Invocation of Knowledge

Theme

knowledge

Occasion

Before study or research; on discovering an error

Responsive form

For groups. One voice reads the left column; everyone answers with the right.

Leader	All
May our curiosity be joined with humility.	May we seek truth without humiliating those who are mistaken.
May we correct ourselves without fear.	May our discoveries deepen responsibility rather than pride.

When to use it

At the start of study. Before teaching. Before publishing. And, most usefully, in the hour after you have realised you were wrong about something in public.

That last occasion is the one it was written for.

What it asks for

Four lines, each aimed at a specific failure of intellectual life.

The first joins curiosity to humility, because curiosity on its own is not a virtue. It can be extractive. It can treat other people’s lives as material. Humility is what keeps enquiry answerable to the people it is about.

The second asks that we seek truth without humiliating those who are mistaken. This is a practical matter as much as a moral one. A community that makes being wrong shameful will produce people who conceal their errors, and concealed errors compound. The correction of a person and the humiliation of a person are different acts, and only one of them makes a group more accurate.

The third asks that we correct ourselves without fear. Fear is the ordinary reason people do not retract. It is rarely fear of the truth; it is fear of what admitting the error will do to their standing.

The fourth is the one that reaches furthest. Discovery tends to produce pride, which is understandable and largely harmless in private. The line asks instead that knowing more should mean owing more. If you understand a system better than the people affected by it, you have acquired an obligation, not a position.

What it does not claim

It does not claim that all views are equally supported. Humility about one’s own certainty is not the same as treating every claim as equally likely.

It does not promise that correction will be received well. Sometimes admitting an error is expensive, and this reading does not pretend otherwise. It asks only that the fear not be the deciding factor.

And it asks nothing of any entity. Nothing intervenes to make research go well. These are four commitments spoken aloud, and their only force is whatever force you give them afterwards.

How to read it

It is short enough to be said in one breath, which is a mistake. Leave a pause between each line; each one is a separate promise and the last is the heaviest.

If you are reading it because you have just been shown to be wrong, read only the third line, and then go and correct the thing where you said it.