3.1: Epistemology
One of the early great names in philosophy was Socrates. He would spend his days walking through classical Athens, especially the marketplace, the agora, asking anyone who would engage with him one simple question, “Do you know anything?” If someone asked you, what would you answer? Remember this is in the marketplace, crowded with people who know you. The obvious thing to say is “Yes, of course Socrates, I know something.” Socrates would then ask you what you knew and start asking seemingly simple questions. The ultimate end (and this is what makes reading Plato’s dialogues that chronicle these conversations fun) is that the person would always end up contradicting themselves and making seem as if they didn’t know anything. Watching people expose themselves as morons in front of everyone was the ancient Greek equivalent of reality television.
So, do you know anything? How do you know you know it? What does it mean to know something? If we don’t know anything, how would it be possible to know this? These are what we in philosophy call epistemological questions. Epistemology is the study of knowledge.
If you have learned anything about philosophy so far, you have anticipated the obvious question. “So, what do you mean by knowledge?” For this, we standardly use the definition given by Plato. Knowledge is true, justified belief. Knowledge therefore has three parts.
First of all, to know something, you have to believe it. If you don’t believe that cows can swim better than wildebeests, then you surely cannot be said to know it. To believe a proposition is to assert its truth. If you don’t think something is true, then there is no way you can be held to know it.
But knowledge is surely more than belief. We can believe false things. You may have once believed that Santa Claus exists. You were wrong. You believed Santa was real, but you did not know it because it is false. It can’t be known. So, we have a second element necessary for knowledge – truth. To know something, you have to believe it and it has to be true.
But that is not enough. You could believe it for the wrong reason and it might accidentally be true. You might ask your friend where his car is. He says honestly, “It is 59 in the parking lot right off campus.” You ask him why he believes this. He tells you honestly that he had parked in the lot on campus, but during his class they came…aliens from another galaxy. The mother ship hovered over his car and they used their tractor beam to pull it up and reverse engineer it. When they were done, they reassembled it – didn’t fix the dent in the bumper – and went to put it back, but the lot had filled up. So, they put it down in the lot right off campus.”
You look and it turns out that his car is in the other lot right off campus. But, it wasn’t the aliens. It was his roommate who needed to run an errand and knew where he left his keys. The roommate is lazy and the lot off campus is closer to their room, so that’s why he parked it there.
So, your friend believed his car was in a different lot than the one he had parked it in. And he was right. His belief was true. But did he know where his car was? No. He didn’t have knowledge even though he had a true belief because it was accidentally true, not true for the right reason. We need a third thing to have knowledge – belief, truth, and justification. You have believe the true thing for the right kind of reason.
The obvious question is “what is the right kind of reason?” This is fundamental question of epistemology. Traditionally, the answer was given in terms of reducibility to undeniable first beliefs. We call this position foundationalism . The different kinds of foundationalist views ascribe different sorts of basic, atomic truths.
Rationalism is the view that the starting place for all justified true belief is the human mind itself. Reason justifies the fundamental truths. There are some beliefs that are innate, inborn to the human mind. Just like when you buy a computer and the operating system and certain programs are already loaded on it, it is the same with the human mind. It comes with certain pre-existing beliefs.
Rationalists will often point to mathematical propositions. Consider one of Euclid’s axioms, any two points can be connected with a line. Is this true? Of course. Have you tried this with all possible points? No, of course not. Then how do you know it? It’s self-evident. You can just see that it’s true. Anyone who denies it is lying or just trying to be obnoxious. It is obvious to the human mind. It is one of the undeniably true starting points from which all of plane geometry is built.
In this way, rationalists need to say that our fundamental beliefs are innate. If you have a human mind, it comes with certain beliefs contained in it that we just believe. 60 From those, using logic, we can derive all other truths. All other beliefs, rationalists hold, should flow like geometry.
Other philosophers have held that mathematical-type truths are the exception. There are some necessary truths like those of logic or mathematics, but most truths are of a different sort. They are contingencies. They might be true. They might be false. There is only one way to know which it is. You check. Look and see. Empiricism is the epistemological view that the foundational truths from which we build up all knowledge are sense perceptions. Seeing is believing.
This is a very scientific approach to knowledge. We build up all our justified true beliefs from what we can observe. Observations can be verified by others, so we can trust them. Them we have the building blocks to construct our world by combining them in new and interesting ways.
Of course, it runs into some complications. Do you believe that there are atoms? Ever seen one? Well, no. But they are part of a theory that explains a whole lot of things that we do see. And I’ve seen a picture of one in a textbook. Actually, you’ve seen the output of electron microscopes that have been graphically represented, printed and interpreted and told that is what you were looking at.
Have you ever seen Santa Claus? No. Santa doesn’t exist. But you thought he did and you had evidence. You saw someone fitting his description at the mall. Presents appeared where they hadn’t been the night before. You left milk and cookies for him and they were gone when the presents appeared. If you think about it, the evidence for Santa is pretty close to the same as the evidence for atoms and yet you believe in one and not the other. Surely, there is good reason to believe that our knowledge of atoms is superior to our knowledge of Santa Claus. This is where philosophy of science emerges from epistemology.
But a third strain of foundationalist epistemological thought moves in a completely different direction. It seeks the basic foundational truths in deeper human experiences. Where empiricism takes all human observations to give us the building blocks, transcendentalism takes certain experiences to be special in doing so. For religious thinkers it would be revelations, that is, direct experience with the Divine. For American transcendentalists it would be the sense of awe and connectedness to the world one gets from confronting nature. Unlike the universalism of empiricism where 61 everyone should be able to observe the same thing if looking at the same thing at the same time, these transcendental truths are particular to the experience of the observer.
Such particularity may make us doubt the truth of the report. How do we know the person isn’t just making it up or misremembering? Such doubt is the hallmark of one of the most powerful objections to the entire foundationalist approach to knowledge. Skepticism is the view that none of these foundationalist approaches are sufficient to give us knowledge. The skeptic argues that we can know nothing, that knowledge is impossible. We want knowledge. We fool ourselves into believing we have knowledge, but this is all a big lie. We don’t know anything.
Is it possible that you are not the person you think you are, living the life you think you are living. Is it possible that you are just a brain, floating in a vat of medium, connected by wires to a supercomputer programmed by an evil genius to feed into the brain electrical signals that it wrongly interprets as observations, as emotions, as the life you think you have. It is possible. Not likely, perhaps, but at least possible. (Yes, this philosophical question is where the premise for the movie The Matrix originated.) If it is possible, could we know which is actually true? If not, can we know whether anything that would serve as a foundational basic building block of our beliefs was true? Skeptics say no.
Then why do we think we have knowledge? Some skeptics say that it is because of human power structures. You believe what you are told…or else. As a child, if you don’t believe what your parents tell you, you get punished. If you do, you get rewarded. You go to school. Believe what your teachers tell you and report it back well on tests, you get good grades. Don’t and you fail. In society, believe what the authorities tell you and you are allowed to live well. Don’t and you will be the target of social alienation and arrest. Social constructivism is the view that believe what we believe, not because there is real knowledge in the world, but because there is political power that determines what we have to think and has the power to enforce these beliefs which are confused with knowledge.
A final approach sees both foundationalism and skepticism as too radical. The fact is that we have beliefs about the world and some of them are reinforced by the world in allowing us to do the things we want to do and some of them are destroyed by the world when the world does not allow us to do what we want to do. As humans, we have 62 goals. We try to reach those goals employing our beliefs. If a belief is helpful, keep it. If not, throw it away. Pragmatism is the view that knowledge reduces to the usefulness of a belief. We should not speak of true and false, but rather what William James called a proposition’s “cash value.” What is the belief worth? Is it helpful? Sentences are not magical connections to an underlying world, they are just tools in the human toolbox. Keep the tools you need, the tools that work. If your screwdriver breaks its handle, you throw it away and get a new one. Same with your intellectual tools. When they break, get rid of them and get a new one. Believe them when they work, but know that they are just tools.
So, epistemology leads us to ask all sorts of questions about the nature of knowledge. What do we know? Can we know anything? By what means do we come to know what we know? Let’s look at a question in epistemology raised by jokes. Jokes are sets of sentences. Jokes make sense. You get jokes. You also get math problems. In both cases, there is confusion followed by an “aha” moment. The “aha” moment in the case of the difficult math problem occurs when you realize the answer or the path to the answer. It is the gateway to mathematical knowledge. Does this mean that jokes give us knowledge? You have to know things to get the joke, but does getting the joke give us knowledge?