What does it mean to know something? How do you know you are doing it right? What sort of activity is “knowing”? We know what it means to be strong–i.e., to be able to lift something–but what does it mean to be smart? What does it mean to knowledgeable? What makes us able to know? What does knowledge feel like when we’re in the midst of it?

This has been an abiding question for me, probably since grad school, starting 20 years ago. I now have a simple three part answer that, of course, merely scratches the surface of a much more complicated one. But it’s important to me to emphasize that the three simple parts of my definition of knowledge are all things you can go ahead and train if you want to get smarter. You don’t need anyone to help you get started, though you might need someone to help you polish.

Compare strength again. Weight lifting is a sport that doesn’t just depend on raw strength. Body building, likewise, is an art that doesn’t just depend on muscle mass. In both cases, there are important skills that need to be learned from others. You need a coach. But there is also a simple, ordinary, nonspecialist approach to strength that you can do completely on your own. You can do push ups, and sit ups, and jumping jacks, and you can go for a run. All these things will make you stronger, and if you do them within moderation (and sensitivity to pain) they are unlikely to injure you.

The same goes for getting smarter. The three basic things you should become good at are:

1. Making up your mind.
2. Speaking your mind.
3. Writing it down.

It’s literally that simple.

First, recognize that making up your mind has to do with forming a belief that you have good reason to think is true. You practice this every day by asking yourself a question that you think it’s within your power to answer. Is there water on the moon? Are there more people alive today than have ever died? What caused the extinction of the dinosaurs? What is a CDO? Start with a question that you don’t quite know the answer to but, of course, one that you are curious about. Then go online and try to make up your mind. What sorts of reasons can find to believe one thing or another? Remember that you don’t just want to find “the right answer”, you want to understand why it it the right answer.

Next, tell someone about it. Try to tell someone that you think is knowledgeable about the subject. Are you able to converse intelligently about the subject you have researched? Does the conversation become you merely listening to this other person explain it to you? Or do you do all the talking (suggesting that they are not actually as knowledgeable as you thought)? Is the conversation interesting? If you know what you’re talking about, it should be.

Finally, write it down. Spend 18 or 27 minutes writing a single prose paragraph about what you have learned. Make it at least six sentences long and most 200 words. Make sure you provide your sources.  When you’re done, read it out loud. If possible, have someone else read it back to you. It should be easy to read. It should constitute a strong confident statement of the fact you know to be true along with your reasons for thinking so.

Smart people can carry out these activities in the same way that strong people can lift, carry and throw things of various weight with confidence. Even when they are operating at the edge of their strength, they know what they are capable of. That’s because they are used to using their muscles. You want to be used to using your knowledge in the same way. Think, speak, write. These are the basic disciplines.

Whether it’s student demonstrations or failed replications, academic discourse seems to be in a lot of trouble these days. My view is that it can be traced back to the 1960s and what is sometimes called “the crisis of representation”, or what Gilles Deleuze called “the indignity of speaking of others”.  This has steadily eroded the institutions we needed to maintain our composure, if you will, in the face of conflicting claims. Though he meant it in a somewhat more technical sense, Wittgenstein was onto something when he said that “the civil status of a contradiction” is the philosophical problem. The crisis is that we don’t know how to react when someone (or someone’s data) contradicts us (or our theories). It terrifies us. Even an election result traumatizes us.

For some time now, my working hypothesis is that the quality of our discourse depends on the strength of our prose. We have to learn to approach experience as something that can be articulated in an orderly sequence of paragraphs, each stating and supporting a claim. In that form, opinions should not appear at all threatening (as they certainly might on a placard in an angry mob). I think we have failed to maintain our universities as sites of rigorously “prosaic” experience, places where even poetry is read, not to carry us off into ecstasies, but to bring about a reorganization of our emotions, a reordering of the prose of the world.

For a re-ordering to make sense, of course, there has to be some order to begin with. And this, it seems to me, has been lost. I need to think some more about this. I think it is very important. We need to cultivate, once again, “the prose of world”, and this will require us to establish some decorum. Deleuze to the contrary, we need to learn how to speak for others with dignity. Otherwise, it seems, we can’t even speak with each other.

Next year, I want to hold a regular colloquium at the Library about the nature of scholarly or “academic” writing. I am of course referring to the kind of writing that researchers are supposed to “publish or perish”, but also, by extension, to the sort of writing that students are required to submit for examination. I believe that the first is a model for the second, that students are being taught in their studies how to do what scholars do for a living.

But what is so special about this kind of writing? What sets it apart from other kinds of writing (writing that is no less important) in life and business? What specific difficulty does “academic writing” imply?

My answer is that academic writing is the presentation of what you know in such a way that other knowledgeable people can help you decide whether or not you really do. It opens your thinking criticism by qualified peers. While it is, in a certain sense, intended to persuade your reader of the truth of your claims, this rhetorical force is always tempered by keeping the text open to criticism. That usually means it has to be written in a clear and coherent manner, so that defects in thinking are not concealed by defects in writing.

In an important sense, the text will not be persuasive to an academic audience if it is too obviously “rhetorical”, too eagerly trying to convince the reader of the truth or justice of its message. It must demonstrate a self-consciousness about the possibility of error. It contains an implicit declaration of “correct me if I’m wrong”. This makes demands of the style of the paper, of course; but it is also why academics are so “hung up” on references. It must be possible to check a claim against its sources.

Anyway, the colloquium I want to hold will be an open discussion among CBS faculty about how we can understand the adjective “academic” as the unity of student and scholarly writing. It’s the craft that the university conserves and transmits to future generations. The art of writing down what we know.

It’s one thing to imagine something. It’s another believe it, and yet another to know it. The first step is relatively straightforward: you go from merely picturing something to yourself to thinking that’s “how it is”. I can imagine a beer in my fridge. But it’s much nicer to think there’s a beer in my fridge. Ideally, of course, I would know it. How would I do that?

Well, first of all, while I can easily believe there’s a beer in my fridge without there actually being one there, in order to know it, there has to actually be one in the fridge. My belief, we might say, has to be true. But I also have to have a good reason to believe it. Merely very strong wishful thinking doesn’t count as knowledge, even when it happens to be true. And no amount of good reasons will do if what I’m thinking about isn’t actually the case.

Those three different mental operations are useful to distinguish: imagining, believing, knowing. They are all modes of thought, I suppose. But they are distinct modes. Each can be done well or not so well. I encourage you to practice all three.

A great many things are known to us, but how do we know them? What does it mean to be able to know? What does it take to know something?

There is, first, of course, the question of what it takes to learn something for the first time. But is there not also some skill or talent that is required to keep knowing? We sometimes talk about “maintaining” a position, as in, “I have always maintained that social life is predicated on recognition.” We can ask, “maintained” how? Maintained in the face of what forces that might render the position unserviceable?

The general answer, I would think is: in the face of criticism. So, the ability to know something is the ability to engage with criticism without losing belief, truth and justification. That seems about right. It merely traces the outlines of a competence, to be sure. But I think it’s important to think of knowing as an ability, not merely a state.