From the Commonwealth of Learning to the Future of Knowledge: A Dialogue with Professor Peter Burke
Editor: Raymond J. Wu
DOI: https://doi.org/10.61362/CORE0616
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(Conducted by the CORE Academy Secretariat)
The International Core Academy of Sciences and Humanities is pleased to publish a dialogue with Professor Peter Burke, Fellow of CORE Academy, under the title “From the Commonwealth of Learning to the Future of Knowledge.”
Professor Burke is one of the most distinguished cultural historians of our time. His work has made major contributions to cultural history, the social history of knowledge, the history of ignorance, the study of polymaths, and the history of historical thought. In this dialogue, Professor Burke reflects on the old ideal of the respublica litterarum, or “Commonwealth of Learning,” and considers its meaning in a world of increasingly global yet fragmented scholarly communication.
The conversation also addresses the future of knowledge in the digital and AI age, including the distinction between information, knowledge, and judgment; the persistence of older struggles over access, authority, and trust; the importance of source criticism; the place of the humanities; and the long history of dreams of omniscience, universal knowledge, and perfect prediction.
The CORE Academy Secretariat conducted this dialogue as part of the Academy’s continuing effort to provide a platform for Fellows’ reflections on scholarship, knowledge, and the responsibilities of international academic life.
1. In your letter accepting the Fellowship of CORE Academy, you referred to the old ideal of the respublica litterarum, or the “Commonwealth of Learning.” How should we understand this ideal today, when scholarly communication is more global than ever, yet also increasingly fragmented by specialization, digital communication, and geopolitical division? Does it remain a living ideal, or does it need to be reimagined through new forms of academies, learned communities, and dialogue across disciplines and cultures?
In my view, the old ideal is still alive. It is often said that it died at the end of the 18th century, a victim of the age of nationalism, but international collaboration flourished in the 19th century, taking new forms such as the international conference of scholars, facilitated by the rise of the railways. During the Cold War the ideal might have seemed to be ill, if not exactly dead, but I can testify to its survival, since from the 1960s to the 1980s I exchanged letters and books with scholars in Poland and Hungary. It took a new form in the age of e-mails, allowing replies so rapid that they feel like a conversation. New forms of learned community may be emerging but old ones are being reshaped, notably institutes of advanced study on the Princeton model, encouraging interdisciplinary dialogue among scholars most of whom are invited to stay for a year to work on either an individual or a group project. Having experienced this institution at Princeton, Berlin, Canberra, Uppsala, Wassenaar and Los Angeles I think I am in a position to say that it works!
2. You have written about the ways in which knowledge is produced, classified, circulated, preserved, and sometimes forgotten. Looking across the long history of knowledge, what tends to be gained, and what tends to be lost, when new technologies transform the conditions of knowledge?
I fear that gains are always accompanied by losses, even if the loss is not great enough to cancel the gain. Plato already pointed out that the transition from an oral culture to one relying on writing led to a decline in memory. More recently, I remember that as a student in Oxford in the 1950s, trained in a print culture, we could easily read a long book at a few sittings but it was hard for us to adapt to the need to skim a number of books for our weekly essay. To help us, there were courses in ‘speed reading’. Today, the problem is the opposite one. Between their PCs and iPhones, students have plenty of practice in rapid scanning. What they now need are courses in slow reading!
3. Today, we often speak of an “information age,” and now of an age of artificial intelligence. Yet an abundance of information does not necessarily mean a growth of knowledge, and the accumulation of knowledge does not always lead to mature judgment. From the perspective of a historian of knowledge, how should we understand the relationship between information, knowledge, and judgment?
I distinguish information from knowledge by suggesting that while information is relatively ‘raw,’ knowledge has been ‘cooked’ in the sense of processed, the processes including verification, classification and generalization. Without judgement (understanding, wisdom) knowledge is useless, but while these skills can be learned from experience, I doubt whether they can be taught in the way that criticism and verification can.
4. New technologies often promise to make knowledge faster, more widely accessible, and more open. Yet the history of knowledge also shows recurring patterns of exclusion, hierarchy, mediation, misunderstanding, and loss. In the digital and AI age, do you see older struggles over access to knowledge, authority, and trust returning in new forms?
Definitely! Access has improved, while still excluding a substantial share of the human population, but what is relatively easy of access is often a less reliable form of knowledge than what is stored in libraries, laboratories, observatories, clinics, etc. The debate on the authority or lack of authority of ‘experts’ is an old one but also a continuing one. The spread of fake news makes the question of trust especially urgent. One response has taken the form of ‘critical information theory’, a pompous phrase that corresponds to what historians have long been calling ‘source criticism’. It needs to be taught in schools. I am cheered by the response of the BBC, which in the last year or two has begun to tell viewers and listeners whether or not a particular news item has been verified.
5. Your recent book Ignorance: A Global History treats ignorance not simply as the absence of knowledge, but as a social and historical force. In the age of artificial intelligence, some argue that wider access to AI-generated answers will reduce ignorance, while others worry that it may create new forms of dependence, credulity, misinformation, and a weakening of judgment. How would you assess this tension? What kinds of ignorance might AI help diminish, and what kinds might it produce, conceal, or make harder to recognize?
Historians are at their best examining long-term trends which their contemporaries, fixed on the moment, scarcely notice. Hence an answer to your question, certainly annoying but possibly wise, would be, ‘Can I have 50 years to think about it?’
When printing with movable type was invented, some scholars noted that the new medium of communication would spread falsehoods along with truths. The same goes for the Internet and AI. We now have so much information literally at our fingertips, but the experience is overwhelming and verification takes time. The new media are marvellous at avoiding spelling mistakes or for simple information like the name of the capital of Madagascar, and AI does a good job of summarizing articles (I tried it on mine and I could not do a better job myself), but in wider and more important fields, I don’t trust it. I use a translation app but only into languages that I already know so that I can correct the mistakes (owing to the machine’s lack of specialist knowledge, which is corrigible, and also its literal-mindedness and lack of a sense of humour, which it may not be possible to correct).
Ever an optimist, I am cheered by remembering that coexistence is possible. After printing was invented, manuscripts did not disappear. A division of labour was gradually worked out. Can a similar division be made today between old and new media?
6. When we speak today about the “future of knowledge,” what lessons from its history should we be careful not to forget? In a digital and AI age, might some older forms of learning, judgment, dialogue, or scholarly community become newly important rather than simply obsolete?
I am not optimistic enough to say ‘newly important’, but expect older forms to survive alongside the new ones, with the possibility of creative interaction.
7. Recent discussions of the future of knowledge often emphasize science, technology, data, and artificial intelligence. From your perspective as a social and cultural historian of knowledge, what can the humanities contribute to our understanding of knowledge, its limits, and its human consequences?
Yes, I do believe that both history and philosophy, together with anthropology and sociology, whether we regard them as social sciences or as part of the humanities, can help us understand the limits of knowledge, as well as the reliability and unreliability of claims to knowledge. Just as scholars and scientists turn information into knowledge, so we need to turn knowledge into understanding, a process that requires trained judgment not only from scholars, but also from leaders in other domains of practical knowledge, such as business and politics.
My recent research has centred on the history of connoisseurship, in other words, the art of judging works of art, long practised in China and, since about 1500 AD, in the West as well. The attribution of works to particular artists is often made rapidly by a practised eye, but depends on a good memory and on comparison, often unconscious, with works the connoisseur has seen in the past.
Today, we are beginning to see the use of AI to attribute works of art, giving the machine information about genuine works by Van Gogh, for instance, and asking it whether a given painting displays the pattern of brushstrokes unique to that artist. I would emphasize, though, the fact that the corpus of genuine works is the result of earlier judgments by human connoisseurs. Whether AI will be able to suggest amendments to the corpus is impossible to say at this time!
8. Your work has ranged widely across cultural history, the social history of knowledge, ignorance, polymaths, and historical thought. What advice would you give to younger scholars who hope to study knowledge across disciplines while retaining historical depth?
I think that a scholar should begin small and then gradually widen. That is, choose a topic for Ph.D. research in one discipline but draw on insights from neighboring disciplines. Then widen the topic beyond the restrictions of time and length of dissertation imposed by the rules of a Ph.D. Choose a new topic but with some connections to the former one, and so on.
Final question
9. As a final, more speculative question, artificial intelligence sometimes appears to revive older theological and philosophical dreams of omniscience, universal knowledge, perfect prediction, and even a kind of “divine” or godlike perspective on the world. I do not mean this in a narrowly religious sense, but rather as a metaphor for the human aspiration to uncover hidden orders, infer the future from the past, and overcome our own errors, biases, and forms of ignorance. From the perspective of a historian of knowledge, how should we understand such aspirations? To what extent can the past illuminate, or even help us reason about, the future? Does artificial intelligence bring us closer to such a possibility through more comprehensive forms of knowledge, or does it risk renewing older illusions of prediction, mastery, and overconfidence?
I think that you are right to refer to older dreams of omniscience. In the tenth century, Gerbert of Aurillac, a famous polymath, was believed to be helped by the devil and to keep a bronze head in his study that would answer all his questions. Today we have Alexa and the iPhone which do exactly that! But the story of Gerbert, like the later story of Faust, contains a warning for us, a reminder that hubris can lead to nemesis in the world of learning as well as the world of politics.
As for your question about the use of history, it exposes the illusions of prediction by emphasizing the unintended consequences of human action. It helps us understand events in the present by encouraging us to situate them in the context of less visible changes over the long term. It reminds us of the variety of the ways of being human and so offers an antidote to the ethnocentrism of nations, social classes, etc.