Knowledge – The Basics

 If I have achieved anything so far, it is to suggest that knowledge and its associated concepts – truth, certainty, belief, doubt, meaning, and so on, are a lot more problematic than we imagine in our everyday usage. The problem really emerges when we try to strip everything away and see what we are left with.

The standard example of this is Rene Descartes who, famously, doubted everything he possibly could until he was only left with himself as thinking: ‘I think, therefore I am’ he declared, ‘cogito ergo sum’. This statement and its approach impressed quite a number of philosophers over the centuries but has also been rejected and criticized. For example, it has been suggested that Descartes still went too far, and could only say ‘I think I think, therefore I think I am, I think’, or, more succinctly, ‘there is thinking going on’. But even these adjustments to Descartes’ idea still, in terms of his hyperbolic doubt, go too far. There are still background assumptions involved in these very stripped down statements, including the idea that making a statement in a language is meaningful.

Clearly, if we pursue hyperbolic doubt to its logical end, we land up with nothing and are unable to do, think, or say anything. This is not, to say the least, helpful. Something must have gone wrong, and what seems to be the error is Descartes’ method, at least in this case. We cannot strip everything away which we can doubt and presume that what is left is indubitable. There has to be more to it than that.

The more that there is is that life, thought, meaning and the rest of it is a lot more complex than we usually give credit for. An adult will have a great deal of learning and experience behind them even before making a statement like ‘the sun is shining’. There is a lot about language, the meaning of words, the reference of words, and the use of grammar implicit in the simplest sentence. Without all this, a sentence is just a group of arbitrary sounds or marks on a page (or a computer screen).

The upshot of this is that we cannot separate our thinking from anything else, including memory, imagination, and language. Somehow I know that I have stopped the car in the wrong place to drive it into the garage. How do I know that? The answer seems to be to do with experience, memory, and perception. I can perceive where I have placed the vehicle relative to the entrance, I have done the maneuver before and so remember how the car was placed at that point and, having driven it for a while, I have a feel for how big it is and what I can manage of not with it. If I have not driven it much before, or if I have not parked in that garage before, I am much less certain about how and where to place the car to avoid hitting something. I can, at this point, imagine doing so, even if I have never undertaken the procedure before. How confident I might feel about parking in the garage is a function of all of these factors and probably a few more.

A piece of knowledge, therefore, is accepted or rejected on the basis of a whole view of the world, or at least (to make things manageable) the relevant parts of the world to the issue at hand. This is, in fact, how science works. A new result is found and analyzed in relation to other relevant bits of information in the subject. Questions of coherence emerge, and how significant they are is highly dependent on the view and confidence of the scientist in the result and how divergent it is from expected results. It is, of course, possible for a result to be revolutionary and to be accepted (in due course) and rendering all other results, or at least understandings of the subject, outdated. But these results are rare in science; normally a new result applies to a certain situation or subfield, it does not usually create a new paradigm for the science.

The relevant parts of the world to my parking the car in the garage are my knowledge of the size of the car, the width of the garage door , and so on. There are, of course, background features here as well, such as my knowledge of how to drive a car and the effectiveness of the brakes and the mechanism holding the door open. Once you start considering all these things, however, the ability to act can become paralyzed. To stay sane in everyday situations we do not go that far. The background assumptions remain exactly that and we take them for granted unless we notice some evidence to suggest that they may not be behaving normally. For example, if we notice brake fluid dripping from the car, we might question the effectiveness of the usual mechanism for stopping.

Similarly in science the background assumptions are largely unstated or investigated: The universe behaves in a regular, predictable way. An experiment conducted today will be reproduced tomorrow, and so on. Ultimately, these assumptions are unprovable. The question of why the universe exists at all is not a scientific one, in the sense that it cannot be answered by science itself. The sciences examine the universe, not the conditions of its existence. Somewhere a metaphysical assumption is made, without evidence. The answer that the existence of the universe is a mere brute fact without explanation is just as much an unprovable metaphysical assumption as the answer that God made the universe. Neither can be proved scientifically because neither relates to science.

Ultimate questions depend on metaphysical assumptions. These are part of the background assumptions that people make. If scientists worried every time they conducted an experiment whether the universe they were observing existed, then little new science would be done. If I wondered about the existence of my car every time I wanted to park it, I would never go anywhere. These are simplifying assumptions that enable us to cope with the everyday and, in fact, with the scientific and everything else that we do think about. We cannot, ultimately, divide knowledge of our garage from knowledge of the existence of the universe, but for all reasonable activities we have to, and so we do.