What we do depends on what we know. But how often do we pause to ask: how do we know what we know? Where does knowledge actually come from, and who decides what counts as knowledge in the first place?
Philosophy has a word for this territory: epistemology. The Greek roots of that word, referring to the study of knowledge, might evoke something detached and technical. Yet for the World Ethic Forum, those are practical, foundational questions.
We are an organism engaged in a shared inquiry into the preconditions for radically shared aliveness, giving rise to a culture of care and kinship. And of course, one cannot inquire properly without first asking how inquiry itself works. How is knowledge generated, digested, reflected on, and further iterated? What are we doing when we claim to know something? And through which ways do we know? Might there even be multiple pathways to knowing?
If we skip those questions, we risk building our whole practice on unexamined foundations. We’re at risk of assuming, without realising it, that knowledge is only ever rational, individual, and formed as an explicit verbal statement. That knowledge lives inside the brains of experts. That it is only the data that always tells the truth. At worst, that whatever cannot be measured does not count.
Then comes a separate reason why those questions matter: it’s not just about how we inquire, but what we are inquiring into. Groups, organisations, and communities act in relation to what they believe to be true about the world. Culture, decisions, and relationships are all shaped by what we know, or what we believe we know. So, if we want to cultivate a culture of radically shared aliveness, we will need ways of knowing that are coherent with a relational worldview.
The Dominant Lens and Its Limits
Western modernity privileges one form of knowledge: the kind you can write down, test, replicate, and cite. This mode of knowing has given us some extraordinary tools, and deepened our understanding of many aspects of the world. But it is one lens among many. When it becomes the only lens, the only way we believe knowledge gets created and exists, a rich, diverse and important spectrum is lost.
The form of knowledge embraced by Western modernity tends to abstract, separate, and often extract. At its worst, it knows the forest only by measuring the square feet of timber it holds – in better versions, by mapping the nutrient and energy cycles that happen through it – but not by dwelling within it to feel its inner movements, experience it as a coherent whole, interconnected with everything else in the world. It locates knowledge inside individual expert minds, rather than between people, between generations or between people and the living world they are embedded in.
When our ways of knowing fragment reality into pieces, our ways of acting tend to follow. We manage ecosystems rather than belonging to them. We treat communities as problems to be solved rather than relationships to be tended to. And the problem repeats itself, or worse, perpetuates itself and creates more dissonances and unhealthy fragmentation.
An Ecocentric Epistemology
The World Ethic Forum is anchored in what we call radically shared aliveness: an understanding that humans are not detached observers of life, but embodied participants within it. The microbiome inside us. The mycelial networks beneath our feet. The migratory birds navigate by magnetic fields we cannot perceive. Life is relational all the way down, up and sideways.
If we take this seriously, not just as a poetic idea but as a foundational orientation, it has profound implications for what we consider knowledge. An ecocentric worldview asks us to consider that relational systems carry knowledge. That a forest, a watershed, a community, or a body know things that no individual mind can fully capture or articulate. That valid knowing might sometimes be somatic before it is cognitive, felt before it is formulated, collective before it is individual.
Four Ways of Knowing
Researchers Heron and Reason offer four types of knowing that, together, describe how human beings actually understand the world.
There is experiential knowing: the kind that lives in the body after years of practice. The doctor who senses something is wrong before the test results confirm it. The teacher who reads a room. You cannot fully download this kind of knowledge into a manual. It grows slowly over time, and has to be lived into.
There is presentational knowing: the kind that moves through image, pattern, and story before sharper language has quite arrived. When we draw something, or narrate it, or move with it, we reach for knowledge that is already there but hasn’t yet found its clearest expression.
There is propositional knowing: the familiar mode of concepts, frameworks, and theories that dominate Western epistemology.
Finally, there is practical knowing: the knowledge of how to do something. You can read every book about riding a bicycle. At some point, you have to get on it and ride.
These four modes are not a hierarchy. They are an ecology, rich and complementary. Yet most of us, most of the time, have been trained to live almost exclusively in the third.
Indigenous Knowledge and the Long Memory of Place
One of the most important epistemological traditions is that of indigenous and traditional knowledge systems. These are not primitive precursors to scientific knowledge. They are sophisticated, rigorous, and often ancient ways of knowing. They are relational and place-based in their orientation. Developed over generations of intimate relationships with specific landscapes and their human and more-than-human inhabitants, they carry information about biodiversity, climate patterns, and ecological resilience that Western science is only beginning to catch up with.
Those knowledge traditions have been largely suppressed, at great loss. We are trying to navigate a planetary crisis using only a fraction of the knowledge humanity has created, curated and accumulated over millennia. Engaging with indigenous knowledge is not simply an act of cultural respect. It is an act of epistemic wisdom and humility: an acknowledgement that no single tradition holds the whole picture, and that the present times call for an epistemological expansion.
Knowing Together
Different ways of knowing open up different ways of coming together. There is a dimension of knowledge that only becomes visible at the collective level: what we might call participatory knowing. This is the kind of knowledge that does not live inside any individual mind. It exists between, in the quality of a relationship, in the intelligence of a group that has learned to think together, in the felt sense of a shared field.
The World Ethic Forum actively seeks to cultivate this form of knowing, particularly in our yearly Firekeeper Circle gathering. Practices like systemic constellation work and somatic movement are not merely experiential exercises. They are ways of bringing dimensions of a situation into awareness that would not otherwise surface: making visible the relational field, the body’s wisdom, the patterns that analytical thinking alone tends to miss.
When a group can draw on multiple ways of knowing, not just debate and analysis, but story, movement, image, and felt senses, it becomes capable of holding more complexity. It can attend to rippling effects. It can stay in relationship with what it does not yet understand. That is a different kind of intelligence than the sum of individual expert opinions.
It is, perhaps, closer to what the moment requires. It is, in all likelihood, essential to growing a culture of radically shared aliveness.