The extended epistemology

Experiential, presentational, proposition, and practical ways of knowing

Early in 2025, a new co-operative inquiry initiative began. The Dwelling Places inquiry set out to explore participants relationships with the living presence of the Land where participants live. I was asked to expand on the ‘extended epistemology’ which is at the heart of co-operative inquiry. This is an edited and expanded version of what I said.

Co-operative inquiry, and action research more generally, is often described by academics as a ‘research methodology’, maybe a ‘qualitative’ research methodology (although there is nothing in action research that precludes quantification). I think this is a mistake and misleading. The idea of ‘methodology’ in human inquiry can be seen as arising in the European Enlightenment as part of the search for certainty. Historian of science Stephen Toulmin (1990) shows how Cartesian abstraction arose as a response to dogmatic religious struggles and bloody violence of the European religious wars. The huge political disturbance and appalling bloodshed gave rise to a mistrust in human judgement and a demand for a new form of certainty. Hence the radical doubt of Descartes and the emergence of ‘methodologies’ that removed human judgment from the development of knowledge.

Co-operative inquiry is a counter to this move. It should be seen not as a ‘methodology’, but as a way of restoring and enhancing the human – individual and collective – capacity for imaginative sense-making, for creative innovation, for enhancing our lives within the wider community of life on Earth. As Hilary Bradbury and I wrote in the Introduction to the Handbook of Action Research

A primary purpose of action research is to produce practical knowledge that is useful to people in the everyday conduct of their lives. A wider purpose of action research is to contribute through this practical knowledge to the increased well-being – economic, political, psychological, spiritual – of human persons and communities, and to a more equitable and sustainable relationship with the wider ecology of the planet of which we are an intrinsic part. (Reason & Bradbury, 2001:1)

It is worth reflecting that many of the things on which human lives depend – horticulture and many basic foodstuffs, essential crafts, skills such as metal working – had their origins in human inquiry long prior to the Enlightenment, the invention of science, and subsequent Industrial revolution. Sandra Wooltorton points out that the process of co-operative inquiry is remarkably similar to Indigenous practices (see for example Poelina, Perdrisat, Wooltorton, & Mulligan, 2023). Typically, after a day encountering Country, Indigenous people will gather together, making sense of the day through yarning, maybe dance and song, in everyday engagement that is both reflective and educational. So there was some sense that the inquiry cycle, although not in any sense formal, is quite close to a longstanding practice. As John Rowan and I wrote on the cover of Human Inquiry (Reason & Rowan, 1981):

Who was that research I saw you with last night?
That was no research, that was my life!

Co-operative inquiry is an inquiry practice in which a group of people with shared concerns cycle between action and reflection, engaging in turn with the four ways of knowing: experiential, presentational, propositional, and practical. And while this seems quite straightforward, it is surprisingly difficult to grasp. Some people just want to engage in experience, some focus their attention on creative response through painting or poetry, many reach immediately to some form of intellectual sense making, and some just want to get into action. It is important to keep the cycle moving through the different ways of knowing, and to do this in the context of supportive and challenging inquiry group (and that is another story!). Some members of the Dwelling Places inquiry were concerned that there was a tendency to leap from experiential straight to propositional knowing, and asked me to re-visit the extended epistemology.

experiential knowing is the touchstone of the inquiry process

Experiential knowing brings attention to bear on the lifeworld, to everyday lived experience. This is that aspect of knowing that arises through face-to-face encounter, perception, empathy, and resonance with a person, place, or thing. Experiential knowing is essentially tacit, difficult, even impossible, to put into words; it may be inaccessible to direct conscious awareness. But it is fundamental because through experience we have direct access to the ground of existence; it is the touchstone of the inquiry process; it deepens through the process of inquiry. We can think of it as did the polymath Goethe, a founding spirit of experiential inquiry, who ‘sought to use firsthand encounter directly in a kindly but rigorous way to know the thing in itself’ (Seamon, 1998).

We might think that experience is simply what arises in day to day life. Yet we can also think of experiential knowing as a skill which arises as we attend more closely. You can train yourself as an individual to pay close attention, to bracket any ideas and preconceptions, your expectations and responses, and to attend to experience at all levels, with all senses. So, for example, when we seek to encounter River as living presence, we need to take time, to give open loving attention. We may sometimes feel River responds to our call and get excited; or on another occasion feel, ‘Oh, nothing's going to happen today. The world won't talk to me’. Notice your excitement, your doubt, your anxiety. Notice what feels unsayable. It’s all part of the evidence. When I was supervising people doing PhDs, they would often get to the stage where they say, ‘Well, no, I can't write that down’, even sometimes ‘What would my mother say?’ We repress much of our experience and the important thing at this stage is to make it available in all its richness for later critical reflection.

My colleague Kate initiated an inquiry with young women in in big organisations, asking ‘What is it like to be a young woman in management?” One of the young women brought a story back to the groups, saying, ‘Well, I'm no good. I can't give a presentation’. That was her first level of experience. And her colleagues said, ‘No, go back and watch and listen to carefully to what happens’. And she watched and listened, and she now reported, yeah, that she wasn’t clear and was stumbling, but also that her (male) boss was sitting at the back, picking his nose, putting his feet up on and yawning. And she attended to that as well. So she re-described the experience – which we'll talk about later – from ‘I'm incompetent’ to ‘I'm being subtly bullied’. (McArdle, 2002)

In human-centered co-operative inquiry projects, experiential knowing often is about noticing what has been culturally oppressed or repressed. Paolo Freire calls this conscientização, learning to perceive social, political, and economic contradictions (Freire, 1970). Inquiry in a sentient world is about attending to those aspects of our relation to the more-than-human world that are ignored and denied in our culture. It is also about shifting the nature of awareness, toward what David Hinton, drawing on Taoist and Ch’an philosophy, sees as ‘empty mind mirroring of wild nature’ (Hinton, 2022:15) Discovering the capacity for ‘empty mind’ is of course part of the inquiry process.

As you go deeply into the sensuous detail of it all, attending moment-to-moment – like in the River inquiry how whirlpools move with the current, to the way the birds are flying, the grass is blowing. Develop the skill of noticing what feels ‘unassailably authentic’, those experiences have an authority of their own, which contradict taken-for-granted expectations and demand our attention.

And the other thing is record. Recording, I think helps the encounter. Notebooks, sketching, audio, photgraphs. You may think recording distances you from experience, but this is not so as long as you stick with recording experience as it ariseds. I usually take an audio recorder with me out to River or Country, and I talk into it. I don't find it disturbing. Sometimes in ceremony, I say things I don’t expect, I'm surprised at myself when I listen it back. There's something about catching yourself unawares, and the recording is helpful.

So we can see experiential knowing as a learning, a self-training process. Noticing what we may usually pass over, developing new patterns of awareness. It is the ground of the inquiry process which we must return to again and again, deepen and enrich it, and to ensure that what we may build on it – our understandings and our practice, remain grounded.

So then to presentational knowing. I see this at two levels. Presentational knowing is that first clothing or articulation of experiential knowing: we ‘tell the story’ to ourselves and others, make a sketch, maybe sing or dance, as an expression of our experience. This may bring experience into consciousness for the first time, both to ourselves and to our inquiry colleagues. Stay close to the evidence. Notice your memories. Talk about what happened. Notice what you include and edit out as you tell the story. Notice what you re-remember as you tell the story. My guess is you’ll often remember more as you give an account, you will have new insights as you talk. Stay with it, and again, record, reflect, catch the moments. So there's that first sense of presentation or knowing, which I think it's important to stay with.

The second level is when this spontaneous narrative is intentionally articulated and developed through creative writing, storytelling, drawing, sculpture, movement, dance, all drawing on aesthetic imagery. This may be ‘naïve’ and untutored art; or may draw on a degree of artistic skill and sophistication.

I have spent much time with my artist niece, Sarah Gillespie. We've done two little books and written two articles together. She tells a story – this is the first level of the presentational knowing, of sitting on a bridge drawing a tree. She spends all day on a bridge, observing closely, working slowly. She tells us

It was a damp day, but I sat in the drizzle and drew for an hour or two while swallows flew low all around me. I am quite slow, making small marks: big gestures may look good on the page, but they contain too much of me, don’t give enough space to be sure that I am actually looking at what is there. When I had nearly done – and I struggle with how to express this in words – I felt the tree not as an object I was drawing but as a living, animate presence; as much an energetic, actual, presence as another person in front of me (Reason & Gillespie, 2023).

Then we talked about the difference between a sketch like this and a finished works of art, what is the difference? Sarah pointed to a drawing on the easel in her studio that she was working on, saying

What I am reaching for in this drawing is that feeling… that, “Ah!” that intake of breath, gasp of joy, sense of relief that it’s there, just that it’s there. And that I am here to see it. The drawings need to vibrate… I have to find a visual language, articulating in marks on paper that the universe, the everyday universe, is shimmering, trembling, rustling now.

A finished artwork in whatever form, aims at a poetic communication, that echoes the original experience and speaks out, drawing on all the skill the artist can bring. It’s a development of that first level.

Sometimes a completed presentational piece comes spontaneously, ‘gifted’ by the universe. Once, on a retreat in the Welsh Hills, I watched a Red Kite flying high above. About to turn away for breakfast, I paused; in that moment, everything changed, and a fully formed poem, catching the moment, came to me.

Had I turned away sooner
How could I have seen
The sliver of silver sunlight
Under the Red Kite’s wings?

Presentational knowing can also be seen as knowing through imagination. Eleanor Robins writes on Substack of

… humanity’s age-old, incomparable, perfect method of sharpening our perceptive capacities; expanding our consciousness to intuit felt experiences and realities beyond the self; and committing, rigorously, to bringing those intuitions through into material reality in the most illuminating way possible.

the primary significance of propositional knowing is not to reach for truth… but to provide new ways of making sense of the world that are both informative and liberating.

The inquiry cycle then moves to Propositional knowing, knowing ‘about’ something in intellectual terms, in ideas and theories. It is expressed in statements which use language to assert facts about the world, laws that make generalisations about facts, and theories that organise the laws. This propositional form of knowing is the main kind of knowledge accepted in modern society, which we are redescribing for the more liberating purposes: in co-operative inquiry, propositional knowing is not limited to formal academic theories, but includes all forms of articulated and tacit sense-making.

I take the idea of ‘redescribing’ from Richard Rorty, the pragmatist philosopher, who argued that the main importance of propositional knowing is not to reach for truth, whatever that might be, but to provide new ways of making sense of the world that are both informative and liberating. (; see also Reason, 2003; Rorty, 1989). Ideas are political and drive everyday life, and the ability to develop alternative views critical of everyday common sense grows out of in-depth examination of experience and new narratives. Living cosmos panpsychism offers the Western mind one such alternative: it redescribes the experience of humans as living in a sentient and communicative world.

Another example can be seen in feminist theory. In the 1960s and 70s many women met regularly in consciousness raising groups, re-examining their everyday experience as women in Western society. This fundamental experiential knowing was drawn on my academic feminists to develop theories that redescribed the nature of gender and the roots of social power, which have influence social and political debate to this day.

However, propositional knowledge knowing needs to be handled with care, especially in the language-driven worlds of late modernity. As Wittgenstein said ''Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language''. It has great conceptual power to divide the world into isolated mental subjects and independent non-mental objects. Propositional discourse is representational and specular in nature. Through the lens of our theories, we look out at the world and imagine it spread out passively for our scrutiny. We can examine it, attempt to work out how its parts fit together; indeed ‘We construct an abstract simulacrum of reality that re-presents, through the lens of theory the manifold that initially presents itself to us more immediately’ (Mathews, 2017:146)

On the other had a about a good theory is one you can carry around with you, one that doesn’t depend on all kind of complex structures and illuminates experience in new ways. The extended epistemology is in itself one such theory. It is a theory can be developed and elaborated (as I am doing here) but at heart it compact and memorable as four ways of knowing.

And then practical knowing. This is what my old friend Bill Torbert described as useful to the actor at the moment of action, rather than the disembodied thinker at the moment of reflection (Torbert, 2001). When you go to dentist you're very pleased that the dentist has a practical skill in their hands, that they can do stuff. They have conceptual structures to guide their practice, but in the end it's that ability to do something at the moment that matters to the patient. And of course, it's again, the practice is bound up with experience, because he knows what he's doing, and he's looking at the tooth and deciding what it needs.

There are all sorts of practices that we can learn. Some of them are about drilling teeth; others about how to survive as a young woman in a patriarchal organization; and yet others about how to pay attention to River and invoke a living presence. And speaking to River and Land is a form of practice that we can learn, that needs practice, that matures over time. And this practice gives rise to experiences which are taken back into the inquiry cycle.

The whole point of an action research is to develop practice – informed, reflective practice – as John Heron argued persuasively (1996). We can think of these ways of knowing as a pyramid, rooted in experience and culminating in action. Or we can think of them as a cycle in which each form of knowing emerges from and informs the previous. One can begin the research cycle at any point, from ideas, from experience, from a powerful experience of art. Most often, the inquiry starts as a tacit feeling of unsatisfactory experience is crystalized.

research… “can be a piece of knitting’

Both the pyramid and cycle descriptions can be helpful. But I want to offer a third image, coined by my colleague John Rowan, who insisted that research doesn’t have to be stiff and formal, ‘it can be a piece of knitting’. In this image we knit together the four ways of knowing so that they intertwine, hold each other in a complex and flexible pattern: experience feeds novel ideas which lead us to seek new ways of expression which allow us to try new practices which both challenge the idea and lead to new forms of experience and so on…

So finally, if my first comment is right that co-operative inquiry and action research are about restoring the human capacity for inquiry, how do we make sure that happens? I think we need to have these ideas in our heads and we need to use them as reflection on what we are going. We need in an inquiry into our inquiry. We need regular quality reviews. We need to think regularly, ‘Well, how are we doing? are we going round the cycle?’ are we paying enough attention experience or are we leaping into ideas? How can we develop our presentational capacities?’ Maybe it is good for group members in turn, to keep a sharp eye on aspects of inquiry. Consciously develop your inquiry skills as an individual, and as a group. And as a group, do your best to develop a culture of inquiry that is both supporting and challenging.

References

Heron, J. (1996). Quality as Primacy of the Practical. Qualitative Inquiry, 2(1), 41-56.

Mathews, F. (2017). Invoking the Real: from the Specular to the Ontopoetic. In A. Gare & W. Hudson (Eds.), For a New Naturalism. New York: Telos Press.

McArdle, K. L. (2002). Establishing a Co-operative Inquiry Group: The perspective of a 'first-time' inquirer. Systemic Practice and Action Research, 15(3), 177-189.

Poelina, A., Perdrisat, M., Wooltorton, S., & Mulligan, E. L. (2023). Feeling and Hearing Country as Research Method. Environmental Education Research, 1-16. doi:https://doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2023.2239531

Reason, P. (2003). Pragmatist Philosophy and Action Research: Readings and conversation with Richard Rorty. Action Research, 1(1), 103-123.

Reason, P., & Bradbury, H. (2001). Inquiry and Participation in Search of a World Worthy of Human Aspiration. In P. Reason & H. Bradbury (Eds.), Handbook of Action Research: Participative inquiry and practice (pp. 1-14). London: Sage Publications.

Reason, P., & Gillespie, S. (2023). The Teachings of Mistle Thrush and Kingfisher. Australian Journal of Environmental Education. Special Issue Indigenous Philosophy in Environmental Education: Relearning How to Love, Feel, Hear, and Live with Place.

Reason, P., & Rowan, J. (Eds.). (1981). Human Inquiry: A Sourcebook of New Paradigm Research. Chichester: Wiley.

Rorty, R. (1989). Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Torbert, W. R. (2001). The Practice of Action Inquiry. In P. Reason & H. Bradbury (Eds.), Handbook of Action Research: Participative inquiry and practice (pp. 250-260). London: Sage Publications.

Toulmin, S. (1990). Cosmopolis: The hidden agenda of modernity. New York: Free Press.