Human Authorship: How Do We Know (Well)?

Written interview with Troy Swanson and Mark Lenker, discussants for HUMAN AUTHORSHIP: Heterodox Libraries Symposium, Spring 2026.

Troy and Mark address three questions here—about what it means to know and how we come to know, and what the act of knowing involves; whether the rhetoric about the “information age” is illuminating or obscuring; and how intellectual virtues may matter in knowing and understanding a complex world where information permeates all that we do in our professional and personal lives.

Swanson and Lenker will extend these ideas in their fireside chat for HxLibraries Symposium, Spring 2026: HUMAN AUTHORSHIP. Register to join us for this FREE virtual event on Friday, April 10th, from 11am - 3pm U.S. CT.

Troy responds here to the first question, what it means “to know.”

What do we mean when we say we “know” something? How do you define or characterize knowledge or the act of knowing?

To know something is really to hold two things at once: there is the thing that is known (a memory, a claim held in the mind) and then there is the feeling that surrounds it, what is called the feeling of knowing. That feeling is not incidental. It is a summary of the mind’s unconscious processing, a judgment that surfaces into consciousness and tells us, “yes, I know this” (or tells us the opposite). The act of knowing, then, originates in the modular nature of the mind, drawing on the full range of ways an individual understands and acts in the world. Knowing is not simply an act of fact-gathering or evidence-weighing. It is a synthesis. Yes, shaped by logic, but also by information processing, worldview, identity, values, and past experience. Many times we know what we think but are not clear how we arrived at that stance. Logic often comes after the fact to help us tell a story about what we know intuitively. Arguments are often stories we tell to adjust evidence to our worldview. In this way, knowledge is slippery, filtered, and difficult to examine.

This understanding carries real consequences for how we think about information literacy. If knowledge is shaped by the whole person, then evaluating information cannot stop at evaluating the information itself. It must also involve a reflective turn inward, an evaluation of ourselves as knowers. We must even be skeptical of conclusions arrived at through logic and rationality. What assumptions do we carry? What experiences have primed us to accept or reject certain claims? It is not enough to take a set of facts, apply a layer of logic, and expect “true” knowledge to emerge on the other side. Genuine critical thinking requires us to interrogate not only the quality of the evidence before us but also the lens through which we interpret it.

Mark offers a different “lens” on knowing:

There is a distinction that comes up for me frequently when I think about teaching. The idea is that the French language has two distinct concepts that both translate into English as “know”: connaitre and savoir. (Some other languages follow a similar pattern.) I first encountered the distinction in William James’ writings about knowledge, but he pulled it from even earlier thinkers.

Connaitre is associated with recognizing something. I think of it in terms of barely developed facts. For example, I know that the Nile is a river in Egypt, and that it is crucial in Egypt’s history. That’s about it – I’ve never been to the Nile, and I’m not a careful student of Egypt’s history. I’ve seen some writers describe this sort of knowledge as “surface learning.” Connaitre can get you through a simple multiple-choice test, but ideally it’s a starting point for going deeper.

On the other hand, savoir is the kind of knowledge associated with a growing set of meaningful experiences. We see it in the French expression savoir-faire: knowing what to do, knowing your way around a thing or a place or a subject. It takes time for a learner to develop savoir knowledge, but it goes deeper than connaitre and relates more meaningfully to the rest of one’s life than connaitre.

A critical error in learning is mistaking our connaitre knowledge for the more authoritative savoir. I think that this sort of mistake can be due in part to social pressures to take firm stances on complicated issues, and some is due to the obscure nature of our own thinking – metacognition is difficult. If we have read a handful of news stories on a hot-button issue, have we developed connaitre or savoir?

Information literacy is savoir-faire about learning from information. Can instruction librarians impart this savoir-faire to students in a 75-minute one-shot class? No, but that’s ok for us who work in higher education. College students are not empty vessels: they show up with meaningful experiences in learning from information through previous academic experiences and through learning outside the classroom. Teaching librarians can stimulate further development and adaptation of students’ existing savoir-faire for work in the college environment, but it’s important to be deliberate and strategic in connecting information literacy with students’ previous experiences.

On the second question, Troy considers the ‘information age” term and suggests alternatives:

How should we think about the term “information age” now, and in your view, has it been an unquestioned good? What is another term that might better describe our current societal involvement with information, writ large?

E.O. Wilson called humans “eusocial” animals — a species that gains its evolutionary advantage not through individual strength but through being super-cooperators. Individually, we feed the food chain; together, we sit atop it. And how do we accomplish this? Through information. We use information to solve the fundamental problems of coordination and cooperation, to capture ideas, build culture, and send the lessons of the past into the future. From this perspective, the last 100,000-plus years of human history have been an “information age,” which is why I don’t find the term particularly useful for describing what is distinctive about our current moment. What we have done, more specifically, is taken Norbert Wiener’s idea of cybernetics and put it on steroids. At the heart of the computer-driven transformation is the convergence of network effects, social infrastructure, and mobile communication tools. Humans have always built self-organizing social structures to accomplish goals, and these new technologies have dramatically empowered that ancient ability.

As for whether this has been an unquestioned good — no, it has not, and I think the answer to that question is closely tied to finding a better name for where we are. We are increasingly a collection of minds in constant connection with one another, beyond geographical limitations, and that connectedness feels like the most relevant feature of our era. But as we layer AI into this discussion, we have to remember that technology is never neutral. As media studies scholar Dr. Jeremy Shermak has noted, we have moved away from “the medium is the message” to “the business model is the message.” That shift should give us pause. The tools of connection and intelligence we are building are shaped by the incentive structures behind them. If I was to give the current time a name (to replace “information age”), I would call it something like “the age of entanglement” or “the age of mediated connection.” Any honest name for this moment needs to reckon with the tension between our deep eusocial drive to operate in groups and the business models that increasingly mediate how we do so.

Mark offers a counterpoint:

I don’t disagree with Troy’s observations, but I’m actually ok with “Information Age.” I can’t think of a better two-word portrait for what I see happening around me.

You can tell information is among the things we value most because we spend so much time with it. The other day, I saw my high school-age daughter watching videos on her phone while she was brushing her teeth. It doesn’t take very long to brush your teeth – could she have just stepped away from the videos and brushed her teeth?

I should have yelled at her, but I was too busy reading a joke that a friend texted me on my own phone as I walked down the hall.

Speaking of information in our domestic lives, for most of my life, houses have had pretty standard names for rooms: bedroom, kitchen, living room or family room. But about 15 years ago, I started to see homes with “media nooks” or full-on “media rooms.” I don’t know whether this is still the case, or whether we are now so seamlessly integrated with our portable devices that every room is understood to be a media room.

I do know that you can now buy couches and easy chairs with USB ports. Apparently, we now seek to make information a part of our lazy moments too.

We are revising our personal spaces to make information and its platforms a constant in our lives. Information holds an increasingly prominent place in the pantheon of values that we devote time to. It’s the Information Age.

Is it a good thing to devote so much of our time and attention to information? Time and attention are limited resources, so it is crucial for librarians and other educators to reflect on how information fits into a meaningful, satisfying human life. This is an information question, so it falls within the purview of librarianship (though I hope we draw inspiration from other disciplines as we live with this question).

I have found the writings of Jenny O’Dell and Cal Newport to be friendly starting points for contemplating a balanced life with information.

With the third question, on intellectual virtues, Mark points to a capacity-building perspective for librarians to consider:

How should we think about the role of intellectual virtues, such as intellectual humility, intellectual diligence, intellectual courage, and curiosity? To what degree can we increase our capacity for epistemic virtue, and how? What are the effects — and limits — of these dispositions on our knowledge and relationship to information?

Jason Baehr has argued that intellectual virtue shows us a lot about what lifelong learning means in practice. The curious lifelong learner takes an interest in learning more about the world even without the structure and incentives you find in the classroom. The intellectually humble person recognizes that there is much more to learn even after they have completed their formal schooling, and so on.

Many of us in academic libraries aspire to help students develop transferrable research and information skills required for learning throughout their lives. Intellectual virtues are the habits of mind that motivate students to make that transfer and apply those skills to questions in their own lives.

Can we increase our capacity for intellectual virtue? An education in virtue concepts may or may not translate into the loving pursuit of truth that intellectual character involves. There are probably innumerable subtle differences in personality that determine whether and how education blossoms into character. But I think a couple of things are essential for intellectual character to take root.

First, you need to be cared for in a way that assures you that you are basically ok. It is hard to put the truth first in the way that intellectual character requires when you are overwhelmed by hunger, physically or emotionally. Exceptional people maintain their intellectual virtue even in tough times, but somewhere in their personal history, they had someone invest in them and build their self-respect. This kind of care allows a person to devote their energies to pursuing the truth, even when the truth is not convenient for us.

Second, you need sustained time with people who show virtue in their intellectual pursuits. They exhibit curiosity and intellectual humility even when doing so might make them appear less authoritative. They prepare their work with diligence, even when it is tempting just to phone it in. They poke holes in their own wishful thinking. Their lesson for us isn’t just what they know – it’s how they think.

So, completing a workbook on virtue concepts will not guarantee virtuous character, though it might build your vocabulary for understanding character in helpful ways. Instead, developing intellectual virtue requires (at the very least) care that leads to a healthy self-respect and sustained time with virtuous examples.

With intellectual virtues, Troy points to their necessity but linked to increased self-awareness of the way the mind works.

Intellectual virtues matter enormously, but I think we need to ground them in a realistic picture of how the mind actually works. The research I draw on (from Robert Burton, Joseph LeDoux, Donald Hoffman, and others) suggests that our starting assumption should be that much of our thinking originates in unconscious processing, and that consciousness often functions more as an interpreter of decisions already made than as the driver of those decisions. That reframing changes how we understand each virtue. Intellectual humility, for instance, isn’t just a nice disposition. It’s a cognitive necessity, because the brain constructs a unified simulation that actively hides its own workings from us. The “feeling of knowing,” that innate sense of certainty we experience about our beliefs, can surface useful signals from unconscious processing, but it can also deceive us, giving us confidence that has nothing to do with the quality of our reasoning. Curiosity and diligence, then, become the habits that push us past that false comfort, and intellectual courage is what it takes to sit with the discomfort of recognizing how much of our own thinking we cannot fully see.

We can meaningfully increase our capacity for these virtues, through disciplined reflection, metacognitive practice, source monitoring, and what I think of as learning to notice where our feelings of certainty come from. But we have to be honest about the limits. We can never fully step outside our own cognition to audit it objectively. Our slow, deliberative thinking, as Hugo Mercier’s work suggests, evolved more to scrutinize other people’s arguments than to correct our own biases. And research on knowledge resistance, particularly Mikael Klintman’s, shows that whole layers of our cognition are designed to serve social belonging rather than truth-seeking, operating largely beneath conscious awareness. So the most important effect of cultivating epistemic virtue may be paradoxical: the further you go in developing these dispositions, the more clearly you see that full transparency into your own mind is not achievable. Acknowledging that honestly (rather than pretending we can think our way to perfect rationality) is itself the most important move we can make in education and information literacy.

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Mark Lenker is Teaching and Learning Librarian and Associate Professor at the University of Nevada Las Vegas Libraries and author of The Human Relationship with Information (Routledge, 2026).

Troy Swanson is Teaching & Learning Librarian and Library Department Chair at Moraine Valley Community College and author of Knowledge as a Feeling: How Neuroscience and Psychology Impact Human Information Behavior (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023).

The Heterodox Libraries Community (HxLibraries) presents a rollicking exploration of HUMAN AUTHORSHIP. We invite thinkers and creators who are engaging deeply with the question of what it means to be human—in the present moment, in the wisdom of the past, and in the face of an ever-uncertain future. Join us for this free virtual event to celebrate creativity and the human experience on Friday, April 10th 11am - 3pm U.S. CT.