Eating and drinking can be dangerous adventures. Poor Emperor Claudius was likely done in by his wife. She served up an appealing but death-dealing plate of mushrooms. We have seen how the unfortunate son in Camus's The Misunderstanding was murdered by what seemed a generously offered cup of tea. Anyone with food allergies realizes the importance of knowing the ingredients in any particular assortment of edibles. Medieval and Renaissance kings felt especially vulnerable. To get a good sense of whether any meal was dangerous, they inaugurated a practice known as "credence." Assistants would submit the food to various tests provided by the best science of the time. Someone would also actually taste (test) the meal. Should this faithful servant show signs of illness, the royal palate would be saved from ingesting poison.
From this act of tasting-testing comes our word for a side table where food is set before serving it, credenza(餐具柜). We also get clues about the nature of knowing. To say "I know" in ordinary life is not a disinterested claim. It is one related to matters of concern. Detachment and disinterest are not the earmarks of cognition. Knowing is one mode of making our way in the world. It marks an act of confidence that opens the way for comportment of one sort or another. Since kings had to eat, they could not indefinitely withhold this confidence-that-leads-to-comportment. At some point, for example, after the chemical tests and after examining the servant-taster's reaction to a forthcoming meal, they "knew" whether it was safe or not. Or at least, they "believed," based on good enough evidence, that it was safe. Such situations of initial unease and subsequent confidence provide some initial lessons about food and knowledge. First, knowing in the ordinary sense has to do with matters of concern. Second, knowing is part of a feedback loop that involves acting. Third, there is no sharp line of demarcation between knowing and believing.
What we call "knowing" identifies a degree of credibilization, that, for all practical purposes, needs no longer be put into doubt. Kings made every effort to credibilize the claim "this food is safe." Still, imperfections in testing and delayed-action poisons could lay waste to the best tests. When there is longer time, a panoply of tests, and ample evidence from a variety of sources, the chances of error, though always present, approach a vanishing point. When doubt has been reduced to such a degree, the claim can be labeled "knowledge." There is, however, no difference in kind here, only a difference in the degree to which credibilization has led to confidence in guiding comportment.
CONVIVIALIST EPISTEMOLOGY
pp. 63-64
Here is where a food-centered approach can offer a humble, earthier alternative to both the godlike mirroring of facts and the equally godlike construction of facts. Both of these positions derive from a one-sided overemphasis on either mind or its correlative creation, objects. Thinking of the stomach as a full participant in the human situation occasions important shifts in emphasis. The everyday eater is situated in a world that has to be dealt with and survived in. We are not thinkers first, eaters second. We are eater-thinkers. As such we are deeply implicated in situations within which we find ourselves. Our everyday practices as stomach-endowed creatures make us primarily engaged participants. Even the highly vaunted "theory" of philosophers, as Gilbert Ryle reminded us, is a particular kind of practice, a mode of making our way in the world. We can, if, for specific purposes, we set our minds to it, suspend this primary engagement. Then we can assume one pose as creatures of laboratory detachment or another as inventive interpreters of texts. But these are derivative stances, taken up because of specific projects. They exist as appendages to our everyday more stomach-centered lives and their associated practices.
There is an outdated usage of a common word that captures both the centrality of practices and their continuity with intelligence. The word is "conversation." Its oldest meanings emphasize the various kinds of "con-verse," that is, dealings, with our surroundings.!? To engage in "conversa-tion," if we are to believe the Oxford English Dictionary, initially meant "consorting or having dealings with others." As the word's semantic range evolved from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries, the sense of engagement segued seamlessly and, I would say, appropriately, into "conversation" as we understand it today. Significantly, the Oxford English Dictionary, in defining "conversation" emphasizes a theme from the previous chapter: prepositions."The action of living or having one's being in a place or among persons." "Occupation or engagement with things" (italics in original). We speak as a way of making our dealings with, by, for, and through our surroundings more thoughtful. "Conversation" as engagement and "conversa-tion" as discourse are inextricably intertwined. Mind/body dualism skews this interpenetrating continuum, replacing it with an oppositional bifurcation.
I-YOU ACQUAINTANCE REHABILITATED
pp.67-68
Unlike French and German, English has only a single verb “to know 認識.” The other two languages have double terms (connaître/savoir認, kennen/wissen識), which minimizes the chances of limiting the scope of “knowing.” One term, connaître/kennen tends to emphasize the sort of knowing that arises from personal involvement, while the other stresses a more detached approach to understanding. The first is typified by acquaintance built up over a table with a history of shared meals. The other is typified by the dissection table. English-speaking epistemology, whether of the depersonalized or the textualist camp, tends to marginalize the first. Convivial epistemology, situated within a guest/host paradigm, reverses this valuation. The primary analogue is now acquaintance over time. When we think of knowing in its fundamental, that is, fullest, most fruitful and inclusive sense, it is this acquaintance over time that we should envision.
The term “trust” associated with the confidence gained via credence table procedures, takes center stage in this regard. “Trust” can have the sense of commitment, a confidence that certain factors (data, experimental results, lengthy association) have earned from us the response “yes, it is so.” But trust can also involve the commitment of one’s person. Two people clink glasses, look into each other’s eyes, and promise to be faithful for life. The shared libation associated with a vow is an ancient practice. For the Greeks this use of drink was called a sponde, a solemn offering. Such offerings accompanied engagements of the self to some course of action. From the Greek root, we get a cluster of related terms whose link with drink has unfortunately been forgotten: spouse, espouse, respond, and sponsor. What they retain is the sense of a trusting act that binds oneself faithfully to others and to a way of living.
Within the social sciences, anthropologists are especially sensitive to this commitment-and-acquaintance dimension. Understanding another people requires a particular devotion, that of living with them, sharing their lives, eating their food. As a member of the community he was studying told Paul Stoller: “If you listen to us, you will learn much about our ways. But to have vision, you must grow old with us”. Commenting on a particularly disconcerting ride in a bush taxi during his first visit to the Songhay, Stoller describes stages of growing awareness. What began as frustration, anger, and puzzlement gradually transformed itself into enjoyment and heightened understanding. But such a transformation could only result after two decades marked by uncounted bush taxi rides.
When Jane Addams committed herself to open Hull House and offer hospitality to poor immigrants in Chicago, she did not primarily conceive the undertaking as charity offered by a superior to an inferior. She had been to college. She had taken the obligatory European tour. Now, she sought yet another level of understanding. Living with the immigrants would not only yield a benefit to the poor and uneducated. It would also be a good thing for the children of privilege who “had developed too exclusively the power of acquiring knowledge and of merely receiving impressions”. It was by living among the poor that young women “who had been given over too exclusively to study might restore a balance of activity along traditional lines and learn of life from life itself”. It’s a pity that the colloquial, double-directional use of “learn” (as in “he learned me good”) has not gotten wide acceptance. Instead of the single-directional terms “teach” and “be taught,” a verb is needed to indicate both teaching and learning. The verb, emphasizing interdependent relationship, much like the term hôte, would place the emphasis where it belongs: on the resonating reciprocities between partners in an endeavor.
The I-you trust most associated with personal knowledge is the one linked to the word “spouse.” It identifies a commitment that leads to a lifetime of shared experiences, not to mention meals. Here, we go back to Genesis and a kind of knowing that can only come about if there is an antecedent confidence that the upcoming shared adventure will involve important transformations. It is an inclusive and growing knowledge, one that moves seamlessly between “knowing” as initial familiarity, as sexual intercourse, as growing commitment, as more sensitive discernment, as well as accumulation of information. Interestingly, the Oxford English Dictionary provides a similar trajectory as it traces the history of the word that is central to convivial epistemology, “conversation.” There are other meanings of the term besides the ones we have already discussed. The word has meant the action “of being in a place among persons,” “consorting or having dealings with others,” “sexual intercourse or intimacy,” “occupation or engagement with things,” “circle of acquaintance,” “manner of conducting oneself in the world,” and “interchange of thoughts and words.”
When awareness arises from lengthy acquaintance through shared experiences in various settings, we come not only to know in a fuller sense but also to an important realization: the “you” is inexhaustible. The philosopher Emmanuel Mounier pointed out, the other is “non-inventoriable,” always has something more to offer, cannot be simply subsumed under a universal concept. Knowledge by increasing acquaintance, in whatever field, encourages the attitude of expecting “always something more,” “always some surprise,” “always some resistance to being easily categorized.” When the acquaintance paradigm is kept central, there is less temptation to think in terms of reaching a once and for all God’s-eye achievement. After spending two years in Japan, Victoria Riccardi heartily endorsed the views of an American friend who is a longtime resident. After one week in the country he had proclaimed himself ready to write a book about the Japanese. After one year, he felt comfortable with maybe an article. After a long time, he thought he could only get out maybe one sentence. In Levinasian terms, the other, as stranger, guest, or subject-matter of investigation, offers a manifestation of the infinite. Only a commitment to a shared life can begin to bring out the realization of that infinity.
Chinese translations of “subject” and “object” have the characters “host主” and “guest賓” in them. This is a nice link, reminding us that all knowing can be considered an extension of “I-you” acquaintance. Given the guest-host metaphor, we might be tempted to think of ourselves, the researchers, as hosts. The alternative is actually more correct. It is the researchers who enter realms unknown to them. They are the strangers seeking to make their way in an unfamiliar realm. Following the guest/host metaphor, all knowing is thought of as resulting from a kind of long-term contact. This contact is accompanied by conversations, in the many senses of this term. The personal dimension had been obfuscated within spectator-based epistemologies. As we move away from these, there is an opportunity for rehabilitating the personal dimension and recognizing it as present, to some degree, in all forms of knowing. At that point, we will have recovered the sense that the safest general claim we can make about knowledge takes us back to Genesis where it “connotes an intimate acquaintance with something”.
