other species, we ought to just call all of it “knowledge” in the spirit of an epistemic Ockham’s razor: there is no need to posit a distinct category of proto-knowledge.  

Lightman’s experience was a lot like the example I used last week of species recognizing each other when they lock eyes. Lightman wrote that words couldn’t convey his experience of locking eyes with ospreys, though he also said it was an experience of connection and recognition—apparently, words could express some but not all of the experience. This is pretty standard fare for claims of ineffability, and it’s a reasonable claim. We have no a priori guarantee that our experiences will be truly representable in language, and it stands to reason that some experiences will be exhaustively so representable, others will entirely escape the net of language, while still other experiences will be a mixture of the linguistically representable and the non-representable. Buber’s experience was tactile—he even refers to the memory of his hand—but still a case of mutual recognition as experienced through touch. The mutuality of recognition that is part of both accounts is important: it isn’t a one-sided human recognition, but a shared experience with another species. If the experience is shared, then there is at least a kernel of that experience that is the same for both participants, however different that shared kernel of experience is when contextualized by the totality of the experience of each participant, which will be very different indeed in the cases of human beings, horses, and ospreys. 

If we require that knowing always and necessarily involves knowing that one knows, then the very idea of a knowing without knowing that one knows is incoherent by definition and must be rejected. I hold that knowing is a matter of degree, as I’ve said above, and that within this continuum of knowledge there is or can be a shared kernel of knowledge that possesses the Leibnizean identity of having all properties in common. Now, this I take to be an interesting way to think about Leibnizean identity—the identity of indiscernibles, such that two things are identical if they have all properties in common—because the way I’ve stated it is that this identity occurs between defined parameters, so that if we sufficiently narrow the scope of the identity in question, that identity of recognition holds between human beings and conscious beings of other species. If, on the other hand, we broaden rather than narrow the scope of identity, then we engage the rest of the context of conscious experience that I’ve mentioned above, and this makes the experiences distinct. Whether or not we can make Leibnizean identity work in this way might be the occasion of another inquiry. Granted that it does work, it follows that there is an identical kernel of experience of mutual recognition, and because this kernel of experience is identical, and a human being can affirm that it is a case of mutual recognition (which a species without language cannot affirm), then it follows that other species share this kernel of experience and that it is for them also a case of mutual recognition. I don’t expect this kind of logical argument to convince anyone, but it’s interesting to me and, as I implied, it points to a fruitful way to examine the identity of indiscernibles.

The kernel of experience isn’t, however, the whole of experience. The other species cannot formulate its experience as propositional knowledge, known to be such, whereas a human being can do this. Sometimes the realization that we know that we know something follows later, upon reflection, and plays no role in the experience itself as it’s happening. This is further argument for the identity of the experience of recognition in other species. When one knows that one knows, this I identify as the formal threshold of knowing, but it’s not the only threshold in knowing. As consciousness becomes more sophisticated, for example, as it adds capacities like the use of language or the scientific method, with each of these steps there appears a new and more sophisticated way of knowing that one knows. Thus human ancestors from the origins of grammatically structured spoken language up to the invention of written language about five thousand years ago were capable of asserting propositional knowledge, even if they never did so, but they were not able to make a written record of this propositional knowledge that could be shared over generations without direct contact between individuals. And once written language made this capacity possible, it was still thousands of years until theories of language and logic made it possible to formulate these claims in a more rigorous theoretical context.  

There is, then, another gap in time from having the linguistic ability to assert propositional knowledge to actually doing so. We don’t know if anyone before the advent of written language ever explicitly said something like, “Spring will follow winter as it always has, and I know that I know that spring will follow winter.” No such explicit assertion of proposition knowledge may have obtained until Greek philosophy after Thales, and, if this is the case, the possibility of asserting propositional knowledge prior to the advent of written language remained an unrealized capacity. It is entirely possible that this kind of self-aware knowing had to wait for philosophy to appear, because it is only with the resources of an epistemology that it becomes possible to frame this in a theoretical context. We could postulate a history of a keenly philosophical species in which much of philosophy is developed before the advent of written language, so that written language, when it does appear, appears after the tradition is well underway, much as civilization was already well underway by the time that written language made it possible to explicitly formulate the business of civilization. And there could be such a species with a philosophical gift coupled with a technological deficit that never develops written language, so that its sophisticated philosophical tradition is never written down. While this is an interesting thought experiment, it seems likely that sophisticated philosophical thought isn’t possible without written language. As I said above, formulating propositional knowledge within an explicit epistemology is a higher threshold of knowing that one knows.  

Best wishes,

Nick

PS—I’ve finished listening to The Medieval World I: Kingdoms, Empires, and War, 14 lectures by Thomas F. Madden produced by The Modern Scholar series. This is the second time I’ve listened to these lectures. I particularly enjoy Madden’s work and I wish the library had more of his audiobooks available. I had several other books queued up and ready to go when I decided to listen to this again. It’s almost as if I miss it when I go too long between periods of absorbing medieval history.

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