Knowledge

A throughline across Kyle’s reading is a distinction between two kinds of knowledge — rational fact-gathering versus skill development. Faith is Not Blind (the Hafens) draws it sharply: “There are two very different kinds of knowledge. One involves such rational processes as gathering information and memorizing. The other kind … we might call skill development.” Their key claim is that “the process of becoming Christlike is more about acquiring skills than it is about learning facts and figures” — and that “simply knowing something will not sanctify us.” They lean on Michael Polanyi’s tacit-knowledge argument that “to learn by example is to submit to authority,” picking up rules “not explicitly known to the master himself.”

Charlie Munger — USC Gould School of Law Commencement Address frames the acquisition of knowledge as a moral duty and prizes the “learning machine” who goes “to bed every night a little wiser.” Munger distinguishes meaningful, deep knowledge from “chauffeur knowledge,” and quotes T.S. Eliot: “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” The Faith of a Scientist adds the religious-intellectual angle — “an honest seeking after knowledge of all things of heaven and earth” — while warning (via the example of Aquinas weaving “very bad mechanics” into proofs) that systematizing all knowledge prematurely produces “a philosophy shot through with palpable error”; better to “start on it right now.”

Where this appears

• Faith is Not Blind — the two kinds of knowledge (facts vs. skill); becoming Christlike as skill-acquisition; Polanyi on tacit knowledge
• Charlie Munger — USC Gould School of Law Commencement Address — knowledge as moral duty; the “learning machine”; chauffeur vs. real knowledge; the Eliot epigraph
• The Faith of a Scientist — religion as “honest seeking after knowledge of all things of heaven and earth”; the danger of premature systematizing