Scientific knowledge is fundamentally 'haptic' rather than passively observational — it is acquired through active, touch-like interaction, manipulation, and engagement with the world, not through detached visual absorption of facts.
Chirimuuta introduces her concept of 'haptic realism,' arguing against the 'spectator theory of knowledge' by claiming that acquiring knowledge, especially scientific knowledge, necessarily involves hands-on engagement, manipulation, and interaction rather than passive absorption. ✦ AI generated
Mazviita Chirimuuta · Machine Learning Street Talk · 2026-01-23 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 17:15
“Can you introduce that?”
if you think that scientific knowledge in particular is more kind of touchlike, you can't ignore the fact that we sort of run into things. We have to pick things up, engage with them, ultimately change them in order for us to acquire knowledge of them. So you cannot discount the fact that we're kind of meddling with things in the process of bringing about our knowledge.
verbatim transcript · starts at 17:15
17:15when we look around at our surroundings um and use sight as a source of knowledge? We can get into this um mindset where it seems like we do not have to interact with things in in order to know them. we can just kind of absorb information passively and then because we're not bringing about our representations in a kind of active way it would seem to us and I'm not saying
17:40this is how vision works but it's a kind of conceit that often comes about if you use this very visual model for knowing um John Dwey called it the spectator theory of knowledge so this is a clear predecessor from what I'm saying here is that like we just look around we absorb how things are our knowledge is sort of entirely objective. It's almost like a God's eye view on reality. But if you
18:04think that scientific knowledge in particular is more kind of touchlike, you can't ignore the fact that we um sort of run into things. We have to pick things up, engage with them, ultimately change them in order for us to acquire knowledge of them. So you cannot discount the fact that we're kind of meddling with things in the process of um bringing about our our knowledge. Um and another sort of dimension of this
18:32haptic metaphor is that our hands are not only a sensory organ, but they're also the means by which we manipulate things. So manipulation means precisely working with the hands. And so I think that really captures, if you like, the double face of scientific models. They're both of uh means of acquisition of knowledge in the way that hands are also sensory organs. We sort of find things out about the world through the
18:57sense of touch, but we're also they're also means for changing things, for doing things. >> We speak about this in evolution. What would happen if you could just rerun evolution? You know, what would happen if we could just have a parallel universe and the entire enterprise of science just ran again? And what you're alluding to is that it wouldn't be completely different. Maybe there are some guardrails but but it is actually