Editors’ Introduction

Abstract

W elcome to the second issue of KNOW. As with the first issue, we’ve encouraged our contributors to speak in their own voice about their experience in their field of expertise and its assumptions, constraints, and possibilities. An interesting trio of overlapping approaches to this prompt has emerged in the following nine essays. Some offer what could be seen as normative ideals, whether current or corrective, for how a field should be practiced and what its aims should be. Others grapple with what Sheldon Pollock here calls “the conundrum of comparison.” Comparison and/or analogy have represented practices of knowledge formation at least as early as Aristotle’s Poetics and Rhetoric, but the assumptions embedded in the practices have not often been articulated with the complexity they deserve. Another group of essays more or less explodes what we think we know, whether it’s statistical inferences underlying scientific “discoveries” or the simple unknowability of the systems of thought that resulted in the Andean use of quipus in lieu of written records. The common thread here is the necessity of context and complexity in our approach to any form of knowing; it seems