Interesting question. I know of a tension between anecdotal versus scientific: Anecdotal would be "my grampa smoked till he was 96" versus scientific would be "statistically, smoking cuts 10 years off your life expectancy".

I also know of a tension between subjective and objective: For example someone may have subjectively experienced God, but acknowledge the lack of any objective data to support God's existence.

I also know there is a tension between intuition and reason: For example, someone may feel in their gut that a bungie jump is unsafe, despite all reason.

So when people talk of a tension between experiential and academic ways of knowing, maybe they mean some combination of the above.

With respect to Big History, some people may have a subjective, intuitive, gut experience that life is more meaningful, purposeful, important, sacred than the scientific, objective, logical Big History narrative would dictate.

Thank you Karen and Ken for your thoughts.

So, to answer my original question, I would say that empirical (and hence academic) and experiential ways of knowing may appear to be different, but fundamentally they are not, but as always it is a little more complicated than that.

The thing is, and thanks again Ken for providing a short history of this, Plato and Aristoteles' and all the others afterwards have based their thinking on what they knew about the natural world at their respective time, but this knowledge has grown, and so I have been wondering for quite some time now, what would their thinking have been had they known what we know about nature now? This of course is just a thought experiment, but I guess it is fair to say that their philosophies would have been different. Don't you think?

About the other two points you raised, Ken (it was nice meeting you at the conference, by the way): I am writing an article for Origins in which I want to reflect the conference experience since for me it was the first conference and my first time in the US. It would be good to have some more reflections of this conference, also and especially from more experienced conference attendees. And you basically already started ... with raising these two points!

My impression at the end (and actually really only after watching the video of the wrap up session on facebook again) was that we need a lot more discussions and we cannot only have them at conferences. These are deep issues and I personally need time to think about things before I can say something substantial. Also after two and a half days packed with presentations and lectures and small talk in between, I was rather tired. That is why (back at home and refreshed) I made notes of the wrap-up session from the video recording and they have been uploaded to the conference presentation folder on Google Docs. So, we can follow up and make the conference worthwhile in the long run.

I will raise some more issues and epistemology/theory of knowledge is one of them. Even though I may only ask questions and at the risk of sounding naive to those within Big History that know it longer and better than I do for now.

Ken, don't worry about your blind spots. Since everybody has them, we are all in the same boat so to speak. I think, acknowledging the fact that one has blind spots is the first step. Then one is more open, for other people will show us our blind spots. If we let them! The question is whether we are willing to listen to them and think about what they say.

Well, at 46 I wouldn't consider myself young, but I am certainly new to big history and very inquisitive.

So, I am still wondering what these other ways of knowing are, when as you said:

"the scientific way of knowing involves an interplay between reason or rationalism, and experience or empiricism - and sometimes with a dash of creativity" 

and: "that it's also not just a matter of knowing, but how well we come to "know.""

I have become kind of fond of the scientific way of knowing, I must admit, so I am certainly biased. However, shortly before I discovered big history, I had come across Deanna Kuhn's Education for Thinking project. She asks the questions: Why do we send our children to school? and What do we want schools to accomplish?

Her answer in very short is that they should teach students to use their minds well, in school and beyond, so that they develop the skills and values needed for lifelong learning. She uses research from developmental psychology to pedagogy. Especially interesting I found part 2 Knowing about knowing where she explains several levels of epistemological understanding, and the fact that what we call scientific thinking actually originates in what children do when they try to make sense of and try to organise their experience. Only that the children are not aware of these processes of theory revision. They think with their theories, not about them. That comes later, when we become aware of that, and then it is no longer effortless. 

Also, I learnt from her that scientific thinking, though essential to science, is not specific to it. It basically is any instance of purposeful thinking with the objective of enhancing the thinker's knowledge.

So, that's my foundation for ways of knowing, and since I have started this entry by stating that everybody has blind spots, I'd like to invite readers to make me aware of mine.

What are our blind spots? Basically, I would say that whenever we make assumptions but are unaware of them.

The grand thing about the scientific approach, I think, is that in collaboration with philosophy, the underlying assumptions can be made explicit and questioned from time to time. In so far, it is reasonable to assume that with scholarly methods we can prod reality and reality answers us back. That kind of naturalism indeed must be the foundation of the academic enterprise. For, unless we assume that there is a natural world and we can find out how it works, there really is no point in discussing anything. 

As far the the knowledge gaps are concerned, I am going with Cynthia Stokes Brown who said that they will be part of the natural world too. So, there indeed is no need to assume something supernatural, just to fill in the gaps. (See Origins VI 1 for Cynthia's article on The Meaning of Big History - philosophically speaking)

Moreover, this position has the advantage that we surely can all agree on that the natural world exists and we are able to investigate it, but it does not at all require us (big historians) to agree on whether the natural world is all there is to know. (See my own article on Origins VIII 4 - Reflections on Religion and Big History) It simply ensures that we have common ground for our exploration and development of big history.

Finally, I think it is a rather bad idea to mix big history with religion. Religion cannot serve as a way of knowing when within any particular religious belief system it is not allowed to question the underlying assumptions. Take God for instance: that is just as much an assumption as the methodological naturalism is an assumption of science. Only that God is an assumption that empirically can neither be proven nor disproven. So, is this really a reasonable assumption to make when our aim is to work towards making the unknown known, to fill in the knowledge gaps? Bringing god into the discussion to me seems more like a way to end the discussion, or get lost in trying to figure out what is meant with god.

Also, trying to include religious perspectives effectively means trying to exclude non-believers. This is what religions have always done in the past, and not only religious belief systems, also secular belief systems. After all, it is only consequent when ones major aim is to uphold a belief system based on assumptions that are not to be questioned ever!

Science/academics should work as a dogma-prevention machine. Questions, investigations, formulating hypotheses and testing them against reality are the core of the scientific method. Belief systems defend themselves against all this by revolving around a dogma making that absolute. In a constantly changing world, this sooner or later clashes with reality.

Since this post is about academic versus experiential ways of knowing - I'll throw in a bit of personal experience here: I grew up in the former GDR/East-Germany and was properly indoctrinated (meaning I did believe it) into the belief system of Marxism-Leninism which aimed at installing Communism, but ended up in what we called "real-existing socialism" and there was no way you could question certain things or they would have locked you up. As simple as that. After the change (I was only 17 when the Berlin wall came down) I began to learn all sorts of things which I had no access to before and soon enough I started to think about religion as well. In fact, many of my relatives are believing Christians, but my parents had decided not to send us to religious instruction. I began to see the similarities between these two belief systems, only that the religious one is anchored in the idea of the supernatural and the other is just based on a grand idea of equality. Later on I discovered German thinkers who did the same, only professionally. One outstanding example is Joachim Kahl (Marburg) who left the church after having studied theology (he simply could not go on believing the way he did before) and then, as quite a number of people in the 1960 in West-Germany, instead started to believe in Marxism. Only after the change he realised that this is just another belief system that runs counter to reality and consequently said good bye a second time.

The answer, of course, is not to fall for an absolute relativism, meaning it is reasonable to assume that we can know about the world, and even if that knowledge is uncertain, it still is sufficiently certain to live our life.* It simply means that we have to become aware of the assumptions underlying our theories, ask ourselves if they are still reasonable to make and keep on working towards making the unknown known. We are doing ourselves a great disservice when instead we choose to simply declare the unknown to be the work of God (whatever that concept means - I still have not slightest idea). Is that what you mean with god of the gaps, Karen?

*and by the way, this amazing technology that allows us to communicate across the Atlantic is a very convincing proof of our knowledge of the world - it is not perfect, but it doesn't have to be. Just as much as we don't have to be perfect, we just need to do our imperfect best.

I just read a book by Richard A. Muller, an experimental physicist called "Now - The Physics of Time." The aim of the book is to offer a different "arrow of time" than the most widely accepted one: increasing entropy. While he may or may not be correct in his proposal that it is the expansion of space-time itself causing this arrow, what I found more valuable is not only his explanation of some difficult concepts in physics, but more so, on the limitations of what science can discover.  He protests against what he calls "physicalism," and others call "scientism:"  the assertion that if science cannot measure something, then it isn't knowable or worth knowing.  He points out that this is yet another ideological based dogma, and refutes it with some well known examples.  For example, science can study and study what the color blue is by its wavelength, how those light waves are received by the retina, processed by the brain, etc. and still, science cannot ultimately claim to measure or understand what the subjective experience of blue is. He gives other important examples as well. Admittedly, I especially like him because he is the physicist that is stating nearly exactly as I have stated to others about its limitations.   For example, he points out that science has no equation that predicts or explains the phenomenon of "life" even at its most basic level, nevermind explain the phenomenon of consciousness. Hence, it is dogmatic and hubristic to proclaim that science has determined that there is no free will.   Sorry to sound boastful, but I've said the exact same thing!  When I've made these statements in the past, the typical retort was that "well, life is nature's way of trying to optimize energy flows."  That's not a true explanation, however, and one can propose and cite many other ways for the universe to expend its energy flows, nevermind it still doesn't explain this incredible phenomenon.

End conclusion: yes, there are many flavors of dogma, not just religious, but nearly any ideology that proclaims to be the answer to the Truth.  In short, it's complex out there.