Knowledge: Lore, practice, engineering, systemics [Tech Evol]

This is another segment from David Hays (1995) The Evolution of Technology Through Four Cognitive Ranks, New York, Metagram Press. It is section 2.3.1 from Chapter 2, “Ranks, Revolutions, and Paideias.” Hays provides a brief sketch of the different kinds of knowledge characteristic of each cognitive rank.

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I love tools, as you would expect of a writer on technology. My computer monitor stopped working while I was writing the first draft of Chapter 1, and I replaced it instantly because I cannot write without it. But I love thought, and the cognitive tools of thought, even more. The changes in technology from rank to rank are wide and deep; they seem inexplicable without changes in thinking.

For the kinds of thought that produce the technologies of the four ranks, for what I called know-how, Benzon and I have these names:

Rank 1 Lore
Rank 2 Practice
Rank 3 Engineering
Rank 4 Systemics

(Fig 2.1 shows some characteristics of lore, practice, engineering, and systemics, rank by rank. The content of the figure is speculative and a little more technical than the main narrative.)

Figure 2.1 – Characteristics of the Ranks

Rank 1
	LORE
	Thinking is analogous to action.    Child learns from parent by example.    Skills belong to families.    An innovation is an intuitive leap.
Rank 1.2
	Ideas from one craft applied in another.

Rank 2
	LORE	PRACTICE
	Apprenticeship opens crafts to recruits.	Thinking is at the level of first order relations over actions. Each culture makes its own choice of relations. Handbooks summarize as much as can be put into words. Some teaching of technology is from books. Contemplation of written descriptions leads to new methods.
Rank 2.5
		Knowledge from natural philosophy is acquired  by practitioners. Renaissance is the first time application is fruitful.

Rank 3
	LORE	PRACTICE	ENGINEERING
	Elementary education produces trainable workers, who acquire a little lore on the job. Craft skills are necessary in biological fields (both agriculture and medicine)	Supervisors in advanced industry keep records of operations. Innovations are reported in written media.	Thinking is at the level of second order relations: Causality, in the West. Arithmetic and experiment guide development of new devices and processes. Innovation is deliberate.
Rank 3.5
			Knowledge obtained by science is taught to engineers.

Rank 4
	LORE	PRACTICE	ENGINEERING	SYSTEMICS
			Computer models help operation and installation of systems.	Thinking is at the level of 3rd order relations. Theories of particular cases are created for control and innovation.

 
Let's look at the knowledge of each rank in turn.  

Rank 1 begins with speech and is transcended in classical antiquity. For the most part, rank 1 societies live by hunting and gathering. They make tools and weapons, houses and clothing, boats and ornaments. Almost nothing that they make has moving parts. For weaving, tie threads side by side along a stick and hang the stick from a tree. Pass another thread back and forth to make a strip of cloth. The potter's wheel appears late; it belongs on the growth curve toward rank 2. In the simplest societies, each man knows all of the men's skills and each woman knows all of the women's skills. In more complex societies of rank 1, some crafts require special skills. The number of specialties ranges up to 10 at most. Each specialty is passed from parent to child, although in some places a specialist may adopt and train someone else's child.  

Lore is the knowledge of an apprentice, acquired largely by imitation and practice with only a little talk about method. One theory has it that the date of the origin of language can be fixed by observing a change from

stone tools that the apprentice can learn to make by imitation alone

to

more elegant tools that can be learned only by listening to explanations along with imitation.

I won't vouch for the logic of this argument, but it is plausible. Still, it can not displace the fact that most of the know- how in rank 1 is acquired by imitation; the talk is only to polish the fine details of the skill. Lore is the oldest kind of knowledge, and we need it today. What art can be mastered without imitation? Kuhn argues that even science requires imitative learning.  

Being knowledge we don't know we know, lore is hard for some to recognize. Zuboff* discusses the implicit skills of workers in modern plants at great length; her point is the undercutting of their skills by the introduction of computers. Gellner* also writes of lore:

Modern society has many 'specialisms', but the few in agricultural society are more sharply distinguished. They are "fruits of lifelong, very prolonged and totally dedicated training ..." (p. 26)

Two examples:

1842: Buddle writes that coal miners must begin work in mines from before age 13. They have to get a feel for the coal. HBC2 340 1780s: Operation of the mule can be learned in a few months, but maintenance takes several years. And only for those who grew up in the mill. Estimates by Harold Catling. TIRv 30

Growing up in mine or mill, one becomes a miner or miller just as one becomes a native speaker of English by growing up among speakers of English. Possessing the lore of mill or mine, the adult is no better able to teach it than the ordinary sapient can teach a language. 

Rank 2 in Europe begins on the growth curve described above and is transcended on another that will include the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution. Rank 2 and all later ranks rely on agriculture (and animal husbandry) for most food. Rank 2 makes and uses simple machines, sometimes driven by water wheels or windmills, or turned by animals walking in circles around capstans or on treadmills. These machines grind grain, hammer iron, and eventually do many other tasks. As it happens, agriculture did not get much help from simple machines. The great bulk of a rank 2 population must therefore work on farms, plowing, planting, and harvesting the crops.  

Rank 2 produced many, many thinkers who looked at the work being done around them and wrote manuals describing agriculture, the making of machines, and other techniques. Chapter 1 mentions a manual from China. In 1122, a German Benedictine monk named Theophilus wrote _De diversis artibus_,

"a religiously motivated codification of all the skills available for the embellishment of a church, from the enameling of chalices and the painting of shrines to the making of organ pipes and the casting of great bells for the tower. ... the first flywheels ... a new and cheaper way of making glass ...; the tinning of iron by immersion ..." ( MRTe* _, page 245.

And there are hundreds or thousands more manuals. These are works that describe the best known way to do again what has been done before. The knowledge gained by studying them is more explicit than lore; call it practice.  

Rank 3 begins with the long growth curve of 1300-1900, and we are now watching its transcendance. Rank 3 built what and where no one had built before: Machines with thousands or tens of thousands of parts, performing all sorts of tasks on farms and in homes and factories. Tall buildings and long bridges, from the Arctic to the Tropics.  

To make a new kind of thing by following established practice does not succeed. Rank 3 was possible only because a new kind of knowledge arose, a new kind of thinking. Certain persons in rank 3 knew how to solve new problems. They published books and founded educational institutions to transmit this knowledge, and called their new system of thought engineering.

 A craftsman works on a thing; as he makes it, he encounters problems and solves them. An engineer works on an idea; as he thinks about it, he foresees problems and solves them, then gives his solutions to craftsmen to execute. His thinking has to be more abstract.  

Rank 4 is only now forming itself around and within us. The computer is its most obvious emblem and tool. Some computers have more parts than any machine of rank 3, millions or tens of millions ( 486* ). But more importantly, the design of a new computer is different from the design of a new bridge. For the engineer, the river already exists and so does the traffic. Persons and goods are moving in vehicles either by boat across the river or by highway in a roundabout route that uses an existing, smaller bridge than the new one will be. For the computer designer, nothing is given except everything. From very general knowledge of the universe, including us, and wide knowledge of how computers are made, the designer invents the problem first and then the computing machine to solve it. We are trying still to understand what such a person needs to know, and what methods will be useful. We train electronic engineers, and mathematicians, and computer programmers. A few of the best of them then go beyond what they are taught to make innovations in the art of computation. For the emerging kind of thought that we expect to have wide application in the future, Benzon or I suggested the name systemics.  

Looking backward, we see that systemics will be of no use without engineering, which needs practice to get jobs done, which needs lore to fill in the innumerable details of working in the material universe.  

Looking forward, we see that lore is acquired so slowly that a person in rank 1 can master only one rich art in a lifetime, and the art cannot be so very rich at that. Manuals of practice let the student learn faster, but are good only within established limits; engineering reaches further, but the engineer cannot begin without a stated requirement. We need systemics, because we need people who can look around and perceive requirements that have been invisible to us.  

In an appendix, I have included a short statement that I prepared for a course on cognition. You may want to concern yourself with the way changes in cognition from rank to rank can be correlated with changes in technology; or you may not. If you read the appendix, be aware that its argument is speculative in the utmost extreme. (Benzon and I have published a paper on ranks of cognition.).