I have very slowly been working my way through my dad’s papers, digitizing what’s not already out there and mostly uploading to PhilPapers. This undated essay and syllabus represents the project of his that I most vividly remember and admire. There is a longer manuscript proposal to be scanned down the road, but this brief overview captures the core. He taught a course based on this at Hunter College in 1977, as the intro mentions, and at least one instance of a seminar at George Washington in 2013. – HCE 7/7/2025
THE MAP OF KNOWLEDGE
Peter Caws, The George Washington University
“The Map of Knowledge” is the name of a course that I introduced at Hunter College of the City University of New York in 1977, as part of a curriculum development project funded by a grant to the College from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The idea of the course went back to an earlier period when, as an officer of a major foundation (Carnegie Corporation of New York), I had had an opportunity to study at close quarters the curricula of a large number of American colleges and universities, and had come to certain conclusions about their deficiencies. Its title was borrowed from the English philosopher R. G. Collingwood, who wrote a book entitled Speculum Mentis, or the Map of Knowledge, although my use of the metaphor differs somewhat from his. Also its conception no doubt owed something to two books that strongly influenced my own intellectual formation: William Rose’s An Outline of Modern Knowledge (London, Victor Gollancz, 1931) and Alan Pryce-Jones’s A New Outline of Modern Knowledge (London, Victor Gollancz, 1956), though the internal structure of these works to some extent shares the deficiencies in question.
These deficiencies, whether in the curriculum or the literature, reflect a general problem in the acquisition of knowledge, so that the idea of the Map is relevant not only to the academic world but to the condition of an educated public in general. The interest of the course and its content are such that it could readily be adapted to other levels of teaching, for example the re-training of high school or college teachers. Also it has been suggested to me that it could successfully be presented as a television series for a wider audience, and on reflection this seems to me a natural and desirable next step. I will develop these points further below.
The deficiencies, as far as the curriculum is concerned, are of two kinds. Since the reforms at Harvard under President Eliot the most frequent pattern of undergraduate education has been one of elective courses, broadened by distribution requirements and deepened by a major concentration. This is fine in principle, but in practice the distribution requirements have not given the coherent sweep of knowledge across the disciplines that is needed if the electives are not to be merely fragmentary, and without which the major is likely to be arbitrary and isolated. One remedy for this has been Western Civilization courses, or General Education programs, or Core Curricula, but these have often introduced other difficulties, laying undue stress on history and tradition or repeating the arbitrariness of the elective system at a more general level. What has been lacking is a detailed overall structure into which the various courses (and majors) might be seen to fit and within which they might be seen to be interrelated, a conception of general knowledge not as a miscellany of disconnected facts and principles but as a pattern of interconnected ones.
At the same time little systematic attention has been paid to the student’s self-awareness as a knower capable of the acquisition of further knowledge, i.e. to the nature of knowledge and the available strategies for acquiring it. There have of course always been introductory philosophy courses, sometimes even required ones, but again these are often historical, and even when systematic it is not always clear how the problems discussed relate to the condition of students not specializing in philosophy. Plenty of them, of course, make the connection for themselves, but the opportunity to use the elementary insights of the theory of knowledge as the powerful tools they are for the organization of the knowing and learning process is generally missed.
There is a third deficiency that is peculiar to larger public institutions (like Hunter) drawing considerable proportions of their student body from disadvantaged populations. Students entering private and long-established colleges and universities generally do so with some sense of belonging there, some familiarity with the life of the intellect, and with an expectation that they will be able to meet the demands placed on them. But in urban institutions many students lack this confidence, and seem unaware of the fact that their brains are equipped in much the same way as those of people in more fortunate circumstances – something that needs to be said explicitly, although hardly anyone thinks of doing so. They expect to acquire economic advantages in college, but associate such advantages more with grades, credits, and diplomas, however acquired, than with the knowledge for which these are supposed to stand. This association is not altogether their fault, since many academic practices, not to mention the general attitudes of society – as reflected in the press, the media, advertising, political discourse and business life – encourage and reinforce it.
The Map of Knowledge addresses these deficiencies by beginning from the situation of the individual knower (making clear what it means to have knowledge, what kinds of knowledge there are, how they are acquired, what resources their acquisition calls upon and what strategies can be used to facilitate this acquisition), going on to the history of the acquisition and institutionalization of human knowledge in general, and then offering an account of the various divisions of knowledge (the natural sciences, the social sciences, the humanities and arts, with their disciplinary subdivisions) in terms of their contents and methods. The course ends with a consideration of the uses – social and personal, practical and contemplative – to which knowledge can be put, stressing both its limitatations and the individual’s responsibility for it. Although this all sounds somewhat heavy I have found that it generates great enthusiasm and is experienced not only as enlightening but also as exciting.
(One test of success in the course is the ability to play a game called the Explanation Game, or the Chalk Game, after T. H. Huxley’s famous lecture “A Piece of Chalk.” This consists of specifying, in as much detail as possible, what disciplines, and what parts of them, would have to be called on to explain fully any object or event taken at random – for example the reading of this text. This would require as a start biology, because of the fibers from which the paper is made; chemistry, because of the processes used in paper manufacture; physics, because of the fact that the sheet holds together but can be torn, would flutter to the ground if dropped, is visible, reflects light differentially, etc.; geometry, because it is rectangular; linguistics, sociology, economics etc. because it can be read, is of a standard size, was packaged and bought; neurophysiology, because of the brain processes involved in reading – and so on and so on. Without becoming an expert in any of these disciplines the seriously educated person should be able to say what they explain and how, where their products fit in the spectrum of human uses and interests etc., and to be able to do this in intelligent detail with respect to anything that comes within his or her experience – including, on a more serious level, politics, the arms race, crime, drug abuse, and so on.)
The idea of the Map clearly reopens the old debate about general education (in the colleges) and general knowledge (in the society at large). One standard entry in this debate is the lament that people don’t know anything any more – their own history, foreign languages, mathematics…. Whether there ever was a time at which such things were generally known may be open to question, but it is worth reflecting that the idea of general knowledge is quite recent, an eighteenth-century idea in fact, and there has hardly been time for a settled canon of such knowledge to emerge. One of the reasons why much of education seems less than compelling to the new generation (each new generation, not just this one) is that its content is automatically what the previous generation thinks the new one ought to know; after a few generations (assuming enough docile newcomers to take in and become attached to and transmit the values of their elders) the need for much of the curriculum may become unintelligible. This is not just because it is not “relevant” in some popular or ephemeral sense, but because the profile of the available knowledge is changing and survivals in the old curriculum may leave little room for what is of most current interest and importance.
In most American institutions the curriculum is flexible enough to avoid this worst-case outcome; new material is being fitted in all the time (as currently with the attempt to integrate knowledge of computers into the liberal arts). But the general principle still holds: if a generation is to decide what it ought to know, rather than learning without protest what its ancestors thought they ought to know, it has to know what there is to know in order to make an intelligent choice. What is called the “knowledge explosion” seems to make that a superhuman task. While, however, it is true that there is quantitatively far more available knowledge than ever before, this does not mean that the map of knowledge is getting much more complex. One of the basic principles of the Map is the distinction between direct and indirect knowledge: I have direct knowledge if I can answer a given question (and justify the answer) out of my head, I have indirect knowledge if I know where to look the answer up (or whom to ask), and am in a position to incorporate it immediately, if temporarily, into my stock of direct knowledge. (This last condition involves having what I call paradigmatic knowledge of the required kind.) Thus I know indirectly all the numbers in the telephone book, even though at any time I know only a few numbers directly. And the fact that the telephone book gets fatter does not complicate the process of acquiring indirect knowledge except in marginal cases (e.g. if the number I want is John Smith’s).
However in order to have access to indirect knowledge it is essential for the available kinds to be recognized and felicitously arranged, and that is what the Map does. Encyclopaedias do it too, except that their arrangement, being most often alphabetical, facilitates access without showing the interrelations between kinds of knowledge. (Something like the Map is provided in the “Propaedia” of the Encyclopaedia Britannica but this is more like a formal index than a full conceptualization limiting itself – apart from the introductory essays – to the compilation of cross-references, and carrying faithfully the Aristotelian imprint of Mortimer Adler’s Chicago.) People read encyclopaedia articles on an ad hoc basis – not that there is anything wrong with this, since if I want to know about the Coptic liturgy that’s the article I’ll read – and often on only some what less contingent impulses than they read magazine articles in airplanes or the Sunday supplements. There results an extraordinary fragmentation of knowledge – which extends from the elective course through the 50-minute class to the one-minute spot on the TV news (consider the current passion for “briefing,” where the context or background will be filled in, if at all, hardly less briefly) – unless there is a framework, a matrix in which the fragments can be set and take on their relative weight and importance.
I am convinced that most ordinary people are perfectly capable of acquiring such a framework of knowledge, and of exercising standards of critical judgment at a relatively high level in everyday affairs, at the same time taking pleasure if not pride in these things (although the latter might wear off as they became matters of course). The general acquisition of something like this in a democratic society seems to me no more Utopian or hopeless than the spread of literacy or cleanliness must certainly have seemed a century or so ago. Cleanliness and literacy were once class matters; they no longer are, at least in anything like the same degree. Intellect has retained class associations (although this is not a simple question, since the studied disdain of it has class associations too); there seems no reason for this barrier not to be similarly removed. The Founding Fathers seem to have thought that this would happen automatically among a democratic people suitably educated, and designed a form of government which assumed a high level of critical discussion (it is worth remembering that The Federalist was published in a daily newspaper).
That promise has not yet been fulfilled. The Map does not presume to take it on single-handedly but is conceived at least in part in a similar spirit. We need a corrective to the current scepticism about knowledge, especially scientific knowledge, which when it knows its own limitations is still our best defense against mindless relativism and its reactionary products, fundamentalism and superstition. We need public and exportable standards of general knowledge and argument, a good deal more rigorous than those currently attained even in relatively high places, if we are to preserve, by other than military means, the values of democracy. (There are good and not merely selfish reasons for preferring those values to the available alternatives, although part of the trouble is that many people who cherish them find it difficult to articulate these reasons.) It was Lenin who thought it hopeless, at least for the time being, to educate the masses to the level of independent judgment, and silly to try. Even if some American leaders seem to want to agree with him, we owe it to our own history to take the other tack. And we might as well exploit for this purpose the two most effective ways into the general consciousness, the two prime teaching instruments, namely the teachers themselves, and television.
My experience has shown that many of the basic topics covered by the Map can be presented in a lively visual way. It may help to give a quick summary of what the main points are, and indicate the propositions whose truth they are intended to impress on the learner or viewer. I give these on the following pages in the form of a syllabus under the thirteen headings I have used for teaching purposes, but the series could be expanded or contracted (although the latter would be the more difficult, since there is already much more material than can be covered in a single semester and any particular offering of the course represents a selective cut from what is given here).
In reading the syllabus it should be borne in mind that the course is not intended as a series of compressed introductory courses in the disciplines alluded to. The Map says: here is an area of human knowledge, this is the part of the world it covers and the kind of problem that arises in it; the discipline that deals with it is called (anthropology, biology, classics etc.); these are some of the standard topics in that discipline and some of the people who have made important contributions to it. In teaching the course it is my practice to insert from time to time a “commercial” for the department to which the student would have to go to get detailed information on a particular subject. It should also be borne in mind that the accessibility and interest of the course, as well as the vividness of the illustrative examples, depend in large part on the presence of the instructor and cannot be summarized in a syllabus.
The Map of Knowledge: Syllabus
Week 1: What knowledge is.
The etymology of “knowledge.” Knowledge as an ability. Knowing how and knowing that. Definition: knowledge is the ability to make true statements and defend their claim to truth. Kinds of knowledge based on criteria of truth: truth by correspondence (justification by evidence), truth by coherence (justification by inference). Possibility of knowing through coherence what would if we could make appropriate observations be seen to be true by correspondence. (Examples: what we read in the paper; what professors say.) Question whether this is knowledge. Network of sources of knowledge; degree to which it can be trusted. Direct, indirect, and paradigmatic knowledge. Metaphor of map; three principles: scale, one-world, glove compartment. Knowledge as maps of world, map of knowledge as map of maps. Glove compartment = each individual head. Re-emphasize connection between knowledge and ability.
Week 2: How knowledge is acquired.
Having knowledge = having acquired a mental (or conceptual) structure. Structure as set of relations (things in relation = states of affairs, words in relation = sentences, concepts in relation = propositions). Instruction as the construction of this (inner) structure. Genetic or endosomatic instruction vs. social or exosomatic instruction. Primacy of reading as vehicle of instruction (techniques of reading). Carrier of mental structure (presumably) the brain. 30 billion neurons, epigenesis. Three brains (or four if count hemispheres as two): reacting brain (brain stem, reptilian brain); feeling brain (limbic system, paleomammalian brain); thinking brain (cortex, neomammalian brain) – this divided into left (propositional, logical) and right (appositional, impressionistic). (All this approximate; variations.) Control of reactions and feelings by thoughts, influence of reactions and feelings on thinking. Note brain works by itself, we don’t have to operate it (it has to be operating already for us to do anything). TRUST THE BRAIN!
Week 3: How knowledge is preserved.
Knowledge quickly forgotten unless formulated so as to facilitate memory, connected to other items of knowledge. (Why don’t we remember being very young?) Kinds of memory: image retention, short-term recall (active, fades), long-term recall (imprinted, fades more slowly, importance of access). Attention (retention to short-term), rehearsal (short-term to long-term). Best vehicle for memory = language (mnemonics, writing – externalization of long-term memory; libraries as collective memory). Nature of language – system of signs (sign = sound or mark + concept). Language learning – babbling, linguistic deflation. Horizontal and vertical instruction; slang, dictionaries. Danger of learning merely linguistic formulations: rethink instruction – internalization, memory, reformulation and testing (thinking).
Week 4: How knowledge grows.
Context of human and cultural evolution (universe ~ 10 billion years, homo sapiens ~ 1 million years, recorded history ~ 6000 years, modern science ~ 400 years, computers ~ 30 years). Humans until recently just smart animals. What accounts for emergence of knowledge? a) language b) enduring artifacts. Many false starts in both language and culture, extinguished because disaster or lack of critical mass. Reduction of multiplicity of languages – Indian Village theorem. Observation of regularities (stars, seasons, birth, death etc.), development of names and of beliefs, passing on of lore. Curiosity, exploration (psychology of this). Basic requirement for growth of knowledge: say anything at all, remember it if true, forget it if false. After many generations will have stock of tested propositions to be passed on. (This a case of general evolutionary principle: variety + selection.)
Week 5: How knowledge is organized and taught.
What do people tend to remember and repeat to one another? three main paradigms: jokes, gossip, interesting or useful information. (With suitable caveats these can be generalized respectively into the humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sciences.) Accumulation of myths and legends, chronicles, rules and recipes; emergence of learned class (priests, scribes, medicine men etc.), instruction at first of sons of kings etc. Liberal education, originally of free men (vs. slaves), now for the liberation of everyone; freedom = absence of constraint + availability of resources + information about state of affairs + knowledge about world. Esoteric knowledge, fears of liberation of lower classes (fears of scarcity, but note knowledge a commodity that can be shared without being diminished). Classical studies (classicus = top class vs. proletarius = bottom), divinity (for preparation of clergy), law etc. University = highest and most general education: Plato’s Academy (4th c. B.C.), Museum and Library at Alexandria (2nd c. B.C.), universities of Bologna (1088 A.D.), Oxford (1249), Harvard (1636), local university.
Week 6: Scientific and humanistic knowledge.
Divisions and disciplines to some extent accidents of history, but justifications: originally humanities vs. divinity, natural philosophy vs. moral philosophy etc., learning of classical languages, reading of classical texts (canon). Now science (scientia – just knowledge): causal explanation. Subject matter of natural sciences = objects and events whose causal antecedents do not include human intentions, subject matter of social sciences = objects and events whose causal antecedents do include human intentions. Humanities and arts not sciences but disciplines and practices; their subject-matter = objects and events chosen for attention because of values they embody. Mathematics and religion special cases: mathematics = study of all possible relations expressible in formal languages, whereas science = study of relations actually obtaining among things in the world; religion = study of ties (ligare = to bind) between humans and God (in which case off map altogether) or between humans and other humans (in which case partly social science, partly humanities).
Week 7: Humans as part of nature.
Society is human but human beings themselves are natural before they are social. They are animals, i.e. living things not attached to their source of nourishment. Life = a metabolic process in self-reproducing entities (organisms) that can develop in an energy-rich environment. Evolution is source of proliferation and variety + scarcity + mechanism of selection. Biology: kingdoms (plants + animals but also fungi etc.); classification (Linnaeus); comparative anatomy (Cuvier). Similarity of animals to humans / similarity of humans to animals; sociobiology. Brains as computers, thinking machines? Molecular biology, genetics; medicine, surgery, genetic engineering; death. Humans as animals that make their own life, anticipate their own death.
Week 8: The material of the world.
Organisms made of same elements as inanimate world; inorganic vs. organic chemistry, properties of carbon; properties of any element (fundamental particles). Extent and origin of physical world. General problem: going beyond observation, getting out of flat region. Hypotheses, theories; confirmation, fallacy of affirming consequent. No alternative worked out view of world (hypothesis of God non-explanatory because too powerful). Results of hundreds of years of converging theoretical work: (probably) big bang, hydrogen + helium, stars formed by clumping and gravitation, heavy elements in stars, planets thrown out and cooled etc. Forces: gravitation/inertia, electromagnetic, nuclear forces. Orbits, gravitational fields, solar system (Ptolemy, Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, Einstein). Large numbers: age and size of universe, size of atom; Avogadro’s number; show how large built up out of small (e.g. clothes from threads as locally observable case). The matter of which we are made is as old as the universe and may be eternal; we are its present organization and are temporary. Entropy, second law of thermodynamics. But our organization is complex enough to make knowledge possible (Schrodinger: why is the atom so small? because we’re so big).
Week 9: The human habitat.
Humans material objects in material environment: oxygen, water, ambient temperature, availability of food, shelter, companions, mates. Characteristics of earth (why oxygen in atmosphere and not hydrogen?), climate erosion etc. Geological eras, palaeontology, 19th-century controversies over age of earth, origin of species (Darwin). Earliest hominid ancestors; probable routes of settlement of continents; competition with other animals, other humans. Emergence of technology, neolithic revolution (agriculture, domestication of animals, metallurgy). Growth of cities, transportation, industrialization. Artificiality of habitat, irreversible dependence on technology, relation of population to environment, energy sources and resources, pollution and destruction.
Week 10: Humans in society.
Families, tribes, kinship systems; idea of culture (annihilation game: all adults dies, onlypre-linguistic children survive, cared for by wolves or whatever; what culture re-establishes itself? two cases a) artifacts destroyed b) artifacts survive). Relations between humans not primarily bioogical; different relations define different social sciences – family, other groups etc. (sociology); law, power, authority etc. (political science); property, production, distribution, exchange etc. (economics). Theories of property: Locke, Marx; capitalism, socialism etc. History: chronicles, interest in ancestors, fiduciary lives, calendars. Great movements, periods: Judaic, Graeco-Roman, Medieval, Reformation, New World etc. Forms of government, morality, customs, trade. Concept of progress, meaning of history, historical materialism, eschatology, effects of technology; nationalism, ideology, war and peace.
Week 11: Humans as self-determined individuals.
Freedom again (cf. week 5); problem of freedom vs. determinism. Choice, conditioning, idiosyncrasy. Idea of self, of subject – doctrine of soul, origin in dreams, fear of death. Early memories, early traumas, theories of mind (Plato to Freud), doctrines of personality and its development (Jung, Piaget, Kohlberg etc.). Behavior and behaviorism. Skills – knowledge how (in musculature, not just in head); training. Test questions for values: a) how would you wish world to be? b) if it were that way, what would you do then? Action as negative (vs. deficiencies in world) or positive (seeking ends freely and creatively posited). Individual vs. collective values and action. Special role of knowledge for freedom: other people can constrain, deprive, or deceive, but they cannot compel ignorance when knowledge includes knowledge of its own limitations (Socrates). Self-knowledge; self-determination – character, habits, form of life, goals. Self-interest, altruism; equilibrium, sustaining relationships (friendship, love).
Week 12: The world of culture and the imagination.
Accumulation not only of knowledge (preserved because of its utility) but also of texts and artifacts preserved for their own sake, as embodying values. Instrumental and terminal values (ethics and aesthetics). Popular culture: myths, legends, rites, customs, festivals etc. Literature, theatre, music, dance, film, the plastic arts etc. Language as making (poetry); idea of text, narrative, genre. Variety of languages and their development; national literatures (translations). History of ideas, art, literature: antiquity, Renaissance, Enlightenment, romanticism, symbolism modernism, feminism etc. Creation + criticism as special case of evolutionary principle (variety + selection). How works are made, preserved discarded: publishers, producers, curators, editors; the market. Virtuosity, excellence and exactitude in making and performance. Art as ideal as expression, as entertainment. Civilization – arts of living, manners accomplishments.
Week 13: Understanding the world, living a life.
All this knowledge and experience carried by individual subject, constitutive of self, of person (distinguish these – persona = mask, this not necessarily bad faith, cf. manners above). Finite life, different from anyone else’s, to be made one’s own; understanding of whole; meaning (if any) of questions about the “meaning of life” (the asking can be the meaning). Living well, living wisely. Philosophy (the examined life: reasons for belief and action) and religion (the committed life?); speculation vs. analysis, the testing of beliefs. Faith as supplementing knowledge, as psychological need, as comfort. Responsibility for beliefs a) if merely private b) if consequences for others. Responsibility therefore for state of one’s own knowledge, need for self-instruction (FEED THE BRAIN! – and not junk food). Effect of knowledge on satisfaction (ignorance as bliss); dropping out, escape – the free rider problem. Knowledge as the key to what the world might be, what life in it might be.