Beyond the Brain: Knowledge as an Embodied and Cultural Process

Abstract

What does it mean to know something? We often imagine knowledge as something that happens primarily in the mind: information is acquired, processed, stored, and eventually retrieved. In Epistemology Beyond the Brain, Lynnsey K. Weissenberger, John M. Budd, and Ken R. Herold challenge this picture by exploring a more holistic understanding of knowledge—one that includes the body, intuition, culture, tools, and social systems. Music provides a particularly interesting setting for this discussion because musical knowledge makes it difficult to maintain a clear boundary between knowing, doing, perceiving, and experiencing.

Beyond a Disembodied Mind

There is something intuitively strange about saying that a musician’s knowledge exists entirely inside their brain.

Imagine asking an experienced guitarist how much pressure is required to bend a string exactly one whole tone. They might give you an explanation involving technique, finger position, string gauge, or muscular control. But at some point, the most accurate answer may simply be: I know how it feels.

That does not make the knowledge mysterious or irrational. It suggests that knowing may involve considerably more than our ability to formulate explicit propositions about what we know.

This is the territory explored by Weissenberger, Budd, and Herold in Epistemology Beyond the Brain. Their starting point belongs to a broader movement away from the idea of cognition as an activity performed by an isolated, disembodied mind. Instead, they consider knowledge as something produced through relationships among cognition, bodily experience, cultural practices, tools, environments, and social systems.

Importantly, the authors are not simply proposing another category of knowledge to add to an existing list. Their argument is more fundamental: perhaps the boundaries within which we usually locate knowledge are themselves too narrow.

Where Does Knowledge Actually Live?

Research on embodied cognition offers a useful way into this problem.

Drawing on Spackman and Yanchar, the article presents the embodied mind as something that cannot be neatly separated from the body that acts, the tools it uses, the environment it inhabits, or the social history through which it learned to act in the first place.

Memory, from this perspective, does not need to reside exclusively “inside” an individual. It can be distributed across bodies, environments, and tools. Abstract concepts are grounded in embodied situations. Perception and action, rather than belonging to separate stages of cognition, continuously shape one another.

This changes the question considerably.

Instead of asking only what does this person know?, we might also ask:

What makes this knowing possible?

The distinction matters. A musician’s knowledge may involve years of bodily practice, notation systems, instruments, teachers, recordings, stylistic conventions, rehearsal environments, and communities of musicians. Remove all of those relationships and it becomes increasingly difficult to say exactly where the musician’s “knowledge” begins and ends.

Intuition Is Not Quite as Personal as It Seems

The discussion becomes especially interesting when the authors turn to intuition.

We tend to speak about intuition as something intensely individual: my intuition tells me this, or this musician has an intuitive understanding of harmony. But the article complicates this assumption by treating intuition as something that can be socially and culturally constructed.

What feels immediate to an individual may have a surprisingly long history.

A musician may instinctively feel that a phrase should resolve in a particular way, that a groove is slightly misplaced, or that one interpretation sounds stylistically convincing. The judgment can occur before the musician is able to explain it verbally. Yet that intuition did not necessarily appear from nowhere. It may have been cultivated through years of listening, imitation, performance, correction, participation, and exposure to particular musical communities.

Intuition, then, can operate as a mediator between knowledge and embodiment. It allows accumulated cultural and practical experience to participate in decisions without requiring every element of that experience to become consciously articulated.

This also explains why intuition should not automatically be equated with truth. Culturally shared intuitions can be mistaken. Nevertheless, they remain meaningful because they reveal ways in which communities organize experience and produce knowledge.

Music Makes the Problem Particularly Visible

Music is an especially productive field for examining these questions.

Following John Blacking’s How Musical Is Man?, the authors approach music as the synthesis of cognitive processes that are simultaneously cultural and embodied. Musical activity therefore provides an unusually clear example of knowledge that cannot easily be reduced either to abstract information or to bodily habit.

To investigate this, the study draws on ethnographic interviews with eleven musicians from different musical traditions, asking how they understood ideas such as musical information and musical knowledge.

An important distinction emerges from their responses.

Information can become knowledge through embodied experience. Technique, perception, practice, and intuition transform information into something a musician can actually inhabit and use. Knowing music therefore involves more than possessing information about music.

At the same time, knowledge also appears as information applied in context. A musician demonstrates knowledge when they can perform something, explain it, adapt it, criticize it, or make an informed decision in a particular situation.

This distinction seems simple, but I find it quite powerful.

Knowing about something and knowing how to act with it are not quite the same thing.

And musical practice makes that difference remarkably difficult to ignore.

Toward a Holistic Epistemology

All of this leads to what the authors describe as a holistic epistemology.

Knowledge, in this account, does not belong exclusively to the individual mind. It emerges through an integrated system involving bodies, cognition, culture, social relationships, technologies, and collective practices.

That does not mean cognition suddenly becomes irrelevant. Quite the opposite. Cognition remains part of the picture—it simply stops being the whole picture.

This also allows the authors to recognize multiple ways of knowing without forcing all of them into the model of explicit, propositional knowledge. Embodied experience, culturally constructed intuition, collective practice, and sociotechnical networks become epistemologically relevant.

For Information Science, this significantly expands what counts as an informational process. Information is no longer simply something transmitted from one mind to another. It participates in larger systems through which people act, perceive, remember, interpret, and ultimately come to know.

Perhaps that is what I find most compelling about the article. Asking where knowledge is located may already assume that knowledge must have a single location.

Music suggests otherwise.

Sometimes knowing is in the explanation. Sometimes it is in the gesture. Sometimes it is in the instrument, the memory of previous performances, the expectations of a community, or the almost instantaneous feeling that something simply sounds right.

The interesting question may therefore be less where is the knowledge? and more what relationships allow this knowing to happen?

Connection to My Research

This article connects particularly strongly with my interest in memory, recognition, and culturally situated listening. If musical knowledge and intuition emerge through relationships among body, culture, experience, and technological systems, then recognizing a sonic identity cannot be understood purely as an internal perceptual operation. What sounds familiar, characteristic, or culturally meaningful may depend on histories of listening and embodied participation. This becomes especially relevant to my research when technological mediation transforms musical materials: the question is not only which sonic properties survive the transformation, but also which embodied and cultural relationships allow an identity to remain recognizable at all.