BIG05.THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE (BERGER TABLE)

BIG05.THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE (BERGER TABLE)

"..an interesting possibility for what might be called a sociological psychology, that is, a psychology that derives its fundamental perspectives from a sociological understanding of the human condition." - Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann

Is there a periodic-like table for knowledge?

BIG outline: As noted earlier, knowledge is going bigger right now and David Christian’s Big History, and Sean Carroll’s The Big Picture are encouraging signs of knowledge becoming more connected. However, this BIG looks at the possibility that there is a periodic-like table for knowledge. In all the time I have been developing this idea I have always referred to it as The Berger Table. My story on this really beings in 1996 when I read Berger and Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. I saw "this interesting possibility" as a real challenge. So, when it came to my MA thesis it was always going to be something related to this, and 'A Sociology of Human Agency: Understanding Action' was the result. It wasn't really that well written but the ideas inside showed real promise, so much so that I thought a PhD was my next move. I could have went to Manchester University to study 'The Psychology of Learning and Misconceptions in Science' but I went for the full PhD studentship studying Economic & Social History at Leicester University. Over the course of my time here I drifted increasingly from my original proposal and was spending more time on what was increasingly becoming what would become a general theory of culture. I was connecting the social sciences, arts and humanities along a social epistemological spectrum, and beginning to see how they could bridge into the neighbouring natural and physical spectrums. Over time it seemed like there was a structure to discover and that it was possible to tabulate knowledge: The Berger Table

BIG outcome: Wittgenstein wrote that “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” I prefer “the limits of my knowledge mean the limits of my world.” The Berger Table, more so than the Periodic Table does for the scientifically interested, tabulates not just the human world, but the very framework of human reality. We’re the only species in the living world without a natural environment. We don’t live in ecological niches, we live in spheres of knowledge, or “communities of knowledge” as Sloman and Fernbach write in the 2017 The Knowledge Illusion about the collective nature of knowledge. We are gaining more knowledge about how the world works and The Berger Table will be a lasting testament to the power and pace of the Expressive process in developing this. Moreover, as Berger and Luckmann highlighted the benefits of connecting sociology and psychology, there is deep benefit in connecting seemingly disparate subjects and fields of knowledge across the social, natural and physical sciences. We’ve got a periodic table of chemical elements. Physics has a standard model of particles and forces. The Berger Table is another important way of displaying human discovery. This structured array of fields and subject matters are key markers of where we have come as a single species in knowing about the universe, and exciting possibilities of where we still have to go for new areas of awareness. The Berger Table helps us understand understanding in a very particular framework. Its time it was realised.