Things are seldom what
they seem
Skim milk masquerades
as cream.
Knowledge, according to the following
definitions, is an act (definition one), an object (definition two), and the
results of an act of thought (definitions three through five.)
1. The act or state of knowing;
clear perception of fact, truth, or duty; certain apprehension; familiar
cognizance; cognition. "Knowledge,
which is the highest degree of the speculative faculties, consists in the
perception of the truth of affirmative or negative propositions." Locke.
2. That which is or may be known;
the object of an act of knowing; a cognition; --
chiefly used in the plural. "There is a great difference in the delivery
of the mathematics, which are the most abstracted of knowledges." Bacon. "Knowledges is a
term in frequent use by Bacon, and, though now obsolete, should be revived, as
without it we are compelled to borrow "cognitions" to express its
import." Sir W. Hamilton.
"To use a word of Bacon's, now unfortunately obsolete, we must determine
the relative value of knowledges."
H. Spencer.
3. That which is gained and
preserved by knowing; instruction; acquaintance; enlightenment; learning;
scholarship; erudition. "Knowledge
puffeth up, but charity edifieth."
1 Cor.
viii. 1. "Ignorance
is the curse of God; - Knowledge,
the wing wherewith we fly to heaven." Shak.
4. That familiarity which is gained
by actual experience; practical skill; as, a knowledge of life. "Shipmen that had knowledge of the sea." 1 Kings ix. 27.
5. Scope of
information; cognizance; notice; as, it has not come to my knowledge. "Why have I found grace in thine eyes, that thou shouldst
take knowledge of me?" Ruth ii. 10.
Knowledge
has no implication that what you are doing or what you are getting is true or
valid. Thus, any kind
of cognition, including dream and trance states, involve some kind of
processing of belief. The most
influential attempt to define knowledge can be traced back to Plato’s Theaetetus that
defined knowledge as justified true belief. Thus, we must ask:
1. Do I believe it?
2. Is it true or proven?
3. Does reason or evidence justify it?
The Theaetetus
definition agrees with the common sense notion that we can believe things
without knowing them. Whilst knowing
p entails that p is true, believing
in p does not, since we can have false beliefs. It also implies that we believe
everything that we know. That is, the things we know form a subset the things
we believe. According to the Jesuit
Philosopher Bernard J. F. Lonergan, the question now
becomes:
1. What am I doing when I know?
2. Why is that
knowing?
3. What do I know when I do that?
In thinking about epistemology, I’ve
arrived at four propositions that I regard as reasonable presuppositions. They are as follows:
1. We can be certain about some knowledge. We have shades of apprehension of knowledge
that range for an awareness of a simple fact to certitude. There is a current of scientific agnosticism
that claims “we cannot be sure of anything.”
Karl Popper would say that you can never prove a theory or know it is
true, but you can disprove theories by proving facts that are incompatible with
them. You cannot induct a universal
claim, he says. An observation that ten
swans are while only tells us that tens swans are white, not that all swans are
white. Thus, the verification of truth
lies only in our ability to ask whether it can be proven false by some
unambiguous test. But I don’t believe
that the facts or common sense support this theory. Is there any doubt that table salt is sodium
chloride, that we need oxygen to live, and that some atoms are
radioactive? While what we know about
the natural world is rife with uncertainty, there is also certainty and science
builds on that certainty from: “we know
that X is true” to “we know with scientific certainty that X is true” to “it is
impossible to conceive that X is false”.
2.
Language is a tool of knowledge, but language isn’t knowledge.
Language is only another way of manipulating symbols to bridge the
Kantian thing-to-me and the thing-in-itself.
But I allow for the possibility that we don’t have the symbols that
correspond to the assumed reality. I
think this is especially true in theology that uses revelatory language and
God-talk. Sometimes, the nearer you get to God with language, the further you
get from God. “Words strain,” T.S. Eliot
writes:
Crack and sometimes
break, under
the burden,
Under the tension,
slip, slide, perish,
Decay with
imprecision, will not
Stay in place,
Will not stay still.
And
language limits ethics. “Ethics, if it
is anything, is supernatural and our words will only express facts,”
Wittgenstein writes, “as a teacup will only hold a tea cup of water even if I
were to pour a gallon over it.” Saul Kripke has written of the disconnect
between properties of reality and essence of reality. For example, an ideal dictionary would list
all necessary and sufficient conditions for something to qualify as a tiger,
but this may not suffice to account for the hidden internal structure or
essence of the tiger, which may yet to be discovered or may never be
discovered.
3.
All criterions for truth and
knowledge are self-defeating. The
principle of verification is unverifiable, the principle of meaning is
meaningless, the principle of usability is useless, the principle of logic is
illogical as a universal propositions.
Because of this, I reject, for example, using the “law” of
non-contradiction—that a proposition can not be and no be simultaneously—may
always hold for all truth, some of which might be paradoxical and
existential. Needless to say, the
criterion that all criterions are self-defeating is itself self-defeating.
4.
Knowledge is the apprehension of a
relationship between what is perceived and what is arrived through the rational
accumulation of past certitude, induction, deduction, and dialectic. I’ve
taken eclectic view of knowledge that claims that justified true belief can
emerge from the following:
1. Corresponds between our inner
world—our consciousness-- and our outer world— matter and ideas. Thus, I reject Kantian agnosticism, the
bifurcation between appearance and reality.
2. Rational. It is reasonably and contextually related to
what we also believe is reasonably and contextually valid or true.
3.
Builds on the past in what we know with certitude to be true
4.
Employs inductive reasoning-- the scientific method-- where appropriate
5.
Employs deductive reasoning—axiomatic mathematics-- where appropriate
6.
Submits claims of knowledge to the widest, deepest, and fairest
dialectic of competing counter arguments, claims, and evidence
In the case
of metaphysics, steps three and four may be of limited or no value. I consider this final step to be the most critical, as I believe that there is no independently
apprehended truth. I call this final
step "the word on the street"--- the amalgamation of opinions and
facts that results in a calculus of bankable truth. I don't trust the word of the butcher, the
baker, the candlestick maker, or for that matter, the president, the preacher,
and the scientists taken alone. But I do
trust what comes out of the melting pot when all those beliefs, experiments,
and judgments coalesce into something that approaches a consensus.