"It is what we know already that often prevents us from learning"
About this Quote
The real villain here isn’t ignorance; it’s confidence. Bernard’s line turns the usual heroic story of learning on its head: the obstacle isn’t the empty mind but the mind crowded with “already.” That single word carries the sting. It suggests habits of thought, inherited categories, professional orthodoxies, and the quiet social rewards of being right. What blocks new knowledge is less a lack of information than an attachment to the frameworks that once earned us status, coherence, or safety.
Bernard, a 19th-century physiologist and architect of experimental medicine (not a psychologist, despite the common mislabel), is speaking from a period when science was trying to discipline itself away from armchair certainty and toward method. His context is the lab: hypotheses are necessary, but they’re also temptations. The subtext is a warning against confirmation bias before we had that term. We don’t just observe; we select. We interpret. We defend. “What we know already” becomes a filter that decides which anomalies count and which get dismissed as noise.
The sentence works because it indicts the most flattering version of ourselves: the educated, experienced, sensible person. Bernard implies that expertise can calcify into a kind of intellectual tendonitis. Learning, then, isn’t merely accumulating facts; it’s practicing the disciplined embarrassment of letting prior knowledge be provisional. In an age of algorithmic feeds and identity-driven opinions, the line reads less like a lab note than a cultural diagnosis: certainty scales; curiosity requires effort.
Bernard, a 19th-century physiologist and architect of experimental medicine (not a psychologist, despite the common mislabel), is speaking from a period when science was trying to discipline itself away from armchair certainty and toward method. His context is the lab: hypotheses are necessary, but they’re also temptations. The subtext is a warning against confirmation bias before we had that term. We don’t just observe; we select. We interpret. We defend. “What we know already” becomes a filter that decides which anomalies count and which get dismissed as noise.
The sentence works because it indicts the most flattering version of ourselves: the educated, experienced, sensible person. Bernard implies that expertise can calcify into a kind of intellectual tendonitis. Learning, then, isn’t merely accumulating facts; it’s practicing the disciplined embarrassment of letting prior knowledge be provisional. In an age of algorithmic feeds and identity-driven opinions, the line reads less like a lab note than a cultural diagnosis: certainty scales; curiosity requires effort.
Quote Details
| Topic | Learning |
|---|---|
| Source | Quote attributed to Claude Bernard; cited on Wikiquote (Claude Bernard). |
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