When Knowledge Production No Longer Requires Knowing: Rethinking Gewu Zhizhi (Investigating Things and Extending Knowledge) in the Age of AI

Counts differ because each database indexes a different set of publications. We treat OpenAlex as the canonical count; Google Scholar is not shown (no API, and crawling it violates its ToS).

This essay reconsiders gewu zhizhi (investigating things and extending knowledge) under a technological condition in which propositions, explanations, distinctions, questions, and even apparently reflective trajectories of inquiry can be produced before an equivalent process of human knowing has occurred. Rather than determining whether artificial intelligence itself knows, the paper examines what becomes of human epistemic formation when developed symbolic outputs can increasingly be obtained without reproducing the trajectories through which human knowing ordinarily emerges. It therefore distinguishes the possession or production of epistemic products from the genesis of knowing within historically and relationally formed subjects. The analysis argues that knowing need not begin with an explicit question. Existential and affective salience, aesthetic interruption, contingent encounter, memory, and co-experience can reorganize attention before a determinate object of inquiry has been articulated. Curiosity can consequently become manifest through conditions whose relational and historical organization precedes the episode in which curiosity becomes recognizable. On this basis, the essay offers a contemporary philosophical reconstruction of gewu zhizhi. Gewu is approached through sustained encounter, attention, differentiation, testing, and revision, while zhizhi concerns the formation of a subject increasingly capable of seeing, questioning, judging, and continuing inquiry. Generative AI disrupts the familiar sequence from encounter and investigation toward articulated knowledge by allowing the proposition to precede the knowing. Yet the resulting proposition can itself become a new object of investigation and can either activate further inquiry or prematurely stabilize a question that had only begun to emerge. The additional capacity of AI to generate plausible questioning, hesitation, objection, revision, and discovery narratives further shows that the appearance of an epistemic process is insufficient to establish epistemic formation. The continuing significance of gewu zhizhi therefore lies neither in restoring artificial scarcity to knowledge products nor in preserving difficulty for its own sake. Its contemporary significance can instead be located in the generative conditions through which a subject remains capable of becoming a knower: curiosity, world-directed encounter, existential and affective responsiveness, contingency, co-experience, judgment, revision, and the formation of new questions. The essay concludes with practical implications for non-substitutive education, AI-assisted inquiry, and public knowledge practices. Among these, it proposes that public knowledge systems may increasingly need to preserve sufficient generative provenance alongside stabilized epistemic products, while leaving the formal modeling and implementation of such infrastructures to a separate research programme.