Up: [[Thinking]] Created: 2023-04-29 Updated: 2025-02-18 No knowledge can be produced by a single way of knowing. If we keep this in mind, we’ll find that our points of connection explode exponentially, that our knowledge is deeper, and that our expressions are immeasurably richer. Since the Scientific Revolution and then the Age of Enlightenment, we have valued **Reason**, which I’ve seen defined as a search for patterns and their exceptions so that we can make models and predictions. There is no question that reason is vitally important. I shudder to imagine where our society would be without it. Update in February 2025 We’re now seeing politically what happens to the world when reason is absent. We are far beyond shuddering. But society’s advances don’t come just from reason. If we are talking about ethics, for example, reason needs the support of emotions. And most of society’s technical or material advances come through a combination of scientific thought or reason, and **creative** thought. [[Intuition]] is considered reasoning from within. It’s a form of pattern recognition that has been called immediate cognition. You don’t want to rely on it solely because intuitions can be wrong as often as they are right. We might think of **imagination** as belonging exclusively to the domain of the arts, but every time you turn on the news and empathize with someone who is in a situation you have never experienced, you have combined imagination and emotion. And imagination can help us make sense of the world. Einstein famously said, *The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.* Emotion doesn’t just influence our knowing. It is an actual way of knowing. Try appreciating anything in the arts without it. And of course we rely heavily on our [[Senses]] to make sense of the world. We don’t question this often but different people experience the world differently through their senses. There isn’t one common response. **Faith** is a way of knowing that describes not just religious belief, but anytime we are prepared to accept assumptions. And if you’ve ever had the heartbreak of a family member with dementia, as I had with my father, you know that **memory** shapes your identity, influences how you gather new knowledge, and, indeed, is the source of much of what you know either through your personal memory or the memory of the collective. Fortunately, we don’t have to make ourselves checklists of ways of knowing. Oops, I forgot to look at that idea through my senses! That would be silly. All we have to do is pay attention to the [[Image]]s that come unbidden to mind and give them every bit as much credence as reason in our sensemaking work. An inner image is a combination of many of these ways of knowing. It is NOT necessarily or even often visual. Words, especially metaphors, are the common carriers of images.