Extended Epistemology

The Idea of an Extended Epistemology

• Epistemology: the study of the nature and scope of knowledge
• Extended: widespread or extensive, with spatial magnitude

An extended epistemology stresses the need to know phenomena in many ways beyond, but not excluding, the intellectual. How individuals encounter, understand and respond to themselves, others and their contexts comes from knowing through their senses and bodies as well as the ideas, assumptions and theories that live in their minds. In everyday life, people interweave each of these ways of knowing more or less consciously. An extended epistemology invites one to make such knowing intentional, conscious and explicit—to cultivate value and pay attention to all the ways that people come to know, not just through conceptual thinking.

In positivist-oriented academia, such ‘more than intellectual’ knowing can be devalued in comparison with conventional theorizing and empirical knowledge generation. It might then be positioned firmly away from everyday research practice. Similarly, organizational life rewards and normalizes thinking as the prime way of knowing and empirically derived facts as the only worthwhile outcomes. However, Heron and Reason see the extended epistemology as an interesting developmental challenge for individuals' (and institutions') critical subjectivity and place it at the centre of the action research paradigm.

Others, too, are now explicitly seeing an extended epistemology as a timely and essential component of our human response to global socio-ecosystem challenges. If quality action research is concerned with human (and more-than-human) flourishing, then the human intellect alone, whilst clearly useful, is not enough for us to respond to the challenges we face as a species. And if Einstein was right when he said that no problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it, we need to expand our consciousness in order to address the issues of our time, broadening the very idea of mind in order to address the problems that our societal norms impose on us and the more-than-human world.

Heron and Reason have advocated for this, more inclusive approach over many years, proposing that this extended epistemology has four interwoven ways of knowing. These four ways embrace the preverbal, manifest and tacit knowings we might associate with artists, crafts people and our own visceral, sensory vitality. The four ways of knowing, in more depth, are as

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