Ways of Knowing (Part II)
This is a long-delayed follow-up (or perhaps it should be partly 'prequel') to this previous post. Like that post, it arises from a coffee-shop experience. During a professional chat I was having with a student, I asked, "So what do you think a 'Way of Knowing' is, since you have to write an essay on it?"
She promptly told me, "Sensory perception, emotion, language, reason. Those are the Ways of Knowing."
As you might realise, this is yet another case of definition by example. It's like defining 'life' as 'a quality possessed by all living things', and then proceeding to give me a list of things that are thought to be living things.
So I asked her, "What is the 'Knowing' defined as, in 'Ways of Knowing'?"
She replied, "Knowing is justified true belief."
This is a textbook answer, and a pretty good one, having been around for around 2400 years. Plato first formulated it somewhere in his dialogue Theaetetus, in which he discusses knowledge with that eponymous student. Unfortunately, the text shows that Plato felt this definition to be flawed, although it is the starting point for most discussions on epistemelogy (or 'the rationale for why we believe').
I'd have to say that knowledge minimally should meet these three criteria (i.e., something must be justified, true, and believed in order to be 'knowledge'). I also agree with Simon Blackburn in general that improperly meeting any of these conditions (that is, by accident, coincidence, or some flawed reasoning — or lack of reasoning) makes it 'not-knowledge'.
A 'Way of Knowing' must therefore be a process or mechanism that allows us to modify our quality of knowing (hopefully) for the better; that is, it is something we can use to develop justification, confirm truth, and/or increase belief in something. Quite clearly, if deployed incorrectly or inaccurately, it can also do the opposite: all the 'Ways of Knowing' this student quoted can give us false knowledge.
A good test of 'Ways of Knowing' is the question of whether they possess the values of validity, reliability and/or utility when used in a particular situation. That is to say, do they help us deal with the right thing, do it consistently, and do it within a useful set of circumstances (time-frame, comprehensibility etc).
Take 'sensory perception' for example, the first thing that Plato dismisses as insufficient in the dialogue mentioned earlier. It's a pretty valid 'Way of Knowing' in most circumstances; we more or less know what we are turning our senses towards, and multiple senses can give us a better knowledge of a given phenomenon. However, our senses, being intrinsic to our biology, are unreliable — they give results that are seldom exactly reproducible for one person, let alone between many people.
An example of this unreliability is taste. Nothing tastes exactly the same twice, although we might think so; and certainly no two people can experience exactly the same taste. This holds true for the other senses as well. Senses rely on physical stimuli mediated through random chemical action in a biological context; since the latter two are not strictly reproducible, the interpretation of the first is not reliable. To be more direct, if the brain and its associated sensory apparatus are always changing, what makes you think the system ever produces the same results twice?
This is why wine reviews must be one of the greatest scams on earth. Nobody has the same tongue or palate, and it is quite obvious that wine reviewers have (or at least claim to have) a more sensitive tongue and/or palate than 99.9999999% (yes, that would make the top wine reviewers one in a billion) of the population. This means their sensory perceptions are even less reproducible than those of normal people, which means their reviews are nonsense since hardly anybody will ever experience what they experience.
See how easy it is to think about 'Ways of Knowing'? The real challenge is to actually work out a valid, reliable and useful definition of your own and then continue onwards from that point.
She promptly told me, "Sensory perception, emotion, language, reason. Those are the Ways of Knowing."
As you might realise, this is yet another case of definition by example. It's like defining 'life' as 'a quality possessed by all living things', and then proceeding to give me a list of things that are thought to be living things.
So I asked her, "What is the 'Knowing' defined as, in 'Ways of Knowing'?"
She replied, "Knowing is justified true belief."
This is a textbook answer, and a pretty good one, having been around for around 2400 years. Plato first formulated it somewhere in his dialogue Theaetetus, in which he discusses knowledge with that eponymous student. Unfortunately, the text shows that Plato felt this definition to be flawed, although it is the starting point for most discussions on epistemelogy (or 'the rationale for why we believe').
I'd have to say that knowledge minimally should meet these three criteria (i.e., something must be justified, true, and believed in order to be 'knowledge'). I also agree with Simon Blackburn in general that improperly meeting any of these conditions (that is, by accident, coincidence, or some flawed reasoning — or lack of reasoning) makes it 'not-knowledge'.
A 'Way of Knowing' must therefore be a process or mechanism that allows us to modify our quality of knowing (hopefully) for the better; that is, it is something we can use to develop justification, confirm truth, and/or increase belief in something. Quite clearly, if deployed incorrectly or inaccurately, it can also do the opposite: all the 'Ways of Knowing' this student quoted can give us false knowledge.
A good test of 'Ways of Knowing' is the question of whether they possess the values of validity, reliability and/or utility when used in a particular situation. That is to say, do they help us deal with the right thing, do it consistently, and do it within a useful set of circumstances (time-frame, comprehensibility etc).
Take 'sensory perception' for example, the first thing that Plato dismisses as insufficient in the dialogue mentioned earlier. It's a pretty valid 'Way of Knowing' in most circumstances; we more or less know what we are turning our senses towards, and multiple senses can give us a better knowledge of a given phenomenon. However, our senses, being intrinsic to our biology, are unreliable — they give results that are seldom exactly reproducible for one person, let alone between many people.
An example of this unreliability is taste. Nothing tastes exactly the same twice, although we might think so; and certainly no two people can experience exactly the same taste. This holds true for the other senses as well. Senses rely on physical stimuli mediated through random chemical action in a biological context; since the latter two are not strictly reproducible, the interpretation of the first is not reliable. To be more direct, if the brain and its associated sensory apparatus are always changing, what makes you think the system ever produces the same results twice?
This is why wine reviews must be one of the greatest scams on earth. Nobody has the same tongue or palate, and it is quite obvious that wine reviewers have (or at least claim to have) a more sensitive tongue and/or palate than 99.9999999% (yes, that would make the top wine reviewers one in a billion) of the population. This means their sensory perceptions are even less reproducible than those of normal people, which means their reviews are nonsense since hardly anybody will ever experience what they experience.
See how easy it is to think about 'Ways of Knowing'? The real challenge is to actually work out a valid, reliable and useful definition of your own and then continue onwards from that point.
Labels: Epistemology, Knowledge
etched with acid at 10:24:00 am
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home