Those working in academia are often pressured to turn the messy, profound magic of the humanities into clean, predictable, measurable data points. They are told to measure learning through propositional truths—the concrete facts, the dates, and the clear thesis statements that neatly fit onto a grading rubric.
An essay by philosopher Matt Duncan offers a refreshing take on humanities for those of us who feel like the soul of our disciplines is being squeezed out by data.
Duncan revisits Bertrand Russell’s classic distinction between knowledge by description–the facts you can read in a textbook–and knowledge by acquaintance–the direct, raw, conscious awareness of an experience. The beautiful, frustrating reality of knowledge by acquaintance is that it completely resists being fully put into words. Try perfectly describing the taste of a peach to someone who has never had one. Try articulating the exact weight of grief, the terror of war, or the precise feeling of looking at a masterpiece. You will always come up short.
And that is exactly the point for those teaching literature, history, philosophy, and the arts.
Lately, the humanities corner of academia has been plagued by a pessimistic skepticism—driven by the need for empirical metrics—suggesting that if a student can't perfectly articulate or optimize an output, the knowledge isn't real. But Duncan reminds us that experiential knowledge is an expansive, foundational domain of human life.
When a student sits with a tragic text, listens to a haunting piece of music, or grapples with a profound ethical dilemma, the transformation happening inside them isn’t a set of declarative sentences. It is a direct, conscious encounter. It is a felt reality.
The work is not to force these profoundly personal, introspective experiences into automated summaries or sterile standardized boxes. The work is to defend the space where they happen. The most transformative insights students have will always exist in the silence right after the poem ends—in the special kind of knowledge that simply cannot be put into words.
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