Something I wrote in response to wanting to better conceptualize and remember Propositional Knowing — using Perplexity AI to round out the corners.
A seventy-five-year-old widower, a Paris cab driver, whose hometown is the beating heart of France — a fact he knows as well as his own name. He knows every street, alley, and café in Paris with the certainty and precision that only decades of living and working can bestow.
This man's propositional knowing (dianoia) expresses itself every time he states: "The capital of France is Paris." He can name the arrondissement, recite the order of the boulevards, and recall the exact metro stops for landmarks.
These are facts, propositions, knowledge stored in semantic memory. If asked, he can say, "Notre Dame is on Île de la Cité," or "There's a pharmacy on rue Cler three doors from the bakery" — all immediate, propositional content.
But his story glows with non-propositional knowing, the kind that Plato considered far more fundamental.
Techne (Procedural Knowing)
He drives expertly, weaving through traffic, dodging the delivery vans, finding obscure addresses without hesitation. His procedural memory guides his hands and feet — he "knows how," not just "knows that." His success is measured by his skill: delivering passengers safely and smoothly, his "aim is true." This is knowing-how, not articulated but enacted.
Noesis (Perspectival Knowing)
Every lunch at his favorite café, sitting on the street corner, watching Paris go past, he "sizes up" the situation. He notices who's in love, who's lonely, who's late — he reads the room, senses the atmosphere. His awareness — what's foregrounded, what's backgrounded — this is the silent noticing, the "successful noticing" of noesis. It's not stored as a fact; it's lived through episodic memory, reliving those afternoons and sensing the beauty in the ordinary bustle.
Gnosis (Participatory Knowing)
As he notices, he remembers his wife's face when he proposed and she said "oui." That memory isn't just an image or a fact. It's a moment where his identity and hers became entwined — a participatory knowing, where love binds them. The sense of belonging, the deep felt meaning, the identity stitched together by years of shared life — this is the "self" as itself a memory, an expression of participatory knowing. He is not just "in" Paris; he is woven into her fabric, and into his own story.
What Vervaeke's lecture urges is a refusal of "propositional tyranny." Knowing the capital of France, repeating facts about Paris, articulating addresses — these are important, yet they rest on deeper foundations. The cabbie's skill, awareness, and sense of meaning all intermingle and depend upon one another.
His wisdom isn't simply in reciting, "The capital of France is Paris," but in living the reality of Paris every day: responding gracefully to life's patterns, opening himself up to beauty and memory, embodying love and belonging, and cultivating virtue from daily experience. Propositions help, but it's the lived, participatory, and perspectival knowledge — the true wisdom of Plato's model — that gives his life meaning.
"True knowing transcends what we say, reaching into how we act, what we notice, and how we belong — in the city, in love, in the world, and in the body of Christ to the glory of the Father of celestial lights."
In the end, his story is both a tapestry of facts and a living illustration of Plato's argument: that true knowing transcends what we say, reaching into how we act, what we notice, and how we belong — in the city, in love, in the world, and in the body of Christ to the glory of the Father of celestial lights.
Nick Pavlovits