by Hugh M. Lewis

All knowledge that is or possibly becomes available to us is human knowledge--if other animals know, we cannot know what or how they know. This knowledge remains fundamentally unavailable to us. There is no knowledge that is not first prescreened and filtered through the mechanisms of human perception, cognition, memory, linguistic interpretation and active social construction. Thus there are certain built in constraints to our knowledge systems, namely and first that they are by definition human knowledge systems. This is the most general form of anthropological relativity that conditions and limits ultimately what, and how, we may know about the larger reality.

We must understand therefore that there are constraints inherent to our knowledge, of how we come to see and understand that world, that are built into our very condition as human beings, and this pre-structures what we may know and see in significant, even unknown ways.

We have developed alternative systems that have allowed us to systematically expand our knowledge base. We have developed instruments of perception, microscopes and telescopes, that allow us to see on scales never ever imagined to exist previously, and these instruments have broadened and deepened our field of view of reality by many orders of magnitude over what it was when we only had the vision of our bare eyes. Other kinds of systems have been developed to increase our knowledge of unknown realities in many other ways as well. All of these systems have broadened reality for us, and broadened our understanding of reality manifold.

But however powerful and enlightening our alternative systems may be, we must face a realization that all knowledge must ultimately be filtered through a human screen of consciousness, and this filter is far from perfect or being infallible, no matter how logical or well trained or informed we may presume ourselves or one another to be. It is most likely that there are some forms of knowledge, some domains of reality, that are for the most part permanently beyond the horizon of our understanding and comprehension, however remotely or indirectly it may be ascertained. Even the possibility of the existence of such unknown realities, containing what we may refer to as unknown systems, is itself even something that may be fundamentally uncertain. I suspect that we will reach our observational and inferential limits in understanding the fundamental processes of physical reality, for instance, in any decisive or certain manner, and that we will also reach certain grander limitations of our view of the larger universe. In fact I think we have already probably encountered such limitations even though we are hesitant to see them as insuperable boundaries to our knowledge and our science.

Two main points arise from this consideration of the fundamental anthropological relativity of all our knowledge systems, or possible knowledge systems. First, what we know, however much this may ultimately be, is always finite and always bound by the horizon of what we do not know--or of the fathomless unknown. We face a fundamental dilemma of trying to comprehend what may be ultimately infinite in terms that are by definition finite. Secondly, what we know is conditioned by the constraints of our knowledge, by how we know, and the act of knowing, which is never "pristine" as the "thing in itself" but always preconditioned by previous experience, by our own assessments, models, and patterns of perceptual recognition. It is not just that our knowledge is pre-selected and constrained in unconscious ways, but that our act of knowing reality, at whatever level, in whatever way, leads to our interaction upon some level with that reality. We bring not only our pre-understandings to our knowledge, but we bring it to what is known or possibly known by us.

These two sets of constraining conditions to human knowledge, that define the basis of anthropological relativity of knowledge, are mutually implicit to one another, and create a condition of ultimately never being certain of our knowledge, of what we really do known, in any non-relative manner. The only kind of knowledge that appears to transcend this dilemma is that encompassed by the logical relations, operations and terminologies of mathematics, the language of the "pure sciences." Pure mathematics does so by fact of its representation of ideal (i.e., non-real) realities that, by themselves, have no direct instantiation in the real world, but which are represented by many phenomenological instances that can be said to be applied forms. Even pure mathematics itself may ultimately be subject to these kinds of relativistic constraints, though we may not ever know for certain. Certain types of mathematical problems remain intransigent to solution.

One cannot over-stress the importance of understanding the role that anthropological relativity must play in our comprehension of the world, in all fields of knowledge, especially in relation to the sciences because it is in these areas of knowledge that objective/empirical claims to reality are regularly made but often without default consideration of possible anthropological constraints to such knowledge. The success of science has bred a certain attitude of hubris about what it knows and is capable of achieving, and in turn perhaps a blind eye to its own intrinsic limitations. 

It is an important caveat to note as well that when we refer to anthropological relativity of knowledge, we are referring to a basic philosophical and cognitive condition intrinsic to our form of symbolic knowledge itself. We are not referring thereby, however implicitly, to more vulgar forms of humanistic relativism, the problems of cultural relativity or interpretive parallax, or the role of emotions and dispositions in our thinking, and so forth. We are referring to a fundamental condition, a basic statement about the limits, nature and structure of all human knowledge, however it may be expressed, interpreted or used in the world.

It is especially in the realm of systems theory and systems science that the question of the anthropological relativity of knowledge comes to greatest focus and therefore gains the greatest significance. This is because systems theory deals primarily with the complementarity of alternative frameworks of reference, especially dealing holistically with complex systems, as all natural systems really are, and this entails the adoption automatically of a relativistic approach to such understanding, consideration of the fundamental contextuality and conditions that constrain our knowledge of the world.

We have largely taken for granted the pan-human condition of the anthropological relativity of our knowledge because it remains normally invisible and transparent to us as a condition intrinsic to ourselves. We cannot see the outside of the room that we are looking out from in the first place. The idea that we can feasible step beyond the boundaries of our own knowledge worlds arises in a partial manner of inter-psychological or inter-cultural parallax when we do encounter and interact with people who have adopted fundamentally different frames of reference for their knowledge than our own. We gain a sense of relativization and objectification of the difference that we normally do not need to deal with when we deal only with collective precepts and assumptions that are considered to be globally shared and universally true. But we are not likely to be brought fully to the objective awarenesss of the limitations and structure of our own knowledge unless and until we encounter some form of alternative intelligence in the universe, that is capable of some form of intelligent knowledge and information transmission. It will only be then that we are fully awakened from the complacency of our own knowledge foundations, and provided a frame of reference that we have never experienced before. I will not presume to make any predictions at this time about the outcomes of such an encounter for our worldview and thus, for our world.

General Systems Essays, Vol. I